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.

Posted in Health What to do | Comments Off on USA: 47th in life expectancy despite most money spent & thousands die from lack of health care

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“.

Posted in Advice, Starvation | Comments Off on Rich nations grabbing land from poor nations

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.”

Posted in Electric Grid & EMP Electromagnetic Pulse | Comments Off on Magnetic Reversal could knock out power grids and communication systems

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.

Posted in Infrastructure & Collapse, Society | Comments Off on Climate Change and Infrastructure

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.

Posted in Drought | Comments Off on Drought and the Food Supply

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.”

Posted in Energy, Liebig's Law, Natural Gas | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Natural Gas — How Much is Left in the USA?

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.

Posted in Liebig's Law, Polycrisis | Comments Off on Liebig’s Law Of the Minimum

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

Posted in Drought, Polycrisis | Comments Off on History of Drought in America since 1899 – Worst ever now

Extinction has Nearly Happened Before: The Human Bottleneck

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

Sam Kean. 19 Jul 2012.  Blogging the Human Genome Entry 10: The chromosomal evidence that mankind nearly went extinct.  Slate.com

Take your pick for the cause of our near-extinction—ice ages, plagues, Indonesian gigavolcanoes. But humans have far less genetic diversity than most other species, and the most reasonable explanation for this is a genetic bottleneck: a severe reduction in the population of humans in the past, perhaps multiple times. One study suggested that our population, worldwide, might have dropped as low as 40 adults. (The world record for fitting people in a phone booth is 25.) That’s an outlandishly pessimistic guess even among disaster scientists, but it’s common to find estimates of a few thousand adults, below what some minor league baseball teams draw. Consider that these humans might not have been united in one place, but scattered into small, isolated pockets around Africa, and things look even shakier for our future. Had the Endangered Species Act existed way back when, human beings might have been the equivalent of pandas and condors.

Read more about the human bottleneck here: Wikipedia. Population Bottleneck.

My comment:

Analysis of our genome has revealed we probably went through a time when we were reduced to a population between 40 and 15,000.  If we reach such low numbers again from all of the factors in Collapse and some or all of the 9 boundaries being crossed, and other potential extinction events and damage to the ecosystem, it could be harder to survive this time around.

However bleak the world was during the last bottleneck, it wasn’t too hot, poisoned by chemicals, and didn’t have acidic oceans killing off life on the bottom of the food chain.  There’s some speculation that the survivors lived along the ocean and were able to survive by eating shellfish and seafood.  That won’t work this time around because shellfish are the first to go in acidic oceans (they can’t make shells), and we’ve consumed a lot of the world’s fish to the point that we’re eating the sardines and anchovies that fish depend on to survive, further weakening their wild populations.

Posted in Extinction Experts | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Extinction has Nearly Happened Before: The Human Bottleneck

Methane’s potential for another major extinction event

Posted on July 17, 2012 by

June 22, 2016. As Alaska warms, methane emissions appear stable, study finds. phys.org.

Excerpts:

One reason no increase has been seen may be that “Bacteria that produce methane and bacteria that consume methane will both become more active as temperatures get warmer,” said Steven Wofsy of Harvard University and co-author of the study. “Our study suggests that over the past 30 years, these processes have balanced out in the study area.”

Analysis of nearly three decades of air samples from Alaska’s North Slope shows little change in long-term methane emissions despite significant Arctic warming over that time period, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

In the new study, researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, NOAA, NASA and other university partners examined 29 years of continuous, precision measurements of atmospheric methane and other gases from the NOAA Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, which is part of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.

Reg Morrison. 18 Mar 2012. The Climate Debate Is global warming real? Here’s a fresh look at an old argument.   http://regmorrison.edublogs.org

You should go to the link above, it’s got great PHOTOS and a whole lot more information.

EVOLUTION’S SHOTGUN  Few are aware that the moderate climate we enjoy is largely a by-product of four billion years of bacterial activity. Even more poorly understood is the fact that one particular group of bacteria played a fundamental role in the evolution of life on Earth, and continues to do so. These are the principle producers of the crucial greenhouse gas, methane (CH4). They are among the world’s oldest life-forms, and without the injection of their heat-retentive waste gas into the young planet’s primitive atmosphere, Earth may have remained relatively lifeless. In considering the role played by these methane generators (methanogens) we need to be aware of methane’s greenhouse potential. Its four hydrogen atoms make it a reactive gas with a relatively short life, and it is commonly said to be some 20–23 times more heat-absorbent than carbon dioxide. But this figure only refers to its average potency over a time span of 100 years. Rarely mentioned, however, is the fact that during methane’s first decade in the atmosphere it has more than 70 times the potency of CO2, and during its first five years it has at least 100 times the greenhouse impact of CO2. Also neglected is the fact that vast quantities of methane are imprisoned in innumerable icy cages all around the world—in frozen tundra bogs and on the semi-frozen seabeds that fringe most of the world’s continental land masses. Commonly known as hydrates, these icy gas reservoirs alone hold some 3,000 times the volume of CH4 in the atmosphere. In an evolutionary sense this vast stockpile of potent bacterial gas represents one of evolution’s most effective culling mechanisms. There is strong evidence to suggest that eruptions of methane from this vast reservoir have contributed to massive extinction events several times in the past. It now appears that the sharp rise in the average global temperature over the past 30 years has once again begun to destabilise these hydrates, allowing this potent bacterial gas to escape into the seas and into the atmosphere.

METHANE RELEASE  The massive reserves of bacterial methane that become trapped in marine and tundra ices for long periods of geological time may well represent the ultimate climate-control mechanism for the whole planet. There is good geological and biological evidence to suggest that there have been three or four occasions in the past when eruptions of methane into the atmosphere have sent global temperatures soaring upwards. On each of these occasions the geological and fossil record indicates an increase in atmospheric CO2 and a slow temperature rise, followed by an abrupt warming that can only be accounted for by a massive release of methane. Ominously, each of these methane eruptions also coincides with a mass extinction of life.

Humans are releasing methane too. Methane CO2+CH4 = Climate Chaos.  General waste (landfill), Coal & Gas mining, Flood Irrigation, Cattle &  Sheep

HYDRATES  Many marine hydrates are locked in place by the icy abyssal currents that are generated by the sinking of cold, dense saltwater in polar regions. These abyssal currents gradually girdle the planet before surfacing and returning to their polar birthplace. This global circulation system is known as the thermohaline current. So long as these cold abyssal currents continue to flow, the world’s sea-floor hydrates generally remain frozen and stable. But whenever rising temperatures thaw the polar icecaps to any significant degree, the boyant melt-water pools on the surface, inhibiting the driving mechanism that runs the world’s thermohaline circulation system. This allows wind-driven fingers of warm surface water to reach down to the sea floor and release the methane from its icy cage. The last time this appears to have happened was about 55 million years ago, when according to the geological record, a discharge of 1,200–2,500 gigatons of methane caused a temperature spike of 8°– 10°C in polar regions and brought lush redwood forest to northern Greenland. Such polar warmth generated a deep-ocean temperature rise of 5–7°C in high latitudes, and appears to have switched off the the world’s thermohaline circulation starving the inert abyssal waters of oxygen. The carbon-loaded acidified seas caused a mass extinction of marine foraminifera. The temperature spike that occurred at this time appears to have been vastly greater and more abrupt than could possibly have been generated by the gradual rise in atmospheric CO2 that preceded it.1 The global temperature has risen almost 30 times faster than this during the past 30 years.

Posted in Extinction, Runaway Greenhouse | Comments Off on Methane’s potential for another major extinction event