Rice Farmer

News links will resume on Monday.

More on the Great Fall-Apart. One of today’s news links, which I’m sure many readers noticed, is “DoT budget isn’t keeping up with need for road, bridge repairs.” The article kicks off with the truly grim observation by the transportation secretary that “The Transportation Department has a backlog between $80 billion and $100 billion in high-priority infrastructure improvement projects that it cannot afford to fund” (emphasis mine). That represents a lot of miles of road and many bridges that will be repaired or replaced later than needed, and I predict that repair or replacement will never come for a significant percentage.

In the same vein, recently the New York Times ran an op-ed piece lamenting the woefully insufficient amount of investment in infrastructure. For those with shock-resistant hearts, this article gives a number of specific examples showing the horrendous state of America’s infrastructure. Here I will mention one of the best examples, which was that even though the state of Pennsylvania more than tripled its expenditures on bridges, it ended up with an even longer list of bridges needed repairs!

Of course, the US isn’t the only country with this problem. Britain isn’t known as “pothole nation” for nothing. And Japan, which at first glance seems to have a very modern and well-maintained infrastructure, has, for example, loads of bridges that need repair or replacement. According to this article (in Japanese), Japan has about 150,000 bridges that are 15 meters or more in length, and about 90% of them are managed by municipalities. Of those, 121 are totally closed to traffic, and 680 are still open but have instituted weight restrictions because of their deteriorated conditions. Recall that Japan is a geographically much smaller country than the US, and you can see the significance of these figures. Because many bridges and roads were built during Japan’s years of rapid economic growth, over the next decade a slew of them will be up for repair or replacement, and the money surely won’t be there. But bridges and roads aren’t the only problem. This post from last year provided some information on the grave state of sewage pipe in Tokyo.

We won’t make any headway on infrastructure because energy is too expensive now. Only a few years ago crude oil was still in the $20–30 range, which enabled countries to go on infrastructure construction sprees. Now that the same barrel of oil costs three times as much, we can buy only one-third as much energy for the same amount of money. And because — thanks to peak oil — budgets are severely constrained, that further limits the amount of energy we can expend on infrastructure. In a word, we’re fighting a losing battle. Infrastructure will crumble faster than we can possibly fix it.

The upshot is that vehicles will in time no longer be able to navigate broken roads and bridges, and that alone will strangle economies. Meanwhile, when aged water mains and sewage pipes break, the cities they serve will become uninhabitable. The big cities of the world now bill themselves as “24-hour cities” offering every kind of luxury and serving as economic and cultural centers, but when toilets are stopped up, sewage overflows in the streets, and there is no water, those masses of concrete will be hell.

In case you were wondering if the Great Fall-Apart, my inelegant name for the deterioration of the world’s infrastructure, is still continuing, the answer is an unqualified yes. “Risks in 2010: Crumbling Infrastructure” informs us matter-of-factly that “Worldwide, some 35 trillion dollars will have to be spent over the next 20 years to meet infrastructure needs, estimates the World Bank” (emphasis mine — as if I needed to emphasize it). Of course this figure includes the construction of new infrastructure as well as repairs to and replacement of existing infrastructure, but the magnitude of that sum is enough to floor even the most optimistic person. All I can say is: Good luck.

Public infrastructure is funded by taxes, bonds, and fees for its use. All face problems now. With usage down, fees are down. Tax receipts are of course flagging badly. We’ll look at bonds below. Here a writer argues that Americans are not taxed as much as people in many other countries, and need to pay more taxes in order to finance “sustainability infrastructure.” Surely building all that new infrastructure will require much more money, and we have to add onto that the funding needed to repair/replace what we already have and is crumbling. Although not explicitly stated, it seems the writer assumes that there will be some kind of recovery which will underpin the economic growth and job creation needed to enable people to pay all these taxes and fees (assuming there is no tax revolt, but that’s another story). But under peak oil, recession is the rule. We cannot expect a return to the good old days, and even economic/finance experts are admitting that any recovery will be “jobless,” meaning that many of the jobs lost since the 2008 crash will never return.

Now on to bonds. Owing to peak oil, debt defaults are getting to be a huge problem that is going to get worse. And it appears we are in for a storm of muni bond defaults. As Warren Buffett has observed, insuring muni bonds is turning into a “dangerous business.” And bonds are another major source of funding for infrastructure projects.

So, where’s all this leading? Peak oil means lower tax revenues (even if taxes are raised), lower fee revenues (because of lower usage), debt defaults (including bonds), and continuing recession that perpetuates and aggravates these. In sum, the world will not even come close to raising that $35 trillion figure stated above. We’ll see less new infrastructure created, and a lot of existing infrastructure deteriorate further. Some infrastructure is already being downgraded, as I noted here.

The Great Fall-Apart is an inevitable consequence of energy decline. Instead of taxing people to death in a vain attempt to save and expand the vast infrastructure that cheap oil built, we should embrace decline and reorder our priorities.

Brazil is importing 2 million barrels of gasoline from Venezuela to make up for an ethanol shortage caused by the effects of poor weather on the sugar cane harvest. We often hear about the effects of weather on the output of renewable energy sources such as wind and photovoltaic. This is commonly called “intermittency” or “variability,” and is a characteristic of many renewables that prevent them from supplying base load electric power. Even normally more stable renewables such as hydroelectric power are susceptible to the vagaries of nature, a current case in point being Venezuela, which is suffering a crippling power shortage owing to insufficient rain.

By contrast, biofuels are often considered to be above this, but here is an instance in which a country that has made itself heavily dependent on ethanol finds itself short of fuel because of uncooperative weather. So here is the intermittency problem appearing where many people seem to have overlooked it.

In this post on February 5, I discussed the decline of education and training needed to maintain the knowledge and skills which industrial/technological civilization needs to maintain itself. Amigos, there is more bad news. Here we find that European universities are putting higher education on the chopping block, and this article tells us that UK universities are literally falling apart. And there is no shortage of articles in the US media about cuts affecting compulsory education programs (in Utah a lawmaker even floated a plan to cut the 12th grade). If elites wanted a “dumbed-down” population, they sure are getting it now.

Watch as the dearth of knowledge and skills combines with energy decline to drag civilization down.

“British Airways to Buy Sustainable Jet Fuel Made From London Trash” informs us of a plan which seems quite common-sense and reasonable, and indeed, there is nothing new about waste-to-energy schemes. But will this ensure modern civilization’s energy future?

Before proceeding further, let me say that I have nothing at all against making good use of everything. I myself compost everything organic emitted by my household, and play the good citizen by participating in the local recycling program.

But let’s consider where all that “waste” comes from in the first place. Without fossil fuels — primarily oil — we wouldn’t have all that trash, because it is generated by economic activities that are powered by fossil fuels. And then the trash is picked up and hauled by trucks. Therefore, even if using trash to produce power or to make fuels is reducing reliance on fossil fuels, ultimately the whole operation is underpinned by fossil fuels. That doesn’t sound very “sustainable” to me.

Lots of people are making fun of Sarah Palin’s hand notes. Personally, I don’t like Palin’s politics, and I don’t think she’s smart enough to run a country (which of course has not stopped others). But that’s neither here nor there. The issue here is: I don’t understand why using notes, written on hands or any other medium, is bad.

As I recall, most of my college professors lectured from sheaves of notes. Last year I delivered lectures to several citizen groups about peak oil, and I used an outline that covered two and one-half letter-size sheets of paper. And since I’m not particularly good at remembering figures, I wrote all those down, too. It simply makes good sense to write down the points you want to cover, and also keep your facts straight. So, I would encourage Palin to use more notes.

One more thing: Palin’s critics only harm themselves with such ill-conceived and below-the-belt criticism, which is akin to ad hominem or shoot-the-messenger attacks. That the White House itself has stooped to such cheap mockery is indicative of the administration’s good-idea bankruptcy, which is why the mess Dubya left is now much worse.

I now return you to our regularly scheduled war.

A Emagazine.com article, “Nuclear Power and the Bottomless Bank,” describes how the US is working hard to spend gobs of taxpayer money on propping up the moribund nuclear power industry. Let’s consider parts of the article here.

If enacted, the legislation would create a special “bank” affiliated with the Department of Energy (DOE) called the Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA), which could potentially provide underwriting for 187 new nuclear power projects—at an estimated cost of $10 to $14 billion each—and assume responsibility for cost overruns and delays.

This is rich. The Clean Energy Deployment Administration will fund projects to generate lots more deadly nuclear waste. You call that clean? Oh, and did I mention that there’s no place to dump this “clean” waste? The CEDA would underwrite these multi-billion-dollar projects and cost overruns, which are virtually assured.

If the Senate version is approved, there would be unlimited funding for nuclear power projects throughout the country, instead of just in the three states (Florida, Georgia and South Carolina) that allow utilities to bill consumers in advance for the cost of constructing nuclear power plants. Federal investment in nuclear energy would replace that from the Wall Street investment community, which has been loathe to invest in these expensive capital projects.

That’s real smart. Even Wall Street won’t touch nuclear power with a ten-foot pole, so we’ll solve the problem by letting the taxpayer subsidize this boondoggle. Speaking of subsidizing, the history of commercial nuclear power started in 1956 at Calder Hall in Britain, and about a year later the first commercial reactor in the US, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, went online. So this technology has been around a good half century, which you’d think would be enough time for a viable technology to stand on its own. But instead we still hear that giant sucking sound — the sound of the nuclear power industry vacuuming up tax dollars, and this new bill shows that the situation has gotten even worse.

But that’s not all. Read the whole article for more disgust and shock.

Meanwhile, as I said a couple of posts back, money is disappearing fast. Even if the US government budgets money to subsidize nukes, that doesn’t mean the money will actually materialize. I could budget a summer vacation in Europe this year, but ultimately there will be other, more pressing uses for my cash, or perhaps because the world economy is rapidly deteriorating, that cash simply won’t be there. In truth, the US government is flat broke and on the way to bankruptcy. Further, we face the burning question of how much longer US debt will sell.

As I’ve pointed out a number of times, money is just a means of mobilizing and accessing energy, so all these massive subsidies are pumping colossal amounts of energy into a system that is supposed to be delivering it. I have yet to see a convincing EROEI analysis of nuclear power (admittedly it is very difficult), but considering the sheer scale of nuclear power’s energy subsidy, you’ve got to wonder if we are really coming out ahead. Nuclear power was supposed to supply electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.” Instead, it’s turned out to be disastrously expensive, and this proposed subsidy budget confirms that still more emphatically. There is no doubt about it — the nuclear power industry is on the ropes, and the need for this massive subsidy proves it.

There will be no nuclear renaissance, and if this bill becomes law, it will just throw more good money after bad.

The Oil Drum has so many great articles that I encourage people to visit the site occasionally. One really fine recent contribution is “Energy Flow, Emergent Complexity, and Collapse,” which discusses how energy flows allow societies to achieve higher levels of organization and complexity until the point of diminishing returns, whereupon collapse ensues. Very relevant to the present point in time, and we can in fact observe these processes at work in our midst. Although slightly long for busy people, I think it’s well worth the time.

Perhaps I’m tooting my own horn, but I have in the past touched upon some of these things here. One example, from last year, is “The New World Order,” in which I noted that declining energy will precipitate the slide toward chaos. Another, from 2008, is “Stored Solar Energy vs ‘Real Time’ Solar Energy,” where I attempted to show the profound difference between the amounts of energy we are able to access through stored solar energy, i.e., fossil fuels, and real-time solar energy, or that which arrives at our planet on a daily basis. These two concepts are part of the overall fabric of the TOD article.

Now that all the “easy oil” has been found, we will find ourselves moving at an accelerating pace toward what is known as the “net energy cliff,” which is the time when there is a rapid increase in the amount of energy we must expend to obtain energy, leaving us with progressively less energy to run the economy. That obviously translates into decreasing organization and complexity, whose concomitant is increasing chaos, and eventual collapse.

With money disappearing faster than fresh humans at a vampire party, there is less money for everything (except weapons, of course). And considering the challenging problems of nuclear power, not least among them gross cost overruns, one should not be surprised to hear about the “Dim outlook for nuke industry.” Consider this:

A coming “nuclear renaissance” is often cited by government and industry officials as reason to keep investing in Canada’s nuclear-power sector. Without support, they say, the country risks being sidelined in a market poised for massive expansion.

But that growth, according to an independent report released Thursday, simply isn’t happening. After 10 years of industry cheerleading, the world’s fleet of nuclear reactors has become smaller.

“There has been, in fact, a decline in the contribution of nuclear power to the world electricity production, from 16.7 per cent in 2000 to 13.5 per cent in 2008,” said the report, the result of a three-year study by the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Ottawa.

Now that’s some really depressing news for nuclear power groupies. Not only is there no “nuclear renaissance” in the offing, the nuclear power industry is not even holding its own, and nukes are producing a significantly lower percentage of the world’s electric power. Because the industrial system itself is on the wane, and because nuclear power is such a large-scale, energy- and capital-intensive industry, there is zero possibility of a “massive expansion.” Governments are cash-strapped and burdened with crushing debt, and fossil fuel net energy is declining. As a result, sufficient funding and energy for a “massive expansion” will never be found on Planet Earth. Of course a few more nukes might be built, but that effort will be the dying gasp of the industry.

Apropos a recent post, “Chinese Bank Lending Unabated,” economic/finance blogger Mish has posted “Nonperforming Loans in China Rise to ‘Trillions of Renminbi.’” You should definitely take the time to read his comments after the Bloomberg article quote. The prognosis is not good.

A very short but very significant article, “Skills shortage ‘spells disaster for engineering jobs,’” sounds a warning about the coming shortage of people with the skills to maintain industrial society. Although this article specifically addresses the problem in the UK, the entire industrialized world faces the same challenge of sustaining a pool of skilled engineers and construction workers. In this post from last year I observed that much energy needs to be expended on the education and training for this purpose. But energy-constrained societies will perforce expend less energy on education and training, which virtually assures a decline in the numbers of engineers and skilled workers, and less education and training for each one.

This is one more factor that will help drag industrial civilization down.

A BBC article reports that people in Kazakhstan are protesting a proposal to lease farmland to China. But attempts to lease or buy farmland in other countries didn’t start in Kazakhstan. The global farmland grab has already started. Of course this is a form of neo-colonialism, and that’s bad enough, but there’s an aspect to this that is even more alarming: When a country or its corporations try to obtain farmland in other countries, that is an admission that they don’t have enough farmland at home to feed their inflated populations, or in the near future will not have enough.

Supposedly China is telling its banks to cut lending, but “Chinese Bank Lending Explodes In January” tells us that in January banks already lent a fifth of what they were supposed to lend for the entire year. One wonders how much China can do to cut lending and overcapacity, and bring down its real estate bubble. The Middle Kingdom needs something on the order of 8% growth just to keep absorbing all the new people coming into the labor market. No doubt many of those workers are kept busy by the overcapacity in manufacturing and by building lots of office space and condos that sit unused. That in turn is funded by this massive bank lending. If the leadership lets up on the gas too much, it could multiply the rolls of unemployed and lead to unrest. But because this fast growth and overcapacity can’t go on forever, it’s just a matter of time before more drastic measures become necessary.