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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Burning down the House: If you build it, they will succumb.

 Total quantity of per capita energy used by the US Commercial and Industrial Sectors (excluding transportation). Computed by dividing EIA Energy Consumption by Sector by Total Non-Farm Employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I love charts ... they're so succinct, and so misleading, at the same time.

Take the one above, for example. Although the chart might be accurate, as far as it goes, it doesn't go far enough. The clue to this fact is in the parenthetical text beneath it, where it admits that the most important energy use, transportation, is not even taken into account.

Now, the point of the article in which this graph appears was to show how as energy inputs increase, labor, by leveraging that increase, can increase its productivity.

What it admits that it doesn't show, is that labor, because it is physically, as well as fiscally, responsible for getting its ass to and from work each and every day, can, when prices of gas are low and consumers therefore opt for larger, more energy-consuming vehicles, change that equation. As asset prices increase, and the work force is forced farther and farther away from the place of employment, the overall energy input is increased. Yet instead of being leveraged to increase productivity, it is leveraged to DEcrease it: more miles are driven, thereby burning more fuel to get a worker to the plant who is already less productive, because driving 2 hours instead of one to get to work is a drain on not only the fuel tank, but on the employee as well, no matter how much they tell themselves otherwise.

However, it's the gallons of fuel burned, ie, that extra energy input, that is the important feature here, because, although more energy has been added to the equation, productivity declines, and although business doesn't have to account for the additional fuel burned to produce the same output, additional fuel is nevertheless burned, and so what gets produced for a given amount of CO2 vented into the atmosphere, which is the ultimate parameter, gets less and less the more fuel prices plummet.

As pointed out in an article in SalonAugust was the biggest month ever for U.S. gasoline consumption (well, until September), burning up more than a gallon per day for every
U.S. man, woman and child, as Americans return to their old ways and buy bigger and bigger cars, translating into more weight to haul around one 160 pound load. No matter how many electric vehicles you manufacture, (and the vast majority, not only already on the road, but being scooped off showroom floors, are ICE machines, not electrics/hybrids) the physics of energy usage just don't bend enough to ever make it cost-effective to lug around 3 tons of glass and metal wherever you happen to need to go, but especially not to work. With each ton you add to vehicles' weight you add a requisite increase in energy consumed to move it, and therefore decrease the productivity of the US workforce, all with the necessary collusion of the banking industry, which extends the loans, the insurance companies, which offer ridiculously low insurance premiums, and the government itself, which is responsible for the regulation of both. 
Which is to say that all the parties that are supposedly working to make the Climate Change agreements hammered out at Copout21 last April are heavily invested in making sure they don't work. And with such an alignment of forces against change working to maintain the status quo, exactly what chances would you give that anything substantial is going to change? That's right. You already know the truth. The agreements will not be met, because it's in nobody's interest, except mankind's, and since each signatory claims to be exempt from obligations to which they hold others, mankind itself, which has no voice in the matter, is doomed.
































Monday, October 24, 2016

'Til Doomsday: Open Carry

        
Ak747: Watch the bullets fly.



   Open Carry

It's after dark, I'd like some peace of mind
But I'm frightened of increasingly armed mankind
Yes, there's always something we think will come
To save the day 
But guns and mayhem go hand-in-glove 
When shots ricochet  

Bam, Blam, I'm shot down now, Open Carry
Bam, Blam, I'm shot down now, Open Carry

I try so hard not to get upset 
Because I know all the trouble I'll get 
Oh, he tells me guns are nothing to hide 
And nothing to fear 
But when hot bullets tear up your insides  
There's no one can hear 

Bam, Blam, I'm shot down now, Open Carry
Bam, Blam, I'm shot down now, Open Carry

Oh, he shot me, that's only part of the crime 
He shot me so he can keep me in line 

Bam, Blam, I'm shot down now, Open Carry
Bam, Blam, I'm shot down now, Open Carry
Oh, rush, rush, load it up now, Open Carry
Oh, hush, hush, loaded up now, voices carry 
Oh, hush hush, darling, she might shoot you here
Oh no, Open Carry

He said get up 
I can't get up 
Oh God, bleeding on the ground, open carry 

Oh, open carry 
I sure wish I could still walk






Thursday, October 20, 2016

Mass Debate Shun.


Abs Tract Painting.


As the candidates once again take to the stage to carp at one another, it's apparent something fishy's going on. While king tides bring the ocean right into city streets along the east coast, swamping one of Marco Rubio's Climate Change Denial debates, wherein he continues to insist it's a global hoax even as waters swirl around his car in the parking lot of the very venue at which his debate's being held, not a word is whispered about what we're going to do by either of the two Presidential candidates (nothing says nothing like nothing from these nothings, so nothing will make us Best).

Instead they rant on about bigger defense spending, more taxes on the rich, and the unarguable, taken-for-granted-that-it's-good: Growth. Specifically, growth of the middle class.

Which is why climate change can never be anything but cursorily discussed: growth.

Cancerous, untrammeled, fossil-fuel-amped, mindless Growth. Stoked and stoked like a fiery engine that even as it glows red-hot from continuous combustion is fed so much more fuel the metal itself starts to meltdown. We've all caught in the China Syndrome: grow grow grow your population, your productive capacity, your urban populations, until we're not only choking to death on each other's fumes, we're suffocating from lack of oxygen as it is inexorably replaced by CO2. The solution?

More Growth.

Even as The Donald rails about babies being ripped out of their wombs, even Hillary daren't use the term suggested by his anti-abortion rant: women are birth-machines, and Trump is a birther. And births equal Growth

But about growth on Wall St? The Fed? Growth fed by Rampant speculation? Not  a peep.

Hillary tries. For just one moment, when Donald was accusing her of wanting to double your taxes, she mentioned that her economic plan would not add one nickel to the Deficit. But, when Donald accused Obama (why is it Hillary and Donald, but no one ever refers to Obama as Barrack?) of doubling the National Debt, she almost brought up the difference between the two, but she wisely glided past that possible riposte, because she knew the vast majority of citizens in the most rabidly Capitalistic culture in the world, have no idea what the difference is between the National Debt and the Budget Deficit, never mind the relationship between the two. Otherwise she could have mentioned that it was the Republican President, rubber-stamped by a Republican Congress, under GW Bush, that also doubled the National Debt, but instead of doing so to put the economy on a sustainable path, they did it to flail it into a red-hot fury in which fair remuneration was impossible during which a grand carnival of excess speculation swallowed up everything in sight. Speculation heralded as necessary for all great enterprises, the necessary fertilizer, the compost on which all human progress grows. Wasn't it just eight years ago that GW Bush, with his own unscrupulous hands, had madly heated the enormous engine of Capitalism until it burst into fragments and wounded everyone it was carrying along with it? And wasn't it he, GWB, who had encouraged that idiotic, crazily exaggerated Stock Market euphoria of Dow at $36,000? (we're barely half-way there after ten years and $20 trillion in QE and accumulated budget deficits later).

And now, even after the CO2 reading of atmospheric forcing has climbed above 400ppm, where it is destined to stay for the rest of our lives, while its already rapid accumulation accelerates, the only solution that either candidate of the world's number one contributor of that gas is to spew more and more of it, at an even faster rate, into our one and only air supply.

Because that's what Donald's anti-abortion bluster amounts to.

That's what Hillary Clinton's plan to "Grow the middle-class" amounts to.

The number one root cause of climate change and global warming is exactly that: the growth of the middle class, more specifically, the American Middle-Class.

Everyone knows this, and there are two responses to it, both firmly rooted in denial:

1) Outright denial of those who share the physical and intellectual paucity of Marco Rubio.

2) Calling the above "climate deniers", while advocating and supporting supposed solutions that only exacerbate the problem, such as energy independence, ethanol production from fossil-fuel-based agriculture, and bio-diesel manufacture from plantations created by burning down rain forests, because they are soaked in ignorance about essential properties of energy and its relationship to money (economics) and Nature (the environment). But they are inextricably entwined.

The cognitive dissonance necessary to argue around something that is so central to our current living standards and how to maintain some form of happiness even as we reduce our carbon foot prince during the purple reign of methane itself requires a surplus of energy to be wasted; personal and mental energy that would be much better spent on other intellectual pursuits. As long as those suits don't include any more useless debates full of clowns and fury, signifying nothing.















Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Energy Independence: Globalization and its Disconnects.


Add caption


Few noticed Hillary Clinton's monumental lie to the viewing public the other night when she made the outrageous claim that the USA had achieved "Energy Independence". So little is known about energy usage and its repercussions, there being so many lies and half-truths foisted onto the public, that even in so heated a forum as the churlish childish arena we still insist on calling "debates", (despite there lack of any substantive wrangling with any of the real and vital issues that urgently need addressing), despite their being neither Presidential nor a Debate, that Mrs. Clinton apparently felt it would be a good time to slip this by the audience under the radar. A dog-whistle heard only by those capable of tuning into a different frequency than the hoi polloi she was purportedly addressing .

So, not to pick on Hillary, but, whereas most people will either ignore or accept as meaningless, the Trump statements on energy exploitation and the need for even more rapid, destructive combustion of the rest of the fossil fuels we can manage, at ever-increasing costs, to dig up, they will far more likely internalize Mrs. Clinton's bare-faced lie that the USA is energy Independent, a claim that is as pro-fossil-fuel industry and Climate-Change-Denying as anything Trumplestiltskin said.

So why would she use such a monumental falsehood? Is it possible, even conceivable, that she mistakes us for the gang of backward children she plays tricks on? That she has the same contempt for us that she has for them? Because it was a stupid lie; easy to expose; not worthy of Mrs.Clinton's usual foxy wiles. It didn't even make any sense, given her historical support of Globalization, to which the very concept of Energy Independence is anathema. This fact, and the linked assertion that the US is no  longer dependent on Saudi oil, lend credence to the interpretation of her statements as a sop to those who fear she might actually do something on a national level that might change the continued reliance of the entire economy on the portable combustion machines we fly around in or the mini burners we walk around carrying and checking a hundred and fifty times a day (on Average).

Yes, that little happy phone you carry around, although small in package, is, unlike an auto, which is an obvious source of pollution and energy consumption, also a fossil-fuel burner, comparable in scope because it not only is owned by 5 times as many people as automobiles, but, unlike an auto, is consuming power 24 hours a day 7 days a week, as is the network over which its data must fly.

What the US citizen is unaware of, and could really care less about, is that the reason these two technologies were deployed, is that they were Defense Department initiatives, one by the Eisenhower administration, the other, by the Bush/Clinton administrations, using taxpayer money, approved by the most rabid of conservatives, since they came under the rubric of "Defense", when it/they were in fact shoddily-disguised gifts to the private sector and served as Keynesian stimuli to the economy.

So while the most energy-intensive technology, the one that inspired a nationwide impetus to business from which everyone initially benefited, so its destructive rampage across the continent was cheered, the other, the so-called, Information Superhighway, was designed for the exact opposite: to destroy entire industries and change the middle-class into the muddle-class, were both, like it or not, Military technologies. The first, a copy of Adolf Hitler's autobahns, which, because the third Reich depended on them rather than rail for its internal logistical needs, helped bring about his defeat, as the supply of rubber and oil needed to run them was beyond the capacity of Germany, with its scant supplies of either, to procure. Both the highway/auto complex and Darpanet were spun-off to the private sector as gifts and that, the banks following suit, were used, not to democratize, but to militarize, an entire population, albeit one that, from its inception, was always primed and ready to go to battle to expunge any and all barriers to their untrammeled access to resources.

They were specifically designed to make America grate against every international standard of cooperation and peaceful pursuits of growth, enabling its Superpower status and excluding, as much as possible, the rest of the world from its ascendancy. Now, in and of itself, this isn't really much different than any other Nation State in history, The British Empyre (and I do mean pyre) being the most recent example. But the second world war, or so we were taught in our history classes, proved the old order was one fraught with intractable dangers that would, every generation or so, explode into a planet-wide conflagration, and so the UN was formed and the nations of the world declared they would come together in mutual understanding to try and prevent the recurrence of anything approaching such unparalleled mayhem again.

Ronald Reagan said the hell with that and started the longest, most ambitious build-up of offensive capabilities of any nation in the history of the world for a country that was neither at war nor having its sovereignty threatened by any other country. There was one overriding reason for this atavistic return to trampling around the globe for economic opportunism: Oil. We needed it and they had it. And now Mrs. Clinton insists that we have it again, presumably because of fracking, despite the fact that the number of rigs has plummeted, the amount of oil produced thereby, shrinking.

Not that the amount of syn-oil extracted by ripping up the continent, injecting so much poison into its interior at such high pressures that formerly seismically quiescent Oklahoma has become earthquake central, hasn't produced results. We have gone from producing a mere 1/3 of the oil we burn to double that amount. But production of 2/3's of one's oil supply does not energy independence make. And when you factor in the newly-enabled privilege of the oil industry to take that oil and export it to wherever it'll fetch the highest price, the entire concept of energy independence becomes completely meaningless. Sure we're producing more. But we're shipping that extra production overseas, so we're also importing more. How independent is THAT?

The reason for this blatant lying is the same as it always is, whether it's Wells Fargo or VW, Phillip Morris or Samsung: to further enmesh the populace in the web of lies they beg to be cocooned in. Whether it's that they will somehow be "great" again, or, more insidious, that they have, through some miracle of wishful thinking (of the sort Sarah Palin would have been mercilessly (and deservedly) excoriated for), become "energy" independent. That somehow not needing the Saudi's oil means it's OK to furnish them with phosphorous bombs to drop on Yemen, because we're not now being black-mailed into doing so, but are doing it instead just for the sheer joy of burning up yet another Middle Eastern nation now that we're through with burning up Middle Eastern oil.

Yet it's The Donald who's the monster because he wants to grope women without their consent? Burning them to a cinder, along with their children, in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq, without their consent, well, that's just business as usual; nothing to see here.

But as the Declaration of energy Independence, all the while making the economy dependent on greater and greater supplies of a finite resource whose supplies are dwindling and whose byproducts of combustion are chemical refuse causing worldwide destruction, aren't issues that Mrs. Clinton has either the intellectual or political resources to address, she instead uses the politicians' favorite refuge of obfuscation, subterfuge and the always reliable, outright lying.

During her first tenure in the White House, then as first lady, I watched the freeways leading to Silicone Valley's beehive of activity become more and more congested with larger and larger vehicles, sucking up ever-increasing quantities of energy-intensive fuels, as the New Economy, most of which was comprised of pure hokum, waxed eloquently about Tele-commuting, and how it was going to replace the time-wasting activity of the daily commute, enabling one to spend more time with one's children, reducing one's expenses, and producing less stress in our lives. But None of this happened. Contrarily, people were forced into longer and longer commutes, burning up an increasingly untenable amount of resources, and taking people away from their families for a longer time, every day of the week, with a work-week that now often included Saturday, which, even if for a half day, requires the expenditure of the exact same amount of resources to go back-and-forth, as a weekday in which you get paid twice as much since you worked twice as long.

There has been no change in any of the ways we live our lives that will change any of this for the better. Nothing. Nor are any planned. Yet neither Mrs.Clinton, nor Trumplestiltskin has had anything REAL to say about how they would get us out of this inescapable corner we've painted ourselves into.

And it is for that reason that the debate should have ended right at the beginning when they each flailed the other with fact that they weren't fit to be president. But not because of their personal lives, which are, as everyone's is, hopelessly compromised, but because they have nothing to offer, and so they have offered nothing. And this, it would seem, is the only criteria needed to wrest the nomination for the Presidency of the United States from their respective political parties.

Now could you explain to me one more time why the US is the indispensable nation? The beacon of freedom? 'Cause I really don't get it.


Tuesday, October 4, 2016

"Life's a Gas, So Burn 'er Up!": VW's Descent into Eco-Terrorism for Profit.

On Otto-Pilot: It's Now Out of the Crew's Control.


Despite the U.S. Department of Energy forecast in 2012 that U.S. gasoline consumption would steadily decline for the foreseeable future, August was the biggest month ever for U.S. gasoline combustion, igniting a veritable conflagration of 9.7 million barrels each and every day.

Juxtaposed with this data is Erica Goode's NYT pablum piece, How Small Forests Can Help Save the Planet.  LOL.  This headline is absolute nonsense. Erica, sweetie darling, the planet is in no need of saving. It has been spinning its entire history except a small slice of time, sans mankind, sans mammals, sans geoengineering. During its 4.5 billion year lifetime, it has survived being completely frozen, collisions with asteroids, and volcanic eruptions on a planetary scale. There is no danger to the Planet from climate change, and therefore not one little iota of truth to the idiotic claim that, “Small Forests Can Help Save the Planet".

This is just more cutesy tripe to convince the US public, (which actually needs no convincing, because in their barbaric hearts, they could virtually care less), that we can keep driving aimlessly through life like a bunch of moronic serfs flying around while we sit on our useless asses; mindlessly driving in circles every single day of our lives, increasingly to go to far off jobs simply to pay for the conveyances in which to do so and the fuel that enables said vehicles to gulp down an ever-increasing amount of the very oxygen their drivers need to actually breath, while spewing out poisonous gasses; everybody owning their own little chemical weapon of mass destruction, but as characteristic of modern times, taking no responsibility for the damage and death it strews in its wake. WE are in danger, NOT the planet, ya freak. To see what’s really the problem check out Salon’s:

“http://www.salon.com/2016/09/27/americans-are-addicted-to-oil-gasoline-consumption-is-higher-than-ever-before_partner/”

 And neither do Americans manufacturers have any intention whatsoever of curtailing their production of ICE machines, the manufacture of which is heavily subsidized by the very countries that are sooooo concerned about Climate Change, that they take jet-fueled junkets to completely misleading conferences such as the Paris Copout conference to put on a false display of their sincere intentions, while their actions display a determination to continue to compete with each other to see who can dig up , transport, and burn up the most fossil fuels in the least amount of time. All the while pretending they're NOT doing exactly that. And always knowing that it is in the very worst long-term interests of their constituents. So nurturing a small forest, unless it can add to the perception that they're, well, doing something, is the last thing they care about.

As for the autos, their numbers increase inexorably year after year, decade after decade, at a rate almost as high as the manufacture of the verbal pabulum spewed out by such industry-kowtowing rags as the NYT. However, it is hard to reconcile their sanguine prognostications with reality when it's noticed that gasoline prices, which peaked during the summer of 2008 above $4.00 gallon, driven by crude oil prices that had climbed to over $140/barrel (a result of the mania for speculation fostered by a White House beholden to the Texas Mafia, headed by GW and crony Cheney, that not only allowed, but abetted the rabid run-up in oil prices as their last-gasp effort to wring out of the consumer the cash Texas felt/feels it deserves as the largest  oil producer in the nation) are now predicted to drop below $2/gallon in some parts of the country. Not coincidentally, but co-incidentally, the rate of SUV sales has already increased and car manufacturers are already churning out vehicles "with a larger footprint" (tr: that burn more fuel), and salivating at the prospect of burgeoning sales for these high-margin behemoths. How does this reconcile with the Paris Protocols? Who cares? You'll certainly not hear any one asking why they didn't bring this up during the punditry's jabfest following tonight's Debate Circus.

Professor Peter Wadhams: “In the long run, only by taking carbon out of the air can we hope to get the concentrations down enough to save us from dangerous climate change."

But, despite the "Small Forests", which do exactly that, take carbon out of the air, the rainforests, which do a world-class job of that same thing, are being destroyed, still, at a record pace, yet they already do what no number of small forests can ever do. No, instead, as our economies continue to produce more and  more of the ICE machines that pour the exact same gas INTO the atmosphere, we insist, as we do for water, which we think is a good idea to spend millions and millions of dollars to make it drinkable so that we can then shit in it, and then want to recycle it by cleaning that shat-in water, to the tune of yet additional millions more, instead of just, oh, I don't know, how about this, Not pooping in it in the first place. We likewise bang our collective heads against the wall to devise methods of taking CO2 OUT of the air, while never contemplating a life wherein we simply don't burn burn burn ever increasing amounts of fuels that discharge CO2 INTO it.

"Even if we continue building wind and solar at the current record rates, it would take centuries to reach half of our total power generation from wind and solar". Half!  And that calculation is arrived at without factoring in any of those imagined millions of electric vehicles we contemplate plugging into that already over-subscribed grid.

India Ratifies Paris Climate Change Agreement NPR:


India Ratifies Paris Climate Change Agreement NPR





India Ratifies Paris Climate Change Agreement Narendra Modi 
The message of Gandhi Ji inspires all of us. India will always work with the world to overcome climate change & create a green planet. https://twitter.com/fhollande/status/782555296690503680 


Well, that's a relief, huh? All's well, now that India, the largest coal-burning nation in the world, is intent on "overcoming climate change" (Huh? What does that even mean? Oh, that's right,  nothing ... "CREATE a green planet"?! ... Is there no bottom to the depth of banality they'll sink to?)  But it fits in perfectly with the rest of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Since said  agreement amounts to exactly that: nothing.

“The Sky’s Limit: Why the Paris Climate Goals Require a Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production,” this report says that just burning fossil fuels from projects presently in operation will produce enough greenhouse gas emissions to push the world well past 2°C of warming this century. Limiting warming to 1.5°C would require even larger closures of existing operations.

Like that'll happen.

If there were one iota of truth in the idea of a "Managed Decline", then VW would be forced to halt its operations and become the poster child for how to manage the decline of Fossil Fuel Production: Stop eco-terrorists, which is what VW is, in their tracks. There is no dearth of excess capacity in the auto industry. The dissolution of one manufacturer would not even put a dent in the surplus being sold to an unforgivably naive public. But instead we've chosen to do exactly the opposite; we're going to pay them to continue operations:

When American authorities revealed that Volkswagen used software to trick pollution tests, it spurred widespread outrage. Documents obtained by SPIEGEL show that European officials knew about the deception for years -- but didn't act on it. (So how come the Europeans knew about it years before we did? Hint: they didn't). And how come an incentive package has been designed  by Tennessee to support Volkswagen's production of the seven-seat midsize CrossBlue and a five-passenger hybrid Cross Coupe GTE, bringing that state's citizens' burden to close to a billion dollars, has been provided to support a known criminal automaker and eco-terrorist?

With this blatant outreach to a criminal corporation by a US State government, abetted by the US Federal government, coercing its citizens to subsidize the profits of outlaws that poison not only their own citizens, which they apparently could care less about, but the citizens of the rest of the country as well, (do you really believe the government didn't know about VW's crime before they gave them the first 3/4 of a billion?) Well, okay, but even if you did, their plausible deniability goes right out the window - defenestration for the entire nation -  when in the wake of the VW's criminality, they not only don't fine them, but up the ante by taking even more from their "right to work" citizenry to pad the pockets of a foreign firm's CEOs, giving official sanction to obfuscation, designed chemical poisoning, and increased destruction of the rainforests mentioned above, as the bio-diesel those VW's run on is produced by burning down enormous swathes of perfectly good rainforests to plant palm oil trees for biodiesel production (which in turn requires burning more fossil fuels for its processing and transport). To whit:

... a meeting of European Commission experts in April 2010, "traffic and especially diesel vehicles are predominant sources of NOx (nitric oxide) and NO2 in urban areas."

Head of Tibetan Buddhism: "I think the most important thing is that we need to learn is how to control our human desires. But our culture and our information and all of the media and its advertising purposely stokes our desires and this has a strong negative effect on the environment. So, I think for that reason it is very important to control our desires, which is a very basic thing that we need to do".

HAH! Fat chance. What good is it for a small sect to control their desires while the rest of the world concentrates on spurring their own?

But it's not impossible:

A heavy dose of conservation has cut Japan's total electricity use to below where it was at the end of last decade:  post-Fukushima conservation efforts dropped Japan's electricity use below a PetaWatt-hour, and further efforts have turned the drop in electricity use into an ongoing trend. And that's in just five years!

Yet even as one of the largest economies in the world has been dramatically reducing its electricity production, not only the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but the rate at which that amount is increasing, has continued to grow unabated 'til we now have more than 400 ppm. Now. In September. When its accumulation is at its yearly low. For the first time. Ever. That figure may well never drop below 400 ppm in any of our lifetimes.

But here in the USA or Western Europe, and especially in China and India, growth growth growth; spurred by any and all tricks and sleight of hand the Fed or the Congress, or State or corporate governments, can conjure (see Wells Fargo (whose crimes, remember, would not have been committed if traders on Wall St, which has so far escaped scrutiny, hadn't been so gullible and yield-hungry, that they fell for the "Eight is Great", pitch just as stupidly as Wells' personnel), for a good example), not only in energy usage, but in debts incurred to enable that growth, is going into industries, such as internet companies, that can't exist without increasing energy usages. Many of those debts will surely fail to be paid when expected growth rates falter. And as the BRICS and more tar emerging economies, will prove, given their complete dependency on futures in fossil fuel exploitation, as they follow the path of Venezuela, and become submerged economies, it will increase the pressure to continue doing the only thing we know how to do, only to do it faster, and more efficiently !(*~*)!: Burn up the Globe. So, far from Saving the Planet, we've ignited a Mad Mad Mad Max World of Small Forest fires, carefully hidden beneath paper-thin sheets of metal silently stoked with no more effort than a slight tap of the toe, each contributing their part to a Lake Baikal-like smoking combustion, as everyone blindly zoom zoom zooms into a suffocating future choking on each other's fume fume fumes.