Oiligarchy: Paul St., Wall St. and Wolf St.

This morning's reads included three articles that touch upon our dilemma of what one of the authors referred to as Climate Catastrophe. In this article the pedestrian logic of the politically correct entangles itself in a skein of twisted logic before he's finished the first paragraph, in which he maintains that, if MLK were alive today, he would be talking about the five evils that are interrelated, those being the original three the Rev King actually spoke of, economic inequality, racism, and militarism, but two more the author insists go hand in hand with them, patriarchy and Ecocide (why ecocide is considered quasi-religious enough to mandate capitalization remains a secret).

Perhaps referring to him as Dr. King instead of Reverend convinced the author that his readers would forget that MLK was a no medical doctor, but a Doctor of theology, and that the theology he was a doctor of was patriarchal. ALL the monotheist religions are patriarchal, so, logically, the Jews, via their US mouthpiece, AIPAC  feeling no compunction about equating any protestation over increased US military spending, (what they prefer to refer to as "Defense" spending), as "Anti-Semitic," would most certainly object to Street's equating Judaism with one of the five evils as Anti-Semitic as well.

But bromides as broadsides are what Mr. Anti-Semitic Street deals in, so that he should make such a rash, ill-considered assertion is completely in character with the rest of his essay. He starts out with generally accepted facts, such as the one above regarding Dr. King's reference to the three evils Street feels compelled to expand upon, and then adds his own, poorly analyzed, assumptions to them as though since the first is true, the other must be, despite there being, as in the example above, no bridge to connect the two. And not only no bridge, no possible chance that an avatar of the Patriarchy would refer to it as an Evil.

But the Street's readers are unlikely to notice this so he feels no hesitation about making such a specious claim about how the deceased would ratify his conception of reality. I would, although I agree with Mr. Streets opinion on the matter, argue most vociferously that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King would most assuredly not.

 But like the Gang Green New Deal he refers to repeatedly in his essay, he mostly indulges in stating his opinion about what we should do, with nary a clue as to how we could do it even if we would do it. The it being to foment a rebellion by throwing our bodies into the cogs of a machine he is in the throes of using to reach his audience.


("The fact that the United States under Obama achieved so-called energy independence through accelerated fracking and drilling in the homeland doesn’t change the strategic calculation", Mr Street chimes ... the only problem being that the US doesn't, nor has it in decades, produce enough oil to meet its energy needs, all the fracking did increase our domestic energy reserves, but the US is not Energy Independent, nor will it ever be. Not only does the US not produce the requisite volume  of hydrocarbons to run its economy, the fracked reserves it has been exploiting for the last decade or so, are  unable to be refined in the US, making their export necessary, making the IMport of oil that the US refining infrastructure CAN process even more crucial. This is not energy independence, even if the volumes were enough (they're not), it makes the US energy industry ever more interdependent, (which is not simply just a matter of semantics), as it simultaneously makes the US economy ever more dependent on resource extraction. Just as calls for reduced military spending threaten to crash the economy, since it's the largest industry in the country, supply-sided while we were blind-sided, it is being even further Jerry-rigged to make the cessation of fossil fuel extraction do the same: the more "energy independent" we become, the more energy DEpendent the economy becomes, such that the US is in a far more precarious economic position now than when we were importing a full 2/3's of our oil supply. No accident that.

The energy that moves in and out of the Cushing Facility neither comes nor goes of its own volition, nor does it run off of the fervent output of Street's brow: it is shipped. Which means it burns fuel both coming and going, also making the US less energy independent as it now uses more energy than a decade ago, it's just that that energy is burned by oil tankers, LNG facilities, and ethanol shipments to foreign countries, but not because the US produces enough for its own needs, it is because the reserves it exploits are not the kind it can process.

Which makes me once again wonder what exactly is the purpose of renewable fuel if there's such a thing as renewable energy? Like perpetual motion, renewable energy is a phenomena found nowhere in the known universe. Fuel can be replenished, and the process of producing energy thereby continued. But that energy, once produced, is dissipated and the byproduct of heat created. By pretending that the energy, and not the fuel, can be replenished, the factor of all the heat created by energy production, which happens no matter how it's produced anywhere in the universe, is carefully kept as hidden as the US export of ethanol manufactured from food and heavily (as in it wouldn't be done otherwise) subsidized by US taxpayers, to foreign countries, the profits derived therefrom going into the pockets of the same oil companies Mr.Street writes about, yet this crime and the actionable item one could make of it, isn't broached, only Rebellion is what he calls for. Rebellion! YOU'RE supposed to throw yourself under the bus for a future you therefore won't see, while he mindlessly types away.

In order to generate energy fuel is consumed, that is why the world came up with the term renewable: to differentiate between fuel that can be produced sustainably, and fuel that is produced by burning a finite resource. The energy produced by neither one of theses processes is renewable, however. If you wish to continue to generate energy for society's needs, more fuel has to be consumed, so more heat will be generated. To call it renewable flies in the face of reason, because it suggests that as long as the source of fuel is sustainable, we must never ever concern ourselves with either the accelerating amount of energy we use, nor the growing distance between where it's to be used and where it gets generated. Like oil in tankers, Natural gas in pipelines or LNG tankers, or coal in trains, the energy costs of getting energy from where it's generated to where it's needed, and the resultant heat thereby created, which represents lost energy, on transmission lines. This is always assumed to be negligible. However, if one looks at the PG&E bankruptcy which resulted from the stringing of long transmission lines through a landscape rendered bone-dry via drought - in order to make California, the 2'nd largest producer of fossil fuels in the country - look green. Although the state extracts for burning, almost 200mln bpd (barrels per day), it IMports its electricity from out of state, resulting in the worst two back-to-back fires in its history, both of them caused by those long transmission lines which were mandated so the State's governor could brag about how Green the most prodigious fossil fuel extractor in the country, aside from Texas, is. The resultant costs and the continuing human trauma were not what anyone in their right mind would call negligible. But that electricity that sparked those fires was from a Green Source, so Hurrah!

But as Mr. Street himself mentions, the blanket of CO2 that has resulted from the burning of fossil fuels thus far is already at 415ppm, up from 385 a mere decade ago, and it is accelerating beyond even that extremely disturbing rate of 30ppm's/decade (Wanna do the Math? It means by 2050, the troposphere's load of CO2 will be: 3(decades) X's 30 = 90, + 415 = 505ppm by the time a baby born today is approaching their 30'th birthday. And that's dispersed in the air over the entire globe; in the most urbanized areas it will be far higher).

What the advocates of renewable energy want us to forget is that the reason the blanket of CO2-sodden air causes the greenhouse effect isn't because it lets any more heat IN, it's because it won't let the reflected rays back OUT. So the more energy we keep on producing, and by calling it renewable, nobody worries about the tremendous volumes of waste heat produced by generating energy via renewable fuels, which heat will be added to the already accumulated heat of what's right NOW being retained from the sun's rays' inability to escape the atmosphere, an ability that will not be enhanced by using renewable fuels, it simply won't be worsened (although in the build-out to this new magical future, bilious clouds of CO2-laden combustion will further besot the atmosphere, with a heavy and growing methane component that will goose the earth's temperature even more) . Therefore, the resultant heat from the manufacture, transportation, installation and maintenance of the new power infrastructure will only ADD to the amount of heat retained from solar radiation, because it can no more escape the CO2-laden atmosphere than solar radiation can. And although solar radiation is fairly constant, the heat added from the conversion of fuel, of any fuel, into usable energy, isn't: it's growing. Rapidly.

So yes, it is a Green New Deal, a Greenhouse New Deal, wherein the adoption of all these Green fuels , (Case in point: ethanol from corn is called Green fuel, despite the heavy fossil-fuel-use needed to produce it and the resultant CO2 burden it creates, which must include the billion$ and billion$ of damage to the prairies on a scale not seen since the dust bowl - ie, I mean the damage done before the floods, the green fuels mania merely set the stage for the catastrophe that is still unfolding right in front of our eyes as Paul Street insists that we Go Green) must be added to the carbon footprint of these Green and Renewable, (solely because the Gang Green deems them such), fuels) results in not the slowing of Climate Change, but its acceleration, because we insist on adding heat to the Greenhouse, because we believe energy is renewable, ie, we've been conditioned by the word on the Streets to think "it's Pree!", "it's Pree!"