Sewage Spill

Talk of environmental problems in recent years has tended to focus on climate change, but an excellent Charles Duhig piece in The New York Times reminds us that thanks to inadequate capacity at the nation’s sewage treatment plants many cities still find themselves dumping raw sewage into rivers when heavy rain falls.

Part of the problem is the spread of the ever-villainous vast surface parking lot, whose non-permeable surface (in contrast to, say, grass or trees) creates extra water flow. But the largest issue is simply that upgraded the capacity of sewage treatment plants is the kind of infrastructure project we’ve been neglecting for decades. That, in turn, should be a reminder that it shouldn’t reall be all that hard to come up with useful things to do if there’s an interest in additional job creation measures.