The Importance of Transportation

In light of the inevitable energy crisis and all of its attendant implications for civilization as we know it, discussion has turned to the ultimate fate of mankind’s three forms of modern living arrangements, namely urban, suburban and rural living. A number of written articles and online discussions have been penned of late that attempt to gage the relative success (or failure) for each of these areas. Each of these opinions reflects the authors’ personal outlook on the future (gloom and doom, cautious hope or boundless optimism) and as such color the author’s ultimate assessment of the situation. The purpose of this posting is not to provide my personal take on the matter, but to look at the underlying factor that will ultimately determine any given area’s viability.
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Although many valid factors have been discussed, viability ultimately boils down to just one key factor:
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Transportation
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It’s as simple as that. Each settlement pattern is affected by transportation and a change in it can have a drastic impact on the ultimate viability of the built environment.
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The ability to move people and goods from one location to another is perhaps the key to survival. That fact cannot be hammered home hard enough. This may sound alarmist or over-the-top, but the simple act of moving someone or something from one point to another is absolutely vital. The ease of transportation—in all of its forms—is the hallmark of industrialized civilization. This ease of course has been made possible by cheap fossil-fuel inputs and is best exemplified by the modern American commuter driving from one suburb to work in another suburb or by the trucker hauling a collection of inexpensively made Chinese products to the local Wal-Mart.
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Being able to move from one point to another is of course important. People seldom live, work, shop and relax in the same place. In order to maintain a functioning economy, people must be able to circulate between the various points that are important to them and do so with ease. In pre-Industrial times, most people got around by foot, horse or boat. Distances were small and trips were few in number. Today in many locations, fossil fuel availability has dramatically increased the distances one can travel and lifted the overall number of trips made.
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But transportation is really much more than the movement of people. The truly vital function that it plays is the movement of goods. Goods movement is often overlooked by transportation planners but it includes the shipment of raw materials, finished products and even wastes. Raw materials such as minerals, energy, food and other resources are obvious candidates for transportation as most occur in limited concentrations away from their eventual points of consumption. Movement of finished goods from manufacturers to their eventual end users also requires a well established transport network. Finally, transportation plays a vital role in removing wastes and preventing their accumulation to dangerous levels.
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Likewise, most visualizations of the transportation network commonly are focused on road, rail, marine and air-based systems. While this is accurate, it neglects two other important forms of transport: electrical and pipeline. Both topics are commonly discussed as “infrastructure” in planning documents but really need to be seen as another form of transportation. The electrical transmission system makes it possible to instantaneously move large amounts of energy from one location where it is in overabundance to another where it is in demand. Pipelines play the equally important role of transporting liquids and gasses from one point to another in great, uninterruptible volumes.
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Transportation is often viewed as a matter of convenience or necessity but in reality its role in civilized existence is far more basic (and vital). According to William Catton, transportation is a social leveraging strategy called Scope Enlargement. What the movement of goods allows us to do is balance the surpluses and shortages of a number of areas, so that all can progress to a higher level of development than would have been possible without it. This has reached a culmination of sorts, with today’s transportation now extending worldwide. With it comes a worldwide dependence on the continued free flow of resources, goods and wastes. At this point many places on the planet are dependent on something from somewhere else.
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All parts of this transportation network are of course, energy consumers. Some are very efficient movers of goods such as a pipeline network, while others require huge energy subsidies to exist like commercial aviation. How the entire system continues to function—or not—will determine an area’s ultimate viability. And therein lays the problem.
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We are frightfully dependent on the continuation of this transportation system. It allows for the ease of shipment of large forms of usable energy (e.g. crude oil) natural resources (e.g. water, minerals) and food from areas of production to areas of consumption. It allows for the shipment of goods from one location to another, which over the past few decades has taken a global scope, where fewer, larger and lower cost facilities in a handful of locations replaced far more numerous, smaller and higher cost facilities scattered around the world. Finally it permits the wastes from one area to be moved to somewhere else where it could be re-used, recycled or disposed of so that the source location does not get too polluted.
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Peak Energy (in all of its forms) is the massive and fatal threat to the modern transportation system. It disrupts the system insidiously at first before ultimately rendering it useless. As energy becomes scarcer, it also increases in price. Over the past few years, those increases have taken a toll on economic activity. In the future they will render whole sectors of the economy unprofitable and ultimately not viable. As bad as that is, continued energy shortages will eventually manifest themselves in the form of actual fuel shortages. When that occurs, hard decisions will need to made on what to ship and when. In an orderly Powerdown scenario, those exact choices would be made based on their relative importance to human life so that no one starves or dies as a result of decreasing energy supplies. Unfortunately, the human track record in dealing with crisis situations has been less than stellar. In all likelihood, government actions may staunch the crisis for a few years, before the level of available energy decline begins undoing the global transportation system altogether.
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What that means is that mankind’s strategy of scope enlargement will soon fail us. How that affects you and I personally really depends on where we are located. Those in the suburbs will be hit the soonest and hardest by an energy-driven transportation crisis. These folks travel the furthest on average and are the most dependent on the shipment of all forms of goods and services from somewhere else. Basically, if you live in the suburbs you will eventually find yourself cut off from food, supplies, employment and just about everything else needed to survive. Some attempts may be made to grow or raise food close to home, but for many suburbanites it may prove to be too little, too late.
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At first glance it would appear that urban areas would fare better in a crisis. Distances would be shorter and more people could walk or take transit. Truck deliverers would not need to travel as far. Never-the-less, this area is threatened as well. As shortages mount, the transportation and distribution network will no longer be able to ship all of the required goods to all of the urban inhabitants. The larger the city, the larger the problem. Equally important, wastes would not be able to be properly removed and would likely buildup and foster disease. In an urban area with few other acquisition options, increasing hunger, poverty and social discontent could likely fuel the conditions suitable for riots, crime waves and other ill effects.
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Those in the rural areas would be the least impacted by declining transportation options. While it is true that transportation interruptions would affect the countryside pretty hard, the low overall population and greater distances from the urban and suburban settlements will serve to protect rural outposts from raiding or looting that could occur as order breaks down. This does not mean that country living will be particularly nice though, especially if you were more accustomed goods and services from all over.
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The bottom line is really quite simple. Fossil fuels made it artificially easy for people and goods to move about. That ease of movement allowed humans to enlarge their scope and tap and trade resources from all over to make up or mask local shortages. Unfortunately that free ride will be shortly coming to an end.

Basic observations on our Dilemma

If you have been a regular reader of the Unplanning Journal, you were probably aware that the past few weeks I have been on vacation from work (the first such vacation since 2003). Now I am back with several observations:
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Most people take for granted the continued existence of the most fundamental resources
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Most people worry about the least worrisome details, while completely ignoring the real problems.
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Most people fail to accept and plan for changes, even if they accept their validity
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Most people assume that someone will take care of it for them
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I could go on, but these four capture the essence of our collective ignorance. But here is another obvious statement.
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Everything will change.
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Given enough time, the environment, natural resource availability and even climate will change, sometimes drastically. Changes that will almost certainly come as a shock to those who will experience them. I am sure that somewhere in some civilization long ago there must have been a Greek, Roman, Anastazi, Mayan or Easter Islander that must have thought: “Wow, what a great place we live in. Surely nothing will come and mess it up…”
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And yet—without fail—things do change and inevitably result in that civilization’s downfall. In each instance, the civilization took steps to expand and preserve its own existence. And yet, in each instance those steps never did manage to solve the pressing problem (be it food availability or fresh water access) or actually made it worse. At best, it merely postponed the inevitable day of reckoning. All the while, the inhabitats surely must have been placing their collective hopes and beliefs that their leaders, thinkers, priests or Gods would rescue them.
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Now here we are at that point when somewhere out there in our fossil-fueled global empire there are people thinking, “Gosh what a great time to be alive. Never again will we have to be concerned about our basic survival needs.” As in the past, many people are placing their collective hopes (and ultimate survival) in mankind’s newest religion, technology. Some rely on the belief that when tough gets going (Peak Oil induced chaos) the Rapture is a comin’. Others are content to live their lives with out questioning their own existence within the context of modern civilization.
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Still, it cannot be overstated; a change is coming.
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My own experiences this trip and at work places a human face on the dilemma posed by our collective amnesia or indifference to energy. I have family members that question or reject the possibility of civilization-ending energy crisis. Others remain skeptical that the implications will be that dire or simply prefer not to consider it at all. Friends and acquaintances of mine are busy planning their next home, SUV or business investment. Some colleagues are busy planning for non-emergencies and reacting to “genuine crises.” Others anticipate that the second coming of Christ will save them from any earthly tribulations.
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All clueless.
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And yet a change is coming…

Returning to our roots?

The undoing of high-energy civilization could take many forms: a slow grinding collapse, all-out warfare, a devastating pandemic or widespread social and economic chaos. One thing that most scenarios will have in common however, is the return to rural locations by urban dwellers. Time and time again through out history when crisis have struck urban areas, many urban dwellers scattered to towns, villages and farms from which they have some ancestral connection to. It does after all make sense. Many people feel the most comfortable (even if they do not realize it consciously) when they are away from the masses and close to family and others familiar to them. In a crisis situation, a crowded urban area with limited resources will likely prove to be an unwelcoming place to be. Contrast this to a less densely settled rural area where competition for resources might be lessened and the ability to fend for ones self and family improved.
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In other words: expect peak energy to trigger another back-to-land movement.
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Those intimately aware of the energy implications to industrialized civilization may well be at the vanguard of this movement. When a person knows something will happen and is accepting of its implications, the next logical step will to be to position themselves to best survive any possible effects. Signs of this are beginning to occur. Already individuals have made moves away from potentially impacted areas and taken personal steps to prepare for an energy crunch. More will likely join them.
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Now I am not referring to those exurban “pioneers” that have gotten fed up with urban or suburban living and have purchased themselves a five acre ranchette outside of town so they could live in (relative) isolation. Those people merely are participants in the current high-energy lifestyle, often bringing with them trappings of modern suburban life (SUV, large house, lawns) without making adaptations for an energy crisis. Those people are simply participants in today’s civilization and will remain that way until reality crashes down on them.
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No, the true pioneers are those individuals that drop out of the modern, industrialized civilization altogether (or make adaptations in preparation of that occurrence). They could be starting organic farms, developing local networks (like starting a local currency) or building sustainable homes. Most of these have occurred in the small towns and rural locations well away from urban areas.
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This trend of relocalization and ruralization is a positive one for the sustainability of any kind of civilization. Large urban areas are not sustainable without huge energy subsidies. There are just too many resources needing to be imported, people and goods to be moved and wastes removed for this experiment in mass urbanization to be maintained. Plus, those large areas are dehumanizing in nature and dulls mankind’s sense of community. Once those energy subsidies are removed, those huge urban forms will be deprived of necessary resources and rendered uninhabitable, while their inhabitants turn on each other in competition for the remaining ones.

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Without the existence of those small towns, communities and functioning rural areas, civilization will most likely degenerate into an orgy of violence before scavenging on its remains. Unfortunately, when collapse hits the large urban areas, a number of urban dwellers will flee the chaos into the countryside. This second wave will not be prepared like the first set. These refugees will bring with them some of the ill effects of the city including crime and disease. If the numbers are great enough, it may jeopardize the best laid plans of those thoughtful individuals that had the foresight to plan ahead. This is a serious enough concern to give pause to those considering a move to the rural areas. Just because it is rural and idyllic now, does not mean it will remain that way when modern civilization crashes head first into peak energy.
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Will you, as a prepared individual, be able to handle an influx of urban refugees?
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Will you, as a small town citizen or elected official, be able to deal with a number of new (and unemployed) arrivals to your town?
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Will you as a family farmer, be able to welcome distant relatives to live with you on your farm?
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These are not easy questions to answer. However, Peak Energy will be forcing these issues to the forefront. How we deal with the inevitable instinct to return to our roots will determine whether or not civilization will survive and in what condition. Ruralization is definitely part of the solution. The only problem is in its implementation.

Unplanning Health Care

This week has been an epic one in terms of illness for me and my family. At one point we all were being treated with antibiotics and other prescriptions for a variety of ailments. Bronchitis, upper respiratory infection, conjunctivitis, stomach flu, ear infection and colds, we had them all. With four trips to the doctor and missed school and work days, it certainly been difficult. It also got me thinking: Health care is a mess even before peak energy and even more so as we drift into the inevitable decline of our energy-dependent civilization.

Not only will we live a poorer, colder, darker and hungrier existence, but we will experience it in worse health as well.

Certainly, proper sanitary practices, improved medical knowledge and the proliferation of cheap prophylactic medical measures, have gone a long way in improving life spans and reducing the death rates world wide. But advanced pharmaceutical research, high tech health care imaging and heroic medical operations (e.g. a heart-lung transplant) played an equally important role in reducing death rates for diseases and increasing average life spans. Many of these advances were made possible by cheap energy-driven prosperity and health care coverage. Some drugs, devices and utensils (think plastics here) are directly derived from oil and certain machinery dependent on an uninterrupted supply of electricity. As those resources become harder to come by, the costs and availability of these items will suffer. However health care’s greatest vulnerability is not with the procedures themselves, but with the system in which they are provided.

In most industrialized countries health care is provided in one of two general ways: funded directly by the government (e.g. Canada’s single-payer system) or via a mix of government and insurance funded mechanisms (e.g. the US health care system). Both have their advantages and disadvantages, with different forms of rationing the inevitable result. However, I am not concerned so much with the current problems in either system, but rather how health care in general will fare in an energy-driven decline.

The answer I am afraid is not well.

The US System is perhaps the more fragile of the two. Currently most individuals of working age receive coverage through their employers along with their dependents. People older than 65 and those deemed destitute enough are covered directly by the federal and state governments. The problem is, as employment patterns have shifted over the past few years, so have the number covered. As the number of well-paid jobs with benefits has waned, the number of uninsured has grown steadily to some 45 million today. These individuals along with those in the country illegally have come to rely on hospitals as a last resort while the whole system has become mired in paper work with by some estimates, one out of every ten dollars spent on administrative or clerical expenses. Costs have risen much faster than inflation over the past decade while wages have stagnated. Going into the future, the picture looks much, much worse.

Unemployment will become rampant as whole sectors become eviscerated by rising energy prices. As bad as job losses have been to date, millions still retain coverage. This will change as those sectors go belly up, whether they are the domestic auto manufacturers, travel or tourism industry or even the financial sector. With millions more joining the ranks of the uninsured, the problem will grow from being an underclass issue to a middle class issue. Pressure on the providers of last result will increase to the breaking point to provide coverage to huge numbers of people without any hope of repayment, while costs for the remaining insured skyrocketing out of control as the insurance companies and health care providers attempt to recover some of their costs on an ever shrinking pool of the uninsured. These impacts will filter back to the drug and medical industry manufacturers. Not immune to the malaise gripping the economy, manufacturers of drugs will inevitably cut back on staffing, research and even production. As transportation-driven interruption commence, the delivery of drugs from a limited number of manufacturing locations becomes increasingly problematic, resulting in periodic shortages of key medicines.

How bad it gets to ultimately, will be determined by the actions of the federal government. If they are appreciative to the growing political pressure of the legions of uninsured and nationalize key segments of the healthcare network (out of public safety considerations) to provide emergency and prophylactic treatment, the overall health picture will not dramatically change. Fewer people will likely receive those heroic lifesaving measures we have come to expect so that more people could be vaccinated from the flu or have their basic injuries patched up.

If the feds abdicate this public health care responsibility out of cost or political considerations, the foundation will have been laid for the spread of epidemic and pandemic-level diseases. Even if the government begins to provide such basic level coverage, the increasing costs and disruptions to the national economy will push the government to the financial breaking point.

Other countries are not immune to these impacts. Unless countries choose to prioritize the health of their citizens over other priorities, their overall health situation will also decline. As the economic pie continues to shrink, more priorities (transportation, education, military, civilian governments and other needs) will compete with health care for an ever-shrinking slice of their respective budgets.

Barring a revolutionary source of new energy, health care will devolve back to a much more basic level of service. This is not an entirely bad development either. Health care, like everything else will have to be provided at a local level. Just because available energy will inevitably decline, does not mean that knowledge will be lost. We won’t go back to the era of leaches or ritual sacrifices to cure ailments. But the focus will return to prompt and preventative treatment of minor ailments and injuries so they do not become major issues. Good eating and hygienic habits also will play a part, such as eating a wholesome diet, maintaining an appropriate weight as well as following common sense practices such as hand washing.

The jury is still out on the pharmaceutical industry. The manufacture of many drugs will likely be out of the reach of most local communities. As a result, it would be optimal that in a post peak-energy civilization that emerges from the wreckage of the industrial age, feature a number of pharmaceutical operations scattered around the world, manufacturing the most commonly needed drugs and distributing them regionally, with any developments or advances shared with their counterparts world wide. With an adaptation to a steady-state economic paradigm, the pharmaceutical industry would hopefully become a service to humanity instead of a profit based operation.

That’s the optimistic view anyway. If we do not successfully adapt our health care infrastructure to deal with the realities of a low-energy existence, the framework for a die-off will have been set.

Digging for Problems

The mining industry in California has had a long and sometimes checkered history from the arrival of those original ‘49ers to today’s multinational aggregate firms. Billions of dollars were made from the natural bounty that was tucked in and beneath this state’s streams, hills and mountains. When those resources were depleted, the miners and their firms moved on leaving a legacy of waste and scarred landscapes. In recent decades, the state has forced mine operators to clean up their messes before they vacate their site under a law known as the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act (SMARA). Most operators manage to meet this requirement and leave, if not pristine, then acceptable landscapes. A few unfortunate operations go under before reclamation and leave the state and the county holding the bag, if their bonds were not high enough.

SMARA is really a unique law on California’s book. In addition to the specification of reclamation standards, it does something else quite interesting: it instructs counties to preserve and protect any and all mineral resources for their eventual use. As a consequence, you can get the real interesting situation where the mine operators and mineral resources they are extracting can receive protection from encroaching residential and other non-conforming uses.

Mining in California today is a multi-billion dollar industry and although most players today are in the sand and gravel (for construction use) business, a number of precious metal and non-aggregate mineral mines continue to operate. The mine industry members and constituents are fiercely protective of their status and will fight tooth and nail to open a new site, whether it’s CEMEX’s Soledad Canyon Project near Santa Clarita (LA County), Kaweah River Rock’s Kaweah South Mine in Tulare County or RMC Pacific’s Jesse Morrow Mountain Mine in Fresno County. Kaweah River Rock fought for 19 years and expended several million dollars before ultimately receiving their go-ahead last month. CEMEX actually took Los Angeles County to court (after they denied the project) and got a federal court to force the county to reverse its own decision. RMC continues to fight a pitched battle against the Sierra Club over their site.

The interesting part out of all of these examples is that they are ultimately driven by depletion. Just as oil companies are forced to continuously add reserves in order to replace what they produced, so too do mine companies. The CEMEX’s, Kaweah’s and others are fully aware that as soon as they begin mining, their reserves begin to shrink and at a certain point it becomes obvious: if they are going to stay in business, they will have to seek a new location.

The individual counties, under state direction, are to develop mineral policy elements to protect the mining industry (yes, you read that right) to ensure that an adequate supply of aggregate (construction grade rock) is available for consumption. The calculations of future aggregate demand are made from reviewing the historical record of actual usage and dividing by the population to determine a ton per year average. The resulting figure is multiplied against the projected population to get the expected aggregate demand.

These figures absolutely drive planning decisions. Justification for a new surface mine boils down to these lines:

“We have to approve that plant because our county needs affordable rock.”
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"Without access to a source of aggregate, housing costs will rise"

Current events are beginning to intrude on mine operators and are driving them nuts however. The increase in population and construction activities is stretching their processing capacity to the limits. Just as a refinery's capacity will limit the amount of gasoline produced, a mine's processing plant will limit the amount of construction grade aggregate product it can crush and sort. Yet when asked if he would upgrade the equipment to process more rock, the operator said no, because the reserve would be exhausted faster than the costs of the new equipment could be recovered. Depletion is very much in the mind of a mine operator when making economic decisions.

Energy costs are also causing headaches.

Modern aggregate operations are very energy intensive operations. Surface mining equipment burn through gallons of fuel an hour and shipping via truck increases in cost the further you have to drive it. The processing plant requires a significant amount of electricity to run. All of these input costs have been rising.

One mine operator estimated that it took him 150,000 gallons of diesel to produce 500,000 tons of aggregate in an average year. As prices have more than doubled in the past few years, so too have aggregate costs. Trucking firms add an additional surcharge for their added fuel costs.

Although most sites do not use natural gas, they do consume copious amounts of electricity to run their crushers, sorters, screeners and conveyer belts. An operator capable of processing up to a million tons per year in this county currently uses 40% of the nearest substation's current. The utilities consider these such intensive users they offer them cut rate power if they agree to completely shut down during power emergencies. If they do not agree, they have to pay higher than residential rates for their power. The ISO is starting to get nervous about this summer and as a result a number of mine operators have switched to interruptible in case of power emergencies. During the 2000 and 2001 power crisis, these operations were routinely interrupted at significant expense to their firms.

The mine operators are getting increasingly edgy about the future. Like most other individuals that sense of unease is directed at the wrong issues. The most common complaint heard today is in regards to the great difficulty in opening a new mine due to mountain of bureaucratic read tape and "rampant environmentalism." Their collective fear is that without super-long extended permits they will not be able to meet tomorrow's demand. To that end one mine company requested a 65 year permit and sucessfully permitted a 120 year permit in an another county.

120 years is a long, long time. In all liklihood that mine will never be exhausted. In fact, it may never come close to 1/20 th of the capacity. Declining energy availability will hit the mining sector harder, faster and more severely than others. Without cheap fuel, the material becomes more difficult and costly to extract at the same time most work will dry up. People simply will not be able to afford to build anything any time soon.

Most miners are not aware how dependent they are on the continued flow of cheap energy. The next few years will bring that fact close to home for them. Afterall, depletion is a concept that they are well accustomed to understanding.