Roads are a big one and especially important as that product uses up a lot of what can be extracted from petroleum that would be the leftovers. The alternative will be concrete that makes very good roads but is vastly more expensive and more importantly concrete requires much more energy to produce. Then for it to function properly has to be filled with expensive re-bar (steel) another thing to mine and produce with high energy usage.
So a good question to ask is how many solar farms or windmills will it take to switch over from asphalt to say concrete.
Some of this has been thought about I think because I hear a lot of buzz where the idea of free will traveling will go away and be replaced by these little 15 minute clustering of humanity where everything you will need (not want) will be right where you live. These communities will be linked with mass transit. Again right or wrong more of a European model.
There are other ways to build roads the thinking out of the box innovators not really capitalism, but capitalism will follow edicts and do their best and adjusting the economics for the new norm. These involve agricultural methods of producing raw materials to bind sand and gravel together. Once petroleum is gone and the fuel we use now is 10% alcohol and we eliminate cattle production and other meat proteins, we will have an abundance of farming mostly corn we can redirect into producing some kind of sugar products that some clever scientist can extract what is needed to make roadways.
Of course everything will change your new wide screen TV won’t have the sleek plastic chassis and case made from oil. It will come in maybe a plywood box similar to 1950s TVs. EVs work in part because of low weights high strength of plastic parts. So even the product that’s going to save us will have to undergo major changes. Not to mention the 100,000 other products that have oil at their base.
You mentioned Mayor Pete. Yes he will have all the answers. He might have to stop riding in the big black SUV to the white house and stopping at the gate to unload his mountain bike and peddling the last 100 yards for the photo opp.
Not really. Watching reality spiral. All the good intentions backfire, and the least efficient vehicle dominate sales. China doubles down, while we suffer. Children displayed in new your schools to provide safehaven during the storm for migrants. NY invests $45k per student, and they get sent home to make room for migrants who storm the border. Its the progressive way, and kids can’t read or right, butbthry feel affirmed. They’re getting medical procedures that ensure a lifetime of medication. Sheep. Whete has common sense gone. I see no glowing solution for the future.
In the good old days like 50-100 years ago people thought things through before taking action. Even then we didn’t always get things right or maybe we didn’t think things through far enough or maybe our thought process was not advanced enough to know what an action then would mean in 100 years, But there was effort made.
Today we act in a knee jerk way to each problem facing us real and imagined. It is a linier reaction between problem and solution with little thought about all the branches it could take along the way.
Now the question really becomes have we grown stupider with passing time and no longer think things thru, or have some became so smart as too subscribe to the saying “Never let a crises go to waste.” Some would say taking a mild crises that could be adjusted to and handled with moderate disruption, and elevating it in such a way that more complex changes are needed that adjust the world to their desired outcome.
That’s some pretty dark stuff if true. Throughout history have people ever thought to do dark stuff in order to gain power? We all know the answer to that question.
So the real question is are we as a people simply stupid and all this is just happening because of our stupidity when it comes to problem solving. Or is it all planned in a way that pushes humanity in a desired direction?
I have been hearing the fear-mongers dispense a steady diet of fear, despair and lies since the 60s.
New Ice Age.
Unstoppable Diseases.
Objects from space going to strike the earth.
Volcanos going to cause an ELE any time now.
Hurricanes going to destroy all availability of fuel nation wide.
Record cold going to kill millions.
Nuclear power plants going to melt down and burn a hole to the center of the earth and poison ALL waters on earth.
Global warming going to cook us all and overflow the oceans.
and the list goes on and on and ON.
Yet 100% of them so far have been shown to be wrong, incompetent and/or dishonest.
Now this is NOT to say I don’t think a world-wide even is probably and can kill off billons of humans and animal life all over the earth, but the cause of such an even is at it’s core the very agenda and comes from the very people that have lied and lied and lied about everything else since I was a young boy just old enough to listen and pay any attention (that means since the very early 60s)
And those people control about 98% of the mass media world wide. If I fear any “event” that will cause death on the level never seen in recorded history, I am going to say such evens are engendered by the very people who control the fear mongers who call themselves “scientists” and “news reporters”
A slave doesn’t stay in his slavery because his body is held prisoner. He stays there because his mind is held prisoner.
The MOST effective prison on earth is and has always been fear.
And, according to a Princeton study (2020), cement production generates nearly as much greenhouse gas as all of agriculture. If it were to replace asphalt, that number would go way up.
Of course it would. The main ingredient is Portland Cement that is produced by heating limestone and a few other things to at least 1500C. All the CO2 is the fuel being burned to produce that heat.
What you are forgetting in our near future when fossil fuels are banned we will have an abundance of clean energy in the form of wind and solar, and if we get smart nuclear.
If we get smart and cover a couple hundred thousand acres with wind and solar we would easily have enough energy to make concrete for our roads. That is if we don’t get any cloudy or windless days. Because large scale mining and processing plants normally run 24-7 as it is very expensive in starting and stopping such operations there will also have to be mammoth battery farms along side.
If concrete is now say 150 dollars per yard the biggest component of that cost is energy. With reasonably priced fossil fuels that spew out CO2, we will have to factor in the higher energy cost for the free energy of the sun and wind to capture.
If there was better methods of building roads they likely would have been invented. We have a road near my house called Plank Road and it goes back to when the constant muddiness of that dirt road had them cover it in planks. In the city I live close to they left exposed some of the original brick roads. In New England they had cobble stone roads. The stone came from Europe as ship ballast as much more was being shipped from the Colonies to Europe than was coming back. Free rocks made great roads back then. Not so great at 70MPH.
Everything is energy converted to something else. Without energy we are going to a different place.
I have another word for it. Tunnel visioned advocacy. Kids are illiterate when they spend $45k on each! How much is it to attend an Ivy League INSTITUTION these days? $100k . . . $150k . . . $200K? Kids wrote on chalk boards in a one room building and learned advanced mathmatics. The space program had mainframes but the scientists probably had slide rules on their pocket. Now kids think a high powered smart phone is for computer games and for watching AI figures twerking.
I went to a state (NY state) university in the early 1970s. Tuition at the time was all of $200 per semester. And with my high school grades, I had earned a state (Regents) scholarship that covered 100% of that. Room and board were extra, of course, plus spending money. I had a paid job in the research laboratory analyzing returning Apollo moon rocks, among other space probe related tasks (Mars Viking). I figured that my dad spent about $6000 total on me for my four years of higher education. Years later, my employer paid fully for two masters degrees, and would have paid for a PhD if I had wanted to go that route. Hard to believe when I see what it takes these days.
Gravel (aggregate) is very cheap and asphalt - the heavy black crap that’s left after refining - is too. Sure, it’s the cheapest material for road-building, but is it the best that can be invented? I’ll vote “no” on that one. Having to repave roads every few years due to deformation in hot climates and ice/water/salt damage in cold ones tells me there’s plenty of room for improvement. When the economics are favorable, the chemists and engineers will deliver.
BTW, I know the chemistry (and physics) behind Portland Cement production. Thanks.
Mankind always puts way too much credit to his overall power. “Trying to be God” in effect. Even mankind’s self-blame is actually just a manifestation of his arrogance insomuch as we seem to think we have power over nature and nature’s God, the creator of the earth.
To underscore my point, look at the carbon emersions from 1 VALCANO. According to the statists of the USGS as well as volcanologist in several other country’s we can come up with a few figures of thetons of carbon gasses produced by any given volcano.
What’s reveling is to compare that number to the carbon gasses produced by 100% of all living human beings ----- and we find the volcano pollutes more air in 10 hours then all mankind combined did in the last 4000 years.
We ain’t so big or so powerful as many think we are, or as the fearmongers want you to to believe
Harder to see how little it gets. Our colleges are full of foreign students. Administrators are making $900,000 annually. Donors and alumni are giving millions, and they want attendance to be paid for by the “guvamint”. Sheep children, sheep, I mean sleep. The 86,000 armed IRS agents are here to collect back taxes, to make up for the golden chidren.
How dirt is an Iranian nuke going to be. How dirty is the Russian plundering of it’s former colonies. Our college students are smart enought to recognize US imperialism. I have to start doing the winter things I had planned. Spring is on the way.
I was telling somebody the other day who is lawyer at Barclays and lived in the British Virgin Islands years ago when I did, how shocked I was that the university students at University of the Virgin Islands (mostly West Indian kids from the archipelago) were so competent in mathematics and composition. They mostly attended British one room school houses with maybe just a blackboard, paper and pencils.
He also attended these schools and said “it is a dissertation waiting to be written.”
I was a biology major there and very impressed at the level of preparation many of the students came in with from some very poor old British colonies and one room school houses. I’ve always thought we can learn the most from pockets of success.
(Point being: return to core missions, 3Rs)
No motorcycle. Keep my teeth close on a bicycle. I hate bugs.
Scientists recently figured out why early Roman concrete was superior to our present day concrete.
Perhaps the youngest students were able to observe the more mature students and both model and innovate at an earlier age. Most of the bold innovations of the industrial age originated in the US from such schools. Maybe instead of spending more money on education, the system should revert to basics
A lot of our institutions have had a mission creep away from their core functions and lots of capture, IMO. Look at the example of Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the accountability problems.
Most of my EE masters classes were offered at a local remote office classroom, separate from the main university campus. 95% of my classmates worked with me in the same facility, all American citizens with active security clearances. But I had to travel to take one needed course at the main university campus. I was the only caucasian student in that class. Even the instructor was a former deserter from the Iranian military, unable to ever return home to his family.
My point really was green energy that so many people see as free coming from the sun and the wind and envision as being able to in short order power all land transportation of our country if not the world. It shouldn’t be much of a stretch given the usable surface area of say our country to expect it to solve the problem of cooking limestone to make concrete. After all along with ground transportation it is also being expected to heat our homes and heat our water cook our food along with all our current electric needs that fossil fuel adds to the electric grid. After all the term I hear constantly is the goal is Net-Zero. The only way we have so far to produce electric power at net zero is wind, solar, waves, tides, dams, geothermal, nuclear etc. The goal is to expand all that and drive fossil fuels to zero. That much is very clear it’s the goal. What isn’t so clear is how we will get from point A to point B.
The trend now in our country is removing dams not building new.
As to why asphalt and concrete fail so quickly up north is of course nature combined with wear. Then IMO there is the cash cow effect under-doing the process so that it creates endless opportunity to re-do the work. Where I live they mill the roads cutting off the upper layer as to not have the roads get too high. These millings are gathered up and sold as a waste product and make a wonderful driveway material. Lay them out and roll them down and the sun will reactivate the tars.
I also have faith in science to provide answers to new problems like what to build roads out of when oil is gone. Another big one is roofing and siding as well for our homes. I’m not a fan of vinyl siding even though it covers my home. It is an amazing durable material though. My roof was asphalt shingles 20 year lifespan here. A few years ago it needed replaced and we went with a 40-50 year metal roof. Longer if someone figures out a better paint.
