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Contention _____ is the Economy

The economy is improving now but growing congestion on inland waterways will expose gaps in the infrastructure and tank competitiveness

As we see every day on the Ohio River, our system of waterways help move coal, steel and many other products across the country. It not only is an inexpensive way to ship many goods, but it also takes the burden off our highway system.

For example, the load of dry cargo that one barge can carry would require 16 rail cars or 70 tractor-trailer trucks on the road. With chemicals and liquid cargo, the ratio is even higher.

But the aging system of locks and dams that keeps freight moving on our rivers needs a lot of work. More than half of the locks are more than 50 years, and replacement and repair projects have been backed up for years.

Meanwhile, breakdowns back up barge traffic by hours and days.

The slowdown in the U.S. economy over the past few years may have taken the pressure off the problem, experts told USA TODAY this week. But as the economy begins to recover, the shortcomings of this piece of the nation's infrastructure will become more apparent.

Even if there are no catastrophic failures the lack of investment injects uncertainty that will undermine the viability of the inland waterway system

While my years of study have rewarded me with both a familiarity and a fondness for commercial navigation, I am an analyst not an advocate. Accordingly, I'm inclined to address questions surrounding industry's future value and viability with available reason rather than rhetoric. This motivates a number of questions. The first of these is whether or not inland navigation is now and will continue to be important to the vitality of the US economy. I am convinced the answer to this question is "yes" for both now and foreseeable years to come. The next questions deal with the current system's state of repair, the need for reinvestment, and the likely consequences if this investment is not forthcoming.

In my introductory remarks, I observed that many of the physical facilities that support commercial navigation are well beyond their design-lives. In spite of this fact very few facilities have experienced actual failures. This is the result of careful monitoring and maintenance. However, this necessary vigilance imposes additional costs on both users and the federal government that could be avoided if assets were replaced in a timely way. More importantly neglect sows the seeds of uncertainty among users. Facility failures are unlikely to compromise the navigation system's overall viability, but uncertainty might.

The severely degraded condition of many locks and dams sends a powerful signal to both current and would-be users - a signal that future availability is far from assured. This signal causes uncertainty. Uncertainty slows private investment in waterway terminal facilities and other assets. Shippers, who can, investigate their alternatives. n18 Those who have no alternative must decide whether to risk further waterway-related investment in the face of uncertain future access or simply make do with the facilities they already have in place. In this way, the failure to adequately invest in public infrastructure or even prolonged periods of indecision can induce the quiet collapse of system use. n19 Those who doubt the impact of user expectations on subsequent traffic volumes need only look to the Missouri River basin for a powerful example. n20 If national transportation policy includes commercial inland navigation going forward, then significant system investments must be planned and plans must be executed sooner rather than later.

It is similarly risky to reduce the system to its core components by ending support for tributary navigation. Obviously, it is impossible to make commercial navigation equally available in all quarters, but eliminating access at any location reduces the value of the overall system for remaining network users and should be done only after careful thought. This situation is analogous to telephone service. Your phone is valuable to you, because you can call (or be called by) a large number of other telephone subscribers. If some act suddenly ended all service to Cincinnati, your telephone would be less valuable to you even if you currently don't know a soul who lives or does business there. Tributary origins and destinations represent potential value for shippers on main-stem waterway segments even if their current shipping practices do not include them.

Business and agriculture uncertainty undermines U.S. competitiveness

Gibbs, 12 – Member, Representative for Ohio’s 18th Congressional District (4/18/2012, Bob Gibbs, “HOW RELIABILITY OF THE INLAND WATERWAY SYSTEM IMPACTS ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS”, http://transportation.house.gov/news/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=1609)
Washington, DC – The Water Resources and Environment Subcommittee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-OH), held a hearing this morning on the importance of preserving the reliability of the Inland Waterways System. The Inland Waterways System provides a cost-effective and energy efficient alternative to truck and rail transportation and is also important to State and local economies and job creation efforts. One 15-barge tow on a river can carry as much cargo as 216 rail cars or 1,050 large trucks. However, the unreliability of the aging locks and dams on the System is making waterways a less attractive means of transportation, and moving cargo from waterways to rail or truck would produce significant national economic impacts. “Transportation savings are a key factor in economic growth,” said Chairman Gibbs. “As fuel prices continue to escalate, waterway transportation becomes an even more viable alternative for shippers. But, an unreliable transportation system will inject uncertainty into decisions made by U.S. farmers and manufacturers, making U.S. products uncompetitive in world markets. “Letting the inland waterway system decline further would be an economic disaster to add to the Nation’s already significant fiscal problems,” Gibbs continued. “Having an inland waterways system that is a viable alternative will keep costs down among all modes of transport. If you take inland waterways out of the mix in terms of transportation options, costs go up and American products become less competitive in the global marketplace. And that means lost jobs.” Mike Steenhoek, Executive Director, Soy Transportation Coalition, testified: “Unfortunately, while Brazil and other countries are aggressively investing in their infrastructure, we remain anemic in investing in ours. It can be accurately stated that the U.S. is more a spending nation, not an investing nation. A high percentage of taxpayer dollars are used to meet immediate wants and needs, rather than providing divideands to future generations.” Robert Dolence, Vice President, Leonardo Technologies Inc. (LTI), added: “It is also interesting to note, in other work by LTI, it has been forecasted that even with sustained low natural gas prices (maintaining less than $4/MMBTU natural gas cost levels for 50 plus years) coal maintains a significant role in electric power generation, industrial and commercial use, and exports with a total coal demand staying above the 1 billion tons per year level for the next 50 years. Based on the combined detailed modeling performed, LTI concludes the Ohio River Navigation System is a vital component to ensuring safe, reliable, low cost, domestic energy – including electricity – to our country.”

The lack of investment prevents an economic recovery

Davidson, 5/20 (Paul, 5/20/2012, “USA's creaking infrastructure holds back economy,” http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-05-20/creaking-infrastructure/55096396/1, JMP)
Inland waterways quietly keep the nation's economy flowing as they transport $180 billion of coal, steel, chemicals and other goods each year — a sixth of U.S. freight — across 38 states. Yet, an antiquated system of locks and dams threatens the timely delivery of those goods daily.

Locks and dams raise or lower barges from one water level to the next, but breakdowns are frequent. For example, the main chamber at a lock on the Ohio River near Warsaw, Ky., is being fixed. Maneuvering 15-barge tows into a much smaller backup chamber has increased the average delay at the lock from 40 minutes to 20 hours, including waiting time.

The outage, which began last July and is expected to end in August, will cost American Electric Power and its customers $5.5 million as the utility ferries coal and other supplies along the river for itself and other businesses, says AEP senior manager Marty Hettel.

As the economy picks up, the nation's creaking infrastructure will increasingly struggle to handle the load. That will make products more expensive as businesses pay more for shipping or maneuver around roadblocks, and it will cause the nation to lose exports to other countries — both of which are expected to hamper the recovery.

"The good news is, the economy is turning," says Dan Murray, vice president of the American Transportation Research Institute. "The bad news is, we expect congestion to skyrocket."

The ancient lock-and-dam system is perhaps the most egregious example of aging or congested transportation systems that are being outstripped by demand. Fourteen locks are expected to fail by 2020, costing the economy billions of dollars. Meanwhile, seaports can't accommodate larger container ships, slowing exports and imports. Highways are too narrow. Bridges are overtaxed.

Effects 'sneaking up'

The shortcomings were partly masked during the recession as fewer Americans worked and less freight was shipped, easing traffic on transportation corridors. But interviews with shippers and logistics companies show delays are starting to lengthen along with the moderately growing economy.

"I call this a stealth attack on our economy," says Janet Kavinoky, executive director of transportation and infrastructure for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's not like an immediate crisis. It's something that's sneaking up on us."

Freight bottlenecks and other congestion cost about $200 billion a year, or 1.6% of U.S. economic output, according to a report last year by Building America's Future Educational Fund, a bipartisan coalition of elected officials. The chamber of commerce estimates such costs are as high as $1 trillion annually, or 7% of the economy.

Yet, there's little prospect for more infrastructure investment as a divided Congress battles about how to cut the $1.3 trillion federal deficit, and state and local governments face their own budget shortfalls. Government investment in highways, bridges, water systems, schools and other projects has fallen each year since 2008. IHS Global Insight expects such outlays to drop 4.4% this year and 3% in 2013.

The U.S. is spending about half of the $2.2 trillion that it should over a five-year period to repair and expand overburdened infrastructure, says Andrew Herrmann, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Inland waterways, for example, carry coal to power plants, iron ore to steel mills and grain to export terminals. But inadequate investment led to nearly 80,000 hours of lock outages in fiscal 2010, four times more than in fiscal 2000. Most of the nation's 200 or so locks are past their 50-year design life.

A prime example is an 83-year-old lock on the Ohio River near Olmsted, Ill. Congress set aside $775 million to replace it and another nearby lock in 1988. The project began in 1993 and was scheduled to be finished by 2000 but still isn't complete, in part because of engineering modifications intended to save $60 million. Now, the cost has ballooned to $3.1 billion, and the new lock won't be ready until 2020 or later.

The cost overrun leaves little money for other projects. About $8 billion is needed to replace 25 locks and dams in the next 20 years, says Michael Toohey, president of the Waterways Council, an advocacy group.

But Congress allocates only about $170 million a year, with the government and a 20-cent-a-gallon tax on tow operators each funding half. Toohey says $385 million a year is required to fund all the work. "We're the silent industry" because waterways are less visible, he says.

Also failures independently drive up electricity costs that will ripple through the economy

Boselovic, 12 (3/18/2012, Len, “Locked and Dammed: The region's 23 locks and dams are on the brink of failure,” http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/environment/locked-and-dammed-the-regions-23-locks-and-dams-are-on-the-brink-of-failure-517289/?print=1, JMP)

***William Harder is the former navigation manager in the Corps' Great Lakes and Ohio River division
Corps and industry officials say it would take three or more years to replace a failed lock and even longer if a dam had to be replaced.

Whatever the period of time needed, the 10 million tons of coal and other commodities that move through the Elizabeth locks each year would have to be moved by rail or truck, which are more expensive. Moreover, it would take more than 1,000 large trucks to move the same amount of coal a standard 15-barge tow carries.

"If the Lower Mon closes, there's not enough trucks to move the coal power plants need," Mr. Harder said.

A Corps-commissioned study produced in October estimated a lock or dam failure that closed the Lower Mon to traffic could increase electricity costs up to $1 billion annually. The figure covers only what businesses and consumers could pay and not how those price increases would ripple through the economy.

But Mr. Harder, who disclosed the $1 billion estimate at an industry meeting in Pittsburgh in October, said costs would include power plants paying more to move coal by truck or rail. He said an extended closure could cause some power plants to shut down, increasing the cost of electricity for about 21 million people along the East Coast.

Dams also make it possible for electric generation plants, other industry and municipal water companies to draw enough water from the river to supply their operations. Residents and industries who rely on the Monongahela for water might have problems if the level drops below the intake valves used to draw water out of the river.

"If we would lose those dams, we would have a lot of towns in trouble," said Jeanine Hoey of the Corps' Pittsburgh district.

Water companies say they would be able to provide water, even if a dam were out of commission for three or more years. But it might be more expensive.

"It wouldn't be easy. There certainly would be a lot of challenges," said Joe Dinkel, executive director of operations for West View Water Authority, which draws water out of the Ohio River to serve more than 200,000 consumers in the North Hills and Ohio River communities.

Pennsylvania America Water, which has 220,000 customers in the region, is discussing what the loss of a dam would mean with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, spokesman Gary Lobaugh said.

Economic decline undercuts interdependence and triggers nuclear conflict

Kemp ’10 [Geoffrey Kemp, Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center, served in the White House under Ronald Reagan, special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council Staff, Former Director, Middle East Arms Control Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010, The East Moves West: India, China, and Asia’s Growing Presence in the Middle East, p. 233-4]
The second scenario, called Mayhem and Chaos, is the opposite of the first scenario; everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The world economic situation weakens rather than strengthens, and India, China, and Japan suffer a major reduction in their growth rates, further weakening the global economy. As a result, energy demand falls and the price of fossil fuels plummets, leading to a financial crisis for the energy-producing states, which are forced to cut back dramatically on expansion programs and social welfare. That in turn leads to political unrest: and nurtures different radical groups, including, but not limited to, Islamic extremists. The internal stability of some countries is challenged, and there are more “failed states.” Most serious is the collapse of the democratic government in Pakistan and its takeover by Muslim extremists, who then take possession of a large number of nuclear weapons. The danger of war between India and Pakistan increases significantly. Iran, always worried about an extremist Pakistan, expands and weaponizes its nuclear program. That further enhances nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt joining Israel and Iran as nuclear states. Under these circumstances, the potential for nuclear terrorism increases, and the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack in either the Western world or in the oil-producing states may lead to a further devastating collapse of the world economic market, with a tsunami-like impact on stability. In this scenario, major disruptions can be expected, with dire consequences for two-thirds of the planet’s population

The impact is global nuclear war

Freidberg & Schonfeld, 8 --- *Professor of Politics and IR at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, AND **senior editor of Commentary and a visiting scholar at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton (10/21/2008, Aaron and Gabriel, “The Dangers of a Diminished America”, Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance likely to diminish? If so, what would that mean?

One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across the world is that the primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face an entirely new and adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year's federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237 billion from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and expensive domestic relief programs.

In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to lay out what portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has suggested a possible reduction -- foreign aid. This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden's comment hints at where we may be headed: toward a major reduction in America's world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-induced isolationism.

Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already intense before this crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular. Precipitous withdrawal -- attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion -- might well become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions.

Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun to gather support among many Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow.

Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial architecture. For decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide use of the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted on foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be possible in the future?

Meanwhile, traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on their bellicose paths, while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to chaos. Russia's new militancy and China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern.

If America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum. The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe, and our position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines could all be placed at risk.

In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and finance ground nearly to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by the remorseless fanatics who rose up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run the risk that rogue states may choose to become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our moment of maximum vulnerability.

The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly rock our principal strategic competitors even harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the Russian stock market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices, now driven down by the global slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending heavily on foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and perhaps even sparking unrest in a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to prosperity.

None of this is good news if the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert attention from internal travails with external adventures.

As for our democratic friends, the present crisis comes when many European nations are struggling to deal with decades of anemic growth, sclerotic governance and an impending demographic crisis. Despite its past dynamism, Japan faces similar challenges. India is still in the early stages of its emergence as a world economic and geopolitical power.

What does this all mean? There is no substitute for America on the world stage. The choice we have before us is between the potentially disastrous effects of disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued American leadership.

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