infrastructure investment

INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT


Here is a fun fact that should fill you with fear. Or, 4f- fear filled fun fact. A mere one hundred and twenty five thousand years ago there was a coral reef off of Florida. In an ocean a dozen or more feet higher. Today it is on dry land in a quarry. Even closer to modern man, from thirteen to sixteen thousand years ago the sea level rose fifty feet in three hundred years ( known from studying the fossils of a retreat of mangrove swamp ). This isn’t exactly like something from the dinosaur era sixty million years ago. You hear tens of millions of years, you go numb and blank out the facts. They were far too far away to relate to. But if agriculture has been around roughly ten thousand years, it is a lot easier to relate to 15,000 years or even a hundred and a quarter thousand. It is near history, not a baquizillion years back before cave dudes were scratching bison images on walls at the same time they scratched lice in their pubic hair.

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Now, it is easy to poke fun at all the scientists that huddle together and figure out their Overlords Of Funding Grants only want to hear a certain message, namely that we are all going to die from Gore Warming if a one million percent tax isn’t slapped on gasoline and BBQ charcoal. It is amusing that their maim defense is that “everyone now knows” or “everyone who doesn’t agree with us is an ignorant whore in the employ of the energy companies” ( all the more hilarious given the waning influence of the Seven Sisters as more and more energy supplies are nationalized and viewed as strategic assets ). And I just love how the Great Consensus went from global ice age to global warming in a few short decades. Scientists, confusingly since they are supposed to be impartial and a big fan of rigorous testing and Holy Seekers Of Truth, play a surprisingly familiar role of Official Propagandizers once held by the priest class. In short, they cannot fully be trusted to actually be impartial. Just like everyone else, they convince themselves of the truth as defined by the source of their daily bread. I don’t blame them for wanting to eat, although they get a bit greedy and not only want to eat but to have shelter, usually the minimum being a McMansion in a nice climate, a trophy mate and 1.5 kids that suck up a lot of resources if they are lavished with things such as shoes.

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But even as the official truth went from Man Is Causing Warming to a more benign Man Is Spewing Gases Which Will Accelerate Nature Warming, it is still important to keep in mind that the earth has warmed up nicely in the past with absolutely no help from man driving SUV’s. Just because carbon emission curtailment is merely a hopeful tax revenue method and a control mechanism for decreased travel or energy consumption doest mean it isn’t a concern. It is easy to laugh at the whole dog and pony show, but I still felt the possibility of immediate effects ( defined as my lifetime ) was one of several good reasons to move out of Florida. A very good book, despite the propaganda aspects, on planetary history and ocean rises and its projected future is “The Flooded Earth” by Peter Ward. He also wrote the book “Under A Green Sky”, a titillating read which joyously described the poisoning of the atmosphere and mass extinction of most life.

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I’m sure a lot of writers brains work in a linear, robotic, file clerk way. They are fountains of knowledge, with photographic memories. My brain is bit more, shall we saw, disorganized. I can never remember exact statistics, retaining just enough memorized data to be dangerous ( for instance, I remember oil import declines have been ongoing for either four or five years, and they have been eight percent plus some fraction, but one year could have been seven percent but I’m not sure ). However, one good thing about a brain like this is I’m pretty good at free association. I’m reading the above mentioned Flood book and as I put it down to let my overworked cranium rest I start mental meandering and come up with today’s article, infrastructure investment. I can say where it all started, the mandatory end section that proposed solutions to save mankind, but the process from start to finish is a bit messy. Hell, I can’t remember any of my dreams five seconds after I wake up but I’m sure they lurk subconsciously somewhere ready to do damage sometime. So, let’s begin.

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My basic assumption previously has been that those folks in power had too much of their wealth tied into the current state of affairs and could not risk anything upsetting the status quo. Now I’m beginning to think that this might be a bit simplistic. If every civilization has perished so far, and it has done so in a predictable way with centralization efforts leading at first to surpluses and later to a declining rate of return on investment, one would think that the smarter bears in charge would have figured out this fact and strove to change, at least insofar as to figure out ahead of time how to orchestrate regime saving change and how to profit from it. Not just blindly flowing the same path that made them wealthy. Now, this is still true to some degree. The rich will keep doing what keeps them in charge in style. No one voluntarily draws down their wealth past a certain degree ( once you are fabulously rich giving away 90% of your income to charity still leaves you richer than most and satisfied ). But, as in all things, many influences effect an outcome. You can simplify down to a basic starting point but along the way a lot of things change the path. We all know energy decline will spell our doom, but you need to add inflation, resources remaining, weather effect on crops, and dozens of other factors to arrive at the future. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The wealthy will certainly act as a roadblock to change. But they don’t act as the only reason collapse happens. They might, at best, accelerate it. Poor folks act in their own best interests also. Everybody helps impede the needed change to avert disaster. So when all the books out there include the end chapter on how we might all be saved by collective action, I roll my eyes in disgust. It has never happened and it never will. We always act in self destructive ways as the end approaches. When I maintain that the last bowl of rice grown in California will be sold to the Chinese to make the last interest payment to the central bank as our own citizens starve, that is what I’m referring to. Only a few mavericks and malcontents are predisposed to follow unconventional tactics to survive the coming crap storm. But, again, why? Outside of greed, what keeps us on board the regular train as it nears the cliff?

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Here is my newest, best guess. It is subject to change ( one hopes a more logical informed change, but you never know about these things ). The biggest, although certainly not the only, reason we don’t change is because we can’t. Our infrastructure in place is all we have, and all we will get. We have no choice but to play the hand we have been dealt. My thought is that for any political or geographical organization to consolidate and hold on to power, it had to start with an energy surplus. Whether in extra soldiers fed by extra food leading to more slaves from captured warriors or citizens and more farmland from conquered regions, or in extra food derived from colonized under populated areas ( Siberia, Africa and the western hemisphere were all populated by those living off solar gain- when the Europeans came they started to mine the earth rather than skim off the top, hence the wealth gained ) or from using fossil fuels in a one time use operation, regardless of what the Drill More, Eat Petrol Indefinitely crowd thinks. Just as you need money to make money, you need surplus energy to get more surplus energy. Those with a surplus gained power, and thus had more energy.

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Once they got the energy, the path to keeping power was to invest that surplus into an infrastructure. In the case of Rome, roads to project power, to transport grain from outlying lands and to centralize production for efficiencies ( the famous pottery works in Britain ). In the case of America, one of the worlds largest petroleum pools was turned into a military that conquered half the world. And we are keeping that military to keep our control. But, and here is the rub, energy surplus always goes to enrich the rulers. At first, there is enough to both build infrastructure and to enrich the elite. The citizens are happy, with improved living standards ( in their case, a nice thin beautiful ceramic wine cup ), and the rulers are happy, also from increased living standards ( in their case, ships full of wine casks creating enough profit to buy more vineyards and ships ). As time goes on, the population of serfs grows, as does the wealthy class. In time, the surplus, in no small part because of population increases, shrinks before disappearing entirely.

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Once the surplus starts to shrink there is no material to build a new infrastructure. You are stuck with what you have, period. You can print all the money you want, or debase the precious metal coins all you desire, but they doesn’t create forests from washed out hills, grow crops from dead soil, or fill the oil reservoirs back up. When you talk of building a new solar farm covering a desert versus occupying the last oil reserve of any consequence, you are comparing apples to oranges. In one, you need to find the needed materials such as steel that went to China to build empty skyscrapers. In the other, you are using the war material already on hand. If you don’t have the actual ore and energy, you don’t have a new infrastructure. It really is as simple as that. All civilizations invest their initial surplus into protecting their gains. In time, the surplus is used up. Then, as so little energy remains that you can’t even maintain that infrastructure, you are on a downward path that ends in collapse if not wipeout. No turning back. Any “expert” suggesting otherwise is blowing smoke up your ass.

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