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?