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Thursday, September 26, 2013

Chemi-kill Weapons of Mass Construction.

The ICE-man's Comet.


As I look over many of the charts that depict the warming trends around the globe, including the dramatic thinning of the ice in the Arctic, and then read, in a description of the Bakken "oil play" (as the speculators like to refer to it as): entrepreneurs armed with breakthrough drilling technologies solved the geological puzzle of the Bakken's "tight rock," and in so doing unlocked billions of barrels of oil.

This Oil exploitation which, sans pipeline infrastructure, then flares natural gas into the atmosphere (giving the US the dubious position of being 2'nd only to Russia in the amount of energy it must "burn to burn"), and then burns coal and oil to transport it to distant east coast or southern refineries where it will be cracked to produce gasoline and myriad other byproducts, some of which will be made into the poly-molecular chains used to manufacture plastics. So, as we wring our hands as to what to do with all the plastic in the world, with some cities, such as San Francisco, coming up with 'solutions' of their own, such as banning plastic grocery bags, necessitating the manufacture and transportation of millions of paper bags that we burn tons more fuel to transport (Paper is HEAVY), and then 'recycle' by shipping to China, pouring yet more CO2 into the atmosphere, making even more of the raw material which we've come up with no other use for than to make even more plastic, we dig up more oil to make tons more of it. And more and more of that oil as it comes from places farther and farther than where it's needed and requires more and more energy to get to and extract, the amount of energy expended to get energy keeps increasing, in a kind of positive feedback loop that ends with creating more Fukushimas in order to provide the energy to dig up more oil, coal and Natural Gas.

And then we call the resulting weather phenomena that occur because of this frenetic activity "natural" disasters, when they are quite obviously nothing of the sort. Hurricane Sandy was no more a natural disaster than the Deepwater Horizons debacle was.

Now why I bring all this up is because, when I was considering the rate at which global climate change is accelerating, and then considered that the Kyoto protocols were first drafted in 1997, the graphs demonstrating much of the increase look more as though we decided to burn more fossil fuels and increase the rate at which the globe was heating up rather than the other way around. And, if you take a look at, or listen to the rhetoric of, Capitalism, that is exactly what you would expect to happen, especially as the rate of increase in growth of all the OECD economies indicated not an easing of fossil fuel use, but an acceleration of it. And what this in turn indicates is, as competitiveness increases, so does fossil fuel use, as competition drives resource use to the extreme end of the scale, gutting any efforts at conservation of resources and encouraging instead a War-like despoliation of the planet.

But just as Chalmers Johnson's trilogy of books warning about US military Keynesianism has been ignored completely, even as the US economy becomes more and more hollowed out until it remains nothing but an arms manufactory, replacing Basil Zaharoff as the world's Merchant of Death, Michael Klare's books are similarly ignored as he points out the Resource Wars that the Kyoto protocols, far from stifling, have, because of the refusal of the US and China, the two largest offenders of unmitigated fossil fuel combustion, and one could almost simply say THE largest, as they are embraced in a carbon-spewing orgy, contrarily, been used as though they were a starting gun for the race to dig up and burn the world's store of carbon at the fastest pace possible.

And to further inflame the Gutterdamerung we've built our Valhalla to emulate, as the economies around the globe thrashed and then crashed, not having the wherewithal to withstand the premium imposed upon them by $147/bbl oil, the reaction to that collapse has been to stoke the manufacturing engines of all the most intensive carbon-spewing economies on the globe to red-hot levels so much so that Germany, the world's Poster-boy for Wind-generated energy, is now in the process of constructing more coal-burning power plants to replace all those nasty nukes it shut down after Fukushima demonstrated the impossibility of storing spent fuel rods in any way that could be even remotely deemed 'safe'.

And aside from the fact that the industries being stoked were, in each and every one of those economies, not only export-oriented industries, but the export of the one machine most responsible for the anthropomorphic-induced warming of the entire planet in the first place: the darling of the internal combustion engine, the Automobile. Because although it's never talked about, and because we're so enamored of it, the fact that 95% of the oil used around the globe is to fuel said machine, is completely ignored. If this one product were to lose its attractiveness and become anathema, the entire problem of global warming, as induced by mankind's activity, would simply go away.

It's not a popular meme, but the automobile, the internal combustion engine (ICE) in general, by producing poison gasses that shorten lives and afflict children with respiratory ailments, is, in fact, a chemical weapon of mass destruction.  Cars, together with the industries and factories that build and fuel them, has, chemically, changed the very climate of the entire planet. In our heart, We know this. Mankind begins to understand. These Machines will claim all life. You know this. You have foreseen it. In the gathering dark, the will of the Machine grows strong. It works hard now driven by the hands of men. Men, who are so easily seduced by its power. The icesheet of Greenland has but to slide off its land, take the Arctic for its own and the world will fall. It is close now, so close one's blood runs cold. For Machines now have dominion over mankind, and by extension, all life on this Earth, even unto the ending of the world. Yet our response is to keep building more and more and more of them and have no intention of stopping. Ever.

Happy motoring.  









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