Christine Patton, Peak Oil Hausfrau
When cheap energy reigned, we built acres of infrastructure throughout the United States, without giving too much thought to the energy, materials, and money that we would need to maintain and operate these constructions. The crumbling of this legacy of infrastructure is one of the many day-to-day living problems that we face over the next fifty to a hundred years.
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I would suggest that as part of our powering-down and transition projects, we include the following activities:
- Acknowledge and quantify the amounts of energy, materials, and knowledge that we need to maintain our current infrastructural systems,
- Identify key points of weakness, and system dependencies,
- Create realistic projections for maintenance costs and available budget, taking into account reductions of key inputs such as energy, oil, water, etc;
- Prioritize systems in order of necessity (health and safety) as well as potential for disaster,
- Re-design maintenance of key systems to reduce expense and ecological impact, while increasing longevity and flexibility,
- Find ways to re-organize as many systems as possible in cheaper, and more sustainable, resilient, and localized ways, and
- Find ways to mothball or power down systems that will no longer be cost and material-efficient to maintain and/or which could create harm if left to disintegrate on their own - if left to reach the point(s) of no return while still in operation.
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