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askdashicorn · 6 years

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Why the USA is falling apart

by: Doug Henwood

If I were a debased purveyor of clickbait, I'd call this “Everything that's wrong with America in two charts.” But I'm not, so I won't. But still….

Hurricane Harvey is only the latest reminder that the U.S. infrastructure is falling apart-a situation that become more urgent as the climate crisis bites harder. Here's a data series that goes a long way to explaining why. In simple English, the public sector is barely investing enough to keep up with normal decay, let alone doing anything to improve things.

The series is net civilian public investment from the national income accounts. (The source is table 5.2.5, here.) “Net” means after depreciation, aka wear and tear. Public investment means expenditures on long-lived assets like schools and roads. Prisons are in there too. If we took those out, the numbers would be slightly lower-though not profoundly so, because most of the costs of maintaining the carceral state come from day-to-day operations-96%, according to this estimate-not from building new prisons.

Of course, it's hard to put exact dollar values on the decay of physical assets over time. Economic stats are always highly imperfect, even if they seem precise, carried out to several figures beyond the decimal point. But they're the best we've got-and these are the numbers that American capitalism produces to understand itself, even if they don't bother to pay much attention to what the numbers are saying.

Here are the graphs-the first, net public (meaning by federal, state, and local government) as a percent of GDP since 1950. I started the graph in 1950, even though the figures begin in 1929, because the extreme values of the Great Depression and World War II years would distort the scale dramatically. The second presents the averages by decade. As the graphs show, net public investment is in a long downtrend and is now at near-record-low levels. The only years with lower levels were 1942–1945, when the civilian economy was starved to fund the war effort.

Consider the hardware I saw on our tour of Cameron International Corp (NYSE: CAM), the world's top supplier of subsea components. In search of the elusive "unobtanium," Cameron engineers at the Houston facility perform metallurgical miracles, designing and testing deepwater drilling parts against the most tortuous of conditions-temperatures that fluctuate by 500 degrees, under pressures of up to 30,000 psi (by comparison, your household water supply has about 60 psi)-twisting and bending the steel at up to 5 million foot-pounds of pressure to simulate the real-life conditions of a floating drilling rig, all in an effort to prevent oil spills and blowouts in undersea drilling operations.Everything is double- or quadruple-redundant to guard against dangerous and costly failures. Their "blowout preventers," for example, are high-tech marvels, incorporating microprocessors, super high tolerance parts, electric motors, seals and other components in a unit that sits on the seabed under incredible pressure and temperature, waiting to disconnect the wellbore from the production system in seconds without spilling a drop of oil on command from an operator miles away.

Cameron Blow Out Preventer (BOP) Other Cameron products include "Christmas trees" (stacks of valves and fittings that control the flow of fluids from an oil well and prevent their release into the environment), seals, chokes, compressors, control systems, completion equipment, pipe connections, robotic remotely operated equipment to connect equipment at depths divers can't reach, and subsea systems that can separate salt, water, and gas from oil all on the seabed. Their equipment is routinely deployed today in water depths of over 7,800 feet. Not surprisingly, one of Cameron's top customers is one of our long-term favorites, Transocean LTD (NYSE: RIG) the king of offshore drillers. I got a glimpse of the software end of advanced drilling technology on a tour of Halliburton's "Real-Time Decision Center and Visualization Center." As a former software engineer and architect, what I saw their systems do took my breath away. Halliburton (NYSE: HAL) engineers and their customers can now plot and steer the path of a drillbit from a half a world away, coordinate petabytes of data from disparate sources in real-time, collaborate with engineers in far-off locations, and examine 3-D models of the rocks they intend to drill. Such technology has enabled Halliburton to drill seven hits out of nine attempts in the most extreme drilling conditions in the world-an impressive success rate. Other major industrial companies at the conference like industrial giant FMC Corporation (NYSE: FMC) demonstrated the capabilities of their floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) systems, which enable the development of deepwater fields in places like Brazil and the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. These systems can collect the oil from multiple wells on the seabed, connect their output to a central "manifold" system, do the processing to remove the water and gas, pump the oil to the surface, and load it directly onto tankers. Outlook Solid

With an uncertain outlook on oil and gas for the next few years, one might think that the purveyors of these high-ticket items would be suffering from falling orders, and to be sure they took their hits along with the rest of the equities market through the end of 2008. But all found their bottoms starting in 2009, and have staged an impressive rally in the last two months as they followed the broader market up:

The fact is that deepwater production is now the name of the game in oil and gas. If we want it, we're going to have to go there to get it. Oil producers know this and are still pouring billions into its development annually, in the expectation that over the decades that it will take to develop these fields, their investments will pay off handsomely. In a technical session at the OTC conference, Baker Hughes Inc. (NYSE: BHI) observed that the drop in oil demand in the last big downturn in 1983 was 24% off the peak, whereas demand has only declined 4% in 2009. "The easy oil has been found," declared BHI CEO Chad Deaton, and when the economy rebounds the supply problem will be more intense than ever. He believes that $100 a barrel pricing is needed to ensure future supply, a point I have emphasized in this column (see "The Sleeping Threat of Low Oil Prices"). Or, as Karen A. Harbert, the Executive Vice President and Managing Director of the Institute for 21st Century Energy (a department within the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) put it, "We're going to be wishing for $4 gas if we don't get our act together." The oil and gas industry faces numerous challenges in addition to prices that are too low. For one, a lack of qualified personnel plagues the business from end to end. A majority of the personnel are over 50, followed by a 10-year gap before reaching the next tier of 35-40 year olds who could take their places-the result of a sharp decline in petroleum geology students during the 80s and 90s. Technical, regulatory and political challenges, delivery scheduling issues, and cost control are major hurdles for the industry as well. Taken together, the picture for offshore oil and gas development is clear: demand will remain high, and the prices for oil and gas will have to rise for the industry to meet it. In future columns, I'll share more insights from the OTC conference, including the technical challenges of drilling in the Arctic, the enormous complexity of developing new oil and gas megaprojects costing billions, and some promising new ideas for storing and delivering energy from far-offshore wind farms.

– The Cherry Creek News –

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Net civilian investment was 0.5% of GDP in 2016; preliminary numbers for 2017 suggest it hasn't budged. It declined during the Great Recession and its aftermath, and is now less than half 2007's 1.2%. The contrast with the Great Depression is stark. Net civilian public investment rose from 1.9% of GDP in 1929, the year of the crash, to 3.2% ten years later. For the full decade of the 1930s, it averaged 2.6%-the same as the 1960s, a time of dramatic expansion in the public sector. Since then, it's been mostly downhill.

To get back to that 2.6% average would mean an increase of $400 billion a year in public investment. (For details on the shortfall, and where the spending needs to be directed, see the American Society of Civil Engineers' annual report on the topic.) There's no doubt the U.S. could afford that. But our political system is completely incapable of formulating the problem. (Trump's infrastructure plan is a ludicrous patchwork of tax breaks and privatizations.) And it's only going to get worse, as the rot deepens and the climate challenges mount.

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we-cyberstudentdefendor-blog · 7 years

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How has the Earth survived for 3.5 billion years? (Blog 3)

Sustainability is the ability for the Earth’s natural systems and human cultural systems to survive, flourish, and adapt to changing environmental conditions for a very long time. In order for the system as a whole to endure indefinitely human beings are the most important aspect of this equation. Human beings must have a desire to pass on our world to future generations in a better state than it was before. Before this can happen, however, we must be more conscious of environmental science and what it can teach us. Environmental science is defined as: “an interdisciplinary study of how humans interact with the living and non-living parts of their environment”. It uses information and principles from the natural sciences such as biology, chemistry, and geology, while taking into account of social sciences such as geography, economics and political science. Lastly, it considers humanities such as philosophy and ethics. The three goals of environmental science are: 1) “To learn how nature works”; 2) “To understand how we interact with the environment”; 3) “To find ways to deal with the environmental problems and to live more sustainably”.

An important part of environmental science is ecology. This is “the biological science that studies how organisms, or living things, interact with one another and with their environment”. Every organism is a member of a certain species. “Species are groups of organisms that have a unique set of characteristics that distinguish them from all other organisms and, for organisms that reproduce sexually, can mate and produce fertile offspring”. A big focus of ecology is on the study of eco-systems. An eco-system is defined as a set of organisms within a definite area or volume that interact with one another and with their environment of non living matter and energy. Environmental science and ecology is different from environmentalism — “a social movement dedicated to protecting the earth’s life-support systems for all forms of life”. Environmentalism is an extremely important cog in our mission because it covers political and ethical aspects rather than those of the scientific realm.

Our time on this planet is but a blink of an eye. Nature has been negotiating with many changes in the conditions of our environment for at least 3.5 billion years. There is very little doubt that we must revert to the past when examining environmental changes of the present and future. When we face an environmental change that becomes a threat to us and other species, we must learn how nature has negotiated such changes and then emulate nature’s solutions. It is truly amazing to think about how our planet has undergone and survived the numerous extreme changes in environmental conditions. That is why in environmental science, the question must be constantly posed: “How did the incredible variety of life on the earth sustain itself for at least 3.5 billion years in the face of catastrophic changes … such as gigantic meteorites impacting the earth, ice ages lasting for hundreds of millions of years, and long warming periods where melting ice raised sea levels by hundreds of feet?”. Therefore, we must learn how to live sustainably and more intelligently, and figure out how earth has survived all of the truly spectacular changes in the past. There are three main themes relating to the long-term sustainability of life on this planet. These are: “solar energy, bio-diversity, and chemical cycling”. Simply put, this means: “rely on the sun, promote multiple options for life, and re use waste”. These principles should be considered lessons from nature and we must use them in order to live more sustainably.

The earth, as well as the rest of our solar system relies on the sun for solar energy. The sun provides warmth for the planet and supports photosynthesis which is a “complex chemical process used by plants to provide the nutrients or chemicals that most organisms need in order to stay alive and reproduce”. If we did not have the sun, there would not be any plants, animals, or food. The sun, in all of its infinite qualities, provides indirect forms of solar energy like wind and flowing water, which can be used to produce electricity. While we depend on the sun and solar energy for the future of our planet, biodiversity (or biological diversity) is an equally important consideration, as well. This concept refers to the extreme diversity of organisms and the natural systems in which they exist and interact. These natural systems include deserts, grasslands, forests, and oceans. These systems provide natural services in the form of organisms and living systems interacting together to find solutions to threats such as “the renewal of topsoil, pest control, and air and water purification”. Biodiversity offers the world an opportunity to constantly adapt to changing environmental conditions. There is no doubt that without this way of enduring, our system would have been wiped out a very long time ago. However, we have this ingenious system of diversity, which protects the system, and also promotes another equally important process for sustainability called “chemical cycling”.

Chemical cycling, also known as, nutrient cycling, is the “circulation of chemicals from the environment (mostly from soil and water) through organisms and back to the environment”. It is a natural process which just keeps on going, and the earth receives no new supplies of these chemicals. Therefore, in order for our system to sustain indefinitely, these nutrients must be cycled in this manner. Without this process of chemical cycling, “there would be no air, no water, no soil, no food, and no life”.

Sustainability has many critical components. Natural capital is one example of a natural resource or natural service that allows for us and other forms of life to survive. Natural resources are materials and energy in nature that are essential or useful to humans. These natural resources are often described as renewable resources such as air, water, soil, plants, and wind; or nonrenewable resources such as metals, oil, and other carbon emitting fuels, such as natural gases. Natural services are processes in nature, such as purification of air and water and renewal of topsoil, which support life and human economies. In economics, capital is regarded as something referring to money and other forms of wealth that can support a person, a population or an economy. When thinking about how to best preserve our source of natural capital or natural resources on our planet, we must think in the same way as we do with our finances. Wealth can provide a sustainable life, if it is used properly and responsibly. On the same token, if we are more responsible in how we consume and preserve our natural resources on Earth, we can help maintain the planet’s diverse life.

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