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The complete disconnect between man's activity and the wildfires it spawns is fairly universally accepted. Using PG&E as the scapegoat for the uncontrolled conflagration blazing its way across the state of California is the meme of the day. The State that mandated the use of high transmission electrical wires being slung through drought-stressed forests in order to import "green" energy from out-of-State rather than fire-up its own archaic infrastructure for the sole reason that it can then hail itself as the Greenest State in the union is never mentioned.
Yet even more importantly, with the exception of a self-proclaimed earthquake predictor, Dutchsinse,
not a word is spoken about the very real possibility that fracturing the earth, thereby letting previously entrapped methane seep uncontrollably through the fractures, in order to maintain its position as the second largest oil producing State in the Union, and the one with the largest extent of its geographic expanse fractured like an eggshell, which allows dangerously flammable methane to uncontrollably leak out (the reason they prefer the term "Frack", a word the industry itself invented, is the similarity it has to the word "crack", and a crack can be bandaged over, or sutured shut ... a fracture is not only far more extensive, but results in a tree-like branching of the fault. Which is what it is: a man-made fault created in the same State that's criss-crossed with enough natural faults to warrant its reputation as the nation's earthquake capital).
But as in Texas, which blares its horn about being the largest wind-energy producer in the country, while it is simultaneously busy flaring enough natural gas to meet the entire electricity demand for the State with the largest demand for, well, by their own admission, EVERYthing, and North Dakota alone has, for more than a decade, been flaring its own natural gas resources to such a large extant it pushed the US to the top of the list of countries that flare,shoving Russia off the top spot it had enjoyed for decades, and Colorado seeps in its sleep, nary a mention is made of California's methane leaks, outside of the Porter Ranch/Aliso Canyon fiasco, which is of course, totally repaired.
Yet just as in the Paradise fire, the term "Explosive growth", resulting in an almost preternatural engulfment of everything in sight, the most obvious explanation, that of unflared natural gas seeping from the hundreds of thousand of wellpads and earth-fracturing operations being carried out throughout the State, which is what fracking actually is, are somehow never considered to be a factor, even as these wildfires bear remarkable similarity to the inferno caused by a natural gas leak in San Bruno, Ca. But since shutting down such enterprises would effectively shut down California's economy, just as it would Texas', No. Dakota's, New Mexico's, and, sorry Bernie, the entire USA's economies. We have nothing left. Facebook? Really? Wework? Uber, LYFT? Amazon? Are you serious? Haven't you noticed the lack of anything even approaching profitability from any operation the US is engaged in currently unless it's a scam? Even those, as evidenced by the collapse of the IPO of wework (IPO's being a scam machine, money-burning operation in its own right), are job-destroying operations, funneling VC cash to burn until IPO day when the high-flying stock is monetized and its unprofitable, barebones business plan exposed as the picked-apart carrion it is. Contrarily, each of them is a industry-destroying enterprise.
Fracturing the very ground beneath us is the only business plan our Corponation has: once that fairy tale is fractured, the US economy will lie in ruin, as it's lied through everything else.
In an article on the intransigence of the "problem" of climate change, entitled, Why climate change is so hard to tackle, Axios condenses it down to but a single pair of costs:
1) those associated with paying for the disasters visited more and more frequently on a warming world, and
2) enacting policies that reduce emissions
Wow. It's so easy. Of course.
... although there seems to be a problem with that second item. Namely that for auto emissions alone we've spent decades enacting policies that reduce emissions; policies that mandate more miles per gallon per vehicle driven; and even policies that mandate that each and every driver, usually without their knowledge or consent, mix a fuel derived by literally taking the food out of all those babies' mouths we insist women be forced to bear, to propel a 3-ton vehicle and its lone passenger sitting on their fat ass along a roadway built with no consideration whatsoever for the emissions produced by its construction and maintenance, resulting in a steady increase - one emission reduction policy after another -leaving us with 1.5% growth rate, year after year, in our oil consumption until GW ran that boat aground by raking it across shoals made jagged with purposely hidden leveraged debt. Only bringing the system to its knees with oil-rigged games of 3-card Monte stopped the steady growth in US carbon emissions ... for a while.
That's all worked out so well that, as each of those policies took effect, as each of those emission-reduction targets were set and met, the emissions from the US did indeed change: they went up. But not at the same rate, oh no, the rate at which those emissions were being spewed into the atmosphere accelerated. Because the Corporations those standards were aimed at in order to force their compliance with the polity's desire to produce lower emissions while driving ever-increasing amounts of miles, simply hired a phalanx of lawyers and engineers to sidestep the law and build bigger vehicles, or buy (who needs bribes when you can just buy legislators outright?: Demockracy in Action) the lawmakers and then rescind the mandate for less emissions, or slap an auto body onto a pickup truck's frame and call it an SUV, leaving it immune to the standards the Congress had imposed, and importing/manufacturing foreign models that had software engineered to falsify tests so as to demonstrate compliance while actually INcreasing the toxins pouring out of the tailpipe.
So "enacting policies that reduce emissions" should go well. I mean it's been a really smashing success so far, so let's spend billions more, generating all of those billions the only way a modern economy CAN generate all those billions: by burning more fossil fuels. All to enact yet another set of standards and start the whole merry-go-round of deceit and "it's-all-done-with-mirrors" governance that's been shown to be so efficient at enriching the rich and burdening the poor down to breaking.
All to do nothing more than to put on an act:
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| " I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And doggone it, people like me." |
The profits of doom are all that really matters.
Amy Harder, the author of the above-mentioned Axios piece, then states that,
"Republicans often argue the U.S. shouldn't reduce its emissions since China and India aren't reducing theirs. That's how the collective action problem works, and it could prevent even modest efforts addressing the problem."
Well if I'm not mistaken, there's a concept called the carbon footprint, and that concept, although usually used as a personal datapoint, could easily be more constructively used by applying it to countries. India and China between them contain more than a third of the world's population, (35.7% to be exact) yet it is the US, with its measly 4.2%, that whines it can't reduce its emissions, and it's most definitely not the Republicans who are doing most of the whining, because, as Amy's article makes clear, there is never even a whisper among anyone in America about even the possibility that perhaps its denizens could maybe burn through a tad less energy per capita, since at 20% of total global usage, those making up that 4% of the world's population gobble up 5 X's more energy than consumers in the rest of the world, yet still can't manage to make the country great, but contrarily, have apparently made it a wreck. No mention of the fact that as the world's Sole (some would say soulless) Superpower, it is the US that has a moral responsibility to show how it could be done, the US that stands alone above any law or any treaty it has ever signed, simply reneging on their promises and commitments as soon as they deem it inconvenient to follow them. It is that which keeps any collective international action from working and prevents the most modest of efforts from being put forth to address the problem, the Paris Accords being just the best-known ... there's the Iran treaty, the nuclear missile testing ban, and a myriad of other agreements penned and signed by a US that scoffs at those who expect it to follow them. When the world's policeman, as we have dubbed ourselves, holds itself above the law, there is no law. And when that bully decides that it is not in its best interest to cut its emission, that it must, contrarily, increase them exponentially to make a few billionaires it has made rich even richer, there is no one to tell it otherwise.
You can't say, "Well, this or that other country isn't going to comply", when it is you who claim to be the leader of the free world, and as such, it is you who sets the agenda; and it is you who, having proclaimed yourselves the world's policeman, that enforces any agreements. Abrogating all those responsibilities instead by stating that countries with fully 9X's the population size of your own, yet that currently emit less global-warming pollutants, when, at least in the case of China, it produces those emissions manufacturing products not for their own citizens, but for export for the enjoyment by US citizens, that same US whose transnational firms moved those factories to China in the first place in order to avoid emissions-reduction mandates of their Homeland government, then that excuse gets shown for the shoddy piece of self-serving sniveling it really is.
Now besides the cost of reducing emissions, Amy enumerates a second cost, that of,
"Responding to flooding, heat waves and other extreme weather that climate change is often making worse."
Amy must be unfamiliar with the work of that "conscience of a liberal", Paul Krugman, who has helped popularize the concept that disaster equals economic growth. The more heat waves, the more Air Conditioners people will have to buy, the more hurricanes, the more spending to repair all those destroyed lives. The fires raging through California? Great economic opportunity for the future! That's how Capitalism works, it's only mandate being to get money out of your pocket and into mine (ask any Realtor, it's their profession's mantra. While the laborers who built the houses they can't purchase receive less in wages, the Fed's manipulation of asset prices, via low interest rates and rounds of QE, effect the double-digit rises in asset values and therefore Realtors' take on every property they flip: it requires no more work to sell a $100,000 home than a $50,000 home, but their take is doubled on the former sale. They were literally laughing, and, Enron-style, laughing derisively, all the way to the bank as they pawned off McMansions to unqualified buyers they knew would end up getting thrown to the curb. What did they care? That just meant they got to flip it again, resulting in even more money in their pocket: their risk? Zero. Their customers' risk? Everything. (Do you really think such people care about emissions?).
Could it be Amy thinks that the economic system is for people? That the government makes its decisions based on how it will effect people's lives? How cute! Where does she get these ideas? The government will always protect the economic system, and the one we have in place, the Capitalist system, depends on War, and like war, exists for itself.
That "Under Capitalism and its relentless pursuit of growth, environmental considerations are inevitably reduced to the question of maintaining efficiency, while still expanding productive and consumptive throughput."
They definitely have a flair with words. That is why there is nary a whisper of Conservation, of "making do", self-repair of products instead of buying yet another one, whether clothes, bicycles, etc, things that we would never, as kids, have disposed of, are filling up land-fills, causing yet another problem, neglecting yet another externality of the Capitalist culture that sucks the life blood out of everything and spits its waste byproducts onto the slag heap, scurrying away with its profits to bury them, squirrel-like for their own use later, half the time forgetting where, in what off-shore tax-haven, they've stashed them, but not really caring as long as you don't get them.
There is no such thing as laissez-faire, it is lazy and unfair, it only means the government isn't doing its job, it simply steps aside, abrogating the responsibilities it exists for, and lets Corporate interests runs roughshod over private interest, and denies there's any such thing as the public interest. Eschewing any collective agency and making illegal any group other than the family, it has somehow been forgotten that a Corporation is a collective, and that collectives of people serve at their owners' behest, colluding, as everyone who's ever worked for a Corporation knows (and that's pretty much everybody) to derive some benefit from their easier access to the ruling party to whom its CEO's are the number one, although unelected, members.
Now the statement quoted above about Capitalism and its relentless pursuit of growth, was from an article about "Green" and what the authors have pretty much figured out, pretty much alone from any other writers on the topic, is the nature of the beast. They wouldn't be surprised to learn that, in many California homes where Solar has been installed the amount of money going out of the household to pay for electricity doesn't plummet to zero, on the contrary, the cost not only doubles, it sometimes triples, because although juice is "free", the method of producing it was financed, and despite the close to zero cost the bank pays for their money, they turn around and charge rates between 10-20% to amortize solar installations over a thirty year amortization period, then tie it to the value of the property. It not only puts stress on the roof, increases the cost of insurance against damage from those hurricanes and fires and other natural disasters, but also demands more outlay for battery installation and maintenance, (if not done to their tune, the local utility can refuse to accept your overproduction of electricity as a quid pro quo for when you need theirs at night, and charge you when the sun don't shine), you can't now sell your house unless you sell the solar panels, along with its amortized payments along with it ...you get it? It's not about the energy, it's about the dollars to be raked in from the financialization of energy, which now sits atop millions of rooves. Without ever delivering a joule of juice, some homeowners still have to pay more. Now one might say, well isn't it worth it to get these emissions down? Well, maybe, but in order to pay more, you have to earn more, and so it would come down to what exactly do you do? If you're a car salesman, you have to sell that many more SUV's that shoot exhaust out of their tailpipes, and the more you earn the more you send to the government, that same government that sends those tax dollars to the earth-fracturing industry to Make America Great Again. So by going solar, you are actually contributing MORE to the problem, not solving it, and that's not even mentioning the fossil fuel input that had to be paid forward to first manufacture, then transport, and finally install them onto your rooftop, nor the ecological damage it entails to go to far-off lands to dig up the rare earth elements that had to go into those battery banks for energy storage.
All those green solutions far from saving us are promising instead to bury us. And the fractured fairy tale we tell ourselves, as we put all the blame on PG&E, so as not to have to look at the dangerous games we are playing by fracturing the very ground under our feet, are turning Chicken Little on his proverbial head. Since it's not the sky that's falling but the ground that's leaking into the sky.
We are, on a continental scale, consciously and deliberately releasing the gaseous component of the earth's crust into the gaseous blanket surrounding us whose delicate balance of gasses enables our frail existence. Earth's atmosphere, the main dumping ground for the effluents our efforts for an effortless existence produce, allows us the luxury of biological life via gaseous exchanges with it: CO2 out, O2 in. The fact that upsetting that balance upsets the vast majority of the world's population not in the least is the real problem. And it is intractable. And since the US is the Sole Superpower, and the US has shown itself to have no compunction whatsoever against laying waste to any country fossil-fuelish enough to stand in our way, there is nothing anyone can do about it. The American Dream has been fractured to bits, yet it will allow no alternative to emerge. Instead, the USA, having declared its own fatally flawed template of governance to be the end of history, has somehow made it acceptable that it seems hell-bent on assuring that that's the case.
