Face it: There is no, "If we stop/slowdown our use of Fossil Fuels ..."

Promethe-us: Bound in hydrocarbon chains of our own making.

While watching a few videos about rising sea levels, I noticed that they all prefaced their presentations with the proviso, “If we keep putting CO2 into the air”, or, "If we haven't eliminated/curtailed our use of fossil fuel ...  "

Which leaves one to wonder where exactly they are located. Perhaps they're the Muskatelles and are making their queries from Mars? It's been three years since the signing of the Paris peace accords, and to celebrate the anniversary, as though whisking an ever-expanding coterie of the well-heeled around the globe for nothing other than sight-seeing had anything to do with the accords signed here, Paris just hosted the airshow where Airbus recorded orders and options for 123 planes. Air Lease Corporation alone, which leases hundreds of planes to airlines around the world, placed an $11 billion order for 100 Airbus planes. Do you think they're considering any slowdown in the use of carbon-spewing activity?

Axios, the only news organization that seems to have any idea that there is a link between fracking/petrochemical production/natural gas surfeit and rapidly accelerating carbon accumulation in the atmosphere, posted a special report illustrating some important facts salient to that connection.

Here I can't help but point out as yet another buttress to my argument that the Trumps are merely following and leveraging the Bush agenda's template, with but slight modifications: As I've stated in previous posts, the number of coal-burning power plants, according to our own government's EIA statistics, built during the Bush administration in order to process the "GREEN", make-us-energy-independent fuel (ie, pandering (telling us lies they know we want to believe) to the right and left wings of the electorate simultaneously), ethanol, adding up to roughly one every week, the result of which is the rising CO2 emissions emanating from a USA! USA! that has relocated its highest 

polluting industries to the Communist regime of China. This dynamic is now echoed in the Trump era, only this time with not-so-PC PC plants: Seven new PetroChemical plants have come online in the U.S. since early 2017, with at least a couple more expected this year, per the EIA.

You can see how the one is an echo of the other.

Just as at the end of the Bush regime, the enormous amounts of borrowed money had been used to construct and fund fracking operations such that, once they had brought the rest of the economy to its knees with the help of the oh-so-complicit Bernanke, Obama was presented with the scenario 

Frack or Go Back to Uganda, You Birther.

The petrochemical industry is cut from the same cloth, a continuation of the same conspiracy to lock the USA! USA! into yet another highly toxic, environmentally destructive cash-cow for the Corponations of the world while the citizens themselves, who have in the space of but a decade become the pariahs of the world, are hell bent on remaining, proudly even, exactly that.

Activist consumer groups are pushing for less platic use, and to some extent, less production, while industry aims for increased recycling. (Guess who's going to win? Hint: neither group even mentions the most energy-saving, viable alternative: re-use. Similar to energy conservation, or even to the suggestion of conserving water during California's 5-year-long drought: Re-use isn't even on the table).


Lets see how that works:

From a simple paper label to a plastic shroud.

Guinness bottles used to have the same style of label as the Newcastle Ale bottle pictured above. In the name of Marketing, however, of a product that's already the best know beer brand in the world, and as a ruse to distract its customers from the fact that the actual amount of product they were buying was being reduced, from the standard 12 oz to 11.2 oz, with their new bottle design, spending millions in order to put .8 oz less simply in order that their customers not notice they've raised the prices on them (in order to pay for all the new-fangled designs and redesigns no consumer ever asked for), the Guinness Corporation started wrapping their entire bottle in a dissoluble sheath of plastic. Why? It was so CHEAP, thanks to fracking ... but how is that possible? The retooling necessary to dip a bottle in plastic, or however they get it on, being the least of their worries. They were now shipping less product in a bottle that weighs the same, following an industry trend that has become a tsunami: consumers mindlessly paying an ever-larger percentage of their dollars, not for the product itself, but for the packaging: the smaller the volume, the more you're paying for the packaging and shipping ... that's just physics.

                                                                                                                                                                    But at least you can just not buy any more bottled Guinness, but how do you have any control whatsoever over this:

The wave card in the upper left-hand corner is the size of a credit card, so you can extrapolate the size of this plastic mailer from that. This item, of which I've received dozens so far, were brought by the USPS right to my door. USPS subsidizes the postal costs of businesses, so they don't even have to pay anything close to the postage you or I would have to slap onto it to get it delivered. So here we have the Federal Government paying to deliver plastic cards (and this is no flimsy plastic) by the millions, all of which will end up in land fill, yet they serve essentially no purpose whatsoever. There is no justification for using plastic instead of a simple paper mailing. Any costs associated with the increase in landfill or the rapid despoiling of the environment is not something that either Wave nor the Federal government has to concern itself about: That 's YOUR problem. If the plastic mailer is possible because of the completely mad overproduction of Natural Gas, well, just join in on the Insanity!

But let's not forget Starbucks, Burger King, McDonald's, GM, GE, CITI, Chase ...

Then of course there's the War Machine: Unstoppable, unaccountable, and veiled in secrecy. It is intricately involved in the production of fossil fuels on all levels, from DOE, basically an arm of the Dept. of  War, to the bases around the world located at strategic points for the transportation of energy resources. There is no justification, nor need any be given as the question is never asked, as to why oh why, if the world is choking on oil while its price plummets from rampant oversupply doesn't the USA halt its mad rush to extract its last remnants of petroleum until those prices rise? Or until it can capture the Natural Gas it's flaring into the atmosphere, burning tremendous amounts of energy supplies, on top of the already tremendous amounts of energy consumed to frack/build pipelines, construct multi-billion-dollar LNG facilities on the taxpayers' backs, transport in excess of 100 billion pounds of fracking sand and ceramics needed to be pumped into the ground, along with the  9.6 million gallons of water per well, in the first place?

 It is not a “conspiracy theory” that democracy is manipulated by hidden powers, it is in fact called Capitalism, the boardrooms of which are labeled War Rooms (No joke: Cisoco, AMAT, basically all the silicone valley firms are so besotted with militarism they salivate at the sight of firearms, the crack of a rifle shot) wherein they plan the elimination of competition, the continued use of fossil fuel-derived power, the expansion of every known carbon-polluting industry in the world, the funding of their "Enterprises" by the secret and ofttimes quite overt manipulation of public funds to take their own risk off the table and lay it on the backs of consumers, and other forms of collusion against the people of the United States. Why oh why, one must ask is it such an outrage that Russia tried to interfere in our Democracy, yet these companies that we ladle tax dollars on, and who hire phalanxes of lawyers to avoid taxes ... despite the fact that the cost of employing phalanxes of lawyers far exceeds their tax bill, never have what they consider their right to interfere with our governing bodies investigated?

Of necessity these operations have to be  planned and the road laid a full generation ahead of time for these industries to succeed, and that's exactly what the Bush administration did. Texas is now not so much a United State as a Blue-lighted State where everything is on sale at heavily discounted prices. Texas is used as a conduit, much like  the Mississippi River is, that, like an  opened vein, is used to siphon off the energy resources of an entire continent to feed the hunger of the world for fast cars, or any cars, really, exporting polluting resources to countries that don't have even our continually assaulted environmental protection laws (most of which Texas is foremost in ignoring, abrogating or lobbying against). The malinvestments made, must now be made stamped "PAID", but the only way that can happen, the so-called investments having been made with borrowed money, is to sell sell sell, even at a sinking price so as to keep up the cash flow to service those sour Notes, while bankruptcy after bankruptcy gives Exxon the Jurassic Park-sized footprint in the Permian it now enjoys thanks to buying up all the losers.

 As Baker Hughes and Exxon plants get bombed in Iraq, it is the citizens of the US that are told they must protect these "Corponations'" property. The citizens of the US whose Federal government is in an open conspiracy with the GOP to make sure they are left without any health insurance, that the social security they've paid into for their entire lives is done away with, and that goods they buy get subjected to ever-increasing levies called tariffs to raise their prices so as to allow those same American Corponations to enjoy the full protection of the US military, which has morphed into a band of mercenaries hired to protect only Corporate interests, while putting the rest of the country in the crosshairs of adversaries they've create by their arrogance and raw Greed, as they rampage across the globe, making enemies in every country they swoop down on. Because just as they've ransacked every ounce of conventional oil from this continent as if there were no tomorrow, they're hell-bent on sucking it out of the rest of the world even faster.

 And this is the state they are planning for the US in the future, so you can pay no heed to the little "Ban on Plastic straws", or on single-use plastic bags (I have a Target bag that claims it can be used 125 times .. it's years old ... I've never found a use for it):

Do you think this bag could hoist a 12-pack of even canned beverages without the handles snapping off?

 I  have canvas bags that are far superior in that they can carry far more weight without the handles snapping off (as those little cheap ones surely would with this plastic one). I have been using it for 15, yes that 's FIFTEEN fracking years. So 125 times, though it may sound like a lot, considering that the plastic will never breakdown whereas my canvas bags do, yet I've used them every week, at least: = 15yrs x's 52wks/yr, comes out to their being used 780 times, and nowhere near their life's end ... and, lest you think they're used for light items, the one I have from the Cambridge Bookstore, I use to carry 12-pak bottles of Bass Ale, not a light load by any means (bottle plus contents is ~7oz/bottle and 12 0z in each one weighs ~ 20oz X 12 = 240 0z divided by 16 = ~ 15 pounds):

It even includes a very handy outer pocket.

All those bans on anything plastic are whistling in the wind: the sheer enormity of the current and extrapolated output of the PetroChemicals companies and the overwhelming size of the investments made in the construction of all things ancillary to the fracking industry pushes out every other possibility, crushing it like a beetle underfoot. Our once resilient economy, now calcified by transforming it into a Petro State, completely dominated by one State: Texas, with its Octopus tentacles' cups sucking the life out of the rest of the country, has transformed what used to be a robust and diverse healthy economy into one that easily buckles when energy demand or price deteriorates. You'll hear the snap as it cracks and shudders to the ground:

 "The collapse of Lehman's was like the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of desperate fear moving in ever-widening circles throughout the world. Billions of people still do not know what to make of it, and the waters of the lake have closed over the fallen boulder while most people have gone about their daily work just as usual.

But the waves of fear have touched them, and life is not quite the same. Security, even the sense of it, is gone, replaced with dread and an ominous foreboding in the air. It is in this atmosphere of false calm and desperate anxiety that Obama began his presidency. He had seen the boom-mad economy tottering on the brink of ruin. He had read in the eyes of people on the campaign trail the fear and guilty knowledge of the calamity that was impending and that they are still refusing to admit even to themselves ... especially to themselves."

 But the repercussions in terms of Weather Gone Wild and the havoc it is wreaking as a direct result of the USA! USA!'s fracking mania have already begun, and though it will still take years before any connection is made between the two phenomena, despite they're having occurred simultaneously,  years in which the profits will already have been wrung out of the industry and only a wrecked landscaped, CO2-saturated troposphere, and destroyed environment will be left, at least we can all breathe a sigh of relief that nobody in the world will be clutching a plastic straw as they sip their Corpobeverage out of their plastic single-use "recyclable" (but never recycled) cups. Whew! Thank god we took action.