Elon Musk is at it again.
This time, the divisive billionaire has deployed his army of well-funded lobbyists in an aggressive attempt to push politicians in Texas to award a massive flood-prevention contract to Musk's own The Boring Company, ProPublic reported in mid-September.
The intensive campaign has come despite concerns that The Boring Company's proposal does not adequately fit the project's needs and doubts raised by the company's lengthy history of failed projects.
What's happening?
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey caused devastating flooding across Houston. In the years since, experts have explored ways to prevent the catastrophe from happening again.
The potential solution that has gained the most momentum would involve a series of massive underground pipes, 30 to 40 feet in diameter, which would whisk excess water away from the city before releasing it into the ocean, according to a previous ProPublica report. The proposed project has been estimated to cost as much as $760 million.
Unsurprisingly, Musk has smelled an opportunity, with the Musk-run The Boring Company aggressively lobbying state and local lawmakers with an alternative vision that would involve only two pipes measuring just 12 feet in diameter.
While The Boring Company and its allies have attempted to pitch the company's proposal as an innovative, cost-saving solution, experts have criticized the company's plan as insufficient to protect Houston from disastrous floods.
"If you build a smaller tunnel, okay, it'll be cheaper, but it can carry less water," said Larry Dunbar, a longtime water-resources engineer in the Houston area, per ProPublica. "So what have you saved? Have you reduced the flooding upstream by an inch? And are you going to spend multimillions of dollars doing that? Well, maybe that's not worth it."
Like Musk himself, The Boring Company has a long history of overpromising and underdelivering.
Despite proposals to dig hundreds of miles of tunnels in cities including Chicago, Dubai, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Nashville, Washington D.C., and San José, the company has only broken ground on a single project located in Las Vegas, according to an August report by Bloomberg.
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No way 🙅 Even there, the company has only completed eight out of the 68 city-approved miles of tunnels, with only four of those miles being operational, per Bloomberg. And, despite lavish promises of superfast, revolutionary "hyperloop" transport, those travelling in the completed tunnels do so in standard Tesla EVs.
"Nearly a decade after Elon Musk launched Boring Co. with promises of ultra-fast hyperloop-powered transportation, the tunneling venture has little to show," reporter Arvelisse Bonilla Ramos wrote in Bloomberg.
The company's track record of disregarding environmental regulations and worker-safety rules also has raised concerns. A commissioner for Harris County — where Houston is located — argued that The Boring Company should not be involved in the flood-mitigation project given Musk's "blatant disregard for democratic institutions and environmental protections," according to ProPublica's mid-September report.
However, these monumental and well-documented failures have not stopped Musk and his band of acolytes from pushing for The Boring Company to be the contractor of choice for the new flood-mitigation tunnels in Houston.
Why is it important?
As rising global temperatures cause extreme weather events like hurricanes to become more severe, cities around the world are racing to improve their infrastructure in the hopes of mitigating the devastation caused by natural disasters.
However, The Boring Company's push to take over the Houston-area tunnel project has exposed the risk that opportunistic companies and individuals will see these projects as a chance to line their own pockets with public funds while doing little, if anything, to make conditions safer for residents.
With human lives, homes, food supplies, and livelihoods on the line, the end result could be far more costly than even the millions — if not billions — in wasted tax dollars.
What's being done about it?
By exposing the efforts of Musk, The Boring Company, and their cronies to capitalize on well-intentioned and important projects, journalistic outlets like ProPublica, Bloomberg, and others have helped to bring transparency to the otherwise opaque, behind-the-scenes processes by which such decisions are often made.
However, without pushback from the public, and in particular voters, no amount of journalistic truth-telling or fact-finding will make a difference.
In order to push for more effective policies, you can use your voice, contact your elected representatives, and vote for candidates who will do what is best for all of their constituents, not just billionaires.
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