Twenty-Five years after Kyoto.

2017 marks the 25'th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocols. Let's see what has changed since then: 

Has our use of fossil fuels diminished? No. It has increased, and now has the added burden of diesel fuels and ethanol which, like the fossil fuels they pretend to replace, feature ecological rape and unapologetic habitat destruction.

Has the amount of CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere subsided? No. It is not only not subsiding, it is instead accumulating at an accelerated rate. It is now greater than 410 ppm, and will never again in our lifetimes go below the 400 ppm, never mind the fairy tale 250 the Paris agreements settled on (as recently as 2014 it was below 400 ppm. What this means is that  the rate it is accelerating is itself accelerating. This is akin to seeing yourself driving 1.5 miles over the speed limit, and determining that that is too fast so you have a conference with all the other drivers, and decide to roll back to the agreed upon speed limit, then find yourself in the space of just a few miles going more than 10 miles an hour faster than the speed limit yet deciding nevertheless that the best way to deal with that is to have yet another conference). In addition, this atmospheric burden of CO2 has also been worsened by the accelerated addition of enormous plumes of methane (which is not even mentioned by either Kyoto nor Paris, despite its reputation for warming the planet many times faster than CO2) from rapidly melting Arctic seas and uncapped leaks from thousands of fracked wells. Which fact reminds one of the other powerful greenhouse gas never talked about: water vapor. Which is also not even on the table, as though we think, with floods raging on every continent on the planet, it's only water, so how can that matter?

Has the main culprit responsible for the increase of these gases, industrialized civilization (sic), laid plans to replace itself with a competitive infrastructure? No. It has used financial legerdemain and casino economics to computerize the globalization of industry for the purported reason of making it more efficient, while it has instead made it more intractable, and removed billions from the countrysides and funneled them in to ever-growing metropolises which have no ability to generate the food, water, or energy resources they require for their maintenance.

Has it gotten control over the geometric increase in its human population growth? No. It has instead, by providing cheap fossil-fuel-derived energy to an ever-widening assemblage of nations, increased the Middle Class, the class most responsible for the rampant release of CO2 into the atmosphere, to mammoth proportions, resulting in a burgeoning human population and the increased destruction from the requisite livestock and agricultural acreage and rampant overfishing necessary to sate its insatiable appetite.

Mankind is nothing if not contraire.

As Queensland reels from Typhoon Debbie, and Peru, where hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless by similar deluges that have caused the tragic loss of 100 souls, destroyed thousands of buildings, 200 bridges, and 2,000 miles of highway, while, on  Friday night, a member of this new breed of monster thunderstorms, pumped to greater intensity by the moisture bleed off from record warm ocean waters, unloaded a total of a half-month’s worth of rainfall in just a few hours upon the small Colombian city of Mocoa losing more than 250 residents' lives to the raging torrent and devastating landslides, the new paradigm of locking in tomorrow's disasters by mitigating today's is on full display.

For one State alone, the estimated damage toll from this ongoing climate disaster is now 6 billion dollars. But in both Queensland and Colombia the cost will be even higher. And these billions and billions of dollars in recovery costs will all be earned by generating economic activity spurred by the industrialized underpinnings of Capitalistic monopolies of globalized trade that are at the root cause of each of these disasters, cementing the certainty that they will be repeated again and again. Much like the dynamic of the rolling War in Iraq which has followed a parallel timeline: push it to the brink of destruction, while raking in enormous profits, finance reconstruction from the disastrous levels of creative destruction your actions have resulted in, thereby locking the populations in a prison of debt, rinse, and repeat. Over and over and over and over.

Like a field goal in a tied game, it is not a foregone conclusion, it is a gone for conclusion, and we are getting what we have gone for, so don't be too surprised when it is gone for good.