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| 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:
The message of Gandhi Ji inspires all of us. India will always work with the world to overcome climate change & create a green planet. twitter.com/fhollande/stat…
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.
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