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| Après (plusiers) mois (de fracturation), le Déluge. |
A duality happened this morning, with the perusal of articles written about seemingly unrelated phenomena that are, in fact, what is curiously referred to as, joined at the hip, or in this case, perhaps the ship. Specifically, the oil ship, as in Super Tanker. The ones being used to ship the energy reserves of the USA, the largest energy user in the world, to our enemies. This, despite the fact that even as our population growth is decreasing, along with that population's longevity, its energy usage continues to increase.
Now, as in right now, even as you read this, a lawsuit brought by this administration against the state of Washington is being fought. Washington has no interest in deepening, at great cost to itself, its deep water ports to accommodate the kind of mass exportation of the energy resources of Wyoming to China; that same China, that Trump is now pretending to "chastise" LOL! for its manipulation of trade. But the point is, is that the administration is using DEFENSE as a reason he's trying to force Washington, as in State, into building a facility that is not in its own economic interest, but is in Washington's, as in DC, and supposedly, all of ours, which it most certainly isn't, hence the retreat to the catch-all reason for anything illegal or illogical and counter-productive: Defense. War, or at least war spending, conquers all, as it were.
But, leaving that aside, let's travel southeast to the Texas ports of Corpus Christi and Houston where construction is underway to unleash a tsunami of fracked oil, oil that was fracked (another technology developed and deployed using taxpayer dollars and then handed over to the private sector to wreak havoc with on the rest of the economy, much the same as nuclear technology, computer tech, and the entire internet: all enterprises founded on taxpayer-funded research and development that the Department of Defense then used to reshape the economy to undermine the very tax-base from which it derived the funding to carry out research that no private "enterprise" would EVER have undertaken) purportedly to make America "Energy Independent", which , despite the doubling of its oil production, it is nowhere near being, and will, in fact, never be. That fact, however, has only increased the desperation of the measures which the Energy Czars are using to suborn Free markets and reap the last bonanza to be derived from the use of public wealth to churn National Treasures into private fortunes.
So keeping that in mind, let's visit the Atlantic, as in Monthly, for an article about the increasing number of life events that people are "celebrating", from Promposals, to gender-guessing of newborns (probably as a reaction against the idiocy that gender is a choice: that fleshy appendage you're sporting unsightly? No problem, just have it re-engineered and get your testicles hacked off in the bargain (the fact that one has to take such draconian measures being argument enough that gender is in fact NOT a choice)). Which article (I know, I know, I have more trouble staying on point than a flat-footed ballerina) reminded me of the fact that I considered one of the worst, as in intractable, problems facing any serious obstacles standing in the way of reducing our individual carbon footprint was exactly that, family events, meaning now, not only weddings, funerals, birthdays, and other anniversaries, and the flurry of flights each of those occasions occasion. But now we're adding MORE fumes to that already unsustainable jet exhaust. And all those flights are now peopled by passengers who have brought little packages of stored energy modules to entertain themselves on the plane, using "free" electricity they just stole from the airport, effectively substituting energy usage that used to be supplied by the airplane (jet engines, with very little modification, are used as dynamos in natural gas-fired power plants) with that supplied by the airport. If you think any of the millions and millions of airport passengers care a whit about how that juice was generated, I invite you to take a gander at the energy usage of Washington DC, largely provided by burning West Virginian coal, by top federal government officials, all of them ardent users of the airlines. Airlines which, together with the computers and the internet developed by that same federal government, are among the essential tools used to concentrate power in a central nexus.
Okay. But you see, it is among the young that this is happening. What the Gang Green conveniently ignores, is that like India and China, the Millennials of the OECD nations, (in case you haven't noticed what's happening in France is a result of a slight rise in fuel prices to grant its citizens the right to indulge in just one form of fossil fuel combustion) feel that now it's Their turn to pollute as a right of existence, and have no intention of cutting down on their burning desire to zoomzoom at the touch of a toe or a flick of a switch simply because you're worried about the future of the Planet (as it's so often, so moronically, put).
Again, although it's obvious how I might feel about this inkling, what seems to not be obvious to everyone, or even, from the silence that has been deafening for years now, to ANYone, is that these two parallel tracks are exactly the same two we were on that led to the Arab Oil Embargo, and we are in a far more precarious position today. A teetering tottering Tyranny of Terror traumatizing terra firma via truculence and tariff tirades.
Those two tracks are a concomitant increase in energy usage with a decrease in energy resources to feed the myriad technologies spawned and deployed while energy was (artificially) cheap and (deceitfully) prevalent. (Much like in this recessionary period we are, believe it or not, still in. When the Federal Reserve maintains an interest rate below which the Fed itself says is normal, that is stimulative, and an economy not in recession has no need for stimulation from cheap interest rates that keep entire industries solvent that should have gone bankrupt long ago (the American auto industry comes to mind), and analogously, many businesses are (can you say UBER?) showing initial success precisely because they can take advantage of energy prices far below market rates, that requires the impoverishment of the rest of the economic ecosystem (such as taxis/Bookstores as tax-free Amazon mauls Mall America).
Now, besides that outsize shots of amphetamine to what would be an otherwise shrinking economy, the new administration saw fit to further stimulate via an enormous tax gift to the already wealthy, eg himself and his children (One should remember Trump Charities always begin at home) and then topped that off with yet another overtly stimulative defense spending bill (defense spending is always stimulative, an increase in such spending, is therefore, even more so, and all of these measures are (supposed to be) stopgap: they provide the sizzle not the steak, which despite the padding of an entire decade, has yet to show up on the barbie, leaving it beyond my ken to decipher how even as the stock market and home values are propelled upward on the scintillating scent of all the unearned money to soon enough be garnered from raking the workers over the coals yet again, brings no outcry from those most hurt: Red State Trump supporters.
At least before the seventies, we produced more oil than we consumed ... until we didn't. And the reason we didn't, was the same reason as now: to get the price down for geopolitical reasons (all, while simultaneously extolling the benefits of a "Free" Market, that the entire combined forces of the Federal government, Texas, and Oil companies are strenuously, brazenly, manipulating right in front of our eyes, much like Communism being railed against even as we moved all the public's investment in computerization and other forms of mass production, and just handed it all over to not a Communist country, but to the Communist country: China). The result of which was, as proven by the desire of the first oil cartel to increase oil prices, we sold off the National treasure for a fraction of what it would be worth now (At the time of peak US conventional oil, ~1971, it was selling for $3.60/bbl).
Similarly, we are currently deliberately pumping full tilt in order to depress the price of oil while we export it hand over fist to Asian economies that then use it to undermine America's workers and American productivity, enbling them to dump an enormous mountain of cheap products onto American shores. Cheap because they have in place in Washington their owned man Trump, who is striving mightily to keep American Oil flowing into Chinese manufacturing at below market rates, those rates being kept below market rates via the oil being pumped out of the Permian basin right now (a name chosen cynically, as the Permian was the geologic era of the last great Extinction; this exploitation of the current Permian is promising to usher in a great extinction of its own).
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Now before I finally make it down to Florida, and why they should be suing Texas, as the Californians are suing PG&E, I feel it incumbent to point out that the enormous investment in the infrastructure necessary to move such a vast ocean of oil across the seven seas, is all being done with borrowed money, at cheap, again below market, rates (If home owners had to pay the actual interest rates for the houses they buy, interest rates based on reality, or what the MARKETPLACE perceives as reality (I thought that was all that mattered?), there would be no housing market to sustain the puffed up cloud economy, because prospective home buyers wouldn't be able to afford them. As it is, YOU, unbeknownst to yourselves, not that it's a deep dark secret, but simply because you'd rather not know, are, via Fannie Mae, the FHA and Freddie MAC (which have to buy up those mortgages, for the banks would NEVER take on that kind of risk), force the tax payer to take on the risk instead, burying trillions of dollars of low interest loans in federal bonds that the Fed, that kept the interest rate so low in the first place, then purchased as part of its QE. In other words, as they disparage and mock low-wage/low income households, it is exactly those households that pay for the home ownership of their "betters", because the profits get funneled to the middle class's REITs and Home builders' stock dividends, but the losses are borne by the government: You. Now that the corporations have their point man in Washington to cut their burden of paying the costs of the very institutions that keeps them profitable, the template is being adopted across the economy, even as they continue to insist that it is a Free Market System. As though they somehow haven't noticed that every single aspect of its operation is buoyed by a Central government (run by Republicans who insist the government get out of their way) that every year more and more resembles that of China's in its support for Housing markets, TBTF banks, shadow banking and money laundering, drug company bonanzas, auto manufacturing, and at the center stage: energy resource excavation extraction and exportation. All Hail the Free Market at work!).
The only insurance the banks pay is FDIC, but that 's on deposits, all their mortgage security liabilities they have been off-loading onto the Federal government while they pocket all the profits from their outrageous fees and whatever other Wells Fargo-inspired scam they can come up with. FDIC insurance which, by the way, before 2008 the banks were charged at a rate to support $40,000 in deposits, yet was raised on the fly, with not a whisper of protest, or a hint of paying back the treasury of the US that bore the brunt of the losses, to $250,000 overnight. It's as though you were paying a lower auto insurance premium, with the proviso that if your liabilities exceeded $40,000, you were responsible for the rest, but having incurred $250,000 instead, they said, "Oh, no problem, the government'll cover that. That's why it's free enterprise, we get to enterprise risk-free. ... Can you imagine?)
All the profits to the Corporations, all the risk to the public. That 's the new Capitalism, A poorly Centrally planned and managed economy, with all the profits funneled to the small Party Apparatchiks. This is what we have come to, the fall of the USSR meant the same thing as the fall of the NAZIs, we take over for them, using most of their worst policies, and call it democracy because people can vote ... but for what?
The importance of doing such an enormous (everything 's Big in Texas) buildout, is that those fracking bonds get sold and resold and because what is a liability to one person is an asset on the books of a different entity, leveraged, such that should those bonds fail, the concatenation effect of 2008 re-asserts itself while everyone scrambles around to find out what debt is payable and what debt isn't, all exacerbated by whatever started the rout in the first place (such as a recession or a drop in oil prices).
Now, what all this chicanery, defalcation, embezzlement and other financial "innovation", as well as energy policy manipulation and resource theft, has to do with Florida is, I think, best illuminated by an excerpt from the referenced link:
"Heavy industry in the Gulf pumps out greenhouse gases warming the climate, upping the risks of powerful storms that, in turn, endanger those same facilities and everything around them." (that's Fox news, btw, not MSNBC, or other "suspect liberal").
One of those things "around them" is the Gulf of Mexico. As much as Trump and his ilk may deny climate change and pretend they "Don't believe it" (Why is it that when a liar lies people just can't believe it?), the local effects of industrial activity are well-known, and the pell-mell exploitation of the Permian, when oil supplies are so plentiful that said production is crashing their prices below the cost of production, all during the hottest July and August in the history of record keeping, heated the Gulf to an inordinate degree, then further burdening it by flaring and ignored methane leaks, producing CO2 and water vapor, so the three most powerful greenhouse gases known to man, fueled the tropical depression of what was to become Hurricane Michael that then slammed into the Florida panhandle with the unmatched destructive power of a Cat5 maelstrom that pushed a 20 foot storm surge onto its coast.
If New York can sue Exxon, which has never burned a drop of oil, why shouldn't Florida sue Texas, which is producing oil using a technology that is known to burn more energy than all the previous oil rigs from the last generation of production just to GET the oil, and then combusts the natural gas, simply because they can't wait (all the gas that is flared is wasted, not because the gas is unrecoverable, this isn't the taiga here, but because they can't be bothered to wait until the gas pipelines are built, even though there is no need for that oil on the world market today). And the reason they can't wait is that they used borrowed money and those loans must be serviced, but to service those loans, they must pump more oil, the price of natural gas being so deflated by its overproduction, that they can't service the loans by selling it: this is the exact same dynamic that propelled farmers to plow up the prairies, which enterprise resulted in the dust bowl. Similarly, as Florida has learned, it is the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, that has to pay the cost for and bear the brunt of actions they had no hand in, effecting policies in which they had no voice in implementing.
Now that the Trump ire, with its flair for error, has pronounced that it is human activity that has caused California's wildfires, it would be incumbent upon Florida's representatives, if they didn't include the most reprehensible Senators in the country, to pounce on this acknowledgement to claim compensation from the State of Texas for its flagrant flaring and accelerated, unnecessary venting of CO2, methane, and water vapor, the three most powerful tropospheric heating gases into the environs of the Gulf, which, everyone being aware that heat is the fuel for hurricanes, was known to increase the risk of bombogenesis. Just not for Texas. But for the rest of the Southeast which continues to suffer as bout after bout of drenching, climate-changed-induced storms directly related to the extraordinary over-production of a resource the world has no current need of, but that the administration is using as the centerpiece of making America Great again.
But Florida will just sit and take it, because Florida is filled with Mar-a-LegoBlockheads who care about as much about the panhandle as they do about panhandlers: Move on, you'll get nothing here.
