Life is choices. Choices must be made. Those we do not make, those we choose not to make, those we opt to ignore, those of which we unaware, often for reasons of chosen ignorance, are often made for us, by default. Those choices we choose not to make we have no control over. The outcome is decided by someone or something else. It's like an election. The old saying is - and I am not trying to quote but to paraphrase - if you choose not to vote don't complain about the results. Your vote is your entry fee for the right to complain. You get the government you don't bother voting for.
The approach of peak oil has brought with it a wide array of choices that had to and have to be made. Most of us in the peak oil movement are well aware of many of these choices, are making them at the personal level, are involving ourselves with the process of making them at the local community level. Through key web sites and organizations like ASPO we are attempting to get those national and international choices made. But it is a tremendously difficult task, like changing the course of a runaway ocean liner or stopping a runaway train. The end result of the inaction is that many of those choices are being made by default, by nature.
The biggest problem is getting decision makers - those who have to make the right choices - to understand what peak oil really is and what the implications of peak oil are on our global society. Peak oil is many things but it is not about running out of oil. The mainstream media seem to, for some reason, be very slow (unwilling?) to understand this. They continue to define peak oil as running out of oil and, as a result, characterize peak oil pundits as fringe wackos. If, indeed, peak oilers were defining peak oil as running out of oil that would be a fair criticism. Lew Rockwell, for another example, defines peak oil as the point where all of the oil has been found and irreversible decline starts. That's a little closer but still not a clear understanding of peak oil. All in the peak oil movement understand that discoveries will continue well after peak oil but that those discoveries will be fewer, smaller and far more difficult and expensive to process. The reality is we will probably never run out of oil.
Peak oil is not about your cost of gasoline as such. We will reach a point where whatever oil is left is so energy-expensive to extract and process that it will take more energy to turn it into fuel than the energy we get from the fuel produced. At that point it will simply be left in the ground.
Peak oil is about the rate at which what oil, in its various forms, does remain can be extracted and processed. The global human population currently uses somewhat more than 86m barrels of oil or other liquid hydrocarbon fuel every day. We do not extract that amount of oil and have not done so for over three years. The difference between what oil is being extracted and what liquid hydrocarbons are being used is being made up from alternative sources such as; tar sands, oil sands, coal to liquid, gas to liquid, methane to liquid, bio-fuels and from drawing down strategic petroleum reserves.
At the moment there is still a small buffer in all liquids, being liquid crude and the alternatives listed above. But that buffer is paper thin and global consumption has, for these past three years, been growing faster than the alternatives can fill the gap. That problem has been masked so far by a small amount of demand destruction as more and more "users" are priced out of using petroleum products by the rapid run-up in prices over these past three years. This demand destruction has been most apparent and most damaging in poor third world countries, many of which can no longer afford the importation of any gasoline. A thriving black market has developed in many of these situations where fuel is smuggled into the country and sold at ridiculously high prices to those few customers who are still prepared or need to buy fuel at whatever price.
But spot shortages are starting to occur in the rich, developed countries as well, including U.S., Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Australia and more. Gasoline shortages in developing nations such as China and India are also common occurrences as growth in demand far outstrips the development of the infrastructure needed to satisfy this demand. The frequency of shortages will undoubtedly increase. The global liquid fuels supply, because of the paper thin buffer, is susceptible to significant disruption from previously insignificant events. Every hiccup in Nigeria, Qatar, Venezuela or any other producing and exporting nation, the falling off the exporter list by countries like Indonesia, Mexico, possibly Venezuela, Russia and others throws a major monkey wrench into the global oil market and sees a major up-tick in spot market prices which may, over the course of a week, climb by more than what the average global price of oil oil was ten years ago or less.
One of the most economically disruptive impacts of the choices not made in the face of peak oil - more often exactly the wrong choices made - will be the death of globalization. Globalization has been the driver behind economic growth and expansion throughout the developed and developing world over these past several decades. China, India and other Tiger economies have been, much to the chagrin of a large portion of the population in the older economies of the "developed" world, the greatest beneficiaries of globalization. While the older economies have remained relatively static - these economies have seen a shift from a production to a service economy rather than real growth - with "real" growth (when there is growth at all) of only a couple of percentage points, the economies of China, India and other developing economies have grown at double digit rates, often exceeding twenty percent in good years.
But the mechanics of globalization are driven by cheap oil and its derivative fuels. It depends on the massive and rapid movement of goods over thousands of miles by ships, airlines, trains and trucks, all of which run on liquid fuels derived from oil. All of these forms of transport are under serious threat from rapidly rising oil prices. Airline companies are having to take a number for the line-up at bankruptcy court. Trans-oceanic shipping is teetering on the brink with shipping costs doubling or more because of fuel costs, especially for the long list of products where energy and shipping cost are a major cost component (in many cases more than 25% of the overall product cost before the price run-ups began). Rail lines and carriers, particularly in North America, have been shrinking and consolidating for years and no longer have the financial vitality to absorb these rapidly rising fuel prices. Independent truckers, which now represents the bulk of overland transport in North America, has absorbed so much of the cost of rising fuel costs that they can no longer stay on the road (as they slide ever closer and ever quicker toward bankruptcy), even if they could charge surcharges for fuel costs.
As I detailed in Peak Oil, Deglobalization and Ecolomics many outsourced industries that are being hit hardest by rising fuel prices are beginning to repatriate their operations closer to their markets. U.S. steel imports from China have, over the past year, declined by 20% while U.S. domestic steel production is ramping back up and has increased by 10% during the same period. Much of the production and assembly of goods that had been outsourced to China and other Tiger economies is being repatriated and ramped up in Mexico, the closest source of cheap labour for the manufacture of goods for the American consumer.
But these simplified repatriation decisions that may seem to make good economic sense in a business-as-usual scenario are not, as I detailed in the above article, are not good decision or choices in the face of peak oil. They simply move the energy consumption of the manufacturing processes from one location to another but are still built around an unchanged model of centralized production of goods moved by a hopefully-viable distribution system to the markets and consumers. Moving production to Mexico is definitely not wise in the long term. Mexico's domestic oil production is plummeting, by as much as 20% or more each year, and that poor country will soon find itself a net importer of oil if there is much effort to move outsourced American industry from China to Mexico.
Repatriating outsourced industries from the developing world to the developed world and doing so without redesigning the processes to be less energy-intensive and converted to decentralized processes that produce right in the consuming market, wherever it may be, simply defers the eventual and necessary industrial response to peak oil. Very soon there will not be enough liquid fuels being produced globally, from whatever source, to satisfy total global demand. Very soon the industrial model is going to have to be changed, choices - correct choices - are going to have to be made, to cope with the reality that there is not enough fuel being produced globally to support the present model that relies on centralized, mechanized production and long distance distribution by liquid-fuel-dependant transport infrastructure.
The choices we have neglected to make, for whatever wrong-headed reason, have been made for us. We are no longer in control of the rules of the game. that's the price of choices not made.
Showing posts with label post-peak economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-peak economy. Show all posts
Monday, July 07, 2008
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Our Dangerous Infrastructure
See these other articles in the blog related to infrastructure maintenance;
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis
Lake Ontario & St. Lawrence River after Peak Oil
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof
This article concerns the post peak oil dangers represented by the decay of our modern infrastructure. Of all the implications of peak oil and the energy downslope on the other side this is the one least present in the public consciousness or, for that matter, even in the minds of most of those who are peak oil aware. I understand that. Infrastructure is not something we think about. It doesn't grab our attention. It is just there. The only time we are really conscious of it is when it fails, when the levees break in New Orleans or an overpass collapses in Montreal or a bridge falls into the Mississippi in Minneapolis or the grid dies in the entire northeast or an ice storm collapses hydro transmission towers in Quebec.
Very few of us have any connection with the infrastructure that underlies the smooth working of our society. It is invariably designed, built and maintained by an army of people with very specialized knowledge and skills that are outside the purview of the average citizen. That is part of what keeps it invisible to us. Even the infrastructure in our homes is invisible to most of us, the foundation, the framework inside the walls, the plumbing and electrical wiring running through the walls, floors and ceilings, the structure that supports the roof, the little details that let our house breathe. These are all someone else's concern, the hired plumber or electrician or handyman or builder or whoever. We pick up the phone, unconscious of the massive infrastructure that allows that system to work, and call somebody to come fix whatever it is that is broken. We don't care how they do it, just that they do.
But how much of society's resources are tied up in that dependable, invisible infrastructure? What does it cost us all every year?
Take a single piece of infrastructure, a bridge for example. It is designed and built with a planned serviceable lifespan of fifty years. The annual cost of that structure amortized over the planned lifespan is manageable. For the sake of argument, let us say the bridge cost $50-million to build. The annual cost spread over that planned fifty year lifespan is only $1-million per year. During the first half of that lifespan the annual inspection and maintenance costs are minimal. They may be, let's say, between $200,000 and $300,000 each year, averaging $250,000 annually (about one quarter of the annual amortized construction cost) over the first 25 years. From the midway point of the designed lifespan, however, inspection and maintenance costs normally begin to rise steadily. Anyone who has ever tried to keep an aging car on the road understands this. Let us assume that costs rise 4% per year. By the fiftieth year, at a steady rate of increase in maintenance cost, the annual cost will have risen to $666,000, two thirds of the amortized construction cost. If at that stage it is decided to continue to maintain the bridge rather than decommission it or replace it, the annual maintenance costs will rise over the next 25 years to $1,778,000 per year, nearly double the annual amortization cost during the designed lifespan of the bridge.
In a constantly growing economy the amount of newer infrastructure is always greater than the amount of aging infrastructure, the average age generally half or less than the overall average designed lifespan. Under such circumstances prioritizing and paying for the cost of maintenance for the relatively small amount of aging infrastructure is not a big issue, particularly where there is some form of centralized or collective budgeting (government?) for that cost to be spread over the whole infrastructure budget. The percentage of the overall infrastructure budget committed for maintenance is relatively low. In a declining economy, however, where the infrastructure is always pushed just a little bit further, expected to last just a little bit longer, where the average age of the infrastructure inventory steadily increases toward and then beyond the designed service life, not only does the ratio of maintenance cost to development cost increase but, as the overall infrastructure inventory exceeds its design lifespan the cost of proper maintenance will actually reach the point where it exceeds what would have been the amortized construction cost of new infrastructure. The decision to push the infrastructure to stay in service longer, because of the declining economy, is not made with a clear and honest understanding and admission that the maintenance costs will continue to grow. In fact, more often than not such decisions are probably made concurrent with a decision to decrease or, at best, hold the line on the maintenance budget. This should not be surprising to anyone. Even in this age of a constantly growing economy maintenance budgets are invariably underfunded and maintenance short cuts are the norm rather than the exception.
The reason that the amount of new infrastructure developed in a shrinking economy decreases is not because the infrastructure is any less needed than it was when the economy was growing. It is because the cost of new infrastructure is higher than can be justified in a shrinking economy. The cost exceeds the need. In a declining economy the overall infrastructure budget shrinks. Why, then, would one expect those budgets to suddenly and miraculously increase to meet the escalating needs of infrastructure maintenance when those maintenance costs rise above the level it would take to develop new infrastructure? The budget for infrastructure maintenance in that declining economy will have shrunk proportional to the budget for new infrastructure because "everybody knows" maintenance is always a proportion of the cost of new infrastructure. If the amount of new infrastructure is declining, obviously, so too should the amount set aside for maintenance. This is a mindset that is not likely to be easily changed just because the economy is shrinking.
The current U.S. infrastructure maintenance/renewal backlog is estimated at $1.6-trillion, Canada's between $60-125-billion. The dollar value of the infrastructure in need of that maintenance is probably inestimable at this stage, with over 600,000 bridges and 75,000 dams in the U.S. alone. They were essentially all designed and built with a planned service life of fifty years. The average age of all of that infrastructure, as a result, most of it built between 1950 and the late 1970s, has now exceeded half the serviceable lifespan with as much as one quarter of that infrastructure having already exceeded its full designed service lifespan. And the maintenance backlog continues to grow and the infrastructure inventory continues to age. Canada's maintenance backlog is estimated to be growing by $2-billion annually, the U.S. backlog between $25-50-billion, almost equal the total of the $30-billion annual infrastructure maintenance budget.
As the age of any unit of infrastructure increases and the maintenance costs begin to climb there will most often be a period of time when those rising costs are absorbed through a process of "creative accounting". This is generally done on an assumption that the higher costs are a temporary aberration. As the cost increases develop into a trend, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to "hide" and absorb the rising costs. Those increases must be dealt with, and are usually dealt with by recommending that the unit be upgraded or replaced and/or imposing limits on the maintenance that will be done in order to keep the maintenance costs within budget. It's not unlike what you do when the maintenance costs on your aging car suddenly shoot up. At first you just absorb it, figuring it is a temporary situation. As it becomes a regular event, though, you suddenly have some decisions to make. Do you continue to absorb the cost? Increase you vehicle maintenance budget? Decide to avoid certain types of maintenance that you decide is non-critical? Or decide to start looking for another car? Or do you consider leasing rather than buying? If you are confident your job will continue and your salary will continue to increase you probably decide to replace. But if your job is threatened or the company is imposing salary limitations or salary cuts or your confidence in your future earnings potential is otherwise shaken, you may be forced to consider other options.
That is the situation our society, national and global, will be facing as we pass peak oil and it begins to have a destructive impact on the national and global economy. The first victim of budget cuts is almost invariably maintenance. Investigations following most major infrastructure failures, even in a vibrant economy, highlight insufficient or ineffective maintenance as the key factor in the failure. That is followed by design flaws, either from an engineering perspective or from an insufficient understanding of the failure criteria.
Let us be clear. Neither design flaws nor shortcomings in infrastructure maintenance are a guarantee that the infrastructure will suffer a catastrophic failure. Considering the nearly 700,000 bridges and dams in operation in the U.S. the number of catastrophic failures are surprisingly low. They stick in the public consciousness because they are catastrophic, like a plane crash that kills three hundred people compared to the same number dying in two hundred different car accidents. The plane crash is global news. The two hundred car accidents are buried on the inside pages of two hundred local newspapers.
But this is the nature of air travel and of major infrastructure. When it fails it is serious business. People die, often in large numbers. When the levees failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina thousands of people perished. The 1963 failure of the Vajont dam in Italy claimed 2,500 lives. In the catastrophic dam failure in China in 1975 over 85,000 people died. The Val di Stava dam collapse in Italy in 1985 took another 268 lives. Railway crashes, often due to infrastructure failure, regularly take hundreds of lives. Even as you read this the so-called Saddam dam that holds back the waters of the Tigris River in northern Iraq is in imminent danger of collapse and under constant surveillance. It is no longer a question of if the dam will fail, just a question of when. When it does fail, a wall of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with a population of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Once the dam fails evacuation will no longer be an option. That wall of water will reach Mosul in minutes.
Our major infrastructure, especially that like dams, levees and bridges that deal with water, are very dangerous when they fail. Unfortunately, without proper maintenance and timely replacement or decommissioning failure is an eventual certainty. The only uncertainty is when that failure will occur. In that regard it is important to note that all of our infrastructure, especially that designed and built since WWII, has a designed life-span. That life-span is generally planned to be fifty years. In fairness, generally infrastructure can be retained in service safely for an extra half of it's designed life-span. In general, therefore, with proper maintenance that infrastructure designed to last fifty years can be safely operated for seventy-five years. Some can and does function much longer than that. The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, was opened in 1883 and is still in service today 124 years later, despite both design and construction flaws. The bridge has, however, failed its latest safety inspection and its days may be numbered. It is important to note that the Manhattan tower of the bridge has always rested on sand, thirty feet short of the underlying bedrock. With hundreds of thousands of vehicles crossing the bridge daily and hundreds or even thousands on the bridge at any given time, the risk of any failure being catastrophic is simply too great to continue to push the limits.
If peak oil results in the economic failure that most analysts expect and if it occurs within the next ten to fifteen years, which is almost guaranteed, it could not come at a worse time when looking at the aging infrastructure around us. Over 80% of our current, major, functioning infrastructure was built in the quarter century beginning in 1950 or earlier. Over 50% of that infrastructure will have exceeded its designed service life by 2025. By the middle of this century almost all of that infrastructure currently in service will have reached or exceeded its designed lifespan. In this same timeframe, unfortunately, the national and global economy will probably be in a period of severe contraction due to the impact of global peak oil. It is unlikely in a contracting economy that infrastructure, regardless of it's age, will be replaced or, perhaps, even properly decommissioned. Efforts will be made to keep that infrastructure in service as long as possible, or longer. But peak oil will hit, the global economy will go into terminal decline at the very time when most of our infrastructure seriously needs replacement or decommissioning.
Major infrastructure is increasingly dangerous as it ages beyond its designed service life, even with proper maintenance. Every dam represents a serious danger to those living or working downstream from it. Every major aging bridge crossing any waterway is an increasing risk to those who continue to use it when it has surpassed its reasonable age of serviceability. But by the middle of this century virtually all of our major infrastructure will reach that age, and will probably do so without proper maintenance performed on it possibly for decades.
If a bridge gets too old and too unsafe to use ultimately it can simply be closed off and left to fail. Unless something happens to be under it at the time of collapse it probably won't be a catastrophe. Dams and levees, however, are another matter. They don't pass over water. They hold back water, tremendous volumes of water. If those structures failure the sudden unleashing of all that water will be catastrophic, regardless of where that structure is. Over ten percent of our dams and levees hold back water from major population centers, many from cities of millions of people, like the risk posed to Mosul by the Saddam dam. When they fail, which they will if not eventually decommissioned or replaced, the results will be unquestionably catastrophic. Unlike bridges, dams and levees represent an ongoing and increasing risk regardless of whether we are "using" them or not. They can't simply be blocked off and left to fail with no resulting loss of life or property. A bridged blocked off no longer has traffic crossing it to be at risk. A dam blocked off still holds back billions of gallons of water capable of inundating the land downstream and potentially destroying anything or anyone in its path.
If we enter the anticipated era of declining global economy with a general and, more importantly, leadership mindset that still believes the invisible hand of the markets will right all problems, our infrastructure woes and the risks involved will continue to worsen. That belief in the ability of the markets to correct themselves is based on an assumption that the state of normalcy to which the markets will eventually return is one of growth. That assumption is, however, based on endless consumption of resources supported by an endless and reliable supply of energy. Once we pass peak oil neither will possible. The state of decline, for all practical purposes, will be permanent.
The first victim in any budget cuts is almost always the maintenance budget. The first priority for business, and probably government as well, in a declining economy will be to do whatever is necessary to keep profits up while sales are declining, again based on an assumption that overtime sales will return to a pattern of growth. This invariably means cutting costs. Profits invariably mean growth, the willingness of a society to pay more for goods than their real value (the profits) in a belief that that value will increase with time. In an environment of perpetual economic decline this will not be possible. The longer any business or nation tries to hold on in a belief that things will get back to normal the more assured is their eventual collapse.
The cutting of maintenance budgets in a downturn is, like all other cost-cutting measures, assumed to be a necessary and temporary adjustment. It is assumed that when things turn around that deferred maintenance will be caught up. But when there is no turn around, no correction, no return to normal growth on the horizon, the maintenance deficit and the risks implicit in that deficit continue to worsen. When the infrastructure with which those risks are being taken, for which maintenance is being "temporarily" deferred, is already near, at or beyond its designed service life those decisions put society in general at serious risk. This is critically so with dams, levees, bridges and other water management infrastructure.
Facing the reality of peak oil and the implications for our economy and society is no longer an option, no longer something that can be denied or avoided. There is far too much risk to society in a do-nothing, laissez-faire approach. Doing nothing simply increases the risk and threat. We need to face that reality, face the implications, make the decisions and begin the corrective action necessary before peak oil is upon us and before the global economy slides into a state of perpetual decline. The resources, particularly financial, will simply not be available to take the appropriate action if we wait for that event to push us into action.
I am not optimistic that we will do what needs to be done. All of the historical evidence suggests that we will not. One can only hope and add one's voice to the demands for appropriate and timely action.
The myth of permanence: post-peak infrastructure maintenance
The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis
Lake Ontario & St. Lawrence River after Peak Oil
Post Peak Dam Maintenance, or Lack Thereof
This article concerns the post peak oil dangers represented by the decay of our modern infrastructure. Of all the implications of peak oil and the energy downslope on the other side this is the one least present in the public consciousness or, for that matter, even in the minds of most of those who are peak oil aware. I understand that. Infrastructure is not something we think about. It doesn't grab our attention. It is just there. The only time we are really conscious of it is when it fails, when the levees break in New Orleans or an overpass collapses in Montreal or a bridge falls into the Mississippi in Minneapolis or the grid dies in the entire northeast or an ice storm collapses hydro transmission towers in Quebec.
Very few of us have any connection with the infrastructure that underlies the smooth working of our society. It is invariably designed, built and maintained by an army of people with very specialized knowledge and skills that are outside the purview of the average citizen. That is part of what keeps it invisible to us. Even the infrastructure in our homes is invisible to most of us, the foundation, the framework inside the walls, the plumbing and electrical wiring running through the walls, floors and ceilings, the structure that supports the roof, the little details that let our house breathe. These are all someone else's concern, the hired plumber or electrician or handyman or builder or whoever. We pick up the phone, unconscious of the massive infrastructure that allows that system to work, and call somebody to come fix whatever it is that is broken. We don't care how they do it, just that they do.
But how much of society's resources are tied up in that dependable, invisible infrastructure? What does it cost us all every year?
Take a single piece of infrastructure, a bridge for example. It is designed and built with a planned serviceable lifespan of fifty years. The annual cost of that structure amortized over the planned lifespan is manageable. For the sake of argument, let us say the bridge cost $50-million to build. The annual cost spread over that planned fifty year lifespan is only $1-million per year. During the first half of that lifespan the annual inspection and maintenance costs are minimal. They may be, let's say, between $200,000 and $300,000 each year, averaging $250,000 annually (about one quarter of the annual amortized construction cost) over the first 25 years. From the midway point of the designed lifespan, however, inspection and maintenance costs normally begin to rise steadily. Anyone who has ever tried to keep an aging car on the road understands this. Let us assume that costs rise 4% per year. By the fiftieth year, at a steady rate of increase in maintenance cost, the annual cost will have risen to $666,000, two thirds of the amortized construction cost. If at that stage it is decided to continue to maintain the bridge rather than decommission it or replace it, the annual maintenance costs will rise over the next 25 years to $1,778,000 per year, nearly double the annual amortization cost during the designed lifespan of the bridge.
In a constantly growing economy the amount of newer infrastructure is always greater than the amount of aging infrastructure, the average age generally half or less than the overall average designed lifespan. Under such circumstances prioritizing and paying for the cost of maintenance for the relatively small amount of aging infrastructure is not a big issue, particularly where there is some form of centralized or collective budgeting (government?) for that cost to be spread over the whole infrastructure budget. The percentage of the overall infrastructure budget committed for maintenance is relatively low. In a declining economy, however, where the infrastructure is always pushed just a little bit further, expected to last just a little bit longer, where the average age of the infrastructure inventory steadily increases toward and then beyond the designed service life, not only does the ratio of maintenance cost to development cost increase but, as the overall infrastructure inventory exceeds its design lifespan the cost of proper maintenance will actually reach the point where it exceeds what would have been the amortized construction cost of new infrastructure. The decision to push the infrastructure to stay in service longer, because of the declining economy, is not made with a clear and honest understanding and admission that the maintenance costs will continue to grow. In fact, more often than not such decisions are probably made concurrent with a decision to decrease or, at best, hold the line on the maintenance budget. This should not be surprising to anyone. Even in this age of a constantly growing economy maintenance budgets are invariably underfunded and maintenance short cuts are the norm rather than the exception.
The reason that the amount of new infrastructure developed in a shrinking economy decreases is not because the infrastructure is any less needed than it was when the economy was growing. It is because the cost of new infrastructure is higher than can be justified in a shrinking economy. The cost exceeds the need. In a declining economy the overall infrastructure budget shrinks. Why, then, would one expect those budgets to suddenly and miraculously increase to meet the escalating needs of infrastructure maintenance when those maintenance costs rise above the level it would take to develop new infrastructure? The budget for infrastructure maintenance in that declining economy will have shrunk proportional to the budget for new infrastructure because "everybody knows" maintenance is always a proportion of the cost of new infrastructure. If the amount of new infrastructure is declining, obviously, so too should the amount set aside for maintenance. This is a mindset that is not likely to be easily changed just because the economy is shrinking.
The current U.S. infrastructure maintenance/renewal backlog is estimated at $1.6-trillion, Canada's between $60-125-billion. The dollar value of the infrastructure in need of that maintenance is probably inestimable at this stage, with over 600,000 bridges and 75,000 dams in the U.S. alone. They were essentially all designed and built with a planned service life of fifty years. The average age of all of that infrastructure, as a result, most of it built between 1950 and the late 1970s, has now exceeded half the serviceable lifespan with as much as one quarter of that infrastructure having already exceeded its full designed service lifespan. And the maintenance backlog continues to grow and the infrastructure inventory continues to age. Canada's maintenance backlog is estimated to be growing by $2-billion annually, the U.S. backlog between $25-50-billion, almost equal the total of the $30-billion annual infrastructure maintenance budget.
As the age of any unit of infrastructure increases and the maintenance costs begin to climb there will most often be a period of time when those rising costs are absorbed through a process of "creative accounting". This is generally done on an assumption that the higher costs are a temporary aberration. As the cost increases develop into a trend, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to "hide" and absorb the rising costs. Those increases must be dealt with, and are usually dealt with by recommending that the unit be upgraded or replaced and/or imposing limits on the maintenance that will be done in order to keep the maintenance costs within budget. It's not unlike what you do when the maintenance costs on your aging car suddenly shoot up. At first you just absorb it, figuring it is a temporary situation. As it becomes a regular event, though, you suddenly have some decisions to make. Do you continue to absorb the cost? Increase you vehicle maintenance budget? Decide to avoid certain types of maintenance that you decide is non-critical? Or decide to start looking for another car? Or do you consider leasing rather than buying? If you are confident your job will continue and your salary will continue to increase you probably decide to replace. But if your job is threatened or the company is imposing salary limitations or salary cuts or your confidence in your future earnings potential is otherwise shaken, you may be forced to consider other options.
That is the situation our society, national and global, will be facing as we pass peak oil and it begins to have a destructive impact on the national and global economy. The first victim of budget cuts is almost invariably maintenance. Investigations following most major infrastructure failures, even in a vibrant economy, highlight insufficient or ineffective maintenance as the key factor in the failure. That is followed by design flaws, either from an engineering perspective or from an insufficient understanding of the failure criteria.
Let us be clear. Neither design flaws nor shortcomings in infrastructure maintenance are a guarantee that the infrastructure will suffer a catastrophic failure. Considering the nearly 700,000 bridges and dams in operation in the U.S. the number of catastrophic failures are surprisingly low. They stick in the public consciousness because they are catastrophic, like a plane crash that kills three hundred people compared to the same number dying in two hundred different car accidents. The plane crash is global news. The two hundred car accidents are buried on the inside pages of two hundred local newspapers.
But this is the nature of air travel and of major infrastructure. When it fails it is serious business. People die, often in large numbers. When the levees failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina thousands of people perished. The 1963 failure of the Vajont dam in Italy claimed 2,500 lives. In the catastrophic dam failure in China in 1975 over 85,000 people died. The Val di Stava dam collapse in Italy in 1985 took another 268 lives. Railway crashes, often due to infrastructure failure, regularly take hundreds of lives. Even as you read this the so-called Saddam dam that holds back the waters of the Tigris River in northern Iraq is in imminent danger of collapse and under constant surveillance. It is no longer a question of if the dam will fail, just a question of when. When it does fail, a wall of water will sweep into Mosul, Iraq's third largest city with a population of 1.7 million, 20 miles to the south. Once the dam fails evacuation will no longer be an option. That wall of water will reach Mosul in minutes.
Our major infrastructure, especially that like dams, levees and bridges that deal with water, are very dangerous when they fail. Unfortunately, without proper maintenance and timely replacement or decommissioning failure is an eventual certainty. The only uncertainty is when that failure will occur. In that regard it is important to note that all of our infrastructure, especially that designed and built since WWII, has a designed life-span. That life-span is generally planned to be fifty years. In fairness, generally infrastructure can be retained in service safely for an extra half of it's designed life-span. In general, therefore, with proper maintenance that infrastructure designed to last fifty years can be safely operated for seventy-five years. Some can and does function much longer than that. The Brooklyn Bridge, for example, was opened in 1883 and is still in service today 124 years later, despite both design and construction flaws. The bridge has, however, failed its latest safety inspection and its days may be numbered. It is important to note that the Manhattan tower of the bridge has always rested on sand, thirty feet short of the underlying bedrock. With hundreds of thousands of vehicles crossing the bridge daily and hundreds or even thousands on the bridge at any given time, the risk of any failure being catastrophic is simply too great to continue to push the limits.
If peak oil results in the economic failure that most analysts expect and if it occurs within the next ten to fifteen years, which is almost guaranteed, it could not come at a worse time when looking at the aging infrastructure around us. Over 80% of our current, major, functioning infrastructure was built in the quarter century beginning in 1950 or earlier. Over 50% of that infrastructure will have exceeded its designed service life by 2025. By the middle of this century almost all of that infrastructure currently in service will have reached or exceeded its designed lifespan. In this same timeframe, unfortunately, the national and global economy will probably be in a period of severe contraction due to the impact of global peak oil. It is unlikely in a contracting economy that infrastructure, regardless of it's age, will be replaced or, perhaps, even properly decommissioned. Efforts will be made to keep that infrastructure in service as long as possible, or longer. But peak oil will hit, the global economy will go into terminal decline at the very time when most of our infrastructure seriously needs replacement or decommissioning.
Major infrastructure is increasingly dangerous as it ages beyond its designed service life, even with proper maintenance. Every dam represents a serious danger to those living or working downstream from it. Every major aging bridge crossing any waterway is an increasing risk to those who continue to use it when it has surpassed its reasonable age of serviceability. But by the middle of this century virtually all of our major infrastructure will reach that age, and will probably do so without proper maintenance performed on it possibly for decades.
If a bridge gets too old and too unsafe to use ultimately it can simply be closed off and left to fail. Unless something happens to be under it at the time of collapse it probably won't be a catastrophe. Dams and levees, however, are another matter. They don't pass over water. They hold back water, tremendous volumes of water. If those structures failure the sudden unleashing of all that water will be catastrophic, regardless of where that structure is. Over ten percent of our dams and levees hold back water from major population centers, many from cities of millions of people, like the risk posed to Mosul by the Saddam dam. When they fail, which they will if not eventually decommissioned or replaced, the results will be unquestionably catastrophic. Unlike bridges, dams and levees represent an ongoing and increasing risk regardless of whether we are "using" them or not. They can't simply be blocked off and left to fail with no resulting loss of life or property. A bridged blocked off no longer has traffic crossing it to be at risk. A dam blocked off still holds back billions of gallons of water capable of inundating the land downstream and potentially destroying anything or anyone in its path.
If we enter the anticipated era of declining global economy with a general and, more importantly, leadership mindset that still believes the invisible hand of the markets will right all problems, our infrastructure woes and the risks involved will continue to worsen. That belief in the ability of the markets to correct themselves is based on an assumption that the state of normalcy to which the markets will eventually return is one of growth. That assumption is, however, based on endless consumption of resources supported by an endless and reliable supply of energy. Once we pass peak oil neither will possible. The state of decline, for all practical purposes, will be permanent.
The first victim in any budget cuts is almost always the maintenance budget. The first priority for business, and probably government as well, in a declining economy will be to do whatever is necessary to keep profits up while sales are declining, again based on an assumption that overtime sales will return to a pattern of growth. This invariably means cutting costs. Profits invariably mean growth, the willingness of a society to pay more for goods than their real value (the profits) in a belief that that value will increase with time. In an environment of perpetual economic decline this will not be possible. The longer any business or nation tries to hold on in a belief that things will get back to normal the more assured is their eventual collapse.
The cutting of maintenance budgets in a downturn is, like all other cost-cutting measures, assumed to be a necessary and temporary adjustment. It is assumed that when things turn around that deferred maintenance will be caught up. But when there is no turn around, no correction, no return to normal growth on the horizon, the maintenance deficit and the risks implicit in that deficit continue to worsen. When the infrastructure with which those risks are being taken, for which maintenance is being "temporarily" deferred, is already near, at or beyond its designed service life those decisions put society in general at serious risk. This is critically so with dams, levees, bridges and other water management infrastructure.
Facing the reality of peak oil and the implications for our economy and society is no longer an option, no longer something that can be denied or avoided. There is far too much risk to society in a do-nothing, laissez-faire approach. Doing nothing simply increases the risk and threat. We need to face that reality, face the implications, make the decisions and begin the corrective action necessary before peak oil is upon us and before the global economy slides into a state of perpetual decline. The resources, particularly financial, will simply not be available to take the appropriate action if we wait for that event to push us into action.
I am not optimistic that we will do what needs to be done. All of the historical evidence suggests that we will not. One can only hope and add one's voice to the demands for appropriate and timely action.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Emerging Global Freshwater Crisis
Seventy percent of the earth's surface is covered with water yet more than one out of six people (1.1 billion) lack access to safe drinking water, and more than two out of six (2.6 billion) lack adequate sanitation.[16] And those numbers grow every year. Now over half the world's population live in heavily energy-dependent cities whose aging water infrastructure, even now before peak oil, is beginning to crumble. Even in wealthy North America, the cost of renewing and modernizing water and wastewater infrastructure is enormous, and there is urgency for rational assessment and informed decision making about the need for new or expanded infrastructure and about potential impacts on Great Lakes waters.[12] Where will peak oil leave us?
Earth. The water planet. Or, as Carl Sagan called it, the pale blue dot. Water, water everywhere. The oceans and lakes are full of it. The poles are covered with it. Rivers move it from place to place. Blocks of it measuring thousands of cubic kilometres float about the oceans near the poles. The atmosphere is full of it. All the plants and animals on the planet are made up mostly of it. It's in the soil, even in the rocks. It exists as a liquid, a solid, a gas. On a planetary basis it is a perpetually-recycled finite resource. It has been estimated that, in total, the earth contains about 1400 million cubic kilometers of it, give or take a few million.[15] But it's not always conveniently in the place and in the form we humans want it to be.
It's plentiful, but can you drink it?
Of all of the water on the planet only a paltry 2.5% or about 35 million cubic kilometers is fresh water. The usable portion of those freshwater resources is less than 1% (about 350,000 cubic kilometers) and only 0.0025% of all the water on earth. The total global freshwater breaks down as; 0.3% contained in lakes and rivers (90% of it in lakes); 29.9% fresh ground water (aquifers); 0.9% other: swamp, soil moisture, tundra and permafrost; 68.9% ice caps, glaciers and snow cover.[15] And the atmosphere itself contains about 0.001% (0.4% of global fresh water) of the total water available on our planet.[17]
But fresh water is not evenly distributed throughout the planet. The Great Lakes contain about 18 percent of the world’s surface freshwater supplies - shared by only two nations - with a combined surface area of over 325,000 km2. Overall, however, jurisdiction for the Great Lakes is shared by two federal governments (Canada and the United States), two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), eight US states (New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), and hundreds of municipal governments.[12] Only about 25 million people (about one third of 1% of the global population) rely on the Great Lakes for their drinking water.[12]
At the other extreme, the 29 countries in the near east region account for 14% of the world’s land area and are home to 10% of the world’s human population. Yet the whole region has only about 2% of the world’s renewable freshwater resources.[15] While the global average availability is 7000 cubic meters of water per person per year, in these countries the average is 1577 cubic meters of water per person per year.[15] In Jordan and the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only 170-200 cubic meters of renewable water resources are available per person per year, less than 3% of the global average.[15]
From this limited availability of fresh water, however, withdrawals for irrigation represent an average of 66% of the total withdrawals (up to 90% in arid regions like the middle east), the other 34% being used by domestic households (10%) (representing only 17-20 cubic meters per person per year in the above-mentioned countries), industry (20%), or evaporated from reservoirs (4%).[16]
Population growth, economic development, and changing national and regional values have intensified competition over increasingly scarce freshwater resources worldwide, leading to widespread concern and predictions of increasing future conflicts over shared water supplies.[8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16] Of greatest concern is the potential for conflict within the world's 263 international freshwater basins (basins shared by two or more countries). However, since 1948, the historical record documents only 37 incidents of acute conflicts (i.e., those involving violence) over water, over half between Israel and various of its neighbours. During that same period, approximately 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed.[10] It is unlikely that that ratio will hold over this century as water shortages become increasingly common and critical.
Europe has the largest number of international freshwater basins with 69, followed by Africa with 59, Asia with 57, North America with 40, and South America with 38. The world's 263 international freshwater basins account for nearly one-half of the earth's land surface, generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow and are home to approximately 40% of the world's population. A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins, some albeit reluctantly. Thirty-three nations, including such sizable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international basins. Needless to say such countries take their international water agreements very seriously.[10]
Many international freshwater basins involve a significant number of nation states. The Danube, for example, has seventeen riparian states. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than nine countries. The Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least five sovereign nations. In all, and most worrisome from the perspective of potential future conflicts, 158 of the world's 263 international freshwater basins lack any type of multilateral cooperative management and conflict resolution framework. Of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral, most being bilateral between only two of those states. Many basins continue to experience significant disputes even after a treaty is negotiated and signed, often because of the exclusion from the treaties of one or more of the sharing states. Often, under such pressures, even the signed bilateral treaties begin to break down.[10]
An early and successful model of cooperative water management structures that can help avoid dispute and conflict was the establishment by the United States and Canada of the International Joint Committee (IJC) for the administration of the Great Lakes watershed and connecting and outflowing rivers.[12] Though somewhat unique because of its focus on shared lakes more than the shared rivers, it is, nonetheless, a model of the level of cooperation that is achievable. Certainly the relative lack of complexity in being only a bilateral agreement has helped considerably as well. It is fair to say, however, that a significant part of the strong and enduring relationship between the two countries is due, at least in part, to their mutual cooperation concerning and national reliance on the Great Lakes. Even so, at least one war (the war of 1812) has been fought between the two nations (Canada was a British colony at the time) partly on the waters of these very shared lakes.
Water has always been an important component in the negotiations between states and nations. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has documented more than 3600 international water treaties - covering the surface water in lakes and rivers - dating from AD 805 to 1984.[10] Most of these have to do with rights of navigation, limits on diversion and pollution. The earliest recorded water treaty, however, dates back to 2500 BC, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River.[10] Since 1948 alone 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed dealing with surface freshwater.[10] Yet the surface water at issue represents only 0.3% of the total freshwater on the planet. As regards groundwater or the underground water in aquifers, which accounts for 29.9% of all the freshwater on the planet, "there are no known treaties dealing specifically with groundwater matters."[13] Some freshwater treaties dealing with surface water do casually mention groundwater - almost as an aside or a point for future consideration - but even these treaties do not pursue the issue with any detailed language, measures, agreements or definition.
Groundwater, of course, is considerably more difficult to map and define than is surface water. There are literally thousands of underground aquifers throughout the world, most fortunately contained within the boundaries of single sovereign nations. But hundreds of these aquifers run beneath and across the arbitrary human boundaries above them. And just as one state excessively drawing water from a shared lake or river affects the availability of that resource to other countries sharing it, the excessive drawing down of the water in an international aquifer by one state affects the availability of that water to the other states dependent on it. For example, South Africa shares four rivers with its six neighbours – the Incomati, Orange, Limpopo and Maputo. The water in these rivers is, however, increasingly under pressure due to increased water demands in relatively affluent South Africa, the largest, most powerful of the seven nations sharing those resources.[11] This is not a trivial issue when it comes to groundwater resources. Groundwater systems are often the only source of fresh water in some regions of the world, particularly under arid and semi-arid climatic conditions - such as in the middle east and much of Africa - where demand is rapidly increasing.[13]
The structure and terminology of most international freshwater agreements tend to follow the pattern codified in the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses.[10] Attempts have been underway, through the International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM) efforts[13], to arrive at a similar codification of rules for treaties involving the treatment of international groundwater aquifers. The most recent attempt, The Seoul Rules, demonstrates special concern with international groundwater through the provision of specific articles that relate to “hydraulic interdependence”, “protection of groundwater” and “groundwater management & surface waters” (the latter addresses the issue of conjunctive use).[14] It is still too early to tell what success these efforts will have or whether anything equivalent to UN convention will result. The slow progress to date suggests that there is only a slight likelihood of having a framework in place in time to ward off serious future water conflicts. Issues of increasing water scarcity, degrading water quality, rapid population growth, unilateral water development, and uneven levels of economic development are commonly cited as potentially disruptive factors in co-riparian water relations. The combination of these factors has led academics and policy-makers alike to warn of impending conflict over shared water resources.[10]
Even when nations equitably share these resources, however, the pressure on groundwater resources, both shared and sovereign, can be immense. Groundwater reserves in the Middle East, for example, are becoming increasingly brackish. More than 50% of groundwater in the region, it is estimated, is already saline and the proportion is increasing as the rate of extraction of water from aquifers exceeds recharge, in much of the region by three to one. In Saudi Arabia water levels declined by more than 70 meters in the Umm Er Radhuma aquifer from 1978 to 1984 and this decline was accompanied by a salinity increase of more than 1000 milligrams per liter. The aquifers of Bahrain, the Batenah Plains of Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are suffering severely from seawater intrusion. Groundwater salinity in most areas of the Syrian and Jordanian steppe has increased to several thousand milligrams per liter and over exploitation of coastal aquifers in Lebanon has caused seawater intrusion with a subsequent rise from 340 to 22000 milligrams per liter in some wells near Beirut. With the countries in the Arabian peninsula using up their water resources three times as fast as they are being renewed it is estimated that available water resources will be exhausted within 20 years unless consumption of freshwater is reduced.[15]
The always volatile countries of the Middle East have become critically dependent on the income from their oil resources and accompanying natural gas, essentially their only tradeable commodities. As world consumption of oil has grown over this past half century, the populations of these countries have literally exploded. In many of them over half the population is under twenty years of age. When those oil resources go into serious decline, if they are not on the front edge of that predicament already, the means of support for that tremendous population will disappear. Most of these nations have a policy of being as self sufficient in food production as possible, but water limitations, despite their draw down of aquifers at three times the renewal rate and considerable investment in desalination facilities, have kept them from achieving self-sufficiency.[15] Saudi Arabia, in fact, are doing significant Promotion of the use of saline water and salt-tolerant species to increase food and feed production.[15] To date the lack of food self-sufficiency has not been a problem for these countries because they have had the income to trade for what they can't produce. As the oil revenues begin to disappear, however, the potential for revitalizing age-old conflicts in the region are of serious concern.
Complicating all of the real issues involving water sharing is the fact that water has become the most commercial product of the century. Water is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century.[8] Water has been put on the table as a tradeable commercial product in almost every bilateral and multilateral trade agreement negotiated during the rampant growth of commercial globalization. Many weaker countries are being pressured into putting their scarce water resources up for grabs in order to achieve other gains in these trade agreements. Even Canada is under considerable and constant pressure from the U.S. to put the country's considerable fresh water resources at the disposal of commercial interests. Canadian water and the shared water resources of the Great Lakes basin are consistently viewed in Washington and Many U.S. state capitals as the solution to growing water scarcity in that country's heartland.
The impact of climate change on the redistribution of water resources further adds to the complications that threaten to contribute to future conflict. In some areas longstanding water resources, like many of the lakes in Africa, are drying up while other areas, such as much of Europe, are experiencing unprecedented flooding. Areas like the U.S. midwest, one of the world's foodbaskets, are drying up with perpetual crop losses driving more and more producers into bankruptcy. Extreme weather events are on the increase as the planet warms. All of these things affect the amount of water available to agriculture. The global emergency food grain reserves over this past decade have shrunk from a marginal 119 day supply to a very critical 53 day supply, and continues to decline by 2-4 days supply per year.
There is little question that the growing global water crisis has the potential to be one of the key sources of conflict between nations, and even within nations, over the balance of this century and beyond. Considering the political difficulties that have accompanied the drafting, writing and signing of existing international freshwater agreements (most not during times of critical water scarcities) future agreements will become increasingly difficult to finalize and consistently open to abuse by the signatories.
=========================
The following were key sources of material for this article;
1) IJC Releases Statement on its Review of Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River Regulation
2) United States & Canada International Joint Commission Public Interest Advisory Group Public Meeting
3) Long Sault to Beauharnois: the St. Lawrence River restructured
4) Robert H Saunders Dam (before 9/11) and Dwight D Eisenhower Lock in Massena, N.Y.
5) The Lost Villages
6) Lake Ontario St. Lawrence River Regulation
7) Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence River Framework Data Project examines ups and downs of water levels
8) Water crisis looms in countrywide
9) Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements
10) The World.s International Freshwater Agreements: Historical Developments and Future Opportunities[PDF]
11) A Compilation of All The International Freshwater Agreements Entered Into by South Africa With Other States
12) The International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement
13) International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM)
14) Internationally Shared Aquifer Resource Management: ISARM AMERICAS
15) Role of Biosaline Agriculture in Managing Freshwater Shortages and Improving Water Security
16) World Water Council: Water Crisis
17) Water in the Earth's atmosphere
18) Why is the Ocean Salty?
Earth. The water planet. Or, as Carl Sagan called it, the pale blue dot. Water, water everywhere. The oceans and lakes are full of it. The poles are covered with it. Rivers move it from place to place. Blocks of it measuring thousands of cubic kilometres float about the oceans near the poles. The atmosphere is full of it. All the plants and animals on the planet are made up mostly of it. It's in the soil, even in the rocks. It exists as a liquid, a solid, a gas. On a planetary basis it is a perpetually-recycled finite resource. It has been estimated that, in total, the earth contains about 1400 million cubic kilometers of it, give or take a few million.[15] But it's not always conveniently in the place and in the form we humans want it to be.
It's plentiful, but can you drink it?
Of all of the water on the planet only a paltry 2.5% or about 35 million cubic kilometers is fresh water. The usable portion of those freshwater resources is less than 1% (about 350,000 cubic kilometers) and only 0.0025% of all the water on earth. The total global freshwater breaks down as; 0.3% contained in lakes and rivers (90% of it in lakes); 29.9% fresh ground water (aquifers); 0.9% other: swamp, soil moisture, tundra and permafrost; 68.9% ice caps, glaciers and snow cover.[15] And the atmosphere itself contains about 0.001% (0.4% of global fresh water) of the total water available on our planet.[17]
But fresh water is not evenly distributed throughout the planet. The Great Lakes contain about 18 percent of the world’s surface freshwater supplies - shared by only two nations - with a combined surface area of over 325,000 km2. Overall, however, jurisdiction for the Great Lakes is shared by two federal governments (Canada and the United States), two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec), eight US states (New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota), and hundreds of municipal governments.[12] Only about 25 million people (about one third of 1% of the global population) rely on the Great Lakes for their drinking water.[12]
At the other extreme, the 29 countries in the near east region account for 14% of the world’s land area and are home to 10% of the world’s human population. Yet the whole region has only about 2% of the world’s renewable freshwater resources.[15] While the global average availability is 7000 cubic meters of water per person per year, in these countries the average is 1577 cubic meters of water per person per year.[15] In Jordan and the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates only 170-200 cubic meters of renewable water resources are available per person per year, less than 3% of the global average.[15]From this limited availability of fresh water, however, withdrawals for irrigation represent an average of 66% of the total withdrawals (up to 90% in arid regions like the middle east), the other 34% being used by domestic households (10%) (representing only 17-20 cubic meters per person per year in the above-mentioned countries), industry (20%), or evaporated from reservoirs (4%).[16]
Population growth, economic development, and changing national and regional values have intensified competition over increasingly scarce freshwater resources worldwide, leading to widespread concern and predictions of increasing future conflicts over shared water supplies.[8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16] Of greatest concern is the potential for conflict within the world's 263 international freshwater basins (basins shared by two or more countries). However, since 1948, the historical record documents only 37 incidents of acute conflicts (i.e., those involving violence) over water, over half between Israel and various of its neighbours. During that same period, approximately 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed.[10] It is unlikely that that ratio will hold over this century as water shortages become increasingly common and critical.
Europe has the largest number of international freshwater basins with 69, followed by Africa with 59, Asia with 57, North America with 40, and South America with 38. The world's 263 international freshwater basins account for nearly one-half of the earth's land surface, generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow and are home to approximately 40% of the world's population. A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins, some albeit reluctantly. Thirty-three nations, including such sizable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international basins. Needless to say such countries take their international water agreements very seriously.[10]
Many international freshwater basins involve a significant number of nation states. The Danube, for example, has seventeen riparian states. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than nine countries. The Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least five sovereign nations. In all, and most worrisome from the perspective of potential future conflicts, 158 of the world's 263 international freshwater basins lack any type of multilateral cooperative management and conflict resolution framework. Of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral, most being bilateral between only two of those states. Many basins continue to experience significant disputes even after a treaty is negotiated and signed, often because of the exclusion from the treaties of one or more of the sharing states. Often, under such pressures, even the signed bilateral treaties begin to break down.[10]
An early and successful model of cooperative water management structures that can help avoid dispute and conflict was the establishment by the United States and Canada of the International Joint Committee (IJC) for the administration of the Great Lakes watershed and connecting and outflowing rivers.[12] Though somewhat unique because of its focus on shared lakes more than the shared rivers, it is, nonetheless, a model of the level of cooperation that is achievable. Certainly the relative lack of complexity in being only a bilateral agreement has helped considerably as well. It is fair to say, however, that a significant part of the strong and enduring relationship between the two countries is due, at least in part, to their mutual cooperation concerning and national reliance on the Great Lakes. Even so, at least one war (the war of 1812) has been fought between the two nations (Canada was a British colony at the time) partly on the waters of these very shared lakes.Water has always been an important component in the negotiations between states and nations. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has documented more than 3600 international water treaties - covering the surface water in lakes and rivers - dating from AD 805 to 1984.[10] Most of these have to do with rights of navigation, limits on diversion and pollution. The earliest recorded water treaty, however, dates back to 2500 BC, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River.[10] Since 1948 alone 295 international water agreements were negotiated and signed dealing with surface freshwater.[10] Yet the surface water at issue represents only 0.3% of the total freshwater on the planet. As regards groundwater or the underground water in aquifers, which accounts for 29.9% of all the freshwater on the planet, "there are no known treaties dealing specifically with groundwater matters."[13] Some freshwater treaties dealing with surface water do casually mention groundwater - almost as an aside or a point for future consideration - but even these treaties do not pursue the issue with any detailed language, measures, agreements or definition.
Groundwater, of course, is considerably more difficult to map and define than is surface water. There are literally thousands of underground aquifers throughout the world, most fortunately contained within the boundaries of single sovereign nations. But hundreds of these aquifers run beneath and across the arbitrary human boundaries above them. And just as one state excessively drawing water from a shared lake or river affects the availability of that resource to other countries sharing it, the excessive drawing down of the water in an international aquifer by one state affects the availability of that water to the other states dependent on it. For example, South Africa shares four rivers with its six neighbours – the Incomati, Orange, Limpopo and Maputo. The water in these rivers is, however, increasingly under pressure due to increased water demands in relatively affluent South Africa, the largest, most powerful of the seven nations sharing those resources.[11] This is not a trivial issue when it comes to groundwater resources. Groundwater systems are often the only source of fresh water in some regions of the world, particularly under arid and semi-arid climatic conditions - such as in the middle east and much of Africa - where demand is rapidly increasing.[13]
The structure and terminology of most international freshwater agreements tend to follow the pattern codified in the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses.[10] Attempts have been underway, through the International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM) efforts[13], to arrive at a similar codification of rules for treaties involving the treatment of international groundwater aquifers. The most recent attempt, The Seoul Rules, demonstrates special concern with international groundwater through the provision of specific articles that relate to “hydraulic interdependence”, “protection of groundwater” and “groundwater management & surface waters” (the latter addresses the issue of conjunctive use).[14] It is still too early to tell what success these efforts will have or whether anything equivalent to UN convention will result. The slow progress to date suggests that there is only a slight likelihood of having a framework in place in time to ward off serious future water conflicts. Issues of increasing water scarcity, degrading water quality, rapid population growth, unilateral water development, and uneven levels of economic development are commonly cited as potentially disruptive factors in co-riparian water relations. The combination of these factors has led academics and policy-makers alike to warn of impending conflict over shared water resources.[10]
Even when nations equitably share these resources, however, the pressure on groundwater resources, both shared and sovereign, can be immense. Groundwater reserves in the Middle East, for example, are becoming increasingly brackish. More than 50% of groundwater in the region, it is estimated, is already saline and the proportion is increasing as the rate of extraction of water from aquifers exceeds recharge, in much of the region by three to one. In Saudi Arabia water levels declined by more than 70 meters in the Umm Er Radhuma aquifer from 1978 to 1984 and this decline was accompanied by a salinity increase of more than 1000 milligrams per liter. The aquifers of Bahrain, the Batenah Plains of Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are suffering severely from seawater intrusion. Groundwater salinity in most areas of the Syrian and Jordanian steppe has increased to several thousand milligrams per liter and over exploitation of coastal aquifers in Lebanon has caused seawater intrusion with a subsequent rise from 340 to 22000 milligrams per liter in some wells near Beirut. With the countries in the Arabian peninsula using up their water resources three times as fast as they are being renewed it is estimated that available water resources will be exhausted within 20 years unless consumption of freshwater is reduced.[15]
The always volatile countries of the Middle East have become critically dependent on the income from their oil resources and accompanying natural gas, essentially their only tradeable commodities. As world consumption of oil has grown over this past half century, the populations of these countries have literally exploded. In many of them over half the population is under twenty years of age. When those oil resources go into serious decline, if they are not on the front edge of that predicament already, the means of support for that tremendous population will disappear. Most of these nations have a policy of being as self sufficient in food production as possible, but water limitations, despite their draw down of aquifers at three times the renewal rate and considerable investment in desalination facilities, have kept them from achieving self-sufficiency.[15] Saudi Arabia, in fact, are doing significant Promotion of the use of saline water and salt-tolerant species to increase food and feed production.[15] To date the lack of food self-sufficiency has not been a problem for these countries because they have had the income to trade for what they can't produce. As the oil revenues begin to disappear, however, the potential for revitalizing age-old conflicts in the region are of serious concern.
Complicating all of the real issues involving water sharing is the fact that water has become the most commercial product of the century. Water is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century.[8] Water has been put on the table as a tradeable commercial product in almost every bilateral and multilateral trade agreement negotiated during the rampant growth of commercial globalization. Many weaker countries are being pressured into putting their scarce water resources up for grabs in order to achieve other gains in these trade agreements. Even Canada is under considerable and constant pressure from the U.S. to put the country's considerable fresh water resources at the disposal of commercial interests. Canadian water and the shared water resources of the Great Lakes basin are consistently viewed in Washington and Many U.S. state capitals as the solution to growing water scarcity in that country's heartland.
The impact of climate change on the redistribution of water resources further adds to the complications that threaten to contribute to future conflict. In some areas longstanding water resources, like many of the lakes in Africa, are drying up while other areas, such as much of Europe, are experiencing unprecedented flooding. Areas like the U.S. midwest, one of the world's foodbaskets, are drying up with perpetual crop losses driving more and more producers into bankruptcy. Extreme weather events are on the increase as the planet warms. All of these things affect the amount of water available to agriculture. The global emergency food grain reserves over this past decade have shrunk from a marginal 119 day supply to a very critical 53 day supply, and continues to decline by 2-4 days supply per year.
There is little question that the growing global water crisis has the potential to be one of the key sources of conflict between nations, and even within nations, over the balance of this century and beyond. Considering the political difficulties that have accompanied the drafting, writing and signing of existing international freshwater agreements (most not during times of critical water scarcities) future agreements will become increasingly difficult to finalize and consistently open to abuse by the signatories.
=========================
The following were key sources of material for this article;
1) IJC Releases Statement on its Review of Lake Ontario and St. Lawrence River Regulation
2) United States & Canada International Joint Commission Public Interest Advisory Group Public Meeting
3) Long Sault to Beauharnois: the St. Lawrence River restructured
4) Robert H Saunders Dam (before 9/11) and Dwight D Eisenhower Lock in Massena, N.Y.
5) The Lost Villages
6) Lake Ontario St. Lawrence River Regulation
7) Lake Ontario–St. Lawrence River Framework Data Project examines ups and downs of water levels
8) Water crisis looms in countrywide
9) Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements
10) The World.s International Freshwater Agreements: Historical Developments and Future Opportunities[PDF]
11) A Compilation of All The International Freshwater Agreements Entered Into by South Africa With Other States
12) The International Joint Commission and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement
13) International Shared Aquifer Resource Management (ISARM)
14) Internationally Shared Aquifer Resource Management: ISARM AMERICAS
15) Role of Biosaline Agriculture in Managing Freshwater Shortages and Improving Water Security
16) World Water Council: Water Crisis
17) Water in the Earth's atmosphere
18) Why is the Ocean Salty?
Friday, January 05, 2007
Wealth in the Post-Peak World
How will wealth be defined in the post-peak world? How can money retain its value in a perpetually declining economy? What will happen to the ever-expanding wealth gap between rich and poor?
What is wealth? The term wealth derives from the old English word "weal", which means "well-being" or "welfare" and originally was used as an adjective to describe the possession of such qualities. Over time, however, wealth has come to mean an abundance of items of economic value, primarilly money, real estate and personal property. It is interesting that skills are generally not considered among the resources of which one needs an abundance, despite the reality that professional athletes, artists, performers and more use only their skills to create wealth. Perhaps Adam Smith never considered that possibility when, in contrast, he saw "wealth creation as the combination of materials, labour, land, and technology in such a way as to capture a profit (excess above the cost of production)." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth) Part of the problem, of course, lies in whether we are referring to "personal" wealth or "common" wealth. This, however, gets very muddied when considered in light of the corporation and capitalism as they have evolved.It is arguable whether the concept of wealth is even limited to humans. There are certain other animal species where members of that species make tools, for example the use of a stick to dig termites out of a mound. They will normally abandon the tool (the stick) when it has served its purpose so one might argue that they attach no value to it, do not recognize it as wealth. If one accepts skills as means of wealth creation, however, then the individuals who know how to create the tools to get at food are, indeed, wealthy in their society, personally if they use the stick only to derive food for themselves or communally if they share that food or the tool with others. Likewise, among our ancient ancestors the man with a piece of flint was a wealthy man. With it he could create fire for warmth and for cooking food, either for himself alone or for the group, even trade his ability to make fire for other valuables possessed by those without flint. In both cases, the stick and the flint, the possessor of it could turn it to an improvement in their personal welfare and/or common welfare.
Are wealthy and rich the same thing? According to Wikipedia, "The opposite of wealth is scarcity, the opposite of richness is poverty." Wealth is, in large respect, the possession of resources capable of producing a surplus, today generally assumed to be a surplus of income or a surplus of goods through which to generate income. One can be rich in terms of resources but be unable to produce a surplus of income from them. I believe, in general, we all think we understand wealth in terms of our present global society. But do we?
All wealth, in fact, is relative. It is, in a general sense, one's possession of surplus-producing resources in comparison to others around you. This was clearly put forth by M. Turgot, Comptroller General of the Finances of France, In 1774-76. In his essay, Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth, he stated, "If the land was divided among all the inhabitants of a country, so that each of them possessed precisely the quantity necessary for his support, and nothing more; it is evident that all of them being equal, no one would work for another. Neither would any of them possess wherewith[all] to pay another for his labour, for each person having only such a quantity of land as was necessary to produce a subsistence, would consume all he should gather, and would not have any thing to give in exchange for the labour of others." {http://socserv2. mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/turgot/reflecti} If everyone in a society had the same resources there would be no basis on which to declare one person wealthy and another not. It is the disparity of resources that defines wealth. It varies considerably, in fact, from society to society and even within different sections or regions within a society. If one owns a million dollar property in Botswana that represents considerably more "real" wealth potential than a million dollar apartment in central New York.
Financial economies are based on a very ephemeral and transient commodity; trust. (See my article, Why there will be a fast crash and not a slow decline at http://www.freecanadaradio.ca/fastcrash.html.) (also available in spanish at http://periferiacrisisenergetica.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html) Today's economies are built on a foundation of debt because society largely has faith and trusts that the economy is strong. People and organizations willingly take on debt (spend tomorrow's income today) because they have trust that the economy will continue to be strong and that they will be able to earn enough surplus income or profit in that future to both survive and discharge the debt they are taking on today. Whenever economic growth stalls or, worse, reverses, as it did in the great depression of the 1930s, there is a general sorting out as those most heavilly over-committed struggle as the surplus income needed to maintain and discharge the debt disappears. Some will survive by disposing of assets to discharge the debt. Others will have debt in excess of their devaluing assets and be unable to maintain or discharge that debt.
Our current global economy is very heavilly dependent on both continuous growth and an abundance of cheap energy for its survival. Take away either and the economy falters. The reliance upon an abundance of cheap energy has become ever more critical in the process of globalization that has dominated the last half century. Without that the global distribution system begins to fall apart. In times past local societies were largely self-sufficient and self-reliant, satisfying all of their needs from local resources. Only rare third world or primitive societies can claim to be so today. Trade goods found in your local community today originate from every corner of the world. The food on your table generally has traveled an average of a couple thousand miles to get there. The table and other physical goods you possess will, on average, have travelled several times that distance. Without a viable and vigorous global distribution system driven by cheap and abundant energy the paradigm of locating the heavilly subsidized manufacturing of goods in cheap labour markets and distributing those goods globally starts to fall apart. The more developed nations of North America and Europe have outsourced so much of their product manufacturing that very little is, or any longer can be, produced locally. If the global distribution system begins to run into serious problems of fuel cost or availability the supply lines to your local retailer begin to dry up, with no local alternative to fill the gap.
The most insidious aspect of wealth, but the core of its definition, is the very fact that it relies on a disparity between different members of society. And under the current functioning of our society, whether locally or globally, that disparity continues to grow. The gap in wealth and lifestyle of G8 countries and poor, third-world nations continues to grow. But so does the gap between the rich and poor within our own national societies. According to an article entitled Study: Inequality in wealth, at http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/061213/d061213c.htm "Between 1999 and 2005, the median net worth of families in the top fifth of the wealth distribution increased by 19%, while the net worth of their counterparts in the bottom fifth remained virtually unchanged. As a result, the top 20% of families held 75% of total household wealth in 2005, compared to 73% in 1999 and 69% in 1984." This trend is also the focus of the article The Great Wealth Transfer By Paul Krugman; November 30, 2006 - Rollingstone.com at http://mostlywater.org/the_great_wealth_transfer in which he states, "how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago." (also see The wealth gap widens December 24, 2006 - David Crane - The Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/164866) The end result of the distribution of wealth under our current genre of capitalism is lamented in Work and Wealth: A Human Valuation at http://socserv. mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobson/workwealth.html in which it is stated, "An injurious excess of income is possible for an individual, perhaps for a nation, and the national welfare which an increased volume of wealth seems capable of yielding might be more than cancelled by a distribution which bestowed upon a few an increased share of the larger wealth, or by an aggravation of the toil of the producers."
It is that disparity, that gap between wealth and poverty, between rich and poor, that one needs to be very conscious of as we approach peak oil and the energy downslope on the other side of the peak. The wealth of nations and the extraordinary wealth of a very small number of individuals is a clear bi-product of that reliable abundance of cheap energy. But it is also the foundation of the relative wealth of the middle class and even labour class in wealthy industrialized nations compared to the meagre existence and basic struggle for survival of the vast majority in third world nations. And yet, as we proceed along the energy downslope on the other side of peak oil the crucial component of that wealth disparity - cheap abundant energy - will begin to inexorably decline and, eventually, disappear. It will no longer be that old dream of raising the living standards of the poor but will become the harsh reality of the living standards of the wealthy tumbling into the abyss of scarcity and poverty. Gaps will still exist for they are not simply based on economic disparity. They are also based on power and control over the affairs of others. It is likely, in fact, that as the economic advantages of wealth are eroded away there will remain a tenacious clinging to the power and control that such wealth has afforded.Today's successful economies are based on a simple concept of perpetual growth. That growth will come to a halt as we pass peak oil. The illusion of growth will continue for some time, as it has through a global mania of mergers and aquisitions and currency manipulation over these past several decades, but even that illusion will in time be stripped away as economies the world over begin to shrink and
continue to shrink all the way down the energy downslope. It will be necessary, if it is not already, to redefine wealth, to redesign our economies around contracting markets, if those in control of wealth today are to continue to play a key role in the society of tomorrow. I am not optimistic that this will happen. History suggests that we will approach the coming trials as we have always done, with those in power clinging to it for as long as possible, and far too long.
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