You Are Not In Control

SUBHEAD: The Technosphere controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons.

By Dmitry Orlov on 14 February 2017 for Club Orlov -
(http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2017/02/you-are-not-in-control.html)


Image above: Detail of illustration of man controlled by technology by Igor Morski. From (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/543317142516835055/).

My recent book tour was very valuable, among other things, in gauging audience response to the various topics related to the technosphere and its control over us. Specifically, what seems to be generally missing is an understanding that the technosphere doesn’t just control technology; it controls our minds as well.

The technosphere doesn’t just prevent us from choosing technologies that we think may be appropriate and rejecting the ones that aren’t. It controls our tastes, making us prefer things that it prefers for its own reasons. It also controls our values, aligning them with its own. And it controls our bodies, causing us to treat ourselves as if we were mechanisms rather than symbiotic communities of living cells (human and otherwise).

None of this invalidates the approach I proposed for shrinking the technosphere which is based on a harm/benefit analysis and allows us to ratchet down our technology choices by always picking technologies with the least harm and the greatest benefit.

But this approach only works if the analysis is informed by our own tastes, not the tastes imposed on us by the technosphere, by our values, not the technosphere’s values, and by our rejection of a mechanistic conception of our selves.

These choices are implicit in the 32 criteria used in harm/benefit analysis, favoring local over global, group interests over individual interests, artisanal over industrial and so on. But I think it would be helpful to make these choices explicit, by working through an example of each of the three types of control listed above. This week I'll tackle the first of these.

A good example of how the technosphere controls our tastes is the personal automobile. Many people regard it as a symbol of freedom and see their car as an extension of their personalities.

The freedom to be car-free is not generally regarded as important, while the freedoms bestowed by car ownership are rather questionable. It is the freedom to make car payments, pay for repairs, insurance, parking, towing and gasoline. It is the freedom to pay tolls, traffic tickets, title fees and excise taxes.

• It is the freedom to spend countless hours stuck in traffic jams and to suffer injuries in car accidents.
  
• It is the freedom to bring up neurologically damaged children by subjecting them to unsafe carbon monoxide levels (you are encouraged to have a CO detector in your house, but not in your car—because it would be going off all the time).
  
• It is the freedom to suffer indignities when pulled over by police, especially if you’ve been drinking. In terms of a harm/benefit analysis, private car ownership makes no sense at all.
  
• It is often argued that a car is a necessity, although the facts tell a different story. Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion vehicles on the road. The population of the planet is over 7 billion. Therefore, there are at least 5.8 billion people alive in the world who don’t own a car. 

How can something be considered a necessity if 82% of us don’t seem to need it? In fact, owning a car becomes necessary only in a certain specific set of circumstances.

Here are some of the key ingredients: a landscape that is impassable except by motor vehicle, single-use zoning that segregates land by residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial uses, a lifestyle that requires a daily commute, and a deficit of public transportation.

In turn, widespread private car ownership is what enables these key ingredients: without it, situations in which private car ownership becomes a necessity simply would not arise.

Now, moving people about the landscape is not a productive activity: it is a waste of time and energy.

If you can live, send your children to school, shop and work all without leaving the confines of a small neighborhood, you are bound to be more efficient than someone who has to drive between these four locations on a daily basis. But the technosphere is rational to a fault and is all about achieving efficiencies. And so, an obvious question to ask is,

What is it about the car-dependent living arrangement, and the landscape it enables, that the technosphere finds to be efficient? The surprising answer is that the technosphere strives to optimize the burning of gasoline; everything else is just a byproduct of this optimization.


It turns out that the fact that so many people are forced to own a car has nothing to do with transportation and everything to do with petroleum chemistry.

About half of what can be usefully extracted from a barrel of crude oil is in the form of gasoline. It is possible to boost the fraction of other, more useful products, such as kerosene, diesel fuel, jet fuel and heating oil, but not by much and at a cost of reduced net energy.

But gasoline is not very useful at all. It is volatile (quite a lot of it evaporates, especially in the summer); it is chemically unstable and doesn’t keep for long; it is toxic and carcinogenic. It has a rather low flash point, limiting the compression ratio that can be achieved by gasoline-fueled engines, making them thermodynamically less efficient. It is useless for large engines, and is basically a small-engine fuel.

Gasoline-powered engines don’t last very long because gasoline-air mixture is detonated (using an electric spark) rather than burned, and the shock waves from the detonations cause components to wear out quickly. They have few industrial uses; all of the serious transportation infrastructure, including locomotives, ships, jet aircraft, tractor-trailers, construction equipment and electrical generators run on petroleum distillates such as kerosene, jet fuel, diesel oil and bunker fuel.

If it weren’t for widespread private car ownership, gasoline would have to be flared off at refineries, at a loss. In turn, the cost of petroleum distillates—which are all of the industrial fuels—would double, and this would curtail the technosphere’s global expansion by making long-distance freight much more expensive. The technosphere’s goal, then, is to make us pay for the gasoline by forcing us to drive. To this end, the landscape is structured in a way that makes driving necessary.

The fact that to get from a Motel 8 on one side of the road to the McDonalds on the other requires you to drive two miles, navigate a cloverleaf, and drive two miles back is not a bug; it's a feature.

When James Kunstler calls suburban sprawl “the greatest misallocation of resources in human history” he is only partly right. It is also the greatest optimization in exploiting every part of the crude oil barrel in the history of the technosphere.

The proliferation of small gasoline-burning engines in the form of cars enables another optimization, forcing us to pay for another generally useless fraction of the crude oil barrel: road tar. Lots of cars require lots of paved roadways and parking lots.

Thus, the technosphere wins twice, first by making us pay for the privilege of disposing of what is essentially toxic waste at our own risk and expense, then by making us pay for spreading another form of toxic waste all over the ground.

 Suburban sprawl is not a failure of urban planning; it is a success story in enslaving humans and making them toil on behalf of the technosphere while causing great damage to themselves and to the environment. Needless to say, you have absolutely no control over any of this.

You. Are. Not. In. Control.

You can vote, you can protest, you can lobby, donate to environmentalist groups, attend conferences on urban planning… and you would just be wasting your time, because you can't change petroleum chemistry.

That the need to make people buy gasoline trumps all other considerations becomes obvious if we observe how the technosphere reacts whenever gasoline demand falters.

When rampant wealth inequality started making owning a car unaffordable for more and more people, the solution was to introduce larger cars for those who could still afford one: minivans for the mommies, pickup trucks for the daddies, and for everyone the now common SUV.

And now that gasoline demand is dropping again because of falling labor participation rate and an increase in the number of people who telecommute, the solution will no doubt be driverless cars which will cruise around aimlessly burning gasoline.

Mommies may think that a minivan will keep their kiddies safer than a compact would (not true unless they have 8-9 kids).

Daddies may think that the pickup truck is a sign of manliness (true if you are some sort of gofer/roustabout; pickup trucks are driven by picker-uppers, a subspecies of gofer/roustabout).

But all they are doing is obeying “The Third Law of the Technosphere,” if you will: “For every improvement in the efficiency of gasoline-fired engines, there must be an equal and opposite improvement in inefficiency.”

So, perhaps you should just relax and go with the flow.

After all, being a slave in the service of the technosphere is not immediately life-threatening… unless you crash into a tree or get run over by a drunk. But there is another problem: this arrangement isn’t going to last. The net energy that can be extracted out of a barrel of oil is quickly shrinking.

In less then a decade the energy surplus required to maintain a car-centric lifestyle will no longer exist.

If private car ownership and daily driving are required of you in order to survive, then you won’t survive. There goes at least 18% of the world’s population, which will find itself stranded in the middle of an impassable landscape. Oops!

Given that you are not in control, and given that the car-centric lifestyle is an evolutionary dead end for your subspecies, what can you do?

The answer is obvious: you can plan your escape, then join the other 82% of the world’s population, which is able to live car-free. Some of them even manage to live entirely outside of the reach of the technosphere. Let their example be your inspiration.

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Heal the Planet for a Profit

SUBHEAD: Billionaires have solution to "How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change”

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 16 December 2016 for the Automatic Earth - 
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2016/12/heal-the-planet-for-profit/)


Image above: Men saving the Earth by exploring space - Composite photo of Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (Spacex). From (http://share.cat/up-up-away-back).

If you ever wondered what the odds are of mankind surviving, let alone ‘defeating’, climate change, look no further than the essay the Guardian published this week, written by Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney. It proves beyond a moonlight shadow of a doubt that the odds are infinitesimally close to absolute zero (Kelvin, no Hobbes).

Yes, Bloomberg is the media tycoon and former mayor of New York (which he famously turned into a 100% clean and recyclable city). And since central bankers are as we all know without exception experts on climate change, as much as they are on full-contact crochet, it makes perfect sense that Bank of England governor Carney adds his two -trillion- cents.

Conveniently, you don’t even have to read the piece, the headline tells you all you need and then some: “How To Make A Profit From Defeating Climate Change” really nails it. The entire mindset on display in just a few words. If that’s what they went for, kudo’s are due.

These fine gents probably actually believe that this is perfectly in line with our knowledge of, say, human history, of evolution, of the laws of physics, and of -mass- psychology.

All of which undoubtedly indicate to them that we can and will defeat the problems we have created -and still are-, literally with the same tools and ideas -money and profit- that we use to create them with. Nothing ever made more sense.

That these problems originated in the same relentless quest for profit that they now claim will help us get rid of them, is likely a step too far for them; must have been a class they missed. “We destroyed it for profit” apparently does not in their eyes contradict “we’ll fix it for profit too”. Not one bit. It does, though. It’s indeed the very core of what is going wrong.

Profit, or money in general, is all these people live for, it’s their altar. That’s why they are successful in this world. It’s also why the world is doomed. Is there any chance I could persuade you to dwell on that for a few seconds? That, say, Bloomberg and Carney, and all they represent, are the problem dressed up as the solution? That our definition of success is what dooms us?

Philosophers, religious people, or you and me, may struggle with the question “what’s the purpose of life?”. These guys do not. The purpose of life is to make a profit. The earth and all the life it harbors exist to kill, drill, excavate and burn down, if that means you can make a profit. And after that you repair it all for a profit. In their view, the earth doesn’t turn of its own accord after all, it’s money that makes it go round.

The worrisome thing is that Mark and Michael will be listened to, that they are allowed a seat at the table in the first place, whereas you and I are not. A table that will be filled with plenty more of their ilk, as the announcement of Bill Gates’ billionaire philantropist energy fund says loud and clear:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and a group of high-profile executives are investing $1 billion in a fund to spur clean energy technology and address global climate change a year after the Paris climate agreement.

Gates launched the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund on Monday along with billionaire entrepreneurs such as Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma and Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos. The fund seeks to increase financing of emerging energy research and reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to help meet goals set in Paris, according to a statement by the investor group known as the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

Yes, many of the same folk and/or their minions were sitting at the table with Trump on Dec 14. To see if there are any profits to be made. When a profit is involved they have no trouble sitting down with the same guy they insulted and warned against day after grueling day mere weeks ago. They have no trouble doing it because they insulted him for a potential profit too. It’s business, it’s not personal.

Billionaires will save us from ourselves, and make us -and themselves- rich while doing it. What is not to like? Well, for one thing, has anybody lately checked the energy footprint of Messrs. Bloomberg, Gates, Ma, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al?

Is it possible that perhaps they’re trying to pull our collective wool over our eyes by pretending to care about those footprints? That maybe these ‘clean energy’ initiatives are merely a veil behind which they intend to extend -and expand- said footprints?

The ones in that sphere who wind up being most successful are those who are most convincing in making us believe that all we need to do to avert a climate disaster is to use some different form of energy. That all the talk about zero emissions and clean energy is indeed reflecting our one and only possible reality.

That all we need to do is to switch to solar and wind and electric cars to save ourselves (and they’ll build them for a subsidy). That that will end the threat and we can keep on doing what we always did, and keep on growing it all and as the cherry on the cake, make a profit off the endeavor.

None of it flies even a little. First of all, as I said last week in Mass Extinction and Mass Insanity, there are many more problems with our present lifestyles than ‘only’ climate change, or the use of carbon. Like the extinction of two-thirds of all vertebrate life in just 50 years leading up to 2020. There’s -close to- nothing wind and solar will do to alleviate that.

Because it’s not oil itself, or carbon in general, that kills; our use of it does. And the rush to build an entire new global infrastructure that is needed to use new energy forms, which will depend on using huge amounts of carbon, is more likely to kill off that globe than to save it. “Carbon got us in this, let’s use lots more of it to get us out”.

The trillions in -public- investment that are would be needed will make us all dirt poor too, except for the gentlemen mentioned above and a handful of others who invent stuff that they manage to make us believe will save us. Still convinced?

The lifestyles of the last 10 generations of us, especially westerners, are characterized more than anything else by the huge increase in the use of energy, of calories and joules. As we went from wood to peat to coal to oil and gas, the energy return on energy investment kept going higher. But that stopped with oil and gas. And from now on in it will keep going down.

“Free carbon excess” was a one-off ‘gift’ from nature. It will not continue and it will not return. Different forms of carbon have offered us a one-time source of free energy that we will not have again. The idea that we can replace it with ‘clean energy’ is ludicrous.

The energy return on energy investment doesn’t even come close. And you can’t run a society with our present levels of complexity on a much lower ‘net energy’. We must dress down. No profit in that, sorry.

We built what we have now with oil at an EROEI of 100:1. There are no forms of energy left that come remotely close, including new, unconventional, forms of oil itself. Peak oil has been a much maligned and misunderstood concept, but its essence stands: when it takes more energy to ‘produce’ energy than it delivers, there will be no production.

This graph is a few years old, and wind and solar may have gained a few percentage points in yield, but it’s still largely correct. And it will continue to be.

We have done with all that free energy what all other life forms do when ‘gifted’ with an excess of available energy: spend it as fast as possible, proliferate to speed up the process (we went from less than 1 billion people to 7 billion in under 200 years, 2 billion to 7 billion in 100 years) and, most of all, waste it.

Ever wonder why everybody drives a car that is ten times heavier then her/himself and has a 10% efficiency rate in its energy use? Why there’s an infrastructure everywhere that necessitates for every individual to use 1000 times more energy than it would take herself to get from A to B on foot? Sounds a lot like deliberately wasteful behavior, doesn’t it?

The essence here is that while we were building this entire wasteful world of us, we engaged in the denying and lying behavior that typifies us as a species more than anything: we disregarded externalities. And there is no reason to believe we would not continue to do just that when we make the illusionary switch to ‘clean’ energy.

To begin with, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics says there’s no such thing as clean energy. So stop using the term. Second, that we call wind and solar ‘clean energy’ means we’re already ignoring externalities again.

We pretend that producing windmills and solar panels does not produce pollution (or we wouldn’t call it ‘clean’). While enormous amounts of carbon are used in the production process, and it involves pollution, loss of land, loss of life, loss of resources (once you burn it it’s gone).

An example: If we want to ‘save’ the earth, we would do good to start by overthrowing the way we produce food. It presently easily takes more than 10 calories of energy -mostly carbon- for every calorie of food we make.

Then we wrap it all in (oil-based) plastic and transport it sometimes 1000s of miles before it’s on our plates. And at the end of this process, we will have thrown away half of it. It’s hard to think of a more wasteful process.

It’s a process obviously devised and executed by idiots. But it’s profitable. There is a profit to be made in wasting precious resources. And there is a key lesson in that. There is no profit in producing food in a more efficient way. At least not for the industries that produce it. And perhaps not even for you, if you produce most of your food – it takes ‘precious’ time.

It would still be hugely beneficial, though. And there’s the key. There is no direct link between what is good for us, and the planet, on the one side, and profit, money, on the other.

What follows from that is that it’s not the people whose entire lives are centered around money who are the most obvious choices to ‘save the planet’. If anything, they are the least obvious.

But in an economic and political system that is itself as focused on money as ours is, they are still the ones who are allowed to assume this role. It’s a circle jerk around, and then into, a drain.

Mankind’s only chance to not destroy its planet lies in diverging from all other species in that not all energy available to it, is used up as fast as possible. But that’s a big challenge. It would, speaking from a purely philosophical angle, truly separate us from nature for the first time ever, and we must wonder if that’s desirable.

We would need to gain much more knowledge of who we are and what makes us do what we do, and why. But that is not going to happen if we focus on making a profit. Using less energy means less waste means less profit.

Yes, there may be energy sources that produce a bit less waste, a bit less pollution, than those that are carbon based. But first, our whole infrastructure has been built by carbon, and second, even if another energy source would become available, we would push to grow its use ever more, and end up initially in the same mess, and then a worse one.

I stumbled upon an excellent example of the effects of all this today:


Image above: Rush Hour in Los Angeles, California, on the uncrossable twelve lane Interstate Route 405 (or San Diego Freeway). From (https://www.bluewin.ch/fr/infos/faits-divers/2015/8/3/heure-de-pointe--vues-aeriennes-du-trafic-de-los-angeles.html).

The Shattering Effect Of Roads On Nature
Rampant road building has shattered the Earth’s land into 600,000 fragments, most of which are too tiny to support significant wildlife, a new study has revealed. The researchers warn roadless areas are disappearing and that urgent action is needed to protect these last wildernesses, which help provide vital natural services to humanity such as clean water and air. The impact of roads extends far beyond the roads themselves, the scientists said, by enabling forest destruction, pollution, the splintering of animal populations and the introduction of deadly pests.

An international team of researchers analysed open-access maps of 36m km of road and found that over half of the 600,000 fragments of land in between roads are very small – less than 1km2. A mere 7% are bigger than 100km2, equivalent to a square area just 10km by 10km (6mi by 6 mi).

Furthermore, only a third of the roadless areas were truly wild, with the rest affected by farming or people.

The last remaining large roadless areas are rainforests in the Amazon and Indonesia and the tundra and forests in the north of Russia and Canada. Virtually all of western Europe, the eastern US and Japan have no areas at all that are unaffected by roads.


It’s a good example because it raises the question: how much of this particular issue do you think will be solved by the promotion of electric cars, or windmills? How much of it do you think can be solved for a profit? Because if there’s no profit in it, it will not happen.

One more for the philosophy class: I know many people will be inclined to suggest options like nuclear fusion. Or zero point energy. And I would suggest that not only do these things exist in theory only, which is always a bad thing if you have an immediate problem. But more than that: imagine providing the human race with a source of endless energy, and then look at what it’s done with the free energy available to it over the past ten generations.

Give man more energy and he’ll just destroy his world faster. It’s not about carbon, it’s about energy and about what you yourself do with it. And no, money and profit will not reverse climate change, or any other detrimental effects they have on our lives. They will only make them worse.

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New Gravel Roads

SUBHEAD: In a generation Kauaians may be driving around the island on gravel roads.

By AP Staff on 16 August 2016 in the Star Advertiser -
(http://www.staradvertiser.com/breaking-news/one-citys-answer-to-pothole-complaints-new-dirt-roads/)


Image above: Lowell Frederes stands along 113th Street in Omaha, Nebraska on August 10th. The city had ground-up the asphalt surface of the street saying it was beyond repair and replaced it with a gravel road. From original article.

[IB Publisher's Note: Asphalt roads are basically fossil fuel laid deep on gravel. Concrete roads are even more energy intensive to lay down. Although there has been major projects to improve roadways on Kauai in the last decade, remember roads are temporary. It will be unlikely we will be able to afford maintenance on the roadways we use today. We have grown accustomed to dense traffic with a mix heavy trucks and tractor trailers. Kauai will have to accommodate the future -  like it or not. How we live our "suburban" lives, commuting, relying on Big-Box stores and front door deliveries from FedeEx will simply go away. Our disintegrating roads will likely support 4x4 trucks, all-terrain vehicles, off road bikes, horse drawn wagons for some time. But the  low-riding  sedans, coupes, crossovers, and hatchbacks that fill our high tech roads today will be a thing of the past.]

For miles and miles Omaha stretches on, one tidy, suburban-style neighborhood after another filled with modern low-slung houses set on spacious lawns with towering oaks and elms.

It’s a model of comfortable mid-American living, with one unusual exception: thanks to a quirk in how Omaha developed, about 300 miles of streets in these nice neighborhoods are pitted with potholes almost big enough to swallow an SUV.

The bad roads have been both an anomaly and a source of complaints for years.

But recently, they’ve become the center of a mini-crisis after local officials began dispatching crews to tear up the asphalt in the neighborhoods and turn the streets back into dirt roads, much like what existed in the city’s frontier days.

The sudden appearance of miles of dirt road in the midst of urban Omaha has prompted angry protests by residents and showcased a conflict over the public services homeowners should expect when a modern city outgrows some of its old real estate agreements.

“No letter, no notice. We just came home on a Tuesday, and our street was ground up,” said Joe Skradski, a dentist who lives on 113th Street, where a dozen $400,000-and-up houses now line a dirt path. “Since then, it’s been nothing short of a nightmare.”

Nearly every U.S. city faces a backlog of needed roadwork as streets built decades ago wear out, but the situation is especially vexing in Omaha, a sprawling city of 435,000 people with 4,800 miles of road and not enough tax revenue to maintain them.

Decades ago, a number of developers sought permission to lay down asphalt roads rather than longer-lasting concrete in several sections in the middle of town, and to skip installing curbs and gutters preferred by the city.

The city agreed, with the understanding that homeowners be responsible for occasional repaving. Some substandard roads also were in areas once outside the city but that were later annexed.

For years, the arrangement held up. But as the roads began to age and crumble, and as new residents replaced the original homeowners, resentment intensified about a city government that maintained some neighborhoods while ignoring others.

Said neighbor Bill Manhart, “It’s like living in the country, but in the middle of the city…There’s so much dust and mud on the street, what’s the point?”

A series of meeting between city officials and residents of the affected neighborhoods, which include about 10,000 houses, hasn’t resolved the problem.

“This is insanity,” declared City Council member Chris Jerram at one heated council session earlier this year.

Austin Rowser, Omaha streets superintendent, said the city’s position is “a matter of fairness. Some property owners paid for better streets and a minority didn’t.” He added that the city simply can’t afford the roughly $300 million bill to fix all the substandard streets.

That doesn’t fly with residents who say that dirt roads or crumbling pavement are unworthy of a well-off community with a growing population, a tiny unemployment rate and four Fortune 500 companies.

“Well, gee whiz, if I’m going to be on a gravel street, I don’t think they should increase my taxes,” said resident Terry Hexum, referring to a recent tax assessment hike that would generate revenue for the entire city. He helped organize a protest meeting attended by 200 people about the street dispute.

Officials have suggested that neighbors create a district to finance repaving, or the more expensive option of rebuilding the streets to city standards, which the city would then maintain.

But when no agreement was reached, city officials dispatched its bulldozers, saying dirt roads were better than deteriorating asphalt. It was not the solution residents were hoping for.

Signs went up denouncing Mayor Jean Stothert and other city officials, and one businessman filed a lawsuit that sought to force the city to repave the road in front of his $1.8 million home.

“So, they say it’s not their road,” said Manhart. “My question is: When did it become theirs to take, and when did it become ours to fix?”

Last month, Stothert announced the city would stop the dirt road conversions, would try to set aside more money for repairs and offered to pay half the cost of repaving three stretches of roads that had prompted some of the heated complaints. It was enough to get businessman Bruce Simon to drop his lawsuit, but no one has come up with a funding plan that would fix all the rough road.

According to urban planners, the dispute is a case study in how short-term deals that cities make about seemingly minor issues can backfire when the cities and circumstances change.

Dan Piatkowski, an assistant professor of regional planning at the University of Nebraska, said the dispute is also forcing residents to think about what they get from government. This is especially useful, he said, in a conservative state like Nebraska that is skeptical of government spending.

Many conservatives believe “smaller government is better, but we still want our roads to function,” he said.

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Unpaving Some Roads

SUBHEAD: In the future we will not be able to afford the maintenance cost and material for asphalt roads.

By Staff on 12 April 2016 for Energy Skeptic -
(http://energyskeptic.com/2016/unpave-low-volume-roads-to-save-energy/)


Image above: A badly paved Meadow Lake Road, right before the entrance to the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, New York in 2009. This road should be repaved or abandoned. From (http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html).

The U.S. has 4.1 million miles of roads (1.9 million paved, 2.2 million gravel). About 3 million miles of roads have less than 2,000 vehicles a day, less than 15% of all traffic. The paved portion of these low-volume roads ought to be evaluated for their potential to be unpaved.

Many of these roads should have never been paved to begin with, but the costs of construction, asphalt, and energy were so cheap it was done anyway.  Now many rural roads are past their design life and rapidly deteriorating.  It is both difficult and expensive to maintain them, and dangerous to let these roads fall apart and degrade into gravel on their own.

Unpaving low-volume roads saves energy and money. According to Karim Ahmed Abdel-Warith at Purdue University, preserving low-volume roads costs several hundred million dollars a year, more than half of the annual investment in roads.

Unpaving would also slow vehicle speeds down, further increasing miles per gallon from less aerodynamic drag.

Since roads harm biodiversity, getting rid of a road entirely should be done when possible.
The NRC paper I’ve taken excerpts from below requested feedback from the 27 states that have already depaved roads. This report provides many helpful guidance documents on depaving roads for communities interested in pursuing this.


The historic trend has been to pave roads, not unpave them.   These policies arose in the last century when the costs of asphalt, fuel, and all construction expenditures were low compared with current costs and the axle loads carried on rural low-volume roads were significantly lighter than current loads.

The rising cost of asphalt and fuel and a significant increase in traffic and traffic loads on low-volume rural roads due to commercial, agricultural, and energy trucks, combined with stagnant or decreasing budgets, are causing a situation in which the cost of rehabilitating and maintaining very low-volume paved roads on the existing road network often is no longer feasible.

This study found that the practice of converting paved roads to unpaved is relatively widespread; recent road conversion projects were identified in 27 states on mainly rural, low-volume roads that were paved when asphalt and construction prices were low.

Those asphalt roads have now aged well beyond their design service life, are rapidly deteriorating, and are both difficult and expensive to maintain. Instead, many local road agencies are converting these deteriorated paved roads to unpaved as a more sustainable solution.

Many local road agencies reported cost savings after converting, compared with the costs of continuing maintenance of the deteriorating paved road, or repaving.

Low-volume, rural roads serve as main routes for numerous industries, farmers, and ranchers to get raw material from source to distribution or processing centers, provide ingress to remote public lands, and act as transportation arteries for millions of rural residents. Most of these rural roads have low or very low traffic volumes and have unpaved, aggregate surfaces. Historically, unpaved roads have been considered the lowest level of service provided.

In a demonstration of progress and an effort to improve road conditions for rural residents, many agencies paved low-volume roads with little or no base preparation when asphalt and construction prices were low. Those asphalt roads have now aged well beyond their design service life, are rapidly deteriorating, and are difficult and expensive to maintain.

The increasing sizes of agricultural and commercial equipment, including that used by the energy sector, are compounding road deterioration in many areas.

Traditionally, these roads were maintained or repaved at regular intervals, but with the increasing traffic loads, increasing cost of materials, and stagnant or declining road maintenance budgets, many agencies do not have the funding to support these activities.

Instead, many local road agencies are looking to convert deteriorated paved roads to unpaved ones as a more sustainable solution.

The state of the practice for converting roads from paved to unpaved involves reclaiming or recycling the deteriorated pavement surface, supplementing existing materials as needed, compacting, and for some applying or incorporating a surface treatment, such as a soil stabilizer or dust-abatement product.

In a few cases, no recycling of the old pavement was done, and new surface aggregate was simply placed over the deteriorated road surface.

However, most agencies that have done conversions recycle the old surface in-place and reshape and compact it as a base for a new aggregate surfacing. Thereafter, the new surfacing ranges from locally available gravel to high-quality surface aggregate that can be maintained with motor graders to sustain adequate crown and a smooth surface.

Many of the roads that have been converted from paved to unpaved had annual average daily traffic (AADT) of between 21 and 100 vehicles, suggesting that many of the roads that are being converted should not have been paved initially or that road usage patterns have changed significantly since paving.

Local road agencies are converting roads primarily as a result of a lack of funding for maintenance and construction, safety issues, and/or complaints from the public. Road budgets have remained stagnant or declined in recent decades, but the costs of labor, materials, and equipment have continued to increase. Consequently, local road agencies have been left underfunded and are struggling to maintain their existing road network. Limited maintenance of deteriorating roads (e.g., pothole patching) often is all that can be done with existing resources, with repaving often being cost-prohibitive.

The reported cost of converting ranged from $1,000 to $100,000 per road segment or mile within the United States and Canada. The variation in costs is attributed to how costs are tracked by agencies, how the conversion was done, equipment requirements, supplemental materials, surface stabilization and dust abatement, and addressing drainage and road base issues.

NEEDED: Unpaving guides
A significant lack of available resources, such as a handbook or design guide, for practitioners who are considering or performing road conversions was noted. Numerous survey respondents indicated that they did not use any documented resources when planning and performing the conversion and often used a trial-and-error approach.

In addition, road agencies rarely document procedures and outcomes of road conversions, such as construction problems, crash rates, public concerns and reaction, and comparative maintenance costs of the new surface.

Completing successful conversions is possible with appropriate investigation and design, selection of quality granular surfacing materials, and good construction, and by involving and educating the public as part of the process. However, limited information has been published to guide practitioners in these processes.

LOW-VOLUME ROADS
There are more than 4.1 million mi of roadways in the United States. There is no uniform agreement on how many of these are low-volume roads. About 53% are unpaved and are maintained by local and state transportation departments.

Unpaved roads are nearly always considered low volume.
For the purpose of this project, low-volume or very low-volume roads are defined as roads with AADT of less than 250 vehicles, based on research that determined that converting paved roads to unpaved was cost-effective at this threshold.

The spectrum of options of surface types for low-volume roads ranges from gravel with no treatment to stabilized gravel to bituminous sealed bases to asphalt and concrete pavements. Each road surface type has its own merits and represents one tool in the road management toolbox.

Unpaved roads can be defined as those with a surface course of unbound aggregate (gravel) where no binder, such as tar, bitumen, cement, lime, or other chemical additive, is used. An unpaved road often requires blading at least once annually to maintain the road surface in a drivable and safe condition.

Paved roads are defined as those with an asphalt concrete or portland cement concrete surface, or roads that possess any combination of asphalt binder and aggregate intended to provide waterproofing, adhesion, structural strength, and frictional resistance.

CONVERTING ROADS FROM PAVED TO UNPAVED

Active versus Passive Conversion
Many transportation agencies facing budget shortfalls and deteriorating paved roads are converting their paved roads to gravel (active conversion), whereas other agencies are allowing roads to deteriorate to unpaved conditions owing to a lack of funding for maintenance (passive conversion).

Active conversion is the process of converting a paved road to an unpaved road using equipment and personnel to recycle the old pavement into a pulverized material that can be used as a base for a new aggregate surfacing or as part of the new surface. Passive conversion of a road from paved to unpaved is the natural process of the paved road breaking down and deteriorating to an unpaved surface as a result of exposure to the elements and wear and tear from vehicle traffic.

Based on survey and interview responses, active conversion is a far more common practice, however some local road agencies find that passive conversion occurs simply as a result of a lack of funding for properly maintaining roads.

Factors to Consider for Unpaving

• Road condition: This dictates whether a deteriorated paved surface can be economically repaired to restore it to an acceptable condition or whether there is a need for complete rehabilitation or reconstruction, which may not be affordable. In the latter instance, conversion to gravel can be considered.
• Safety: The deterioration of a paved road surface may be such that it may be safer to convert to a gravel surface either permanently or for an interim period until the road can be rehabilitated or reconstructed.
• Presence of heavy and overweight vehicles: A high volume of heavy vehicles has a significant impact on the standard required for pavement maintenance and rehabilitation. Initial costs to repave or repair a road to an appropriate standard for these vehicles may be unaffordable for achieving an acceptable life cycle. Gravel roads can be much cheaper to repair when damaged, but the frequency of repair may be greater.
• Maintenance capability: Specific equipment and skills are required for paved and unpaved road construction and maintenance. The availability and affordability of either contracted or in-house equipment or skill need to be assessed to compare the ability to maintain each surface type effectively. Dust and erosion control may be a significant factor and could be considered for unpaved surfaces.
• Environmental issues: Air and water quality impacts from dust and erosion can affect human, plant, animal, and aquatic health and create a safety hazard to drivers. Products used to stabilize the road surface and reduce dust can also affect the adjacent environment if incorrectly selected or applied.
• Dust and erosion control: These issues may or may not be a significant factor, but it is essential that they be considered for all surfaces.
• Availability and quality of suitable unpaved road–wearing coarse aggregate sources: The quality and properties of the aggregate have a significant impact on the surface condition and frequency of maintenance required on unpaved road surfaces. Appropriate unpaved road surfacing aggregates are not offered by many commercial aggregate suppliers and can be expensive or difficult to obtain. This issue is more important than many managers recognize.
• Network significance of the road: Primary routes that are frequently used by public transport (including school buses) or emergency vehicles or are priority snowplow routes generally are not recommended for conversion from paved to unpaved surfaces. Local roads serving limited access to residences or businesses are better candidates.

Changes in Traffic Patterns and Vehicle Type
Modern agricultural equipment (i.e., tractors, combines, farm trucks) have greatly increased in size and carrying capacity, along with greater crop yields, creating increased maintenance issues on paved and unpaved rural roads (Anderson 2011), with accelerated degradation of low-volume roads (Figure 6). Multiaxle semis, concrete haulers, large-load log trucks, and rising traffic volume can be equally destructive (Etter 2010; Taylor 2010) (Figure 7).

In some areas of the country where oil drilling and extraction have increased, such as North Dakota, Texas, and Pennsylvania, significant damage to roads from oil field traffic has occurred (Floyd 2013). Many of these rural paved roads have passed the end of their design life (Anderson 2011).

ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS—COST OF CONVERTING VERSUS REPAVING
The 2010 Wall Street Journal article “Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement” highlighted the economic strain many counties face when trying to maintain paved roads in rural areas (Etter 2010).

A recent study found that the state of Iowa would need to increase road funding by $220 million annually just to maintain the current road network (Anderson 2011).

Similar funding shortfalls for local road maintenance budgets are occurring across the country (Canfield 2009; Taylor 2010; Landers 2011). Cold-weather states in particular have high maintenance costs resulting from the repair of damage caused by freeze-thaw cycles but little available funding because of essential winter maintenance operations (Canfield 2009).

Coupled with declining budgets, agencies have seen raw material prices increase. Costs for gasoline, diesel, and asphalt binder, all petroleum-based products, are tied to fluctuating oil prices (Taylor 2010). However, fuel taxes, which are a primary source of funding for road maintenance, have remained constant in this time period. Improved fuel consumption technologies have further reduced this source of income.

The recent economic downturn has made governments reluctant to increase other taxes and has resulted in people driving less.


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