America's highways approaching Third World status. "No money for roads"

The Myth of Permanence: Post Peak Infrastructure Maintenance

As we pass peak oil and then peak energy what will happen to the massive infrastructure and engineering marvels of our global society when we no longer have the energy, resources and technology to maintain them? All we need do is look to the past for answers. What happened to the infrastructure of past civilizations; Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, the Mayan, Incan, Aztec empires? Nature reclaimed them, and was not particularly kind in the process. The wonders of Egypt had to be dug out of an ever-expanding desert. The massive temples and creations of the past empires of the Americas had to be resurrected from the overgrowth of encroaching jungle. The remains of the Roman Empire and ancient Greece had to be exumed from beneath the natural landscape of Europe.

Nature does not lovingly or dutifully maintain our creations for us. She doesn't give a damn how much effort we put into them, how important they were to us. Nature is dynamic, constantly changing. Permanence is a human myth totally at odds with nature's reality.

Infrastructure is the hard wiring of our society. Much of it is invisible. To those living within the embrace of that infrastructure it is taken for granted, is seen as permanent, the foundation of that society and of their individual lives. But it seems so because there is an army of people and a kalaidescope of technology that is constantly working to keep it maintained. While past empires were alive and vibrant similar efforts and energies and armies of people, many of them slaves, were maintaining their infrastructure, maintaining the impression of permanence by keeping it clean and safe and polished and in working order. When those empires fell and all of that constant maintenance ceased that impression and myth of permanence fell apart and the inevitable reality of deterioration set in.

http://oilbeseeingyou.blogspot.com/2006/12/myth-of-permanence-post-peak.html

The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER Posted Mar 24, 2005 12:00 AM

SNIP

Before long, the suburbs will fail us in practical terms. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

SNIP

The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.

As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives, to say the least. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. The interstate highway system is more delicate than the public realizes. If the "level of service" (as traffic engineers call it) is not maintained to the highest degree, problems multiply and escalate quickly. The system does not tolerate partial failure. The interstates are either in excellent condition, or they quickly fall apart.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency