What a Piece of Work is Man: How Ignoble ...

BBC's comment on COPout 27: "No fossil fuel progress":  

Nov. 21, 2022 418.47 ppm

Nov. 21, 2021 415.30 ppm

1 Year Change 3.17 ppm (0.76%)

The completely predictable and abject failure of the COPout 27 Annual Follies left me inexplicably bereft of hope. Perhaps that's because it displayed the real Nature of humanity as a horde of scrabbling, squabbling egotists strutting in their artifice of Globalization, yet whose ideas are more provincial than those of Medieval peasants who have never left their local hamlet:

What a piece of work is Man. How ignoble his treason, how limited in faculty; in form of moving how crippled by machine-dependence; In action how like a fallen angel; In apprehension how like a clod; The pariah of the world, The basest of animals. This quintessence of dust has proved to be no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of lepers. 

While contemplating how to write about the COPout Follies, I realized I've turned myself into a character in a book; a life one reads. Whatever I feel is as useless as spilled ink on a page. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, which are mixed with images that undo them, as so much revising has destroyed my original intent. From too much thinking, I have become my thoughts and not I. I've plumbed myself so entirely that the only thing remaining -  blackly vivid in my reflection at the bottom of a well - is my own face observing me observing it. 

Like a lost playing card from an old and discarded suit of an ancient deck, I have no meaning; my intelligence is pulp, and I have no worth. I merely state my beliefs ad nauseum; wringing out my soul to use as ink, I have made myself useless for anything else except this writing, which is meaningless for the simple reason that it is of no use to anyone. However, to this task I resign myself, being uniquely qualified for it; it is Who I am, which amounts to nothing. And yes, at times there is a hint of tears that aren't cried, so they make my tired eyes burn; while a touch of anguish clutches at my heart and makes my throat dry. Yet I don't even know what I'd cry over, if I cried, nor why it is that I don't just get over it. This contradiction follows me everywhere, like a dark shadow. A specter that leaves me in constant dread of sleep. This results in a terrible weariness that compounds the sadness I feel because of who I never was, a nostalgia for someone who never lived anywhere other than inside my feverish head, flashing intermittently with the awareness that we live inside an illusion conjured by others who have none of our best interests at heart, but that are instead driven by an animus of greed and self-aggrandizement at others' expense, an animus they then dub "Freedom", and thus avoid any real parsing of the deleterious effects they have on others.

How else explain the pawning off of responsibility to alleviate the sufferings of those nations badly impacted by climate change onto the shoulders of citizens, while the corporations and the billionaires sit on their golden thrones (literally ...the Saudi "princes" as well as hirsute financiers have their commodes fashioned from the barbarous relic) sneering at how easy it was to get the richest of the world's citizens to except the fetid "trickle-down" from the shriveled appendages of their betters. 

From the graphic, you can see almost the entire outline of the US bespeckled with CO2 emissions:

Cry the Beloved Continent.

Though the least polluting continent, African countries suffer more than any others from the deleterious effects of cascading climatic catastrophes, with droughts, blackouts, epic flooding and insect infestations, destructive wildfires and the despoliation of entire ecosystems, all to accommodate the marauding necessities of the asset stripping enterprises of those countries on other continents that are emitting the most CO2 and hence, those most responsible for the carnage wrought beyond their borders but for which they accept no blame.

So as the world teeters on the edge of recession, Central Banks, led by the Fed, hike interest rates, while the European powers, bolstered by the ubiquitous American Wehrmacht, slide into yet more senseless carnage, destroying yet another economy to ensure their own countries' pre-eminence. Meanwhile, the new generation's version of  "The Smartest Men in the Room" ignore the interconnected nature of the economy, such that those very raised rates become the biggest threat to Oil prices, which will likely fall because of the totally predictable financial problems brought on by those higher interest rates, (as evidenced by the result of Liz Truss's little experiment in demagoguery that came within a hair's breadth of collapsing her own county's bond market, which would have had a concatenating effect on the rest of the world's) and these lower oil prices will lead to even lower oil production, which will inflict yet another blow to economic growth, and hence lead to a recession the likes of which the world has yet to see in this century (or, considering the unprecedented size of the world's population, in any previous century as well). 

But putting a damper on the rest of the world's growth, while maintaining dollar hegemony, exactly parallels the hoarding of gold by the USA before WW2 that resulted in the financial crash of 1929, yet it is apparentlky only Gail Tverberg, who seems to have noticed that, after the purposely engineered financial crash of 2008, the price of crude oil quickly bounced back to over $120 per barrel in inflation-adjusted prices in the 2011-2013 time frame, yet the world economy continued to grow. Now, at the relatively cheap price of ~$90'bbl today, the US is emptying out its "strategic" reserves to make it more affordable for this most profligate of nations to combust petrol completely unencumbered by any remorse at fueling the combustion of a commodity the rest of the world desperately needs to increase production of goods. And for no other reason than to allow Americans to fuel their addiction to speed at any cost: in other words using a vital resource for recreation while the world goes hungry and naked for lack of that same resource. Consumption for consumption's sake, with nary a lick of work being accomplished in our mindless, puerile pursuit of Happiness.

That the period when we were paying the highest prices for oil in our entire history, was exactly the same period in which the production of oil (from hydraulic fracturing) was ramping up at an equally unprecedented rate has also gone uncommented on. But this time round, there is to be no comparable surge in production of US oil during this decade as there was in the last. Au contraire, the drop in production initiated by the Covid-caused collapse in demand shows every sign of continuing, never returning to its pre-Covid level; while the world-changing release of the most potent of GHG's that has not only been egregiously flared, but leaked, and seeped during the entire episode of pin-cushioning the earth's mantle will continue unabated. But, given that there is no repercussion to any of the marauders effecting this criminal pollution, methane will continue to build in the atmosphere long after every drop of oil has been fractureded out of the last slab of shale on the continent. This will have the known effect of bringing forward changes in the climate regime that should have taken place decades hence to happening "on the ground", "in Real Time", as in the space of but a few years; such that  every country's COPout27 "net Zero-emission" pledges, or "Clean energy commitments" by 2040, 2050, or China's cynical 2060, is totally moot.  The damage will have been irreparably done long before any of those dates, decades away, are reached.

Adding to this methane released from its sequestration in the bedrock of North America and Siberian Asia will be the immense amounts of trapped methane near the Arctic's permafrost surface. Together they will act as a far more powerful accelerant of global warming/climate change than CO2 has. Which means, at eighty times the warming capacity of CO2, we will continue to see climate disasters and habitat destruction happen within years, not decades; tipping points crossed in decades, not centuries.

Zdzislaw Beksinski
 

 Like climbing plants detached from their walls, cities around the globe will collapse, even as the Corponations responsible for the carnage, as they do currently in the Wars waged on their behalf, take their profits and smile. The vital irony that their own enrichment is at the behest of their creators whose grand design to build a "Green" infrastructure, while never bothering to "do the Math" to ascertain how much fossil fuel combustion it will take for them to do so, is not lost on them ... they rather enjoy it. But since their own tenure is temporary, and consumers are easily swayed to ignore the long-term repercussions of their actions, (so long as they are enabled to continue to live their "NON-Negotiable" American lifestyle), its deleterious effects, even on their own children, will first be denied, and when that becomes untenable, scoffed at.

The Journey, after all, has been redefined in Newspeak as the Destination; that's so that we can all just Zoom Zoom to our Doom Doom with nary the rise of a single eyebrow.