Consciousness of Sheep
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Wales has been having issues with its bridges recently. At the end of May, the Severn Bridge – opened in 1966 – had to be closed to heavy goods vehicles. This month an older crossing between Wales and England was also closed, as was the suspension bridge over the Menai Strait. In each case, the closure was more of a nuisance than a showstopper, since each has been superseded by a more modern structure… although resurfacing on the Prince of Wales Bridge aka the second Severn crossing (which opened in 1996) this summer forced heavy vehicles to make a 100-mile detour.
These are merely the few bridge closures that happened to be picked up by the establishment media. Nor is Wales unique. In 2018, Scotland’s Forth Road bridge was closed when cracks in the structure were discovered. For a time, this resulted in commuters facing a 90-mile diversion… emphasising just how important bridges are, even if we take them for granted most of the time. Today, the new Queensferry Bridge has replaced the Forth Bridge, which is now only open to pedestrians and cyclists.
Deteriorating bridges turn out to be a growing problem across the UK. As Dominic Browne at Highways Magazine reports:
“The number of local road bridges that fully collapsed in Great Britain last year increased by 70%, while the overall number of substandard structures rose for the second year running to reach 3,211, according to a major survey.
“The number of structures that collapsed increased from 10 to 17 while the number of substandard bridges saw a 3.4% increase on the 3,105 figure at the end of 2020 and up 5% on the 3,055 figure a year before that.”
The estimated cost of restoring all of these bridges is put at £5.44bn (although given the UK’s abominable track record on infrastructure spending, if restoration was attempted, the price may well double). It is a big “if” though, against the backdrop of a supposed £50bn hole in the central government budget and a host of economic crises across the western economies coming home to roost… which tells us that there is an unacknowledged process of infrastructure triaging at work.
The reason that so many bridges can be left to deteriorate is because alternatives exist. And so, as maintenance budgets are cut, the focus has to be on maintaining what we might call essential infrastructure while allowing more discretionary infrastructure to gradually wither away. Take the Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge was closed in 2020, but like the Forth Bridge, it has since opened to pedestrians and cyclists. In the traffic-congested capital, the closure was annoying. But with 35 Bridges across the Thames in central London, traffic was simply re-routed. Moreover, unlike the rest of the UK, London enjoys a comprehensive rail and underground network which – together with schemes that discourage driving – promote a switch to public transport.
Infrastructure triaging is a much wider problem of course. The RAAC concrete problem – caused by concrete coming to the end of its life – is merely the earliest in a growing concrete failure problem caused by “spalling” aka “concrete cancer.” RAAC (Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete) was a cheap alternative to conventional concrete used between the 1950s and the 1990s. And like conventional concrete, it was assumed that clever people somewhere else would come up with a means of arresting or reversing the inevitable process of decay… but nobody ever did. And unlike Roman concrete, which has lasted for centuries, much of the concrete in our post-war infrastructure is coming to the end of its life.
Ideally, like Wales’s bridges, structural problems can be identified and repaired. But the risk with concrete spalling is that structures decay from the inside with no observable evidence that a catastrophic failure is imminent… a problem which is exacerbated in a climate of austerity cuts, when maintenance checks are scaled back.
This brings us to the crux of Fredirick Soddy’s thinking in the 1920s:
“Psychologically, the economic aim of the individual is, always has been, and probably always will be, to secure a permanent revenue independent of further effort, proof against the passage of time and the chance of circumstance, to support himself in old age and his family after him in perpetuity. He endeavours so to do by accumulating so much property in the heyday of his youth that he and his heirs may live on the interest on it in perpetuity afterwards. Economic and social history is the conflict of this human aspiration with the laws of physics, which make such a perpetuum mobile impossible, and reduces the problem merely to the method by which one individual may get another individual or the community into his debt and prevent repayment, so that the individual or community must share the produce of their efforts with their creditor.”
The implicit assumption in neoclassical economics (which Soddy correctly dismisses as Chrematistics) is that, once created, the physical wealth upon which currency bases its value (money is no more than a claim on future wealth) is permanent, and thus allows the constant revenue from interest or rent. But as Soddy pointed out, neoclassical economics is wholly at odds with the laws of thermodynamics… and especially the Second Law. Unlike money (itself a representation of debt) real wealth decays. Soddy separates this decaying wealth into two categories:
“In the first category are commodities which retain part of the energy expended in their production, as an internal store, which, in the consumption of these commodities, is released to serve the purposes of life. In the second category the energy is expended in overcoming dead resistance, in changing the form or nature of the materials worked upon, and does not remain in the materials as an essential to their use…
“Commodities of the first category are valuable as stores of energy. In them the materials of which they are made serve as the container for a store of available energy. In functioning as wealth they are totally consumed or destroyed as wealth, and this perishability is essential to their function. Energy is of no value in itself, and the flow of energy from one thing to another and from one place to another alone is valuable. The material counterpart of the tendency of energy to flow is the tendency of materials to change. Liability to rot, decay, catch fire, suffer slow deterioration is thus an essential quality of this category of wealth. It comprises food, fuel, explosives, some forms of fertilisers, and similar materials, which actually fulfil the purpose which gives them the title of wealth only by suffering total conversion into waste matter and energy. Whereas in the second category permanence rather than perishability is the essential quality. It comprises clothes, houses, and their equipment and furniture, in general ‘possessions,’ as well as tools, plant, roads, vehicles, ships and other accessory requisites necessary for the production and supply of wealth.”
Our built environment – and especially our critical infrastructure – falls into this second category, which has the appearance of permanence, but is always in a process of decay which can only be arrested by the application of further exergy (both direct and embodied in materials). Soddy’s well-meaning assumption was that by now we would have been well into an age in which accessing the energy stored in the nuclei of atoms would allow us to fully arrest the decay that would otherwise occur. Instead, we find ourselves at the end of the oil age in which the energy cost of energy has risen beyond the point at which further growth in total real wealth (as opposed to currency and debt) is impossible in the western economies and is falling rapidly in emerging markets.
Ultimately, the rising energy cost of energy – the amount of energy we have to devote to securing future energy – is fatal to advanced and complex industrial economies. We already witness this to some extent in the UK, where the remorseless increase in the cost of essentials like food, electricity and gas has caused discretionary spending to collapse… (in the USA, as incomes collapse for ordinary working people, the top 10 percent of earners account for 50 percent of consumer spending). The problem being that the majority of employment and economic activity is in these discretionary sectors where consumer spending falls fastest in response to the rising energy cost of energy.
This though, is but one jaw of what I once referred to as the “net energy pincer.” Thermodynamic drag is the other unavoidable, if slower, pincer. Everything wears out eventually. Not just via the built-in obsolescence of so many consumer products, but even in the most sturdily built of our critical infrastructure. Across Europe, for example, nuclear reactors built to last sixty years or more are now developing cracks which, left unaddressed, would result in failure. And even if the lifespan of these reactors can be extended for a few more years – as is likely this decade here in the UK – sooner rather than later, they will have to be shut down. Wales’s bridges are a less urgent matter. But we cannot take for granted that we will always have the engineers, equipment and materials to keep repairing cables, mending cracks and replacing bolts.
This will no doubt appear as a monetary problem – central and local government departments will no longer have the funds to employ the engineers, maintain and replace the equipment and purchase the resources. And no doubt the majority of us will blame the opposing political team and find ways of claiming that if our team was in charge, things would be better. But the reality is that as an increasing portion of our available energy has to be used both to secure more energy and to maintain the real wealth that has already been created, less and less is available to such things as economic growth and discretionary consumption.
For the moment, an almost unconscious form of triaging is at work… it makes sense to prioritise resurfacing a motorway or major trunk road while leaving potholes to deepen and spread on low-speed urban roads. Similarly, cannibalising the gas-fired electricity plants for parts to keep some back-up generators working makes more monetary sense than purchasing new equipment. The crises will really begin when even triaging becomes insufficient, and even essential infrastructure must be sacrificed. Which of the UK’s motorway or mainline rail networks can be downgraded and which must be kept open? Which of the USA’s interstate highway network can be allowed to turn to gravel? Or, in an economy which is increasingly digital, which datacentres are going to have to close? And what happens when widespread closures across critical infrastructure can no longer be prevented?
As you made it to the end…
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