Last week, Obama announced more than $3 billion in stimulus grants to improve and “smarten” the national grid. To get some insight into what to make of this major development, we chatted with David Leeds, an analyst specializing in grid technology at Greentech Media. He recently authored a free 145-page report called The Smart Grid in 2010, has lectured on the subject at MIT, Stanford, and The Wharton School of Business.

Q: What do most Americans not understand about smart grids?

A: Well, frankly, the term “smart grid” has yet to enter the pop lexicon–so, generally speaking, Americans are still unaware of the concept and its enormous potential to dramatically increase energy efficiency, system reliability, and the amount of renewable energy plugged into the grid.

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The media took notice last month when IBM announced it was opening a “Global Rail Innovation Center” in Beijing. It was an intriguing and timely announcement, certainly. And though we couldn’t help but think that it would have been cool to locate it in a place like Detroit, but we also know that China is the new world leader in high speed rail investment and any sane profit-minded company wants to be where the action is. A sense of proportion: China has made a $730 billion commitment to fast passenger rail, compared to $13 billion in the US.

In any case, it struck us an exciting project and were glad to have the chance last week to speak with Keith Dierkx, the director of this new center, and hear his thoughts on where high speed rail in the US is headed–both literally and figuratively. He was nice enough to chat with us from Beijing on his birthday and offer some insights on what goes on at this rail innovation place, what factors will determine whether HSR hits the big time in the US, and how to kickstart a domestic rail equipment industry.

You argued in Forbes recently that it’s a good thing that the US is only now getting serious about passenger rail. Do you really believe that?
Absolutely. There’s an interesting analogy with Africa in this context. Africa went from no phones to mobile phones very quickly. They were able to leapfrog all that expensive copper infrastructure for landlines. I think we’ve got a similar opportunity to leapfrog intermediate technologies and go straight to 250 mph state of the art trains. It makes competition with the regional airlines all the more compelling.We’re late to the game, but things have advanced so much over the last several years that we have an opportunity come in, cherry pick the best solutions, and go right to the head of the class.

Ed Rendell has talked about how rail should replace air travel under 500 miles in this country. Do you agree?
That’s a very real alternative. I do think the opportunity with rail is more around replacing shorter commuter airline travel than replacing car travel. For example, people who are driving to San Francisco and LA are probably driving for a specific reason. Maybe they want to have a car there. But when they take a plane–by the time you get to the airport two hours ahead of time, go through security, get your bags…–high speed rail competes very well.

How could rail change how Americans live?
As you know, one of the challenges in the US because of “car culture” is that we have spatially organized our society in a very diffuse way with suburbs. And so there’s this sense that we’re not concentrated enough from an urban center to urban center standpoint. I think rail offers a viable way to do that and to become enormously more green as a country.

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Transportation bills of the last decade have enjoyed a terrific amount of bipartisan support, thanks perhaps to a flood of earmarks and a lack of any strong federal mandates therein. But this year (or next year? or 2011?) we’re getting down to brass tacks. We’re turning the ship of state. We’re charting a new course, our leaders tell us. Which means it’s time to find out what kind of bipartisan support there may be for large-scale reforms, including perhaps a stronger focus on rail and transit, or an increase in the gas tax.

Many Democrats have been championing such reforms for years, but there have been a few prominent conservative voices in favor of more and better transit and intercity passenger rail as well. One of them is William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation and the co-author, with the late Paul Weyrich, of the recent book Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation.

Lind was aboard the California Zephyr earlier this month. He was wise in the ways of train passengership, a fan of pipe smoke and brandy, and scornful of computers. He also had some very clear and strong ideas about America’s transportation infrastructure, and what it needs.

MATT DELLINGER: Your book is very interesting. It’s a conservative argument for public transportation, but it’s also a guidebook for classic supporters of public transportation, on how to talk to conservatives.
WILLIAM LIND: That is essentially at the heart of all of our transit work.

So a Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus model. So what does a transit-loving liberal need to know when approaching an auto-loving conservative? What should they be prepared for, and what are the various points of leverage?
The most important thing that a liberal needs to know in talking to conservatives about public transportation is not to use liberal arguments.  You can’t argue for transit on the basis that the poor need it. Conservatives aren’t particularly interested in that. On the other hand, when you start talking about things like promoting and shaping economic development and redevelopment, that’s a big interest to conservatives. When you talk about offering transit that is of a quality that conservatives would actually want to use–which usually means rail transportation–they’re interested, because conservatives are just as tired as everybody else of sitting stuck in traffic.

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Ask a friend to name a shared transportation option and he’ll probably mention that bus that rumbles past on the avenue or the commuter train that all the office jockeys pile into each weekday morning. But Robin Chase thinks the phrase is about to undergo a radical evolution. Almost ten years ago she founded car-sharing service Zip Car, which has proven a smashing success in urban areas across the country and is rumored to be going public next year. Now she’s put her visionary zeal behind GoLoco, a social networking site that encourage people to catch rides with each other (they take a 10 percent a fee if you choose to let them manage the financial arrangements.)

Thinking of your friends’ and neighbors’ cars as a personal transportation resource is the next wave in American mobility, Chase argues — an elegant response to rising costs, congestion and our existing road-heavy infrastructure.

Cassim Shepard of Urban Omnibus and I spoke with Chase recently, and she made the case.

You coined one of my favorite phrases: “Infrastructure is destiny.” I want to use that as a motto for Infrastructurist.
RC:  It feels like such a truism to me now. Our infrastructure either makes a given activity either easy or difficult.  And we all like to do things easily. So whatever infrastructure enables us to do conveniently, that’s what we do more of and the things that it makes difficult, we do less of them. Today we have set up our infrastructure to make getting in your car and going door to door really easy. Getting there by bike or by foot is frequently terrifying and dangerous. So which way do we go? You know, our infrastructure is our destiny.

We’re all familiar with those situations where walking is essentially impossible–even to places that should be walkable.
Recently, I went to Detroit to talk to some car companies and I was staying at a motel next to a highway. Right across the street was a mall. One morning I wanted to buy an apple and a newspaper. But to get across the street you had to go onto the highway up half a mile and do a U-turn, come  back, go across.  And then when I was in that mall, the place that sold the newspaper didn’t sell apples. I had to get back in my car to drive to the other side of the mall to get an apple.

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Last week we ran part one of our recent interview with Michael Dukakis, in which he discussed how building transit will lead to healthier cities and how the burden is now on governors to take the lead on building out our passenger rail network.

In part two, the Duke has some advice for Obama on how to jump start what could become a major domestic industry in decades ahead and .

What the most important thing that nobody is discussing with respect to transportation policy?
The thing that nobody is talking about is: how do we revive the transit rail industry? You know, we can’t make a train in this country. If we’re going to commit ourselves to this kind of spending on rail, it seems to me that one the things that the administration should be doing is taking a serious look at how you revive train and transit manufacturing. Maybe you do it in joint ventures with foreign firms. But why shouldn’t we be getting a chunk of these jobs if we’re going to be spending this money?

If you were in Obama’s position, how would you do that?
The first thing you do is give the automobile makers a $5 billion contract to manufacture transit equipment. This would be far more stimulative, plus you’d get something for it. And then you distribute the equipment to transit systems all over the country. Let’s see if we can’t get them to make a streetcar. I mean, if you can make a bus, why not a streetcar? There are 100 cities in this country that want to do light rail–that’s a market for you. Did I ever tell you the story about Jack Welch and me?

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Malls are being mauled. In case you’ve been paying closer attention to Wall Street or the housing market lately, rest assured that America’s once-bustling shopping meccas are doing just as poorly.

Last month, General Growth Properties, the country’s second largest mall owner, declared bankruptcy. Anchor chains are dropping like flies, from Circuit City to Filene’s Basement. The trend has even reached the level of irony as liquidation resellers are being liquidated. The practical implication of all this is that local malls are going dark all the time across the country, with the carnage being documented at sites like DeadMalls.com.

It’s fair to assume to that these vacant structures are now done forever–at least as old-school malls. But rather than letting these massive properties become gaping holes in the fabric of our communities, it’s time find ways to reimagine them as vital, forward-looking redevelopment projects. This is exactly what Ellen Dunham Jones and June Williamson have done in their book Retrofitting Suburbia. Recently we spoke with Dunham-Jones, the director of the architecture program at Georgia Tech, about how to repair the legacy of this failed American institution.

In one sense your book is about addressing the structural problems with American suburbs. What do you see as the most acute symptom right now of that something is out of whack?
Households that make under $52,000 a year on average are now spending a third of their income on transportation because of where we’ve put the “affordable” housing. Suburbia was premised as the affordable way for households to grow and thrive. But that’s turned into drive-till-you-qualify affordability–and, in the long run, that’s not affordable.

Wow, that’s a lot. No wonder we’re going broke.
It’s amazing: ask people how much they spend on housing and they can always tell you. But ask how much they spend a month on transportation and people are like, “Uh, I dont know.” There’s car payments, insurance, depreciation, and you have to calculate all of that, and then gas. There’s a great website that was put together by the Center for Neighborhood Technology at the Brookings Institution looking at the combined costs about 30 major metropolitan areas.. They said if we’re going to talk about affordability we have to look at housing plus transportation, because increasingly transportation constitutes more of the household budget than housing and yet we haven’t been thinking about it.

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On Friday we had a chance to speak with Richard Ravitch, the man who saved New York’s MTA in the ’70s and is trying to do the same now. We asked him about infrastructure privatization and the stalemate in Albany over his plan.

Governor Rendell and others have been very vocal that public private partnerships are going to play a key roll in dealing with our crisis of underinvestment in infrastructure. Do you agree?
I disagree with him about the privatization of infrastructure. The absence of capital, is a function of the absence of bankable revenue streams–whatever they may be: user charges, government appropriations, or taxes. If you have the revenue streams, you’ll get more capital if you finance on a tax exempt basis than you will on a taxable basis. You have to ask how can raise your capital most cheaply. The answer is with tax exempt financing. That’s why I don’t think privatization is the answer.

What do you see happening in the current standoff in Albany over your plan to bail out the MTA?
I cannot believe the politicians are not going to do enough to prevent the fare from going up. To what degree they’ll take into account the longer term need for capital and the financeability of the revenue streams they create and the fundamental policy issues associated with tolls–which Rendell has been eloquent about–I don’t know. If you don’t address the problem of congestion, you haven’t taken the steps that are necessary. But I don’t know what the outcome will be.

Do you have any sympathy for position of the Democrats who oppose your plan?
I have no sympathy for their position. I don’t think the support of tolls would endanger their political lives.

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He could have been a fashion photographer. There was a point five years ago or so when Oakland native Cary Fukunaga was faced with a tough choice: click pictures of pouting models all day or roll the dice and go to film school. He decided to take the latter route, enrolling at NYU’s famous progam. Fortunately, the decision worked out well for everyone. Fukunaga, 32, is a rising star in Hollywood–and the rest of us can enjoy Sin Nombre, his epic first film about Mexican gangs along America’s southern border. The movie, which won Sundance’s directing award and garnered Fukunaga a multi-picture deal with Focus Features, tells the story of an unlikely friendship of between two illegal immigrants as they trying to cross into El Norte. It was, for the most part, filmed on top of moving freight trains.

The train-top perspective in the film is really striking–it somehow feels slow, cold, and deadly. How difficult was that to do?
I had pretty lofty ideas for how I wanted to shoot on top the train–I wanted to use a chip arm to shoot off the side of the cars, but that proved to be impossible because it kept hitting branches and wires. We basically ended up used a hand-held the entire time.

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Rose George never expected to spend two and half years of her life researching shit. Or, to be more polite, sanitation. But, recognizing how neglected the subject was in popular discourse, she decided to step into the breach. Happily, the results of her efforts have been impressive. Her new book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters, has–in addition to being a charming and engaging read–initiated a much-needed public conversation about the inadequacy of public investment in sanitation in both developed and developing countries. These days she’s working on the issue for the Gates Foundation, giving speeches at places like the World Water Forum, and meeting with Congressional representatives–basically, trying to convince  anyone who’ll listen that it’s time to get serious about sewers.

We caught up with George last week by phone at her home in England and discussed, among other subjects, the world’s most luxurious toilets, why people are unlikely to protest for better sanitation facilities, and how mishandled lingerie can create a nasty sewage spill.

How hard is it to get people to discuss human excrement and all the problems it causes?
There’s a lot of receptiveness to the topic actually, but it just requires someone who is noisy about it and knows how to frame the message properly. Particularly when it’s put in financial terms, people are very receptive.

What’s the financial argument?
You reap $7 dollars in economic rewards for every dollar you spend in basic sanitation. That makes it a really, really good investment. In the developing world, it may cost a couple hundred dollars to install a decent latrine, but think of what you save in terms of health costs and what you would otherwise lose when your workers are off with dysentery or whatever. And in developed world we’re learning that if you don’t continue investing in infrastructure you just going to pay a lot more later. It’s that simple.

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A few years ago, author James Howard Kunstler famously convinced petro-billionaire and Bush crony Richard Rainwater to build an off-the-grid rural compound because the fabric of American society would soon be threatened by skyrocketing energy prices. The Long Emergency, Kunstler’s pungent and highly influential book on the subject of peak oil, won a lot of other smart money converts as well. When a barrel of crude hit $147 last summer, he was looking more and more like a prophet. At the present $47, let’s just say the jury is still out.

But it’s hard not to have the sense that Kunstler’s ideas or worthy of careful consideration, even if one doesn’t share his certainty that oil will be critically scarce in the next ten or twenty years. For instance, his 1994 book The Geography of Nowhere was well ahead of the cultural curve in describing the gross miscalculations of America’s massive investment in sprawling suburbs. Now, even with OPEC cutting production, Kunstler still predicts oil supply shortages dead ahead. Will we feel the bite this year? Next? The year after? “Soon enough,” he says.

Naturally, this informs his ideas about what kinds of infrastructure investments the nation ought to be making. Recently, he discussed national transportation strategy, the tragic nature of imaginary money, and “evangenical roller rinks” with the Infrastructurist.

JR: So we’re starting a major new round of investment in our national infrastructure. Can we agree that’s a good thing?
JHK: Well, for instance, I think it would be a catastrophic mistake to devote a trillion dollars to fixing up the highways. I mean the days of “happy motoring” in this country truly are behind us. We should be planning for a period when energy resources are much more scarce. Throwing that kind of money at roads is not the way to go about doing this.

How would you be doing it?
I don’t know that I would undertake a spending program like this at all. That said, I’m a pretty strong advocate of repairing the national rail system. It’s obviously not the answer to everything. But it would certainly put a lot of people to work doing something that’s meaningful for society. The infrastructure is out there, waiting to be fixed. I’m pretty adamant that we shouldn’t be going the path of high-tech, maglev, high speed rail at this moment, because we need to prove that we can do this at the Hungarian level before we try to proceed past that.

That doesn’t sound very ambitious.
I perceive one our biggest problems being techno-grandiosity. We are so full of ourselves and so sure that technology is going to rescue us and that we’re so good at it that we can defeat every problem that faces us. It’s a fatal hubris, and it’s subscribed to by an awful lot people who have something to say about the course we take in this country.

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Neil Strauss, bestselling author of the girl-getting manual The Game, started worrying about the state of the world a few years ago. Living in dread of various apocalyptic scenarios, he trained himself to be ready to live off the grid at a moment’s notice. His latest book, documenting this enterprise and offering his insights and tips about surviving a disaster, is called Emergency: This Book will Save You.

After completing his survivalist regimen, Strauss now has the skills to deliver a baby goat, gut it, cook it on a fire made from rocks and a toothpick, and wash it down with water collected from a piece of plastic and the sun. He can fashion a knife from a cigarette and knows the secrets of how to escape to a well-armed fortress in a far flung corner of the world in case things really go off the rails in this country.

We reached him by phone earlier this week to get some survival tips and find our what’s wrong with our government’s disaster planning.

Your book seems to have a Libertarian bent. Do you not think the government can be trusted to keep us safe?
I don’t see myself as belonging to any political party. My personal belief is that the government does a decent job maintaining the basic structures of society, but we can’t rely too much on it. We all tend to trust that everything’s going to be okay, that the infrastructure they provide will be fine and that highways and dams will work. From a survival perspective though, the government’s biggest failures are with emergency services plans like the Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Framework.

How is it a failure?
You should think of disaster on a local level. With the federal government everything has to pass through dozens of agencies.

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As part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Climate Action Team, hydrologist and Pacific Institute staffer Matt Heberger has spent the past year studying the effects that rising sea levels will have on the people and infrastructure of California. He and his co-authors have presented their findings to the governor as part of first comprehensive statewide study of its kind. It documents how coastal flooding–an inevitable part of a projected three-to-five foot rise in sea levels by late this century–will threaten not only homes and areas of ecological value, but airports, schools, roads, rail lines, hazardous waste facilities and power plants. There are solutions available, but they are imperfect and expensive–an estimated $100 billion for California alone. But, as Heberger points out, there’s no time to waste in planning for the inevitable.

My understanding is that the sea level rise modeled in this report doesn’t even include the melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets – so it seems like your findings might be understated, if anything.
I focused on impacts on population and infrastructure. The physical science basis for the report was done by researchers at Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Just from some conversations I had with them though, they said that this projection might underestimate what we ultimately see. For the purposes of the report, we went with a sea level rise of 1 to 1.4 meters by 2100.
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John Wray may be the only hot, young literary thing to start off an interview by saying, “I really think the word infrastructure is sexy.” (Thank you, so do we.) And now that his third novel Lowboy (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) is out, it’s becoming clear how much Wray is helping the cause. The protagonist of Lowboy is a paranoid teen on the run, but New York’s subway system—where novel takes place–gets equally devoted and inspired authorial attention. Wray, who for a while lived in a tent in Brooklyn with frisky rats and no running water, has recently been recording subway musicians to create an MP3 Lowboy playlist. Next Thursday, he’ll read on the L train en route to the book’s above ground launch party.

Really, sexy?
Well, I don’t agree with Arnold Schwarzenegger that we need to come up with a better word. I like that word. But I think what he means is that the people who know what infrastructure is have a different relationship to how it functions. For them it’s more about feelings.

I think he wants a new word because he can’t pronounce “infrastructure.”
For years Arnold Schwarzenegger was the only Austrian anyone had heard of and we were all so embarrassed. [Wray's mother is Austrian and he grew up spending summers in Austria.] My uncle kept saying, “He’s smart, look at what he’s managed to do.” It’s very easy to think if someone talks funny that he’s not smart but really if you go back and look at Pumping Iron, he has this surfer’s persona but he’s undermining all the other competitors. He makes all the other dudes incredibly insecure by complimenting them in a backhanded way.

Do you ever write on the subway?
I wrote a huge chunk of Lowboy on the subway. I had to give up my office in DUMBo.  I figured I’d spend a couple days on the subway with my laptop on the A train. I’d go all the way out to the Rockaways with no internet connection or cell phone. I found I could actually concentrate, and it’s great when that line goes above ground. It was probably only three hours a day, pretty consistently, but I got a lot more done on the subway than I did in my office.

How did you research the intricacies of the subway lines and stations?
I think I’ve always had a connection to subway systems. My uncle was a planner of the Vienna subway, and as a kid I’d go to various sites where they were extending the subway lines. I got to watch them put the finishing touches on new stops. I think that’s where it started.

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