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.