Category Archives: Infrastructure & Collapse

90% of why we live past 50 due is clean water (and food) from water treatment facilities and sewage treatment plants that are all falling apart. Oil & gas pipes essential to heating and cooking are rusting apart. Dams, bridges, roads — all built when the EROEI of oil was 100:1 need replacing at a time when the EROEI has fallen below 15:1

Why You Should Love Trucks

source: bitsandpieces1.blogspot.com Preface. Before the age of fossil fuels, getting food, water, and shelter was simple. Nine out of ten people were self-sufficient farmers. But now there are global 24/7 just-in-time supply chains that depend on trucks and other modes … Continue reading

Posted in Agriculture Infrastructure, Supply Chains, Transportation Infrastructure, Trucks | 4 Comments

American Physical Society: has the Battery Bubble Burst?

Aug/Sep 2012. Has the Battery Bubble Burst? Fred Schlachter. American Physical Society. APS News Vol 21, number 8. Phys.org Three years ago at a symposium on lithium-air batteries at IBM Almaden there was great optimism. The symposium “Scalable Energy Storage: … Continue reading

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Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System. National Academy of Sciences.

Much of what follows is from the National Academy of Science 2012  (for the Department of Homeland Security): “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System” & 2013 “The Resilience of the Electric Power Delivery System in Response to Terrorism and … Continue reading

Posted in Electric Grid & Fast Collapse, Electricity Infrastructure, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Oil & Gas, Water Infrastructure | 1 Comment

Biggest Waste of Wealth in All of history: America’s Interstate Highway system

A book review by Alice Friedemann of: Swift, Earl. 2012. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. Related articles $46 Trillion Infrastructure in USA, $6 Trillion is Transportation Expressways & … Continue reading

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$46 Trillion Infrastructure in USA, $6 Trillion is Transportation

James Howard Kunstler has written that Suburbia will be the largest waste of money and physical assets in human history. The end of the age of oil means that just about everything will be useless too.  Below is just the … Continue reading

Posted in Transportation Infrastructure | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Expressways & Interstates are only designed to last for 20 years

Preface. I make the case that civilization would end in a week if trucks stopped running in my first book, and though I had in mind that they would be running low on diesel fuel on the downside of world … Continue reading

Posted in Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Roads, Trucks | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Energy in the Food System uses 19% of all energy consumed in the USA. Pimentel 2008

Pimentel David, et. al. 2008.  Reducing Energy Inputs in the US Food System.  Human Ecology 36:459–471 [ Here are some excerpts from this paper. I don’t list many of the ideas in the article on how to do this though, … Continue reading

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Energy in Food System. March 2010. USDA

Canning, P. 2010. Energy Use in the U.S. Food System.  USDA Economic Research Report Number 94 Another great review of this article is Beyond Food Miles by Michael Bomford, a research scientist and extension specialist at Kentucky State University, an … Continue reading

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Oil and Gas Infrastructure are Rusting Apart

Oil And Gas “Rust”: An Evil Worse Than Depletion Offshore Technology Conference May 5, 2008 Houston, Texas by Matthew R. Simmons Chairman Simmons & Company International Some of the slides are: If Infrastructure Not Rebuilt It Creates A Double Whammy … Continue reading

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Our interlinked infrastructure is so vulnerable one piece can take the others down with it

This article by Robinson et al is a very prescient article written back in 1998, long before 9/11 and he also points out how vulnerable U.S. infrastructure is to cyberwar and cyberattacks at a time when our infrastructure wasn’t nearly … Continue reading

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