Nashville, Tennessee, April 18 (Reuters) – Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday.

An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University.

China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”

Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China’s broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China’s sovereignty claims and says only the island’s people can decide their future.

Earlier this week, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said, opens new tab Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China’s government, but is part of a criminal ransomware group.

In a statement, China’s Embassy in Washington referred back to the MFA spokesperson’s comment. “Some in the US have been using origin-tracing of cyberattacks as a tool to hit and frame China, claiming the US to be the victim while it’s the other way round, and politicizing cybersecurity issues.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hidden threat: Global underground infrastructure vulnerable to sea-level rise

April 21, 2024

Hidden threat: Global underground infrastructure vulnerable to sea-level rise

As sea levels rise, coastal groundwater is lifted closer to the ground surface while also becoming saltier and more corrosive. A recent study by Earth scientists at the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa has compiled research from experts worldwide showing that in cities where there are complex networks of buried and partially buried infrastructure, interaction with this shallower and saltier groundwater exacerbates corrosion and failure of critical systems such as sewer lines, roadways, and building foundations.

The research is published in the journal Annual Review of Marine Science.

“While it has been recognized that shallowing groundwater will eventually result in chronic flooding as it surfaces, what’s less known is that it can start causing problems decades beforehand as groundwater interacts with buried infrastructure,” said Shellie Habel, lead author and coastal geologist in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa. “This knowledge gap often results in coastal groundwater changes being fully overlooked in infrastructure planning.”

The research team aimed to create awareness about these issues and offer guidance from world experts on managing them. Habel and co-authors reviewed existing literature to examine the diverse effects on different types of infrastructure. Additionally, by employing worldwide elevation data and geospatial data that indicate the extent of urban development, they identified 1,546 low-lying coastal cities and towns globally, where around 1.42 billion people live, that are likely experiencing these impacts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Intense heat and flooding are wreaking havoc on power and water systems as climate change batters America’s aging infrastructure

September 17, 2022

Intense heat and flooding are wreaking havoc on power and water systems as climate change batters America’s aging infrastructure

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age of infrastructure development in the U.S., with the expansion of the interstate system and widespread construction of new water treatment, wastewater and flood control systems reflecting national priorities in public health and national defense. But infrastructure requires maintenance, and, eventually, it has to be replaced.

That hasn’t been happening in many parts of the country. Increasingly, extreme heat and storms are putting roads, bridges, water systems and other infrastructure under stress.

Two recent examples – an intense heat wave that pushed California’s power grid to its limits in September 2022, and the failure of the water system in Jackson, Mississippi, amid flooding in August – show how a growing maintenance backlog and increasing climate change are turning the 2020s and 2030s into a golden age of infrastructure failure.

I am a civil engineer whose work focuses on the impacts of climate change on infrastructure. Often, low-income communities and communities of color like Jackson see the least investment in infrastructure replacements and repairs.

Crumbling bridge and water systems

The United States is consistently falling short on funding infrastructure maintenance. A report by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker’s Volcker Alliance in 2019 estimated the U.S. has a US$1 trillion backlog of needed repairs.

Over 220,000 bridges across the country – about 33% of the total – require rehabilitation or replacement.

A water main break now occurs somewhere in the U.S. every two minutes, and an estimated 6 million gallons of treated water are lost each day. This is happening at the same time the western United States is implementing water restrictions amid the driest 20-year span in 1,200 years. Similarly, drinking water distribution in the United States relies on over 2 million miles of pipes that have limited life spans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Intense heat and flooding are wreaking havoc on power and water systems as climate change batters America’s aging infrastructure

September 13, 2022

Intense heat and flooding are wreaking havoc on power and water systems as climate change batters America’s aging infrastructure

That hasn’t been happening in many parts of the country. Increasingly, extreme heat and storms are putting roads, bridges, water systems and other infrastructure under stress.

Crumbling bridge and water systems

Over 220,000 bridges across the country – about 33% of the total – require rehabilitation or replacement.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Implications of Refinery closures for Homeland Security & critical infrastructure safety

April 4, 2022

Implications of Refinery closures for Homeland Security & critical infrastructure safety

Preface. The talk of electric vehicles saving the world from greenhouse gases is nonsense, a red herring to distract everyone from what’s really at stake, and from the material requirements to build them with rare earth and other scarce minerals, and the immense amount of fossil energy required to make them in mining, smelting, manufacture and transport of thousands of parts, and so on. But just focusing on greenhouse gases is a very sneaky way to ignore myriad obstacles.

Cars are just 14% of emissions, and EV only replace gasoline, not the diesel essential for heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships, the kerosene for airplanes, the lubricants essential for all motors, including EV, or the road asphalt EV and diesel trucks move on. EV are less than 1% of cars and always will be, they are too expensive for all but the richest 5% who also have garages and want one and live in places where heat and cold won’t reduce performance and battery life.

A National Laboratory scientist on Chinese gasoline, refining, and petroleum products:

Over the years I have taken the opportunity to ask oil companies about how they would deal with a demand slate stripped of it gasoline fraction, given that that is about the only fraction being targeted by electrification. Chevron’s answer was fairly simple: “It’s our profit center so we’d probably close the refinery” (thus no oil products). Two years in a row I asked the same question to Exxon during some briefings, and both times they said they were “looking into it” and would get back to me (but they never did)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Emerging Energy Crisis

March 9, 2022

America’s Emerging Energy Crisis

The warning signs are everywhere. We are stumbling toward an energy crisis that is likely to be far more severe and long-lasting than the upheavals of the 1970s. And no, this isn’t about Russia or Ukraine. This is about the perilous state of the U.S. electricity grid.

If action isn’t taken soon to address the unraveling reliability of the grid, the United States will face the specter of rolling blackouts, factory shutdowns, loss of jobs and soaring electricity bills. Our organization CASE recently released a policy brief highlighting just how dire the situation is.

Events In recent years show how serious the situation is. According To the Wall Street Journal, outages have gone from fewer than two dozen major disruptions in 2000 to more than 180 in 2020. The catastrophic blackouts that gripped Texas for a week in February of last year should have been eye-opening. Now, warnings from regulators, grid operators and utilities suggest far worse is coming.

There’s no getting around it. The nation’s electricity transmission system is growing increasingly undependable. Aging infrastructure, severe weather, and the rapid pivot away from baseload power to intermittent solar and wind are all contributing. Supply chain problems and local opposition to building new power lines and siting renewable projects are also turning into increasingly tall hurdles. Expectations of increased demand driven by electric vehicles are only compounding the challenge.

The energy transition is happening but the question we must ask is how do we responsibly manage it? It’s becoming apparent that the transition to renewables is vastly more difficult and complicated than some believed. Those who want to shut down every coal and natural gas plant ignore that fossil fuels supply 60% of America’s electricity. There’s growing alarm the America’s haphazard approach to the energy transition is taking apart the existing grid and the reliable generating capacity that long underpinned it far faster than we’re adding reliable alternatives.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Infrastructure Crisis Is Growing Increasingly Dire

September 21, 2021

America’s Infrastructure Crisis Is Growing Increasingly Dire

Despite promises of improved infrastructure and better disaster preparedness, governments and energy giants are failing to provide backup energy provisions to areas hit hard by extreme weather conditions again and again. As these events are becoming more frequent and stronger, how will the energy industry prepare for the future of energy provision?

The ongoing discussion over energy infrastructure resilience which is brought up year after year peaked in February in the U.S. as Texas battled against a severe winter storm that saw the electrical grid shut down and thousands of buildings lose power. Many across the state had to rely on generators to heat their houses to escape freezing temperatures for up to a week.

A significant proportion of energy production in the U.S.’s biggest oil state came to a halt following the storm, having a knock-on effect on energy output levels for the rest of the spring. Oil production is thought to have dropped by around 1.2 million bpd due to freezing pipelines and a lack of electricity to key infrastructure.

But could all of this be avoided had the U.S. government and big oil invested in its aging infrastructure long ago? Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave America’s energy infrastructure a C-rating score, suggesting the need for significant improvement to prevent future production cuts and potential disasters.

Since his inauguration, President Biden has pointed towards his $2 trillion infrastructure plan as the answer to the problem. As well as fixing tens of thousands of roads and bridges, enhancing the country’s transportation links, the plan also intends to improve energy infrastructure and water pipelines across the U.S. over a timescale of eight years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Let’s Talk About Infrastructure

July 15, 2021

Let’s Talk About Infrastructure

The Hungry Horse Dam located just outside Hungry Horse, Montana

Let’s talk about infrastructure, shall we? Living in the human-built world day in and day out, we often forget that all these buildings, roads, buried pipes, wires, sewers, and literally everything else we build is not actually natural. We require nature – other plant and animal species – for the ecosystem services they provide, but nature does not require our infrastructure. Think about that deeply for a moment and realize that no other species requires our electrical grid – it only serves us, and even we don’t require it for survival; we got along fine for most ALL of the last 200,000 years or so (except for the last 150 years) without electricity. We *could* get along just fine without it now too, except we went into ecological overshoot. There is now no way to keep industrial civilization humming along without it, and this brings some rather uncomfortable facts to light as shown in this study.

So many people focus on emissions reductions but don’t realize that technology use CAN NOT reduce emissions. The only way to reduce emissions is to consume less – less food, less energy, and less products and services across the spectrum. For those who think this is not the case, please go here for the proof. Technology is an illusion not much differently than infrastructure because it literally surrounds us and practically all of our activities and daily living use it. So, learning about technology for anyone who doesn’t understand its pervasiveness in today’s culture and society is a great idea. Focusing on emissions reductions is a noble idea, but ultimately one that is somewhat misguided…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American infrastructure, ancient Rome and ‘Limits to Growth’

May 23, 2021

The American infrastructure, ancient Rome and ‘Limits to Growth’

Infrastructure is the talk of the town in Washington, D.C. where I now live and with good reason. The infrastructure upon which the livelihoods and lives of all Americans depends is in sorry shape. The American Society of Civil Engineers 2021 infrastructure report card gives the United States an overall grade of C minus.

Everyone in Washington, yes, everyone, believes some sort of major investment needs to be made in our transportation, water, and sewer systems which have been sorely neglected. There are other concerns as well about our energy infrastructure and our communications infrastructure—both of which are largely in private hands. The wrangling over how much will be spent and on what is likely to go on for months.

What won’t be talked about is that the cost of maintaining our infrastructure is rising for one key reason: There’s more it every day. We keep expanding all these systems so that when they degrade and require maintenance and replacement, the cost keeps growing.

There is a lesson on this from ancient Rome. Few modern people understand that the Romans financed their expansion and government operations using the booty taken from vanquished territories. That worked until it didn’t. When Rome reached its maximum expanse, when it no longer conquered new territories, the booty stopped coming. With the borders of Rome the longest the empire had ever had to defend, it now relied primarily on taxes to finance a large army and administrative presence across the empire in order to maintain control.
Our modern-day version of booty has been cheap energy, much of it supplied by the oil, natural gas and coal fields of America and later its uranium mines…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales

May 5, 2021

Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales

Advertisement from the mid-20th century

I have often used this expression (the title) to describe many things people tend to think of as solutions for one thing or another that either are not solutions or are unrealistic at best in terms of actually solving something. For anyone just joining these articles, this post will help get you started so as to be able to comprehend what this article is about.

As I have expressed before, my deep passion is to help explain where we are (as a species), how we got here, why we are in this mess, and what can and/or cannot be done to “solve” these predicaments. My very first post explained the difference between problems with answers or solutions and predicaments (or dilemmas) with outcomes. In it, we discovered that predicaments don’t have solutions, and that every solution proffered for a predicament winds up causing new problems and/or predicaments or comes with unacceptable costs or just simply doesn’t solve anything.

The reason these explanations are necessary is because a very large portion of society is completely ignorant to these facts and tends to buy into industry hype, marketing, advertising, and propaganda. Why does this happen? Because culturally, this is what society has been doing for the last several centuries AT LEAST. In order to sell an item or service, the seller needs to market and advertise the product or service. Making it attractive to the purchaser and making the purchaser feel good about buying it is key to getting the target audience to bring demand for said product or service. Whether the product or service is actually necessary or does more than make the purchaser feel good is often irrelevant in the grand scheme of things…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New Infrastructure Will Not Come Good, Fast, And Cheap

March 28, 2021

New Infrastructure Will Not Come Good, Fast, And Cheap

Anyone naive enough to think America is about to receive a big gift of newfangled “fixed installations” needed in order to function should look long and hard at what is really being proposed. The “underlying structure” a country and the economy rely upon includes things such as roads, bridges, dams, water and sewer systems, railways and subways, airports, and harbors. None of these things are cheap to construct and when it comes to infrastructure the words, good, fast, and cheap should never be clustered together. While many people see government spending on infrastructure as a job creator and a silver bullet for our ailing economy I would like to raise a word of caution, things are not that simple. The cynical part of me thinks the American people should get ready to get bent over and taken advantage of.

Spending Trillions Likely To Result In An Epic Fail

Now that Biden’s massive Covid-19 relief package has been signed into law, talk is moving towards what is next on the agenda, That’s where, most likely, his infrastructure plan resides, and this is a plan set to explode the budget. If you think that $1.9 trillion is a lot of money, it pales next to what the Democrats are going to propose as they continue on their spending spree. It appears that Biden wants $3 trillion or more which should scare away moderates such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin but it has not. Not only has Manchin not blinked at $3 trillion in new spending instead, he recently stated Congress should do “everything we possibly can” to pay for it. He said there should be “tax adjustments” to former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law to boost revenues, his endorsement of raising the corporate rate from the current 21 percent to at least 25 percent, however, would do little.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

bruce wilds, advancing time blog, united states, government stimulus, infrastructure, crony capitalism

Water is Life. Can We Protect It?

March 27, 2021

The Lempa River, whose watershed provides water for half of El Salvador (Shutterstock)

WATER IS LIFE. CAN WE PROTECT IT?

Americans will have to fight hard to protect their water from corporate greed. They can learn a lot from El Salvador.

From West Texas to Jackson, Mississippi, tens of millions of people struggled through late winter storms that froze pipes, broke water mains, and cut off electricity. They froze without showers, toilets, or washing machines — let alone drinking water — for days or even weeks.

The irony that Texas, the state built on fossil fuels, was completely unprepared for extreme weather disasters shouldn’t be lost on anyone.

Fossil fuel and utility firms have long plied state officials with money. In turn, officials failed to regulate utilities, weatherize their grid, or create programs to weatherize homes — much less upgrade the state’s decaying water infrastructure.

This extreme weather disaster gave Americans a glimpse of the daily reality of billions who struggle to protect their water from polluting corporations.

In our travels, we’ve seen these fights up close — they’re harrowing, but also inspiring. As we in the United States face similar struggles, we might take some encouragement from others who’ve won local, national, and global fights to protect their water.

In particular, we’ve spent countless hours with people across El Salvador, where drought has taxed the river system that provides water for over half the country’s population. Over the past two decades, this river system was threatened by a giant mining company that wanted to mine gold near the rivers.

Gold mining uses toxic chemicals like cyanide that poison water. But a global mining company attempted to buy public support by launching flashy PR campaigns, funding local projects, and hiring expensive lobbyists.

Beyond offering these few carrots, they also carried a large stick. When the Salvadoran government paused new mining licenses to study the issue, the mining companies filed lawsuits against the government under the rigged rules that govern investment across borders.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Robin Broad, John Cavanagh, OtherWords, water, infrastructure,

Lifespan of infrastructure, transportation, and buildings

March 10, 2021

Lifespan of infrastructure, transportation, and buildings

Preface. What follows is from the International Energy Agency 2020 report “Energy technology perspectives” on how to transition to net zero emissions by 2050. This might require the replacement of just about everything, since power plants, steel blast furnaces, cement kilns, buildings, trucks, cars, buses and more that run fossil fuels now would have to be replaced or greatly modified to run on hydrogen, electricity, or other renewables since most of this infrastructure will last for decades, and much of it is quite young, especially in China.

Since mining uses 10% of all energy, and many elements are likely to run out or are controlled by China, and energy transitions take 50 years or more (Smil 2010 Energy myths and realities), making such a transition is unlikely. And if conventional oil did start declining in 2018, impossible.

* * *

Figure 1.12 Typical lifetimes for key energy sector assets

Notes: The red markers show expectations of average lifetimes while the blue bars show typical ranges of actual operation in years, irrespective of the need for interim retrofits, component replacement and refurbishments. “Buildings” refers to building structures, not the energy consuming equipment housed within. Examples of “urban infrastructure” assets include pavement, bridges and sewer systems.

The operating lifetime of some assets, especially those that produce materials or transform energy, can span several decades: this means that it could be a long time until they are replaced by cleaner and more efficient ones.

Figure 1.13 Age structure of existing fossil power capacity by region and technology in operation 2018 (source: Platts 2020a)

About 50% of the installed fossil-fired power generation capacity in China was built within the last ten years, and 85% within the last 20 years. The average age of coal plants is over 40 years in the United States and around 35 years in Europe, while it is below 20 years in most Asian countries, and just 13 years in China.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia & China Invest in Infrastructure; U.S. Instead Spends on Military

November 6, 2018

Russia & China Invest in Infrastructure; U.S. Instead Spends on Military

China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” is famous as an extension of their domestic infrastructure investments, but Russia is also investing heavily in infrastructure. Both countries need to do it in order to improve the future for their respective populations, and both Governments have avoided the Western development model of going heavily into debt in order to pay for creating and maintaining infrastructure. Both are, in fact, exceptionally low-debt Governments.

According to the “Global Debt Clock” at Economist, China has a public debt/GDP of 17.7%, and Russia’s is 8.0%. For comparison, America’s is 93.6%. (Others are: Germany 85.8%, Spain 91.2%, Italy 122.6%, Greece 147.1%, India 54.2%, Pakistan 47.0%, and Brazil 55.0%.)

The United States isn’t going into public debt in order to finance building or maintenance of infrastructure, but instead to finance expansions of its military, which is already (and by far) the world’s largest (in terms of its costs, but not of its numbers of troops).

While the US Government now spends around half of the world’s military expenditures and plans to conquer Russia, China, and all countries (such as Iran and Syria) that cooperate with those ‘enemies’ (and please click onto a link wherever you question the truthfulness of an allegation made here), Russia and China plan to improve their infrastructures, in order to boost their national economies and to minimize the impacts that (the mainly US-caused) global warming will have. These infrastructure projects are optimistic and long-term expenditures, which are being planned and built only because the countries that the US aristocracy are targeting to conquer, expect the US aristocracy to fail to achieve its clear #1 goal, of controlling the entire world and conquering them — of America’s rulers finally achieving the global fascist empire that, in World War II, Hitler and the other Axis powers had been hoping to become.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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