It's All Bellows: You're FIRED: Stoking an Overheated Economy in America Fans European Heatwave.

               
                 Dragon's Breath: Giving a new meaning to the term The Roaring Twenties.

Planned Incineration: When obsolescence just isn't fast enough.

The Trump is quite literally Setting the world on fire, stoking the already energy-intensive US economy by exploiting the Final Frontier of America's fossil fools as a lever to fuel economic growth at any cost.

As the US accelerates its export of accelerants and the world gets its chestnuts roasted on dozens of open fires, the burning of energy to dig up energy flares to new highs. The rig count continues to climb. As do profits (Shell-game tripled theirs and is using those profits to buy back $25bln in its own shares, while BP's profits rose in the second quarter by fourfold, they then announced a $10.5 billion acquisition of BHP’s shale assets, whereas Chevron merely doubled its earnings).

Permian output already exceeds that of three-fourths of OPEC members. Sounds good, huh? That output has a new customer, too. While Tillerson was Secretary of State and everyone pretended that the abrogation of the Iran Treaty was sour grapes-Obama-bashing, because that's what the Donald plays to, The ex-CEO (Oh, is that like ex-CON-man?) of Exxon, who retains millions of shares of the company, was penning a deal with India to replace their contracts for Iranian oil with contracts for Permian-produced faux-oil. Why? Exxon has pretty much bought up the Permian, since the original frackers did what most frackers do: went bankrupt trying to service loans the price of oil couldn't support.

After the implosion of the global economy caused by the unraveling of the greatest con in modern history of the MBS/CDO "products" built from sub-prime mortgages stamped with AAA ratings by bought ratings agencies (all of which are still in the business of rating "securities" to this day: no prosecutions, no wrong-doing; unabashedly admitting that this is just the way the system is designed to work: give cover to con-men and rip-off artists for a fee, all with government sanction, because it is the government that coerces pension plans such as CALPERS to buy only "AAA"-rated securities) the FED went to work, using the same playbook, simply moving from housing to energy resource depletion, and fed the resulting funny money to the fracking industry via Goldman Sachs (spread the graft around, by all means, by any means). Halliburton then providing the well-worn path it trod during the Bush years of fraud and embezzlement of public funds. The brazen deployment of the self-same strategy of providing "Capital" (If you look up Capital, you'll see that in an actual capitalistic economy it is a subset of wealth: that portion of wealth put at risk to generate more wealth. Funny money, whisked into being by electronic legerdemain, is not Wealth, hence it can't be rightly called Capital: it is never at risk, as no one owns it, and its source need never worry about whether its's paid back, as it never existed in the first place) to an industry that had nary a hope of becoming profitable. Just a continuation of the pump and dump defalcations of the housing imbroglio. This would leave (just as the housing scam left the banks able to buy up for pennies on the dollar well-placed properties purposely sold to millions of mortgagees who would never be able to afford them ... fooll me once ....) scores of fracking companies to go bankrupt allowing the oil majors, such as Exxon in the Permian, to scoop up THose assets for pennies on the dollar, while the liabilities of $4$trillion dollars in Fed-generated liabilities, remain on their books, burdening the rest of the economy while the guaranteed PRofits of the fossil fuel producers, now not even taxed at the rate of a grocery clerk, thanks to Risk-Free "Enterprise" Republicans, take the cash and run.

What they leave out is that, whereas OPEC members can sell most of their output, Permian  producers must burn a much larger proportion of theirs to keep the rig count up, ie they must burn a far larger share of their output in order to generate more output. It is comparable to what happened to one-time oil exporters Egypt and Indonesia. As their populations modernized, which always means they exponentially increased their use of energy resources, that part of production left over for export increasingly diminished until they arrived at the point they are at now where they not only can no longer export, but can no longer produce enough for their own population, which means they now must IMport.

Remember, DEcline Rate isn't the same as depletion. Decline means if  you pour more cash into the hole, you can retrieve more oil. Whereas Depletion means, well, you know, depletion.

So as the US continues to export more and more of its fossil fuels reserves, reserves that, given the drastic measures needed to make their extraction possible, from blowing off mountain tops to get Coal, frantically scrambling to build $rig$ after $rig$ after $rig$ to keep up the production numbers for Oil, to assembling LNG terminals, equipment, and specialized ships to carry its Natural Gas overseas, each and every one of its fossil fuel "products" requires an ever larger amount of those very same fossil fuels to be burned just to first get at and produce them, and then to deliver them to their markets. Trump's tenure will leave the ever-energy-hungry US bereft of its own energy resources, just when its debt-fueled overheating bill comes due, making the Bush-era criminal enterprise look beneficent. Because whereas they left Obama with no choice but to pour Fed-created magic money into the fracking industry, the Trump era will leave the US a worn husk squeezed dry of ALL its fossil fuels, even as the pace of global warming heats up.

One of the consequences of this is the production of an increasingly thick veil of methane from leaking production and capped facilities, the most illustrative being that in the four corners region of the US West where satellite data reveals the increase in methane while simultaneous earthly temperature readings pinpoint it as a region of anomalous temperature rise. Roasting in triple degree temperatures.

But thanks to the Wonderful nature of US-style Cowboy Capitalism, none of those externalities of production need put the slightest dent in any of those astronomically rising Corporate profits. Whereas you as a business man, or a citizen, must deduct from your earnings expenses you incur, if a business, or just eat those expenses, if you're a citizen (such as the necessity of burning fossil fuels to get to and from your place of employment. That's an externality in and of itself that no business need concern itself with: that's its employees' problem, and by problem I mean both monetary and energy expenditure), the Fossil fuel producers, along with a host of other corporate entities, such as WarMart that need never concern themselves with the climate-change enhancing costs of ships burning the dirtiest, least regulated fuel anywhere to ship its Chinese production to get it on American shelves, has no need to take that as a hit to earnings: they are simply not held accountable for their very real expenses, which must be borne by mankind instead.

And those aren't supposed costs, they are very real and are being borne even now, in real time, as the atmosphere heats up and the AC bills across four continents skyrocket, reflecting the additional fossil fuels that must be burned in order to run their air-conditioners and those BTU's (That "T" stands for THERMAL: creating more heat to be trapped in order to keep cool from all the heat that's being trapped: in other words, it isn't only heat from trapped solar radiation that is making the planet hotter, every time a fossil fuel is burned, it produces heat as a byproduct, even if the entire reason it's being burned in the first place is to produce cold, the byproduct of producing that cold is radiant heat,heat which can no more escape than solar-gnerated radiant heat can) increase the need for that oil production to increase even further, such that now, while we are in summer, the season that used to require so much less energy than the oil-burning winter did in order to stay warm, has now caught up, with nary a comment made to that fact, such that more oil is burned to cool the planet we are heating up by burning what we need to stop burning if we wish for it to cool down. Eventually, there will be none left to burn to keep warm in the winter, because we burnt it to keep cool in the summer in places so hot we never should have moved to them in the first place.

Just think, in only two years, by which time, the ice-free arctic should provide us with more carbon-releasing furnaceiture, we'll be toasting like marshmallows on a spit held over a campfire during what history will call The Roaring Twenties:

MAGA magma: Masking Americans' Gas-stoked Arson.

I hope you're feeling properly Stoked!