The Art of the Green Nude Deal: It's Got no Close.

In 2018, the United States consumed an average of  20.5 million barrels of petroleum per day.

That's one fifth, a full 20%, of the globe's production in order to run an economy that has such an enormous amount of imports from outside its economy that it has started to impose tariffs to manage the deluge. That ocean of oil laps against the shores of a country with a collapsing infrastructure, a growing homeless population, an inability to absorb new immigrants without paroxysms of internal strife, and a deteriorating balance sheet, all resulting in an enormous and mounting deficits in not only its National Debt and yearly deficits, but in its trade deficit as well, despite an unprecedented growth in the amount of energy it is  pouring first into the production of energy and secondly, into the exportation of that energy at a price barely high enough to pay for operations, never mind to service the debt that grows at an ever more disproportionate rate than its petroleum output.

Thus has the US created its own Scylla and Charybdis: Sandwiched between the dire need of higher oil prices to make its money-losing enterprise profitable on the one hand, and the equally disproportionate impact higher energy prices would have on an economy that burns the lion's share of the world's output, on the other.

Liquids produced from natural gas processing are also consumed as petroleum products. Renewable biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, are used as substitutes for, or as additives to, refined petroleum products.

 In other words, even the combustion of 20% of the entire world's daily production of oil simply isn't enough.

Yet as we go through the EIA's charts of where energy is burned, from Industrial sector to Transportation sector to Agricultural sector, Paper manufacturing, to Electricity Production, nowhere in the data is there the smallest hint of how much, and what's of special interest to me, how much growth there is, in the energy sector's use of energy. Which is a perfectly reasonable request for anyone wishing to invest in the sector, but which the sector refuses to divulge, knowing full well, as it does, that investors have little choice but to be "fully invested", so will take the leap, even without the data.

This is akin to an oil-exporting country not keeping track of growth in its own domestic petroleum use. If they are growing in tandem, Goldilocks; if however, domestic use is growing faster than growth in production, the amount available for export declines along with the revenue derived therefrom.

What the above data suggests (although, as I've pointed out, it must be deduced, since the Oil and Gas industry apparently keeps its energy usage secret from the very agency responsible for reporting on it (the EIA is the source of most of my data points)), is that a growing proportion of the energy produced by the fossil fuel industries is consumed by that same industry in order to keeps its production figures growing.  What isn't happening however, is that the production is being made available to industry and other end-users of energy, because less of what it produces gets out of the industry itself, resulting in the same phenomenon as the oil-exporting nation: it can't pay its bills/investors, as its using an ever-increasing amount of its output just to produce even more output, which then needs to be plowed back into the self-same industry to keep its production figures high, even as its profitability continues to deteriorate and the environmental destruction it causes, reaches cyclonic proportions.  Destruction the industry can do a Pontius Pilate on.

The most probable answer lies in the fracturing industry's parallels to the energy dynamics of the ethanol food-for-fuel program: You might get as much energy out as you've put in, but once the investment dollars top a certain amount, the projects go on whether the energy in exceeds the energy out or not. And just as the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is getting larger every year, caused by the runoff from that same ethanol program, the businesses along the shores of the Gulf get nary a nickel in recompense either from the industry nor the government that is so generous in subsidizing the Ethanol program on the one hand via mandates, but gives the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate to small businesses that have no lobbying cartel in DC to lard the palms of politicians.

Government Mandates stress the ALL in Ethanol.

With the ascension of the Reagan/Bush duopoly to the White House, the marriage of the energy sector to the public sector became lopsided, and has now evolved to the point where the rest of the nation's industries are running on a treadmill that's generating profits, which profits are taxed by State and Federal government and then those taxes, along with credits and exemptions, are recycled via various government handouts, to the energy industry. This was kicked into high gear during both Bush administrations' use of the Gulf War as a  distraction from their manipulation of the energy sector for fun and personal profit (President Plump did not create the idea of roiling domestic politics while creating international turmoil to misdirect the public's attention from his actual intention). Extending "Farm" subsidies and Crop Insurance to what is industrialized-fuel robofacturing is Fraud, the subsidies having been  put into place to insure the country's, if not the globe's, food supply. Using that largess to fund the raising of agricultural products that use coal-fired power plants to process food into fuel is Fraud. The only reason it  isn't referred to as such is that the entire justification for the Ethanol program, to Make America "Energy Independent", was itself fraudulent.

QE took this to a whole other level, upping the game to pour not only tax dollars and government guaranteed loans into the sector, but trillions of dollars from the Fed purchase of Treasuries, effectively burdening the entire economy with trillions of dollars of debt (amounting to a full 25% of the GDP) to assume the onus of exploration, drilling, flaring, etc: the entire infrastructure of fracturing the earth's mantle to deliver the trickle of oil each crack provides, funded by the public which receives nary a nickel in dividends that are instead siphoned off to CEO's and shareholders, who can sell their risk at the drop of a hat, leaving the public to assume the burden of unpaid debt, dry wells, and environmental cleanup of landscapes so blighted they look as though they're right out of a Mad Max movie.

Kim chi Un and Kim chi Deux

The deux iterates the anti-Obama meme for President Plump's Contra-Iran posing that he abrogated an international treaty from spite ... a belief he fosters, as it hides his actual motives (It isn't. It's all about the Oil. The Permian basin oil which, even with the shut-in of Iranian and Venezuelan oil and OPEC's output reductions and Russia's cuts because of contaminated oil, can't goose  prices enough to fetch the price it needs to be profitable. A replay of the Bush/Reagan oil supply-side wreconomix).

Sir Kim Darroch’s cables claim the President was against Iran deal, for ‘personality reasons’, but it was for a far more practical reason: to shut-in Iranian oil exports and replace them with  American exports from the Persian Gulf, following the template of GW in shutting in Iraq's oil. The only viable reason, all the other's having been exposed GWMD lies. Yet this glaringly obvious reason, given the Bush Texas cadre's heavy investment in Halliburton and its associated fracking technology, was never broached, even as the price of oil was manipulated by speculators to global economy-crashing levels.

The Burning Bedrock: Fracturing The Flintstones to enable the Jetsons,

Since GW's earth-shattering administration, the fracturing of the economy, the polity and the very bedrock has continued apace until our current plump president pushed it into high gear, resulting in such egregious and simultaneous results: earthquake swarms in California where the fracturing of an already unstable crust is surpassed only by the fracturing taking place in Texas that has its concomitant gas flaring resulting in CO2 concentrations higher than anywhere in the world.

And what do we get as a counterpoint to all this placing of all our chips on one bet?

The Green New Deal that promises: 

  (1) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs in the United States;

    (2) to provide unprecedented levels of prosperity and economic security
for all people of the United States;

via:

net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

by

meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the
                United States through clean, renewable, and zero-
                emission energy sources,

No problem. We can do it by just

(N) ensuring a commercial environment where every
                businessperson is free from unfair competition and
                domination by domestic or international monopolies.

So easy. Makes one wonder why we haven't already done it. So, which investment banks or Wall St, firms are signed on? None? So they'll just default on their investment in, say, petrochemical plants and plastics, computer, & fossil fuels (without which the roads the Green Nude Deal insists we will ride to the magical zero-emission vehicle infrastructure on won't be built, as they are made of tar).

 All of which is not to say the goals don't sound laudable, the results desirable, but having heard the same rhetoric when the ethanol program was being sold to the public, but which resulted in:

the construction of so many more coal-fired power plants in less than a single decade, that it doubled the concomitant expansion of US coal combustion;

it dynamited every mountaintop in the State of West Virginia;

it tore up the prairie at a pace not seen since the twenties, which had then resulted in the dust bowl;

it aided mightily the aforementioned steady expansion of the Gulf's dead-zone;

and the largest increase in CO2 emissions in the US even as its industrial base contracted;

and finally reduced the mpg's of the US vehicular fleet as a direct result of adulterating gasoline with far less energy-intensive bio-fuel.

This Green solution (that 's all it had to do was call itself green to get the support of "Progressives"), even though, if there were any one single cause that rivals fracturing as the reason why we are now facing a Climate Emergency instead of Climate Change, Ethanol-from-corn, would be it. Yet you see not a whisper of protests from all the Green New Deal signatories to have this economically, environmentally, and  Energy-use-wise disastrous program even curtailed, never mind eliminated. It could be addressed right now, with no Green Nude Deal, but it isn't politically prudent. That alone tells you the likelihood of any of the proposed ideas being implemented in the future.

That all of this harm was done in the name  of the Green solution of ethanol-from-corn, "growing fuel", all leave me skeptical that the Green Nude Deal has chance of doing anything but making matters worse via its "mobilizations" (whenever politicians use military terms to describe their intentions to fund civilian projects, your antennae should go up as they are pandering to your built-in preference for any and everything military, which branch of the government they make nary a reference to, as though it were the Congress, and not the Pentagon, that runs the country. As in the military operations their terminology adopts, once the mobilization begins, the fact that any of them, like Ethanol-from-corn, should prove to have results in complete opposition to their stated ones, and are causing more harm than good, will have no effect on their continued rollout) in the exact same way: Showboating about how "Green" it is, while all the front-loading of CO2 any project to do a fraction of what they sort-of propose can't be undone.

There is no fiscal/industrial/corporate/citizen or any other roadmap published as an adjunct: Like drawing up a Constitution that promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to its polity, yet that extends to every one of them of a certain skin color the right to own and flog other humans (who are included in that promise) as though they were draft animals ... there's gonna be problems.

 Drawing up grandiose-sounding plans without any notion of how to address the very real economic, social and political tensions that will ensue directly because of that plan is highly irresponsible, and given today's celebrity-addled, entertainment-addicted milieu, is an act of intractable cynicism that cares not a jot for the economic suicide it will result in. Clean water never comes from playing dirty pool.

































                       

Days of Wreckoning: UNtrammeled Fracturing Breaks Indiscriminately..

There's a Price to Fooling with Mother Nature.

As an explanation of the hydrological madness pouring down from the skies, the folks at The National Climate Assessment decided to offer us this pabulum:

"The climate crisis has led to an uptick in extreme downpours, since warmer air can hold more moisture".

Pretty tame stuff, that. And at odds with the data:

 Rank     Year     Anomaly °C     Anomaly °F
1     2016     0.94     1.69
2     2015     0.90     1.62
3     2017     0.84     1.51
4     2018     0.77     1.39
5     2014     0.74     1.33
6     2010     0.70     1.26
7     2013     0.66     1.19
8     2005     0.65     1.17
9     2009     0.64     1.15
10     1998     0.63     1.13

As you can see from the figures above, the temperature in 2018 was a mere .03 degrees warmer than in 2014, and has been steadily DEcreasing since President Plump took office.

During that same timeframe, the deluges that have been occurring around the globe have been dramatically INcreasing, so if a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, it apparently is, as opposed to  letting it fall from the sky in deluginous (yes, I made that word up) quantities. 

There is however, one phenomenon that has been occurring simultaneously with the cooling of the atmosphere during that same period: the untrammeled expansion of the USA's fracking operations and their flaring of Natural Gas, the expansion of the latter having outpaced the  former thanks to a lack of pipeline infrastructure to utilize the much larger bonanza of natural gas being "Freed":

Statute of Liberty Gas:

Give me your hired petroleurs,
Your cuddled gases we're churning to set free,
The wretched refuse of your streaming bore,
Send these, freed molecules of fracking-tost NG,
I light my flame to flare from ship to shore.

As you can ascertain from the chart, in 1998 the earth's temperature was up by .63, and it took a full 15 years for it to increase by the same .03degrees C it is now above from 2014's temperature.

According to the thesis that a warmer atmosphere holds more water, then 2016 should have been a far more disruptive year for deluge-like rainfall than the years following it have been. That, however has not been the case, has it? It is after 2016 that the most water has been wrung out of the atmosphere, even as the atmosphere has been cooling. On a certain level, that makes sense, n'est-ce pas? If the atmosphere's cooling it can no longer hold all that water, so it dumps it. But the atmosphere doesn't cool over the span of years to such an extent to explain the dump it just took in Washington DC. As it cooled over that span of years is when it would have been releasing its extra burden of H2O, not somehow waiting over that period of time to rain it all down at once.

There is one difference, though: man-made water vapor from recklessly extensive flaring operations as well as other heat-trapping gases being pumped into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate as the Plump administration gooses the golden egg of oil production, bringing one catastrophe after another to the US. This change, as the US oil production figures continue to escalate, meaning as the US continues to burn a prodigious quantity of fossil fuel just to dig up even more prodigious amounts of fossil fuel, is venting into the atmosphere unheard of amounts of pollutants and Greenhouse gases, the collateral damage to the rest of the infrastructure of non-energy industries, a connection never postulated, as though the two were happening on different continents, on different planets, will continue to get hammered to the point of collapse.

Sure, there will be plenty of fuel to power the grid, but the grid will have been swamped by the raging rivers and rising floodwaters of a continent in the throes of mass suicide. Yet we are killing ourselves not to feed the US energy appetite, which is voracious enough, but that of the very allies and competitors alike that President Plump insults one minute while providing them with the energy required for their export-oriented manufacturing industries the next. Making Asia Great Again (China, No. Korea, So. Korea, India, Japan, Afghanistan, all are recipients of US oil, US fracked oil, to be more specific) luckily bears the same initials, so he can sell the same caps (Which are, despite the label they may bear, Made in China, with American oil).

The Washington Post:  In total, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport recorded 3.3 inches of rainfall between 9 and 10 a.m. That number broke DC's total rainfall record for the date, which was previously set at 2.16 inches.

Note the for the date, ie, more than an inch more rain fell in less than one hour than fell during the entire day of rainfall so copious it broke all previous records back in 1958. That's not just breaking the record, that's exhibiting a heretofore unseen phenomenon that has become all but commonplace,  yet is occurring while the atmosphere is capable of holding less water than it could hold in 2016 when such flooding was not happening on this regular basis.

But it doesn't stop with rainfall. In the west in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, California, Oregon, Montana, the landscape is being pummeled, permeated, overrun with pipelines, heavy trucks and equipment, bearing enormous quantities of sand for fracking, water for pressurized pumping into the earth's crust even while, as we're seeing in California, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Montana, swarms of earthquakes following the exact same path as the drilling operations that are jeopardizing the homes and lives of millions of US citizens and thousand of US enterprises, all to deliver oil NOT to those citizens nor their associated businesses but to siphon it off and pump its bonanza via LNG terminals and oil tankers to the very countries the administration is erecting trade barriers against in an oh-so-showboating manner while uttering nary a whisper about the enormous risks of destabilizing weather and earthquakes that are occurring as a direct result, and at the exact same locations of this feverish, to-the-point-of-madness, activity.

The destruction to the rest of the US that has already occurred is more extensive and promises more catastrophic repercussions than any WMD being manufactured anywhere on the globe. It has already done more damage to the same Homeland that Washington DC is extorting trillions of dollars from US tax-payers in order to supposedly provide them "Security". Yet you can be sure that when the next destructive impact from our headlong rush to self-immolation occurs, there will be another National Climate Assessment report to 'splain that torrential Rain kills grain but goes mainly down the drain,(of the Mississippi River where it feeds the largest G of M dead zone ever) clearing the whole matter up, and exonerating the whole industry that's causing it from any blame.

Reckless Derangement: The World Feeds on President Plump's Greed .

President Plump kin do no wrong.

Today I read this headline that, as all of them relating to this particular subject, doesn't quite understand the problem:

 "we’re not fixing climate change".

Fixing it!? 

Are you (expletive) kidding me? Fixing it? Did you really say that?

The "leader" of the free (whatever that means when we're all of us, everyone, subject to the ongoing disaster caused by a purblind insanity) world insists in the face of the science he rejects, but knows to be true, that data that has been accumulated and used to draw conclusions from, by the very scientists that President Plump is counting on to draw up his fantasy of a "Space Force", an idea out of the mind of a teenage boy enamored of Tom Swift novels, should be looked on as nothing but a really really funny "punked" episode. Thus we'll all chuckle in hindsight at our own gullible selves for putting stock in such an obvious hoax. But like his bogus "Birther" rhetoric, his largely unchallenged characterization as a hoax of the geoengineering of the planet the continued use of fossil fuel amounts to as it transforms our world into an orb of chaos has nothing to do with his actual belief, and everything to do with using distraction and showboating to ensure that sand is thrown in the cogs of the machine he prefers to divert to the sole occupation of insuring his legacy of failure. Failure on no less grand a scale than Nero's or - are  you ready for it? - Adi Schicklegruber's.

Not that he's going to single out any ethnic or religious group for extermination. He knows that's just not necessary, and so last century. Wholesale destruction on a global scale has not been undertaken by any other leader in the history of the world, and that is what our Plump chief executive plans to have for his legacy. A landscape devoid of hope. A lifeless desert. Humanity nailed to a cross of despair. Hail the Architeuton.

We all know this.

We all see it play out right in front of our eyes.

So what do we come up with ?

How do we object?

With what strenuous protests do we voice our resistance?

By whining that, "we’re not fixing climate change".

By calling for a "Green New Deal" as though it's just a matter of flipping a switch, passing laws banning plastic straws even as we construct more petrochemical plants in two years than in the last twenty, sinking borrowed investment dollars into creating enormous chemical-manufacturing sites larger than many of our own municipalities, and which that can, and quite regularly do, blow up in our faces.

We're not "not fixing climate change", we are instead quite consciously, maniacally, with heedlessness and aforethought, creating a future only a world gone mad would sanction; deliberately stoking the flames of a dragon that is breathing its hellish exhalations right into our face, up our ass, and down our throat while we squabble about well, anything really, as long as it'll keep us from talking about, you know, "that". As long as it'll let us whimper that,

"But gee, President Plump, what are we gonna do about climate change, sir?"

As he laughs in your face and points to the state of Texas and its fracking industry that is so extensive, its pipeline infrastructure so convoluted, it looks more like a mining operation on Dune than anything terrestrial:

"THAT'S what we're doing about it",

as he pivots to California, and points to its own fracturing earth diggers in the middle of earthquake country together with its geothermal industry that pumps enormous quantities of pressurized water into the ground to create tens of thousands of micro earthquakes to generate electricity, not for Industry, but for entitled leisure so profound the entire thrust of the Silicon Valley's brain drain is to convince its people their lives should be effortless :

"THAT's what we're doing about it",

 as he then pirouettes and points his pinkie toward the suicide capital of the world, North Dakota, where Bakken pertoleurs are intent on despoiling everything that moves to keep our machines on the move,

"THAT's what we're doing about it."

Bringing you the future: Not with sissy sedans, those are so old-school. No, with out-sized behemoths you need a ladder to climb into. But you need never worry about running out of fuel to quench their voracious thirst, because we, America, have only one thing as a Nation that we can agree on, so have decided that our magic car-pets are the vehicles we plan to fly into the future by the seat of our pants in, purposely neglecting everything else that humankind once held dear: Family, home, friends, community, all willingly sacrificed for our Freedom; our atomized, egoistic, free-floating molecules of Freedom, careening wildly, caroming off one another with nary a reaction, never an  atom of co-operation or brotherhood, with never a word about how WE are destroying the earth's life-supporting capabilities, (No darling, we're NOT destroying the planet, that's just one of our simple-minded phrases to help us pretend we're not actively destroying ourselves, not each individually doing our part to effect the Final Solution ... but we are ... You are).

Today's NYT: "Underlying the opposition to a bill allowing extraditions to mainland China is public dissatisfaction with a political system that leaves many people feeling shut out."

Feeling shut out?

Hello?! You ARE shut out. But democracy won't exactly let you in. Have you seen what the US military can, and does, do?

Have you once bothered to checkout the Permian basin on Google-earth; scoped the deadman's zone of California's grapevine and Bakersfield desert, examined the desultory results of the fracked landscapes of No Dakota left treeless and naked once drained of their last drop of petrol, their methane seeps leaking an unreaped bounty of greenhouse gases into the air? With Madness on this scale, one that is backed up by armed forces the likes of which have never existed in all of mankind's history, one that is chomping at the bit to unleash its righteous fury, why, oh why, dear fellow fly caught in this World-Wide-Web of sticky lies stitched together like flimsy-appearing, strong-as-steel threads of graphene, do you think being shut in is any better?

Yet,  paradoxically, WE are not the solution, we are the problem. It is to deliver to us that most coveted of human aspirations, loneliness, that the economic system and the military that runs it, the democratic forms we so cherish and the environment from which we wrest it, demand promises of prosperity that convince us that the reality of our own doom is but a mirage. Taking the place of a childish imaginary immortality that even the most faithful merely pay lip-service to, we have opted for the more tangible fruit of caged, effortless sponge-bob square-pants hapless luxuriance, our every desire foreseen, our debauched fantasies delivered by spying drones or transmitted via electronic beams to our monitored, eavesdropped-on pods of pleasure. Lying back in the plush cushions and musing, during the few minutes of commercial interruption, that, by golly,

"we’re not fixing climate change."

(Yawwwwwn accompanied by a luxuriously delicious cat-like strrrreeeeetttcchhh).

Gee. Maybe we better get right on it.

Right ... maybe mañana.

While The Quaker State Fractures Itself President Plump's Environmental (sic)Litership Floods the Capital.

"If we could really get all the countries of the world to plant trees on currently unused land that’s suitable for reforestation, that would be great. But even if we went all out and got 100 percent cooperation, it would take 50 or 60 years for these forests to grow to maturity. Unless we do something about actual emissions, we will have added at least 500 gigatonnes of additional carbon by then, bringing us to total emissions of about a billion gigatonnes of carbon. The trees would make only a small difference ...

The tell, as they call it, is in the phrase, "Unless we do something about actual emissions ... ", which, as it turns out, we are doing something, we're increasing actual emissions, of course. What do you expect when everyone, even more ominoulsy, everything, is increasing its carbon footprint: from refrigerators to personal transport, the overall tendency since the beginning  of the century, merely following the pattern set during the last one, is to increase the energy efficiency in everything produced, only at the same time, increasing its disposability, and therefore lifecycle, so increasing its carbon footprint. Ie we have, even as we were becoming the less and less affluent society, been steadily, if not by leaps and bounds now, via the proliferation of devises of every kind, requiring a computer or some form of communication devise, simply to look for a job, not to mention a vehicle in which to get to it once attained, purposely carbonizing the atmosphere at an ever-accelerating rate.  It's been called inadvertent geo-engineering, but like collateral damage that can no longer be called that when you know the damage it's going to do in advance, it can't be called inadvertent geo-engineering when we all know what the result is going to be, at which point it's intentional geo-engineering.

And as nations fall over each other in the race of rats to claim responsibility for the biggest share of that 500 gigatonnes of carbon being added to the already overloading of it in the atmosphere, they resemble California, which has been systematically injecting water at high pressure into its already fractured crust, intentionally causing tens of thousands of MEQ's, otherwise known as micro earthquakes. As in the Geysers, California, where injection-induced seismicity is observed in the form of "clouds" of earthquakes, much the same as right at the epicenter of last week's quakes at both Coso and Salton Sea, where our live geothermal experiment seems to have proven that larger dynamic stress changes from distant mainshocks can trigger larger events. But California needs to kick its electric production from such "renewable" sources into high gear so it throws caution to the windfarm, the repercussions be damned, even as the flooding DC Metro and Whitehouse basement, as the consequences of our headlong rush to energy despoliation, wreaks havoc on the other side of the American continent. So everyone is now front and center to deny any connection from the radically increased methane and CO2 from fracking and flaring, despite flaring being virtually an H2O pump, injecting water into the atmosphere much the same as California injects it into the lithosphere. Yet US citizens sound exactly like one of my art students objecting to me describing the link between the eye and the brain: "But Mr. Lowrey, that sounds like science".

Plant some trees? Sure go ahead, that'll help. They'll be burned to a cinder before they're even  saplings, but it'll make you feel like you're doing something, and that's what really matters, n'est-ce pas?

The Book of Joe Biden: From the ICE-age to All About EV.

With his claim during the Democratic Presidential debates, the front runner chose to pander to his audience with a pronouncement full of foreboding that's sure to bring the punishments of Jobiden down onto the rest of us.

 The full horror of the future plans of the US government, whether run by liberals or progressives, conservatives or reactionaries, is brought front and center by Biden's promise to, "go to a full electric vehicle future by the year 2030".

Now, although it may not be within their comfort zone to contemplate such scientific data, in an article by Lloyd Alter entitled, Upfront Carbon Emissions, he makes it clear that my oft-repeated contention that adding an increased burden of CO2 via the manufacturing of automobiles, which I have detailed in the Cash for Clunkers Obama-era boondoggle, entitled Faith-based Economics, is adding insult to injury: and the insult only exacerbates the already injured party of our ersatz Climate.

The very next day after Alter's article appeared on Treehugger.com, our front-running Presidential hopeful cynically promised that were HE elected president, the US auto fleet of ICE machines, the tires on which the entire country floats to work as though buoyed by the cloud of carbon dioxide gas they emit, would be replaced by EV's in less than a decade, in a mere eight years, by 2030.

The catastrophic front-loading of CO2 into the atmosphere that this gargantuan manufacturing spree would necessitate would put an end to all of our climate fears, as the Weather, the immediate, everyday weather, would make present prognostications of the future calamities awaiting mankind seem tame by comparison.


There are, not surprisingly, more cars than people in the USA! USA!. That's more than 330 million of the billion cars currently plying the world's byway and highways. To produce a replacement fleet in the 9-year span from 2021, when Biden would take office, to 2030, when the entire fleet would be electric, would require a substantial increase in our already suicidal (for human, but GREAT economic stimulus! Yay! 😄😄😄😄😄) rate of manufacture of more than 17 million units per  year. 

In order to replace our over-sized fleet  of ICE machines with SUN (Solar-powered Utopian Nightmare) machines would necessitate the increase by 10 million units a year to 27 million newly-manufactured zoomzoom machines each year for eight years, each unit's manufacture putting more CO2 into the air than the current fleet of machines' full life-time of driving would have put there. While in the interim, those gas-powered cars, which are right now still being produced to the tune of 17 million/year, will still be putting their own carbon load into the atmosphere, with the increased burden of the cost of selling, transporting, and fueling their way into the ICE-age the rest of the world's economies will still be encased in while they go on making the other 18 million ICE machines that make the world's total of 35 million units per annum. 

As documented in my post on EV's, every ton of aluminum robofactured dumps 1.2 tons of carbon into the atmosphere. And for steel, that carbon footprint's even higher: closer to two tons of carbon for every ton of steel manufactured. And cars are composed of a lot of steel. In fact, steel is the most common material in an auto. Approximately 55% of a car's weight comes from steel, according to The World Steel Association. So to replace your average 3-ton SUV, the increase in the atmosphere's burden of CO2 is increased by more than 6 tons for the steel alone. To this must be added the cobalt, lead, aluminum, platinum, rubber, and the transportation of said matériel to where they are used, the Petrochemical plants (fed by the ethane derived from oil obtained by fracturing the earth's crust on a monumental scale) needed to produce the plastic interior, as well as the rubber that meets the road. And that burden of carbon doesn't even include the substantial number of additional power plants, fueling kiosks, and extra-gauge wiring needed to produce the power necessary and transmitted over the hundreds of loss-induced miles to the point where said vehicles will be charged. And that amount is mind-boggling. 

Far from stopping the fracturing of millions of tons of rock in the US it would accelerate it more than stomping on a Tesla gas pedal, and all the talk of Carbon sequestration and Carbon removal from the atmosphere aside, given their lunacy (since each of those processes burns carbon to remove carbon), the weather chaos in the country's heartland would increase to such an extent as to make the Trumpettes' disastrous climate policy, or lack thereof, look tame in comparison. All to mollify Biden's Progressive detractors, the mainstream ranks of the Party being filled with less revolutionary zeal.

So in that one foul promise, Biden has robbed the most most important reason for ousting Trump of its urgency. He has made, by this one fairy-tale pronouncement alone, Trump's re-election not only a certainty, but something his first election never could have been: the desired outcome. An absolute necessity if run-away climate change isn't to result. Because Trump's lack of a climate change plan, his cynical insistence that the very concept is a hoax, is preferable to what Biden has proposed. If we follow the Book of Jobiden we pay it forward: dragging into the present the increase in CO2 forcing that Trump puts off to the future ... where, in terms of disastrous consequences, it belongs. And that takes Biden's pandering to the public to a whole new level.