Most of the power plants that went offline were natural gas.

Yeah there's probably a wealth of people better informed than I on the matter, I merely wanted to point out an extreme case of the disavowed negligence running rampant from the top of our society on down

It's almost like people who don't believe government can be good are bad at making good government.

People who belive in government are equally bad. New York has shorted maintenance on the subway for years with Democrats in power. (Democrats for years have been the government belivers, at least when the Republicans are incomptent they are proving their point )

Grift (spelling?) happens without proper oversight and auditing.

It's said that the 4th (agency, branch?) of the US government was the press. Perhaps the destruction of a press sufficiently funded and driven only by the need to produce things people want to read, rather than entertainment people will pay to read or see, is a large factor in the dysfunction we see in the near term.

I would really love if the Government Accountability Office and some other organizations that produced reports for the library of congress...

1) By default had to publish to the public domain, with the report accessible in the public library stacks (mirrored everywhere).

2) Published a yearly report, with pretty color charts, breaking down the IRS input, which funds that goes towards, and where all of that goes (until it hits classified seal blocks; annotating when the classification is re-reviewed for extension and also when the current sunset to auto-unseal is scheduled.)

3) Also a report of all of the reports produced. (an index) Including those under seal, even if the titles are also redacted.

4) Could be directed to produce more reports by some form of citizen's initiative (maybe change.org?)

5) Should also have offices per state, mega-city (metro region), and county.

To bring this full circle back to the article, the inability to build and maintain things is a recent and uniquely American problem. The fifth largest economy in the world can’t build a train (California HSR), but much smaller countries can. New York’s maintenance and construction costs are a laughingstock with no obvious causes.[0]

Obviously something is seriously wrong, and everything needs to be looked at, but the defeatist idea that “Well, it can’t be done, and if we do it, we’d just screw it up, so don’t bother.” Only in America is there one party that refuses to look at entrenched interests, and another that sabotages things in order to make a point, or more recently to simply “trigger” the other party.

I can tolerate incompetence, but really can’t stand sabotage.

[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/new-york-infrastruct...

The problem isn't unique to the US. We.are the worst, but the UK isn't much better, and even France has issues to work on. Spain has great construction, but their opperations are questionable. Assian countries also have variations. There is no reason India should be so expensive to build in.

That isn't enough for me to accept the "equally bad" part.

Also, as a european, I see both american parties as being on the government is bad side, even if one of them are obviously more so than the other.

Competition between parties can only produce better results when there are at least two parties who are semi-sincerely trying. The awfulness of Republicans is a license for Democrats to let down their own standards to the bare minimum above that.

Thank you for posting a source about the wind turbines.