Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Once marvels of modern engineering, highways are mostly over half a century old, and starting to fall down.
If we had some ham, the old saying goes, we could have some ham and eggs. If only we had some eggs. If we had the money, the new saying goes, we could fix our decaying infrastructure. If we had the materials. But we don’t.
Infrastructure is a cold, hard word. But it means the house in which the industrial world lives — the electric grid, the water and sewer lines, the roads and bridges, dams, airports, seaports, on and on. And our industrial world in America is on the verge of being homeless because the house is rotting down, the electric lines sparking dangerously, the water lines leaking, the roads and bridges rotting away.
Democratic leaders of the House of Representatives and the President recently agreed to spend $2 trillion on the problem. Set aside for the moment the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would take twice that amount of money to do the job. Set aside for the moment that this $2 trillion dollar figure is at the moment just a notion — it does not exist in any budget bill, it has not been allocated or appropriated. It’s just a thought.
If appropriated, the money will have to be, in the current idiom, “paid for,” which means — at least for “fiscal conservatives” — that for every dollar spent on infrastructure we will have to cut a dollar from Medicare and Social Security. God forbid we should take any money away from paying for impulsive regime-change wars around the world.
But let’s assume the Congress finds its courage and votes the money, and the President does the responsible thing and signs off on the budget, and the Congress sticks to its guns and actually appropriates the money. I know, I’m getting a bit light-headed myself making all those assumptions in one sentence. But let’s assume, for one giddy moment, that we have the ham.
Now, what about the eggs?
We’re going to need a lot of steel. 56,000 of our bridges are designated as structurally deficient. Just one bridge — the Golden Gate, for example — contains 88,000 tons of steel plus 80,000 miles of steel wire in its cables. Our power grid — 640,000 miles of high-voltage power lines (strung from steel towers) — is at full capacity and well beyond its expected life span. The average age of the 90,000 dams in the US is 56 years, and the American Society of Civil Engineers grades their condition as “D”. Building just one dam, the Hoover Dam, took 45 million pounds of steel rebar, 88 million pounds of plate steel and 4.4 million yards of concrete.
Where are we going to get that kind of steel? A century ago we made half the steel in the world, now we struggle to see five percent. It takes iron to make steel, and today it is China that mines nearly half the world’s iron, followed by Australia, Brazil and India. The US barely makes the list of the top ten iron producers.
We’re going to need a lot of manganese. Turns out you can’t make steel without adding 10-20 pounds of manganese to every ton of iron. That makes manganese the fourth-ranked commodity metal in the world. The United States does not produce any. It is mined in Gabon, South Africa, Australia, and Brazil. Not to mention vanadium and rare earths, essential to steel production, available primarily from China, with whom we are currently engaged in a trade war, and who is threatening to ban rare earth exports to the US..
We’re going to need a lot of sand for the concrete and asphalt it would take to fix the three-quarters of all roads in the country that are deemed by the US Department of Transportation to be “in dire need” of repair and upgrades. And there is a growing global shortage of sand (at least the sand that can be used for these purposes) in the face of demand not only from decades of development, but now from fracking and the Chinese Belt and Road global initiative as well.
With the national debt north of $20 trillion and growing wildly, we are unlikely to have any ham again; and with eggs as scarce as hens’ teeth, you can forget about them. Looks like cold gruel for breakfast. For a long time.
“DSC_3504” by Ken OHYAMA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
“For a long time.” Forever, actually. On the bright side, I am waiting for the academic paper that demonstrates how the infrastructure can be built only using electricity. Another paper will explain how huge wind turbines and nuclear power plants can also be constructed carbon-free.
just another glaring example of “the limits to growth”
Not only are we short of resources and cash now that fossil fueled industrialization is entering the golden years, but it’s *far* more expensive to replace infrastructure than it is to build it anew. People still look at me funny when I suggest that the future looks a lot more like our past than the Jetsons world that most seem to have envisioned for themselves.
Golden years?? I don’t see the ‘gold’ anywhere here, mate.
Perhaps you mean, twilight years?
Why do you all deny the endless potential of human ingenuity, o ye of little faith? Our scientists will surely devise means of colonizing the entire solar system and the worlds beyond; then the resources we have at our disposal will be endless. Rejoice! A new horizon of wealth beyond measure beckons!
Well, that’s what all the delusional policymakers and four-eyed eggheads in academia proclaim anyway.
ahh, look. a technologod worshiper… who like the jeebus heads, thinks there are no limits and that technology can save us.
It’s a good idea to read a comment (or for that matter a post) all the way to the end before mocking it. Do I have to get a special typeface to designate irony?
I’m old enuf to remember America before the Interstate Highway System. The cities were rich and interesting, the small towns idyllic, and the countryside bucolic.
Towns like Frederick, Maryland and Staunton, Virginia weren’t yet yuppie preserves – parodies of their former selves – but vibrant centers of local commerce and culture, surrounded by family farms brimming with fresh produce, meat and dairy products. Interstate travel was accomplished by passenger trains – wonderful!
As an eleven-year-old I lived in Silver Spring, Maryland – a plastic D.C. suburb (there was no discernable ‘spring’ in this hell-hole). The land was being gobbled-up by developers. My pals and I frequented Miller’s Farm. This was an abandoned 12 acre plot that, for whatever reason, had been ignored by the developers. We’d puff cigarettes pilfered from our parents’ stocks and rap about the shit that punks of our age fond interesting.
One day I looked out over the surrounding landscape of spanking new split-levels and mused something to the effect of, “this isn’t going to work.” I didn’t know why; it just didn’t seem right…perhaps I was remembering my early childhood in Germany – the horrifying wreckage of war contrasted by the sleek autobahns…who knows.
Yes, I remember a similar childhood. I still have the first 12 issues of Mother Earth News and the articles then we’re saying the same thing that the world knows now: It’s not sustainable. Go back to the old ways if you can and here’s how. I remember moving from the farm to the town and looking at the accumulating ruin of North America and thinking “ there is no way this can last “
I grew up pampered and clueless like a lot of Gen-Xers, but I think part of the reason why I have always had such a tendency towards fatalism is that I intuited somehow that “this just can’t last”.
I’m not good at math. If the US has 90,000 dams, and their overall structural rating is a D, how many dams could we then expect to have a structural rating of F?
Also, does F represent failure in engineer speak the same way it does in teacher speak? If that is the case, I guess what my overarching question is; does the US have many, many thousands of dams that could fail at any moment?
Yes.
A little off-topic, but New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia are apparently being somewhat overrun by rats.
Sadly this realistic consideration of the unsustainable future of the infrastructure of the United States also applies to varying degrees to other countries, including many European countries, China and Russia and my homeland, Australia.
Tom, when you write “And the industrial world is on the verge of being homeless because the house is rotting down, the electric lines sparking dangerously, the water lines leaking, the roads and bridges rotting away” are you referring to the USA, or to the whole of modern industrial nations when you describe the impending failure of infrastructure?
I had in mind the situation in the US. I should have written it more clearly.
Well putting aside the need for clarification or further explanation may I summarise what I see as the core issue and hence your predicament, thus:
The United States needs to basically replace the entire road, water storage, electrical distributions systems, sewerage systems, flood levy systems and goodness knows how many high rise skyscrapers in how many cities, that it has taken the last 50-100 years to build and accumulate and it is going to do it um WHEN and with WHAT?
China will eventually face the same problem as we are – and on a much bigger scale, since they have been on the biggest construction binge in human history. Our infrastructure is in the collapsing stage because we’ve been at it the longest. China has a bit of a grace period because their stuff is new – that is, assuming the construction was of good quality.
This pair, an American guy and a South African guy in their early thirties, have a great YouTube channel of videos that they have done during their years living in China. Here’s one on the wonderful quality of Chinese construction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XopSDJq6w8E
Meanwhile…
“Report: Going 100% renewable power means a lot of dirty mining”
https://grist.org/article/report-going-100-renewable-power-means-a-lot-of-dirty-mining/
“Take cobalt. Each electric vehicle needs between five to ten kilograms of the bluish-white metal for its lithium-ion batteries. The authors consider cobalt a “metal of most concern for supply risks,” because nearly 60 percent of its production takes place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country with a dismal record of child labor and human rights abuses. Should the world’s transportation and electricity sectors ever switch to running entirely on renewables, demand for the metal would soar to more than four times the amount available in reserves, according to the researchers.”
Cobalt, by the way, is the central metal ion in vitamin B12. Farmers have to give livestock synthetic vitamin B12 supplements because the soil, from which feed plants used to absorb the essential metal, has long since been depleted of cobalt by industrial scale agriculture.
The wealthy in their bunkers may have to literally eat their Teslas to survive after the collapse.
Hi Tom
Hopefully no attempt will be made to replace the existing infrastructure as it would be a waste even if possible. We will be lucky if we can repair some canals and medium speed trains for the low energy future we actually face.