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A podcast by GBH News reporter Ian Coss gives this notorious project a long-overdue reappraisal. Bonus: The show comes with lessons for climate infrastructure projects of the future.
If you’ve lived in Massachusetts at any point in the last 50 years, you’ve heard of the Big Dig. It’s infamous — a tunnel project that was supposed to bury an elevated highway in Boston to the tune of $2 billion that eventually ballooned in cost to $15 billion and took a quarter of a century to finish.
The Big Dig was more than just a highway project, though. It was a monumental effort that Ian Coss, a reporter at GBH News, calls a “renovation of downtown Boston.” The project built tunnels and bridges, yes, but it also created parks, public spaces, and mass transit options that transformed the city. In a nine-episode podcast series appropriately called The Big Dig, Coss dives into the long, complicated history of the project, making a case for why the Big Dig was so much more than the boondoggle people think it was.
I talked to Coss about how the Big Dig came to be and the lessons we can learn from it as we continue to adapt our built environment to a changing climate. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I moved to Boston for college in 2010, and I remember going to the North End and being struck by how beautiful it was. I didn’t realize how recently that view had changed until I listened to your podcast — I mean, the Big Dig had only wrapped up a few years earlier.
It’s easy to forget how quickly it transformed. I grew up in Massachusetts, so when I would come into the city I would see [the Big Dig] being built — I have vague memories of the elevated artery. And when I moved to Boston Proper in 2013, which was less than a decade after the project wrapped, it was stunning for me to be like, “oh, this is what that project was,” because I definitely didn’t understand it at the time.
What made you decide to create an entire podcast about this “renovation” of Boston?
I think part of it was this disconnect where I grew up hearing about the Big Dig and mostly hearing bad things about it — it was behind schedule, it was a disaster, a boondoggle, etc. — because that really was the reputation of the project, nationally and locally. And then moving to the city and seeing the fruits of it, it was hard to reconcile those things. Like, this “disaster” created a greenway through the middle of the city. Now you can actually get to the airport.
What was driving that narrative of its being a disaster?
The Big Dig went on a very long emotional journey. It started as this kind of visionary, idealistic project championed by activists and supported by politicians of both parties. And then, after navigating the process of funding, permitting, contracting, managing, and designing, by the time it's in construction, it really is not a source of pride.
There are a number of technical things about the Big Dig that could have been done better, and we can learn lessons from it. The way it was contracted could have been done better. The management structure could have been done better. There were flaws in the design, including a fatal flaw that cost the life of a driver in the tunnel.
I think a lot of it is about the storytelling. Just to give one example, so much of the negative narrative around the Big Dig was around the cost. You often hear about how it started with an estimated cost of $2 billion and wound up costing $15 billion. But I think that narrative misses a few things.
One is that it was never going to cost $2 billion. That was not a realistic estimate. But in our country, it is so hard to get approval, political support, funding, and permitting in place that there is a very strong incentive all throughout the process to downplay the costs, downplay the risks, downplay the disruption, make it sound like this is going to be quick and easy and painless and cheap, just to get to the starting line. Because the paradox of it is that if we had known in 1983 or 1987 or 1991 that this was going to be a $15 billion project, it would have never happened. And yet, in hindsight, there are many smart people who told me that this project was a bargain at $15 billion because of what we got in terms of economic benefits, transportation improvements, and environmental improvements.
There’s almost an element of asking for forgiveness rather than permission here, but that forgiveness is inevitably laced with anger because of those expectations.
Right. If only it were just forgiveness.
The Big Dig had its roots in the National Highway Program. Were all those projects going constantly over budget?
There’s a great paper that I cite in episode four where the authors studied the cost of highway building per mile every year from the 1970s through the 1990s, and it’s actually a great sample set because we’ve built so many highways of different sizes in different states. Basically, what they found is that highway costs per mile really ramp up significantly in the 1970s. And that’s, of course, the period when the [Big Dig] was first getting conceived.
So the short answer to your question is, it was cheaper once. But there were other costs, in that those early highways in the ‘50s and ‘60s largely did not consider the impact on communities or on the environment. They did not make a lot of mitigation efforts to minimize the day to day disruption caused by those projects. So I think part of what the Big Dig captures is this really historic change in the way we build things in this country that was ushered in by the anti-highway movements, by citizen activism, and by the National Environmental Policy Act. Over the course of the 1970s we made it much harder to build things, for very good reasons.
I think the Big Dig — which some people describe as the last great project of the interstate era — captures an attempt to do a massive, ambitious infrastructure project that is also loaded with environmental mitigation and also has a robust community process. Part of what we learned through that is that you can have a project that’s cheap and efficient, you can have a project that’s democratic and humane, but it’s tough to have it all. And the Big Dig was trying to have it all, and we did get it all, but at enormous cost. That was the thing that could never be solved.
You make a connection between the Big Dig and climate change right from the first episode. What are the climate lessons we can learn from the Big Dig?
In some ways, it’s ironic to hold up the Big Dig as a case study for climate change because it’s a highway project. My point is not that the Big Dig is, like, the future of infrastructure. But what it offers is a recent case study on a massively ambitious building project. We have some distance, and you can see the whole arc of it, but it very much lives within our era. It’s not the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge or any of those other big projects built in a different time under different conditions.
The way I see it is that in order to mitigate or prevent the worst effects of climate change — and you can feel free to disagree with me — we’re going to need to build a lot of stuff. This is not a problem that we’re going to solve by riding bicycles and growing vegetables in the backyard, both of which I do and hope everyone does. And of course, those projects might look different than the Big Dig because building a wind turbine isn’t exactly analogous to building a downtown tunnel. But I think there are relevant analogies, especially things like coastal mitigation in cities, improving mass transit, building high energy transmission lines — these large scale projects that will affect people but also are an important public good.
You talked on the show about the Big Dig as an attempt to make this process more democratic at some level. People on both sides had very strong feelings about it. This reminded me of the NIMBY/YIMBY dichotomy of climate projects. Did anyone mention any best practices that could be applied to future projects of this kind?
I’ve talked with Fred Salvucci [former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation and driving force of the Big Dig] about this. He mentioned this biblical parable — he’s full of parables — about Jesus walking across the water and then turning to his disciples and telling them to follow. But they step into the water and fall right in, and when they get back out they say it’s impossible. And then Jesus says, “It’s easy to walk across the water. You just have to know where the stones are.”
And Fred said the lesson there is that, in order to navigate this kind of process, you have to know where the flashpoints are, what the issues will be. That way you can anticipate them rather than just going in and saying “this is my project, I’m going to do it this way and you can fight me on it.”
Part of what I think is really interesting about this, which I think speaks to present-day projects like offshore wind, is that in that fight, you have very well-intentioned actors who are trying to make the project better and using the environmental process to do that. And you also have bad actors who are weaponizing and manipulating the environmental process to their own personal ends. And those two things get all mixed up.
You know, I’m an environmentalist. I believe in environmental review. I don’t want to sit here and say that we need to get rid of all environmental permitting because it makes it too hard to build things. But I think it’s also important to recognize that these things can be weaponized.
Scheme Z, which proposed this big spiral loop of ramps and a bridge over the river, is a good example. Politically, that became very messy — they were trying to impose concentrated harm in the name of a public good. And I know, strategically, maybe there are things [Salvucci] could have done to mitigate that or circumvent that, but given the structures in place, the logical outcome is that it spends a decade in lawsuits and review committees and you wind up with something that’s okay, that everyone can live with.
The funny thing about that is that it turned into the Zakim Bridge, which is now a Boston icon.
Right. I mean, that’s part of the communication piece, too.
I was biking under the Zakim bridge the other day, and I biked through where there’s a nice pedestrian and bicycle bridge and this skate park that is always filled with people. Truly, that is maybe the best utilized public space created by the Big Dig.
It’s easy for me to play Monday morning quarterback and say “oh, you should have communicated that better, you should have told the story better.” I mean, he was saying all the right things. But then all you had to say on the other side was “it’s 18 lanes and five ramps,” and that sounded terrible and looked terrible on the page. And I mean, sure, I wish there weren’t all those ramps there, but like you said, ironically, the bridge became an icon of the city.
I think a big part of the lesson for me is how hard it is to build infrastructure democratically because the timescales are all wrong. These things have short-term costs and cause short-term disruption and bring very long-term benefits.
I was constantly struck by this issue of scale, both in terms of time and money. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea of billions of dollars and projects that span decades. These are just things that are impossible for any regular person to really plan out.
I was talking to someone who said that their dad was in his 70s when the Big Dig was just getting started. And for him, it was like, “my city’s going to be torn up for the rest of my life,” right? That’s what this project meant for him — he would live with this mess of a project and never see the results. And he had to deal with that so that you could move to Boston in 2010 and never know the city another way. The cost of that benefit is borne by another generation.
And it’s the same thing with climate change. It moves on a scale that is so much longer than politics. The Big Dig took almost 40 years from conception to completion. So if you’re thinking about political capital, if you’re thinking about two- and four-year election cycles, it’s very, very hard to conceive, plan, and deliver a project on that kind of time scale.
The benefits and costs are almost inverted in climate change, in a way. We’re talking about future benefits, yes, but we’re also talking about future costs if we don’t do anything. But it’s so hard to make people think in a 40- or 50-year timescale.
If the Big Dig was so hard to make happen politically with what I think was a more genial political environment overall, it feels kind of impossible to think of building anything on that scale right now.
I gave a talk at City Hall a few weeks ago and I was talking with some of the young planners there, people who are in their 30s. Some of them have been listening to the series, and they told me they could not imagine what it would be like to get that kind of federal funding out of Washington, get all the local players on board, get it through the permitting process, and get it contracted. Because right now if they try to take away one parking spot and put in one bike line, they’re bogged down in meetings for a year.
I think climate change is also the inverse of projects like this because with the Big Dig, for example, you can feel the tangible benefits of a quicker commute and a more beautiful city. But with climate change, if the projects work, you’d actually feel nothing.
Exactly. Climate change is way, way harder. A road project or a rail project will have benefits. You get ribbon cuttings and photo ops. But if we make Boston resilient to flooding or something, you know, do some big project that would improve the shoreline or whatever ideally, that historic storm surge may never come, or it’ll come and we’ll be prepared for it and nothing will happen. But yeah, you’re working with long term counterfactuals.
It feels to me like climate change was designed in a laboratory to flummox institutions. It takes all of our cognitive biases, our ingrained social and biological blind spots and weak points and just flicks them all at us at once.
All nine episodes of The Big Dig are out now. You can listen on theWGBH website,Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.