The Twin Towers of Oiligarchy: Energy and Cruelty

The Frown prints of the Roiled Family of the Wehrmacht Republic.

All wars are about GOD: Gold, Oil, and Drugs.

As the Trump-thump becomes the opposition's stump, they lose their perspective, they forget that the best way to stop the military-industrial complex at which he is at the helm is to stop buying useless crap, especially new (whether ICE, hybrid, fuel cell, or electric) cars! But our pot-bellied POTUS  has given them exactly what they most craved: someone else to blame for their own hypocrisy as they continue their own energy-intensive, fossil-fuel-powered lifestyles. Conveniently forgotten is the fact that the election was like a beauty contest, and the only choices were two ugly bitches.

Let's look at some of Matt Savinar's predictions that have become manifest since his The Oil Age is Over (copyright 2004) was published:

1) There will be no peace.

Although self-evident today, and even hailed as a reason to bestow Nobel Peace Prizes on those who unabashedly proclaim it, in 2004 this was quite prescient and controversial.

1a) Can the US win these wars?

No. Never intended to, really.

 2)  $50 oil will seem cheap in the years to come.

Not only does $50 oil seem cheap, it's TOO cheap! Not to worry. Nary a soul remembers that oil was under $11/bbl when GW literally took office. As it now sits, $72/bbl or so, the move to get it even even higher is relentless from the 3 PetroStates of Russia, the US and Saudi Arabia, The OPECking order the ROW kowtows to, the combined output of which represents a full third of worldwide production. This is at the heart of the so-called Trade War that has been launched simultaneously with the Fed's push for higher interest rates. Oil costs, being priced in dollars, is already on the rise for other nations as the dollar strengthens. So even as money becomes more expensive for the Emerging Economies, as their loans are based at least 60-70% in  currencies other than their own, drawing down their foreign reserves, the amount of dollars needed to fund just their economies in their current state (ie, sans growth) will inexorably increase, while ours will initially decrease, ebbing exactly as we go to the polls to elect the next US President.

3) The inability of the US to win its wars won't stop us from provoking them. The corporate and government elites will find there is no choice but to fight, which belief is reinforced by the fact that they profit from both inflicting the damage and cleaning up the mess that results.

4) Food production is energy production. Corn into ethanol in which it is taken to an even more absurd equation of oil production is food production that is then turned into energy production, but only after the food produced sucks up more energy production in order to turn it into usable fuel. Insanity writ large that the "conservative" Midwest is now completely dependent on, despite the Bush era coal-fired plants belching CO2 into their pristine air.

5) Russia is not our friend.

6) Petrochemicals are much more than fuel.

Our entire way of life is built around petrochemicals. A fact that the plastic islands in the oceans of the world so ominously demonstrates. There is an article by Dmitri Orlov in which he declares that gasoline was actually a byproduct of petrochemical production before it was a fuel. Think of plutonium in nuclear energy production. A toxic byproduct that would be an enormous expense for the industry that produces it, but is instead turned into a profit source. Brilliant! Until it isn't; and the road we've taken, built from tar derived from the same oil barrel, begins to melt in the heat, producing an analogy of exactly what happens to the economy in the form of cars rendered immobile by the very substance that made their effortless flight over asphalt roads possible.

The Hydrogen economy, Helium 3 NatGas, Nukes: Energy Returned On Energy Invested

Ethanol is the poster boy of boondoggles when one considers this equation, but Natural Gas is right behind for several reasons:

Although hailed as 50% less CO2 for = amt's of power, the equation has been, like ethanol, jerry-rigged by excluding High level of methane leakage from not only existing, but closed wells, which ,

a) thanks to the short lifespan of fracked wells, are proliferating like mushrooms, such that even if they leaked as little as the old wells, there are so many of them that their cumulative addition of unburned methane is prodigious;

b) Fracking wells are drilling constantly to keep up the output a conventional well would have gone on for years producing, so have become completely unhinged from demand: they are so far from meeting actual US demand that their numbers are irrelevant: there can never be so many of them as to satisfy the galloping usage of even our own country, never mind the world, which means that the continental US is being flooded with the NatGas that goes along with them. This has resulted in a glut and a concomitant drop in the price below its production costs. The answer? The one they had in mind all along: LNG. Liquify that sucker and start shipping it overseas. There's a little problem with that. Even not counting the tremendous investment (on credit, of course, with guarantees from Your taxpayer dollars) in both dollars and CO2-generating fossil fuels burned (burning into our "carbon budget") to build the LNG terminals (needed at Both ends, as it must be returned to its gaseous state before being burned), the process itself, of freezing enormous volumes of gas so as to make it "economical" to ship around the globe, destroys any CO2 advantage it had over coal;

c) Burning Coal releases aerosols into the atmosphere that serve as reflectors to solar radiation, cooling the planet on one hand while heating it via CO2 emissions on the other. NatGas does no such thing. And whereas CO2 takes time to build up its heat-enhancing capabilities, the ameliorative effects of the aerosols that coal produces are immediate, so removing, especially while continuing burning apace of other fossil fuels, will add heat to the atmosphere in real time.

7). Industry will benefit as it will be able to outsource labor to domestic workcamps;

     The construction and maintenance of workcamps will provide additional jobs;
   
      With the supply of cheap fossil fuel energy diminishing, big business will have no choice but to return to a system of slavery to maintain its profits. (And under a Capitalist yoke, as I've said perhaps too many times, there will be no Velvet Revolution, it'll be more like Road Warrior).

8) If  he's elected, John Kerry's foreign and domestic policies (or, as it turned out 4 years later, Barack Obama) will probably not be much different than GW Bush's.

9) A now-obvious fact, but: since we refuse to believe that in order for America to be a military power abroad, it must be a fascist police state at home, as democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization, but only black people seem to have noticed, taking, as they have, the brunt of this policy of creepy fascism.

10) Even once we're Bush free, remember Jeb is waiting in the wings. The only alternative to Jeb will likely be Hilary. Basically We're screwed.

Enter Trump. (The reaction to his above-true prediction that he didn't foresee ... but who did even more than a full decade later?)

But the ultimate prediction that we all do our part in ensuring its fruition is the one that maintains that 

11) "There will be no Peace".

"The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

The American polity will lead us into a Mad Max world as it seeks to cocoon itself behind a screen of national missile defense" (And drone warfare, cyber assaults, stealth attacks, psy-ops and trade Wars).

Frank Norris wrote of the Railroad, in his turn-of-the-century novel, The Octopus:

 "Into the  prosperous valley, into the quiet community of farmers, that galloping monster, that terror of steel and steam had burst, shooting athwart the horizons, flinging the echos of its thunder over all the ranches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path."

Perhaps that sounds a bit overblown, but it was the first glimmer of what was to come: it foresaw the tank; that iron monster at the center of our Wehrmacht Republic that carries its rails wrapped around its self-sufficient armory; its treadwheel mashing its own path as it spews metallic projectiles of death while spitting flames that torch houses and people alike, leaving blood and ashes, death and destruction in its wake. A relentless, faceless leviathan with vast power, remorseless, terrible, with a heart of steel, knowing no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance; crushing out the human atoms with a rattling calm, the agony of the destruction it inflicts causing neither a ripple, nor the slightest perturbation to its multitudinous wheels and cogs as they seamlessly roll over every obstacle foolhardy enough to defy its onrushing onslaught; the iron monster that plows full into their midst, merciless, inexorable, flinging bodies like so much chaff, snapping backs, crushing brains out, leaving the Empire, that champion of the Corporations' rule, upon the field as victor; placid, unperturbed, unassailable, snapping the thread of Nations' lives, leaving nothing behind but the tangled ends of an undying grief and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. But the lamentable sounds that rise up from the trammeled victims, the prolonged cries of entire countries' agonies, the sobbing wails of infinite pain, cause nary a flutter of compassion in hearts riven with greedy ambition, that soulless force, fired by desire, that turns humans into monsters, Nations into predatory beasts.

And as we squabble at the border like Capulets and Montagues, forgotten is the support both parties have unabashedly given to rising War expenditures and military deployments for decades, with little more than an occasional squeak of protest since the resultant Merchant of Death spending lardered pork over every political bloc in the nation; so inured to its offal stench have we become that living in this charnel house of a nation, no one senses even a whiff of the fetid fragrance, as redolent of raw violence as an abattoir, preferring to hurl insults at each other so we can forget that, as in the words of the Prince to his subjects: "All are Punished". But no politician can hurl such a bromide at the US polity, because we would simply not know what we are being punished for.

Instead, Peak Oil having been put behind us, we scramble for an explanation of how we have become such a mess. Denial, rejection of societal responsibility, as it becomes, "every man for himself", that mantra of Capitalism, that hammers it into our consciousness that Tomorrow belongs to ME, so that we all forget that there is no safe way out for ourselves when society is sweeping toward destruction. This is so apparent, it's logic so obvious, that instead of arguing against it, the Ruling Class, the Kept Class, the Entitled Class, simply dictated that there's simply no such thing. Society does not exist.

Thus can they rig the economy to allocate its entire output to their own use. And here, in the Democracy that bristles with armaments, bustles with geo-engineering modules called cars, leads the world in the manufacture, deployment and use of chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, all to give us the freedom of choice between which lipstick we buy or what manly-man ballroom-a-plenty underpants we sport, the reality of energy awareness sinks into the morass of national forgetfulness, its central role in the demise of not just our civilization, but our very civility, forgotten. By even the small minority who ever knew about it.

"Low Energy" Future would be a far, far better thing We do.

But a low energy future is a far far cry from what we continue to build for the future of our beloved country. Contrarily, the use of energy continues to accelerate, along with the buildup of methane and CO2 in the atmosphere. Even as deserts all over the globe glisten with solar arrays and rooftops get blackened with solar panel installations, and even as EV's roll off fossil-fuel-enabled assembly lines and mono-crops of corn fill the fields of the Midwest as far as the eye can see only to go up in smoke to fuel ICE machines, the amount of oil burned, the tonnage of coal oxidized, the cubic feet of natural gas needed to slake our ever-growing thirst for electricity (for such essential things as enabling our appliances to 'talk' to each other and quench speculators' burning desire for crypto-currencies), all continue their inexorable rise. A rise, now that we've collectively decided to forget anything so fanciful as 'resource constraint' or 'peak oil', that is now complemented by the rise in what's come to be called green/renewable energy, that, far from enabling us to move to a lower energy future, locks us into one that is so dependent on ever-increasing energy usage, that it will leave us unable to do the most basic of everyday activities, like unlocking the front door to our own house, without a power assist. Ie, without monetizing it.

We have rigged the entire economy to function under the same assumptions as electric windows in cars: reduce the terrible strain that opening the window manually would exact, for a bit of ease, a touch of royal privilege, that tingle of power without effort the flick of a button produces, but leaves us in the predicament of no juice, no escape. We have similarly built our entire economy into a trap, one that is entirely dependent on an electronic array of devises and AI collectively called The Web, which is by any definition a trap, a World Wide Snare, but even the audacity of naming it what it really is has not enlightened us to its true nature in the slightest. Because it gives us a feeling of  power even as it saps the last bit of it to funnel into the matrix.

That was the whole point of the so-called information revolution that one generation is completely mum about to their children: Monetization. That was the push in  the eighties to monetize everything  that wasn't tied down. And that is exactly what trapping us in the matrix does, because that energy that's now needed to unlock the front door, may be as green as you like, but it still comes at a cost, and so to go to work each day, you now have added a little more to your cost, a little more to the Corporate machine that feeds that energy to you in those little sips, in much the same way the media feeds us its doses of scintillating violence and encapsulated murder.

Every time you surrender your ability to do something such that at first it uses, then needs (as alternate methods of performing the task are jettisoned or forgotten), energy, your actions have been monetized, you can no longer perform them without paying someone something. Such as changing the TV remotely. It may have been inconvenient before, maddening, even, but it didn't cost you anything, and, as we  have learned, even that simple amount of exercise, going from your chair to the box to change the channel, is beneficial to a human body, because, like all mammals, it has evolved for action. But this benefit is now foregone, and the adverse health affects of the resultant hours of sedentary viewing, are legion. So something that was a godsend to an invalid has turned the rest of us into invalids, and it's a change we gladly accept, but ultimately pay for. Every household now can boast of dozens of remotes, controlling everything from their radio and TV to their sauna and children. More plastic in that one convenience, when multiplied dozens of times, than was in an entire 1950's apartment. Then there's the batteries, many left to simply corrode in the old devise, as the new one takes a different size, and the electronics, in both the devise itself and the one it controls that needs its own compatible embedded electronics to enable it to respond to the commands you give it via the remote.

And this monetization of everything under the sun makes us participants in the geo-engineering of the planet:

 Dane Wigington's Geoengineering Watch quotes Mr.Wigington's assertion that the more we try to geo-engineer the problem of climate change away, the faster we bring it on. Exactly the same dynamic as the 'green" revolution: the more we add green energy into the mix, the faster Climate Change accelerates.

In a world where we spend hours and hours burning up precious fossil fuels that we all know are leaving an invisible gas to choke us all to death to highlight a meeting between two egomaniacs intent on enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of their countrymen, such as we saw in the recent meetup between a Trump card and an Un leader, not one of the myriad talking heads bloviating over the 'event' ever mentions the self-aggrandizing nature of both its participants; no wonder nary a word is spoken as to the other, more pressing, real problems that are studiously ignored on a daily basis.

The largest of which , and the most glaring, being, the ever-accelerating straight-jacketing of economies to needing ever-increasing energy consumption in a world that constantly bemoans what that self-same ever-accelerating use of energy is doing to the future viability of every lifeform on this hapless globe.

So back to Dane Wigington's Geoengineering Watch.

 Many people consider geoengineering to be of a conspiracy-theory level of thinking, even as they themselves drive around every day of their lives in their own private little geo-engineering machine. Every man and woman piloting around a gasoline-burning engine knows that they are spewing molecules of CO2 into the air every time their foot presses down on  that pedal that enables fossil fuel injection and combustion. We prefer not to talk about it, but that doesn't keep it out of our minds. Ignoring it, however, has driven us, as a society, completely out of our minds. That's what cognitive dissonance does, you know. You eventually go bonkers, because you habitually do things you know, but never acknowledge, are inimical to your own specie's longterm survival. Such as participating in geoengineering the atmosphere of the planet you live on, heating it up to the point of stoking cataclysm after cataclysm. As an example, what we've done in the political sphere by purposely forcing cognitive dissonance onto ourselves: Letting the military call itself the "Defense" department as it wages Infinity Wars against prostrate countries so weak even their neighbors need not arm themselves. The name's soon to be changed to the Nobel Peace Prize Department.

It is because our minds have been purposely trained to accept such lies, and it is done purposely; in the days when war wasn't so blithely accepted as the status quo, but thought of as an eventuality, countries had no problem referring to the military part of their governments as the War Department, as we also did here in the USA. It is only after WW2, when the world decided, well, the US decided, that War was to be the engine that ran the economy, such that we have been on a war footing ever since, did they who must be obeyed decide that the truth caused a bit too much discomfiture amongst those insisting on their  humanitarian ideals as the drivers of our conflicts, and so decided to give it the more innocuous label of Defense. The result, of this pre-conditioning is that we can fully participate in a feat of geo-engineering the likes of which the world has never seen, and simultaneously think of anyone talking  about someone purposely geo-engineering the environment as a nutjob.

But it's a bit too much like collateral damage: If you know ahead of time that someone other than the target is going to be destroyed by your actions, it isn't really collateral damage, as it was part of the plan. If a drone strike is intended for someone in a wedding party, for example, you can claim the groom was killed, and the rest were collateral damage, but that's being what's called to your face disingenuous, but in reality is bald-face lying. If they survive, it's true you don't plan to hunt them down, but that they were killed, was a known side-effect. Planned mayhem is a far more accurate description than collateral damage, which implies casualties other than the target were unforeseen and unavoidable, whereas neither one of those adjectives is an apt description of intentionally bombing a target who is attending a wedding.

In other words, you can't pretend that we aren't purposely geo-engineering the environment simply because that isn't the reason we drive. Because, in order to drive, we must purposely, ie by design, burn fossil fuels which you are fully cognizant add CO2 to the atmosphere, which CO2 is causing that atmosphere to heat. So unless we, now in 2018, agree with that spawn of Manhattan, President Trump, and deny reality, we are currently, purposely, engaged in geo-engineering the environment in order to drive. Not in the same sense that we engineer the landscape so that we can drive over it on a smooth surface by covering everything with a deathmask that smothers the life out of any living thing it's sticky boiling mass is lava'd over, but we nevertheless know that it is part and parcel of the process of combustion that one suck up huge volumes of oxygen, and return CO2 in its place. And when that source of carbon is from trapped sunlight from millions of years ago, the percentages of CO2 to carbon can do nothing but change, with the disadvantage always going to oxygen, it being the limiting factor, since it's only being created by what's alive now, an amount far outweighed by the addition of not only all the CO2 that is being produced from lifeforms currently living, but by chemically attaching it to newly freed carbon that was sequestered in fossilized lifeforms during eon after eon of earth's existence. The limiting factor in science is the one that puts an end to a process when an infinite supply of another is available. You can add all the nitrogen fertilizer to your crops that you want, but if there's not the concomitant amount  of water available, they will grow quite robustly only until the water runs out.

The limiting factor in mankind's case is the very oxygen we breathe. But you won't hear that discussed on the evening news, not interesting enough.

So every time we turn on, press on, or turn up the gas, we should remember the prison guard's pet seagull, which the inmates always referred to as a tern of the screw.