$40 billion cost when levee system fails in California’s delta

Posted on August 2, 2012 by

Scientists estimate this would cost $40 billion dollars.

23 million Californians will have no drinking water.

Up to 1 million acres of some of the best, most productive farmland in the world will disappear forever as salt water permeates the soil.

The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers creates a delta system with a network of 700 miles of waterways, 1,100 miles of levees, 57 islands,  hundreds of thousands of acres of marshes, mudflats, and 1 million acres of farmland. The water is used to cool power plants and many other industries and businesses.  In addition, the Delta serves as a transportation corridor in which highways, pipelines, power lines, railroads and ships merge. These miles of levees, pipelines and roadways, lie just east of many active faults. Furthermore, continuous microbial oxidation, coupled with compaction of organic soils, causes subsidence of these levees.

The failure of the Delta levees is inevitable and can not be prevented

The levees will fail for many possible reasons:

  1. Earthquake
  2. Massive spring flooding.  This gets more and more likely as climate change melts Sierra snow early, which will also prevent California from producing 2 to 3 crops a year
  3. Prolonged rain
  4. Flooding of the central valley (especially another ARkStorm)
  5. Increasing pressure on levee walls as subsidence continues (some farmland is 30 feet below the seawater on the other side of the dam),
  6. Beavers, California ground squirrels, or muskrats tunneling into the levees (as well as pocket gophers and California voles)
  7. Internal erosion caused by embankment or foundation leakage or piping
  8. Improper maintenance including failure to remove trees, repair internal seepage problems, replace lost material from the cross section of the dam and abutments, or maintain gates, valves, and other operational components
  9. Improper design, including the use of improper construction materials and construction practices
  10. Improper operation, including the failure to remove or open gates or valves during high flow periods
  11. Failure of upstream dams on the same waterway that release water to a downstream dam.

References

Sebastian Vicuña et al. 2006. ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF DELTA LEVEE FAILURE DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE: A SCENARIO ANALYSIS Prepared For the California Energy Commission at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dirk H. Van Vuren, et al. 22 Sep 2011. Habitat Associations of Burrowing Mammals along Levees in the Sacramento Valley.  Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology University of California Davis

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What Will Trigger the Financial Crash?

Posted on August 2, 2012 by

#1 An Energy Crisis

My number one vote for when the financial system worldwide collapses is when the energy shortages begin, sometime between now and the next 5 years.  Even if the depression grows worse meanwhile, that would only slow this down by 3 weeks (Hirsch).  As the German peak oil study noted, this will cause stock markets to crash worldwide, because energy does the actual work of making stuff and above all creating growth, the only way to pay back debt.  An oil shortage is clearly the end of growth for even those most in denial with their heads buried solidly in the earth.

This has always been clear to me because some random comment in a peak oil form has always stuck with me.  In the early days when maybe a few hundred people were discussing peak oil in online forums, someone wrote that he’d told his Wall street stock broker friend about peak oil, and the reply was “then we all ought to just go home and put a bullet in our heads”.  So despite all the denial, when reality hits, wealthy people will totally get what that means and pull their money out of the stock market and crash it.

#2 The Financial System Itself

It’s so balanced on a knife edge that just about anything could tip it over:

  • Many expect the Euro to fail and take the rest of the world down with them as the ripples widen outwards.
  • Or perhaps it will be China as it slows down its unsustainable rate of growth.
  • Another flash crash that just keeps going.
  • The unprecedented amount of fraud, greed, and size of the bubble explodes.  Something to trigger the $700 to  $1,200 Trillion Derivatives Meltdown (20 times the size of the world economy).
  • Failure of Banks Too Big to Fail.
  • Another real estate downturn.
  • Currency wars — a race to the bottom as each nation strives to devalue it’s currency to make more money off of exports
  • Government unable to create jobs by funding infrastructure and other projects, especially in the USA if the balance of power lies with Republicans or the Tea Party
  • Wall Street tantrums if the rich are taxed (a sell-off of stocks to make the politicians put the tax breaks back).
  • Pension failures, municipal bond failures, a rash of cities and counties declaring bankruptcy.
  • Social unrest from the unemployed after they exhaust all federal, state, local, and their own savings and IRA/401K’s.
  • Food stamp program unable to keep feeding the 1 in 6 Americans getting aid now.

A combination of some of the above.  All of the above.  Let’s face it, we’re screwed.

I’m always amazed at people who think the system will keep trundling on if the government just keeps printing more money, or a Keynesian jobs program.  Just read economic history and it’s one economic bubble bursting after another, fiat currencies always crash and burn in the end.

#3 Natural Disasters

$50-100 billion in capital losses: 4 times hurrican Andrew or the Northridge earthquake (xxx)

  • If Hurricane Floyd in 1999 had hit central Miami
  • If a Kobe-caliber earthquake were to occur in San Francisco or Los Angeles

A) Earthquakes

B) $1 Trillion California ARkStorm

C) $40 Billion Failure of the levee system in California’s delta

D)  Volcanic Eruptions in Japan, United States, and so on

Private insurance companies were shocked by losses from Andrew and Northridge and many went bankrupt.  Most companies no longer offer disaster insurance along with a traditional homeowner policy in California, Florida, and Hawaii. Coverage is only available through state-managed disaster insurance pools with high premiums, high deductibles, and limited coverage. Fewer than 20% of California homeowners carry disaster insurance now.

Who will now pay for the repair and rebuilding of hundreds of thousands of homes, apartments, and commercial buildings in a major urban disaster is an open question. With the cost of urban disasters increasing, private insurance is not available, government agencies are caught between the public pressure to do more and a congressional unwillingness to pay more, and property owners have no incentives to take actions that would reduce losses and costs.

#4 War and international conflicts

That includes terrorism, popular unrest, civil wars — especially in oil producing countries, or China.

#5 Food crisis

There’s a famous saying we’re only 9 meals away from a revolution.  The French revolution might not have happened if there hadn’t been three bad harvest years in a row.

Economic Crash References

A long list of books at: Fraud & Greed:  Wall Street, Banks, & How to Invest book list

Addison Wiggins. 2003. Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century

William Bonner. 2009. Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics

Natural Disaster References

Joel Achenback. 13 May 2011. The Century of Disasters Meltdowns. Floods. Tornadoes. Oil spills. Grid crashes. Why more and more things seem to be going wrong, and what we can do about it. Slate.com

B. Rowshandel, et. al. 2003. Estimation of Future Earthquake Losses in California.  California Geological Survey

Dirk H. Van Vuren, et al. 22 Sep 2011. Habitat Associations of Burrowing Mammals along Levees in the Sacramento Valley.  Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology University of California Davis

Richard Heinberg: “While leaders make every effort to portray this [period] as a gradual return to growth, in fact the economy will remain fragile, highly vulnerable to upsetting events that could take any of a hundred forms — including international conflict, popular unrest and dissent, terrorism, the bankruptcy of a large corporation or megabank, a sovereign debt event (such as a default by one of the European countries now lined up for bailouts), a food crisis, an energy shortage, an environmental disaster, a curtailment of government intervention based on the political shift in the makeup of Congress, or a currency war”.  The End of Growth: adapting to our new economic reality, page 100.

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USA: 47th in life expectancy despite most money spent & thousands die from lack of health care

Posted on August 1, 2012 by

Preface.  In the USA, vote for democrats, Republicans are openly saying they want to end SSN and Medicare.  Health care and insurance will decline and vanish as collapse accelerates from financial depressions caused by energy decline, so if you’ve been putting off getting exercise, eating well, and getting enough sleep, that’s all you can do long term. Meanwhile vote for Democrats, who will continue to try to make health care to as many as possible, but are also more likely to ration food and gasoline not just fairly, but ration at all.  It is really outrageous that the U.S. is the wealthiest nation that has ever existed or will ever exist, by far, yet we are the only developed nation that does not have national health care.

On the other hand, if you’re a deep ecologist, Republicans are more likely to crash civilization sooner and harder, which is great for biodiversity, climate change, pollution and so on.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

Visualcapitalist (2022) Charted: Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy, by Country

Charted: Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy, by Country

The United States has the largest spending of any country included in the dataset, its average life expectancy of 77 years is lower than 47 other countries! Some researchers believe a big contributor is the country’s higher infant mortality rate, along with its higher relative rate of violence among young adults.

Over the last century, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled across the globe, largely thanks to innovations and discoveries in various medical fields around sanitation, vaccines, and preventative healthcare.

Yet, while the average life expectancy for humans has increased significantly on a global scale, there’s still a noticeable gap in average life expectancies between different countries.

What’s the explanation for this divide? According to World Bank data, it may be partially related to the amount of money a country spends on its healthcare. More Spending Generally Means More Years. The latest available data from the World Bank includes both the healthcare spending per capita of 178 different countries and their average life expectancy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the analysis found that countries that spent more on healthcare tended to have higher average life expectancies up until reaching the 80-year mark.

 

David Cecere. 17 Sep 2009. 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage: Uninsured, working-age Americans have 40 percent higher death risk than privately insured counterparts. Harvard Medical school, Cambridge Health Alliance.

Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health.  The study, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts.

“The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline health,” said lead author Andrew Wilper, M.D., who currently teaches at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.

The study, which analyzed data from national surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), assessed death rates after taking into account education, income, and many other factors, including smoking, drinking, and obesity.

Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease. An increase in the number of uninsured and an eroding medical safety net for the disadvantaged likely explain the substantial increase in the number of deaths, as the uninsured are more likely to go without needed care. Another factor contributing to the widening gap in the risk of death between those who have insurance and those who do not is the improved quality of care for those who can get it.

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Rich nations grabbing land from poor nations

Posted on July 31, 2012 by

[ There are so many nations grabbing land from other nations that I gave up trying to summarize this excellent book and just used a few paragraphs from NewScientist.  Having to import food is a clear sign of being over carrying capacity, and it probably won’t last, because citizens will rise up as energy decline increases starvation in their country, or nearby nations invade.  One of the many reasons Rome failed was that one of their main sources of food was Carthage in North Africa.  After barbarians conquered Carthage the send less and eventually almost no food to Rome, and the population there fell from 1 million to about 10,000 people.  

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts:  KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity]

Fred Pearce. June 29, 2012.  Stealing the Earth.  NewScientist.

From Midwest “missionaries” to Wall Street speculators, investors are grabbing massive swathes of common land, especially in Africa, where the great common lands – the swamps, savannahs and forests – are being fenced off in a rush for land, the 21st-century equivalent of Europe’s enclosure of once-common land that started in the Middle Ages.

It’s happening in Brazil, Paraguay, Mali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and many other countries.  Oxfam estimates 850,000 square miles of mostly common land, equal to France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the UK combined – have been “grabbed” worldwide in the past five years. But in truth nobody knows.  Some governments allow this because they see any investment as good for development. That’s why dirt-poor South Sudan handed over a tenth of its land to foreigners.

Countries like South Korea, Saudi Arabia and China began buying foreign land to keep their peoples fed.

The biggest prize is the Guinea savannah zone, 4 million square kilometres of bush and grasslands between central Africa’s tropical rainforests and the desert to the north and south. It stretches from the Atlantic shores of Senegal east to Sudan, then south through Kenya and Tanzania to Zambia, Mozambique and Angola. The World Bank calls this arc “the world’s last large reserve of under-used land”. But it is also home to half a billion farmers and pastoralists. They are among the world’s poorest people and their numbers are increasing fast.

Fred Pearce is the author of “The Landgrabbers: The new fight over who owns the earth“.

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Magnetic Reversal could knock out power grids and communication systems

Posted on July 31, 2012 by

Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen. 1 Jul 2012. Eccentricity of the geomagnetic dipole caused by lopsided inner core growth. Nature Geoscience 5, 565–569

Lopsided growth of the Earth’s core could explain why its magnetic field reverses direction every few thousand years. If it happened now, there would be solar winds that could knock out global communications and power grids.

There are signs that the next switch may be under way: rapid movements of the field’s axis to the east in the last few hundred years may be a precursor to the north and south poles trading places, the researchers speculate.

Bruce Buffett of the University of California, Berkeley, says the authors present an intriguing proof of concept with their model.

“They are suggesting very cautiously that maybe this rapid change is somehow suggestive of us going into a reversal event,” he says. “You could imagine if the field were to collapse it would have disastrous consequences for communication systems and power grids.”

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Climate Change and Infrastructure

Posted on July 26, 2012 by

Matthew Wald. 25 July 2012. Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling. New York Times.

From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.

Airports: a jet got stuck in asphalt softened by 100-degree temperatures

Culverts: 2,000 culvets were damanged by Hurricane Irene in Vermont

Electric power: down all the time now that extreme weather has become common due to climate change, storms from the June 29 “derecho” storm alone left 4.3 million customer without electricity

Levees: Billions are being spent on New Orleans levees

Nuclear Power Plants: Chicago needed special permission to keep a plant running since the pond it uses to cool with had gone above mandated limits, another plant had to shut down because the water used had gone down so much the intake pipe was high and dry

Rail: heat derailed a train by stretching a track so much that it kinked

Roads: In east texas, heat and drought SHRUNK rich clay soils beneath roadbeads, causing them to crack horrendously.  Northeast & Midwest: high heat causes highways to EXPAND and POP UP, creating jarring, potentially hazardous speed bumps.

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Drought and the Food Supply

Posted on July 26, 2012 by

Lesk, C. January 7, 2016. Influence of extreme weather disasters on global crop production. Nature.  

Drought and extreme heat events slashed cereal harvests in recent decades by 9% to 10% on average in affected countries with the greatest impact in North America, Europe, and Australasia.
The impact from droughts grew larger in the period from 1985 to 2007.

“We have always known that extreme weather causes crop production losses,” said senior author Navin Ramankutty, professor of global food security and sustainability at UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “But until now we did not know exactly how much global production was lost to such extreme weather events, and how they varied by different regions of the world.”

Production levels in the more technically advanced agricultural systems of North America, Europe, and Australasia dropped by an average of 19.9% because of droughts – roughly double the global average.

“Across the breadbaskets of North America, for example, the crops and methods of farming are very uniform across huge areas, so if a drought hits in a way that is damaging to those crops, they will all suffer,” says first author Corey Lesk, a recent graduate of McGill’s Department of Geography. “By contrast, in much of the developing world, the cropping systems are a patchwork of small fields with diverse crops. If a drought hits, some of those crops may be damaged, but others may survive.

Annie Lowrey. 25 Jul 2012. Severe Drought Seen as Driving Cost of Food Up.  New York Times.

Scorching heat and the worst drought in nearly a half-century are threatening to send food prices up, spooking consumers and leading to worries about global food costs.

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Natural Gas — How Much is Left in the USA?

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

Although there’s been a fracking boom for shale gas in America, many are skeptical.   We need local gas since it’s very expensive to import from overseas sources like Qatar, and we’re competing with other nations for delivery, which drives the price up even further.

But North American gas can be stranded since it is very expensive to build pipelines to — at least 1 million dollars per mile, so vast pools in Alaska are likely to remain untapped.  Gas to liquid conversion in Alaska is so energy-intensive that that’s not viable either.

And don’t forget that all of our millions of miles of energy pipelines and other infrastructure are rusting, cracking, and increasing metal fatigue.  Greg Tosi at the Nace Advocate, a group promoting awareness of corrosion control, said “Without energy infrastructure, nothing moves and America stops working. The nation’s energy supply lines are as critical as America’s highway and bridge network. Corrosion is a leading reason for the deteriorating condition of America’s critical network of electrical power, pipelines, water systems, bridges, roads, and hazardous materials facilities. It is far too expensive to rebuild all of these critical infrastructure assets. We must preserve and extend the useful life of our national infrastructure. To solve America’s infrastructure problems, corrosion must be addressed”.

Then there’s the Liebig’s Law of the Minimum affecting natural gas extraction, as Robert Magyar’s points out in his excellent July 19, 2012 article Near drought conditions impacting Marcellus shale gas drilling

Record breaking drought in the USA that is likely to grow worse is affecting our ability to extract shale gas, which consumes a huge amount of water:

“Fracking a well” according to Chesapeake Energy, requires 4.5 million gallons per well. Fracking may occur more than once on a well, so a shale gas “pad site” might have 10 horizontal fracking well veins or bores. So just one site might consume over 45 million million gallons of clean water to crack open the shale and release the natural gas trapped inside. Given how the shale gas industry hides the details of its operations, the water use per fracked well might be much higher than what’s publicly state.

Ecological price  

This is never taken into consideration by economists, because it would slow down the looting by private individuals of a resource that belongs to all of us (that’s why oil and natural gas are nationalized in 90% of the world’s countries, we’re way too stupid to do that here thanks to 1% propaganda and control of the political and economic system).  Magyar points out that everyone’s focused on polluted drinking water and ignoring the clean water used to frack, the millions of gallons of energy burned by trucks to get to and from the fracking sites, and the cost to get rid of the toxic water produced.

The costs of fracking are so much higher than the price of natural gas that this can’t keep going much longer

“A number of oil and gas industry experts estimate extraction costs as well above $4.00 per million British thermal units (MBTU) of produced shale gas in a market today only willing to pay $2.87 MBTU. Some in the industry believe extraction costs are exceeding $6.00 MBTU, more than double the price the market is paying today. Recently the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson complained, “We are losing our shirt.” when talking about the cost to extract the shale gas to what the market is willing to pay for it.”

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Liebig’s Law Of the Minimum

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

Liebig’s Law of the Minimum originally applied to plants, which require 21 nutrients — if any of them are missing the plant won’t grow to it’s full potential, or not be able to grow at all.  It’s similar to the old aphorism “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost”.  World-wide, agriculture depends on natural gas based fertilizers 5.5 billion people are alive now because they’ve quintupled agricultural production.

Yet in most of the world, we’re running on empty with natural gas, despite the much touted shale gas revolution.

Shale gas production is down due to drought, because producing natural gas this way requires enormous amounts of water, 45 to 50 million sof gallons per site to crack open the shale and release the trapped natural gas.  Since the shale industry is so secretive, it could be even more than that amount of water.

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History of Drought in America since 1899 – Worst ever now

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

The dust bowls of the 1950s were worse than the famous dust bowls of the Great Depression.  The conditions for a new dust bowl are happening again, only this time we’ve cut down the trees so that 27 ton tractors can plow for miles before having to turn around — there are few trees to block the dust from flying or being washed away in storms.  You need six inches of topsoil to grow food, and Iowa has gone from an average of 18 inches to 9 inches over the past century — this used to take civilizations 1,500 years to accomplish, but we’ve done it in record time.

We’ve also drained the Ogallala aquifer (174,000 square miles, one of the world’s largest) so much, that it’s too expensive to pump to the surface in many areas.  Which has led to millions of acres of farm land being abandoned.  This is all land that that could start to blow away and overlay good, prime farmland further East.

John Eligon. 19 Jul 2012. Widespread Drought is Likely to Worsen. New York Times.

The drought that has settled over more than half of the continental United States this summer is the most widespread in more than half a century. And it is likely to grow worse.

The latest outlook released by the National Weather Service on Thursday forecasts increasingly dry conditions over much of the nation’s breadbasket, a development that could lead to higher food prices and shipping costs as well as reduced revenues in areas that count on summer tourism.

NYT image “Drought’s Footprint” source National Climactic Data Center, national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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