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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Infrastructure, infrastructure week. It's infrastructure week on Today Explained.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You might have heard. We started the week talking about the current administration's plans and our forgetfulness when it comes to all that New Deal infrastructure we built a century or so ago.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then we talked about trains and why it's so dang expensive to build things in America.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then we flushed ourselves down a toilet to explore what's wrong with our wastewater systems.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yesterday, we talked about human infrastructure.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And today, we're going to talk to an infrastructure human, President Biden's Secretary of Transportation, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When we spoke, didn't seem that sour that he didn't get to be president.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, you get to be the secretary of planes, trains, and automobiles, but also a lot of things people don't think about as much, from maritime to things like commercial space travel, which had a big week and which we oversee in some respects.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the biggest thing is that so many of the most important issues of our time are at stake in transportation.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you care about climate change, this is one of the biggest places you could do something about it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Transportation turns out to play a huge role in racial equity and economic justice in this country.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And again, there's a chance to do a lot about that.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's central in the economy.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's where a lot of the most interesting things that are going to shape our future are playing out, especially in this decade, in the 2020s.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, any day would be an exciting place to be.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But at this moment, where it's also in the center of the domestic policy conversation in a way that, And, you know, transportation nerds don't get to see that, you know, we don't get to see that kind of moment in the sunshine any old year.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, of course, the president himself really cares about transportation.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does that make you his favorite cabinet member? Do you know? Has he said it?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I don't know about that, but it's definitely great to be working on something that the president cares about.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean, you take something like passenger rail, right? And I think in any other administration, I would be confident of being the biggest passenger rail enthusiast on the team.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But it's always going to be second place to the president in this group, although I'm making it a close second.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, not far from where we are in Washington, D.C., is 148 years old.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is the plan for updating our aging and outdated infrastructure, Secretary?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Look, we are coasting off of infrastructure investments and infrastructure decisions that were made one, two, five generations ago.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And we've gotten away with it up to a certain point, disinvesting in this country's public resources for the last 40 years or so.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But it's caught up to us.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And you see it in crumbling roads, bridges that have to be taken offline or worse, that actually collapse.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So many areas that are a single point of failure where if something goes wrong, an entire part of the economy could be jammed up.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So we know that we have to do something and do something quickly.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's what the bipartisan infrastructure framework is.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: This is the biggest investment that we've made in public transit, for example, ever as a country.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Biggest investment in passenger rail since they set up Amtrak in the first place.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And you go on and on down the list.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And, you know, partly in terms of taking care of what we have, like the example you raised, right? These tunnels that are, they were great.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean, total state of the art 100 years ago.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But, you know, times have changed.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But also areas that nobody was thinking about when they dug these tunnels.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Like, you know, those tunnels probably ought to carry fiber optic cable while we're at it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And it's part of the vision to get every single American affordable fast internet.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The fact that it turns out lead pipes are not okay.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And there's no acceptable level of lead exposure for children, which is why we need to get 100% of those led service lines taken care of.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: All of that's part of this package.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit about the politics here.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We kicked off the week talking about the politics, talking about how there's these two plans.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's this bipartisan plan, and then there's this sort of budget reconciliation plan where the Democrats seemingly will have to go it alone.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why are there two plans? And can you explain what's in each of them?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think some people out there might find it a little confusing.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, here's the way I think of it.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: All of this added together is the president's economic vision.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It's how we not only respond to the moment, but make sure that Americans can thrive.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And there are tons of pieces that go into that.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It's roads and bridges.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It's child care.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It's making sure that our housing is improving, taking care of our health care infrastructure.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Now, we had a certain way of breaking that down.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The president had a jobs plan and a families plan.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Admittedly, even that could overlap as you think about it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: These issues touch each other, but we broke it down a certain way.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's evolved through time in these conversations with Congress.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So now we have two chunks, right?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: One, the bipartisan infrastructure framework.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: These are mostly transportation infrastructure investments.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Again, this is huge.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: This is $1.2 trillion over the coming years.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And it's not just kind of renewing or reauthorizing what we always do.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: This is a generational investment.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And these are things that we think a lot of Republicans can and should support too.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Then you have the second part.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We like to think of it as infrastructure too.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We call it human infrastructure, but it's not worth getting bogged down in a definitional debate.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The point is, this is a set of really good policies that we need as a country.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Like making sure everyone can get paid family leave.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Something people in pretty much every other country take for granted.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Making sure that it is affordable to have childcare.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Getting everybody, three and four-year-olds pre-kindergarten education.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And getting everybody access to community college.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: These things, by the way, I don't see why Republicans couldn't vote for this, but it sounds like most of them won't.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you go into it knowing that they wouldn't?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Yeah, the president's view is if there's something we can do together, if there's something that we could do on a bipartisan basis, then we should try.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But there are also parts of his agenda that may not move that way.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And you don't give up on those parts of the vision.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You try to get him through, even if that means having to go it alone, like we did on the rescue plan, that the American people overwhelmingly wanted to happen.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But you just couldn't get Republicans on Capitol Hill to vote for us.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The president said, look, we need to do this.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And we did it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On the bipartisan bill, it seems like there's a lot of pushback about how it will be paid for.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How are you meeting the arguments that the plan is unaffordable or that there's no solid plan to pay for it?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So before we get into the details of the plan, let's just say, let's just point out that it doesn't make sense that the richest country in the world can't afford decent infrastructure.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We're not even talking about space cars or hoverboards for everybody.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We're talking about stuff that people in a lot of other countries already have.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We're talking about bringing our standard of passenger rail nearer to what they enjoy today in Morocco or Italy.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: If the richest country in the world can't have this, then what are we even talking about?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So of course we can afford it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The question is how?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The question is how do you actually raise the revenue to do it?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Now, the president has been very flexible on this.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: He had one red line, and that was he made a promise that he's not going to raise taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year because he thinks the majority of American families are in that category are already paying more than enough.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We also see some of the biggest corporations in this country making billions of dollars in profits, many of which paid zero, zero in taxes.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We see some of the wealthiest Americans who, as a percentage rate, pay a lower income tax rate in effect than a schoolteacher or firefighter.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It doesn't make sense.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Americans agree.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: By the way, a lot of Republicans across America get that that doesn't make sense.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And so the president put forward a way to pay for all this that is basically about asking corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We've gone round and round on a lot of different ways to do it.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's part of what's playing out, even as we speak in the back and forth with the House and the Senate.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's a natural, sometimes messy part of the legislative process.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But the bottom line is, of course, we can afford this as a country.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And maybe even more importantly, we can't afford not to.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean, we're paying that you can estimate to the tune of hundreds of dollars per family in a lot of places, a sort of invisible, we call it a pothole tax, an invisible cost that people are paying already right now, just from their cars getting beat up and the roads being in bad shape.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We are paying a price right now in terms of goods and services being backed up from overburdened infrastructure.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And that's only going to get worse, to say nothing of the climate-related costs of business as usual.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So we're going to pay one way or the other.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We will pay less if we do it smart and if we do it now.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Chime says with qualifying direct deposits, you can be eligible for free overdraft, up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can open an account in two minutes at Chime.com slash explained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, really happy?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But still, we stick it out.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've already put years into this place.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And maybe the most common one.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Isn't everyone kind of miserable at work?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's time to get unstuck.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's time for Strawberry.me.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's strawberry.me slash unstuck.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Secretary Buttigieg, infrastructure is clearly a top priority in the Biden administration.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even the former president talked about it quite a bit.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All the same, how can you ensure that your vision, which isn't a vision for the next three or four years, but is a vision for the next generation, has staying power in future administrations?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, this is one of the reasons why we're paying a lot of attention to policy, not just the big dollar amounts that are getting thrown around, but what do we do to encourage, for example, states before they widen a highway to check whether that's going to help or whether you're just going to get that many more cars on the road?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And is there an alternative that's actually going to be more efficient?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Policies that encourage equity and paying attention in a country that has a really disturbing legacy, for example, of routing highways through black neighborhoods and tearing them apart, that this time around the policies encourage those dollars to be spent in ways that unite and knit people together instead of dividing them.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: These are things that as we put them into place, they can help shape how future dollars are spent, no matter who's signing the checks in future administrations.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And it's also an obligation to get this right, because again, going to the example of highways and what that meant for racial justice.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You know, when you put up a piece of physical infrastructure, you know, unlike a lot of other policies that could be theoretically changed overnight, it's there.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: It's there for a very long time.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And so you better get it right the first time.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The president's also injecting a lot of climate policy into this massive spending plan.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is that being received?
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The first thing we've got to recognize is that every transportation decision is a climate decision, whether we acknowledge that or not.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You know, transportation is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, as I said earlier.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: To me, that means we get to be the biggest part of the solution, but only if we're actually doing policy in the right way.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So before we even get to what you would call a climate title in a bill, just the way we make it easier or harder to have transit in a community, the way we support the rollout of electric vehicles and the president's vision for half a million electric vehicle charging stations around the country, all of these things are climate policy, which is why so much is at stake in this transportation side of the bill.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Then you have other things that we need to do around incentives and tax policy and energy standards that are being contemplated in the other bill that may have to be passed without Republican votes.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Look, time's up.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean, this is no longer a theoretical thing.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: The recent heat wave in the Pacific Northwest basically shouldn't even be possible were it not for climate change.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You saw a transit system shut down because their cables were beginning to melt.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We saw parts of highway buckling in the heat.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And different parts of the country had different examples of how this climate challenge is upon us.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So we need to do two things.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We need to curb the emissions match the president ambitious goals that he laid out at the climate summit and stop climate change from getting any worse.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And we got to deal with the fact that it's here.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Which means resilient infrastructure.
--:-- [Sound effects: A brief clip of a train]
--:-- Pete Buttigieg: If a road getting washed out every third year now maybe we build it right where it was.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Maybe there a different way to do it.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And so on the resilience side and the climate prevention side, you just can't separate that from what we're doing on so-called hard infrastructure.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It feels like we're going from like, you know, administration to administration in these wild jump cuts where you had Obama pushing forward a lot of climate policy, his successor basically gutting the EPA.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And now you guys are coming in and trying to do a ton of stuff.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, how does Washington adjust to these dramatic shifts?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Well, that's why our work is not only to win the day in any given congressional vote, but to make sure that we're having a conversation with the American people about how we got here, about what it means to them when we get these policies through.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And when you do that, that's when you have staying power.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And the example I would always give is the Affordable Care Act, right?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: This was a largely unpopular policy by the time the Obama administration pushed it through.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But it made such a positive difference for so many people that eventually, even when Republicans had all the levers of government, House, Senate, White House, they couldn't destroy it.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: They wouldn't destroy it because the American people knew that it was a good policy and that we needed to keep it.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think that gives us a playbook for a lot of things where if we get the policy right and Americans understand why their lives are better because we did it right, then first of all, hopefully, you know, you get you get some acknowledgement for that, some credit and you get returned to office and you get to keep serving.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But even if you don't, even your opponents cannot dismantle good policies so easily.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are not a jolted Washingtonian. Coming into this and seeing what potential there is with fresh eyes, what would you say to those people who have little to no hope?
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I think we're at an extraordinary moment.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I mean, first of all, again, investments that have been talked about for years, decades even, are actually about to happen.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And technological change is upon us in ways that are incredibly exciting, Scary, dangerous even, if we don't get it right.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But if we do get it right, the impact of electric vehicles, the impact of automated vehicles, the impact of drones, again, could cut either way.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: We've got to get it right.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But what that could mean for congestion, for climate, for rural and tribal communities is extraordinary.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: So I think the 2020s will go down as one of the most transformative decades we've ever had in transportation.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And it means we get to leapfrog some of our own old, maybe overburdened systems if we make the right investments and if we're smart about these policy choices.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: I wouldn't be doing this if I weren't full of optimism about what's possible.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Not that it's easy.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Let me mention one other thing, which is a lot of other competing, you know, some of our friendly competitors.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: You look at a lot of European countries that seem to be and are light years ahead of us on things from high speed rail to, you know, bicycle commuting.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: But if you look at their not so recent past, they weren't always that way.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: There's not something in, you know, Scandinavian DNA that makes it more likely to bicycle or build, you know, high speed rail or have fewer pedestrian deaths.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: They made policy choices.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: And those policy choices are in front of us too.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Secretary Buttigieg, thank you so much for your time.
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--:-- Pete Buttigieg: Same here.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
