The International Criminal Courts Disaster.

The Toxic Shock Doctrine seems to be at work in our globalized world, n'est-ce pas?

Some give good Headlines du jour:

Oil prices crash 30%, sending global stocks tumbling FT.

Saudi Arabia kicked off an all-out oil war on Saturday, slashing official pricing for its crude and making the deepest cuts in at least 20 years on its main grades, in a bid to push as many barrels into the market as possible.

The Financial Times reported “Russia has had enough of the shale guys living off Opec-plus,” said one person familiar with negotiations, referring to the cartel and allied non-members.

https://moneymaven.io/mishtalk/economics/trump-blackmails-germany-with-sanction-threats-over-nord-stream-2-tvWVjwRnrEGS2XEk4AWceg

“Angela [Merkel] you got to stop buying gas from Putin,” said Trump.

 The liquidity crisis will quickly spread far beyond energy.

George W. Bush , the price of gasoline increased from $1.60 per gallon when he took office in January 2001 to $4.40 per gallon in July 2008, a jump of 275 percent.

That spawned a liquidity crisis that spread far beyond energy.

Oil Production

 2017: OPEC’s total production at the time of President Plump's inauguration was  33,140 (in thousands of barrels a day), while

Total U.S. production was ~ 9,000 (in thousands of barrels a day). In

2020: OPEC’s total production sunk to: 29, 000  (in thousands of barrels a day)

While U.S. production surged to 13,000.

That was exactly the amount needed to displace entirely the output of the smaller countries, one of which, not surprisingly, was Iraq, but also Bahrain, Gabon, Nigeria, and other small producers that could ill afford it, had their production side-lined to make way for US production that was made possible by fracturing the rock that the remnants of US oil supply were trapped in.

As the USA, the only major oil producer in the world without any production agreements with any other oil producer in the world, stole market share from the smallest of the small producers, on top of collapsing oil prices, by flooding the market with diluted product (the oil condensate that the Permian and other fracturing wells produce in larger quantities than oil is considered so far from being oil that Russia has wrangled a dispensation: it need not count any oil condensate it produces in its oil production figures. That same condensate that US is pouring onto the market, because that's essentially what "Light Tight Oil" is comprised of.

 In the U.S., a growing volume and percentage of the produced associated gas is intentionally worse-than-wasted by flaring it in such outsized quantities since about year 2000, that it's surpassed by far the 50-year highs of 500 billion cubic feet, a full 7.5%, reached in 2018.

Meanwhile, the burst in supply has encouraged the growth in the entire world of all the wrong industries.

As everyone vilifies Trump, no one seems to have noticed that, like the Capitalistic system he so ardently embraces (who can blame him? What other system would continue to shower money on a known serial bankrupt, con man and Liar?) is ensuring that nothing we do will effect its continued rampage over the natural world, like a Hummer it simply rolls over anything in its path, squelching complaints with the same heavy-handed insistence the Hummer utilizes: its bigger, it's butcher, and goddammit, it's Made America Grate again.

For the last decade, using so-called QE Cash and the bonanza of oil it's drowned the oh-so-concerned globe with, as we rush to save the Planet by freeing it of all those hydrocarbons buried in its nether regions to fund bio-fuel production that reduces vast tracts of rainforest into piles of ash and transforms pristine prairie vistas into polluted agroswamps that pour their fossil-fuel-based fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi to be drained into the Gulf of Mexico to ruin the livelihoods of Gulf fisheries and trawlers by creating an ever-widening deadzone so as to implement a "green" solution to burning gasoline by diluting it with a  product whose energy efficiency is an order of magnitude lower so as to pad the pockets of its sponsors in Congress, the White House and every Red State  in the nation (each of which is demanding less interference from that same Washington swamp while they glom onto ever larger shares of tax dollars from the very Blue States they revile).

While determining that the vast store of energy reserves must "stay in the ground" to stave off disaster, industry after industry that is totally dependent on fossil fuels is making sure we are doing exactly the opposite, as they become the only engines of growth in the modern world.

To wit:

Oil production itself

Petrochemical output drowning the world in its waste;

Natural gas production: to such an irresponsible degree of excess that more than ten percent of its production is simply flared; 

Air travel and its byproduct,

Tourism, and its byproduct,

Hotel Occupancy;

Cruise Industry;

Arms production and sales;

Electronics;

The Internet;

Automobile production.

The latter item for all practical purposes consists of robofacturing (Workers need not apply ... Your job is now to drive drive drive ... anywhere, for anything just get in that goddamn car, turn the IGNITION switch and burn up that gas. Consume! It's the only right you have left) 35 million new ICE machines every year (if you put an end to EV production, it would barely register a blip on the only measures that matters to markets: stock prices and Stock Market performance, bond prices and sovereign debt, CEO salaries and pension plans, tax receipts and military budgets. Not exactly a Green Machine we've spent the last dozens of years creating, is it?).

But more importantly, it leaves no provision for a Green Machine for the next generation either, does it? Only fraudulent claims akin to the Ethanol boondoggle and the bio-diesel programs that purported to be Green, yet which at their dark core had only the Slime Green of the almighty dollar. And there is nothing currently in the works to change any of that. Only this time the lies we're being molly-coddled with are the EV claims of 100% decarbonization (Lol) of the transportation sector, a lie so momentous, its foundation in Evil so entrenched, we will see it, as per Goebbels' dictum, repeated over and over until we believe it (which won't take much; we cling to our rides that fiercely that it is at the cold-hearted core of the American Dream: No Car? You're a Failure! A loser; a mamby-pamby Libtard. Why are you even alive!?).

But since the Western world need keep up the facade of a Free-for-all Enterprise system that requires no input from government, and must have its animal spirits let loose to do whatsoever it deems necessary to turn a short-term profit, the planning that goes on in boardrooms and government offices alike to further the economic plans for the next generation must be conducted secretly. Yet no economy the size of the USA can possibly be run without plans for the future.  But the electorate has voluntarily recused itself from that planning, as it would rather envision a future that, like the Wars we've so recently "ended", just "happens". Otherwise it sounds too much like Socialism.

After all it's so much more logical to do like New York, say, and like, let's say Exxon, just hide the data so that we can sue (ie blame) them for all the oil products we purchased from them and then ignited. (Somehow a company selling someone a gun leaves the buyer responsible if they fire it; but sell them gas and it's the seller's fault if they ignite it). While making a ton of money in the process, and running over all opposition with the petrol-powered military (Which all on its lonesome burns more gasoline than the entire country of Sweden). Like cancer from cigarettes, it's so much easier to blame "Big Tobacco" (which doesn't actually exist: "Major Transnational Corporate money-making profit-machines enabled by our Federal Dollars' subsidies", though, now those entities really do exist).

But one little germ, one microscopic virus has done in less than one of Wall Street weak's quarters,  more to reduce carbon exhaust, bunker-fuel pollution, and automobile futures than all the promises of any Green Raw Deal ever has or will do. Like GW Bush's collapse of the Ponzi scheme of CDO's, MBS, Covenant-Lite, CDO squared, SIV's, shadow banking, Fracking bonanza, the Trump economy is a bag of gas that's not going to be pricked and seep out like the methane from the tens of thousands of leaks fracturing the earth's surface. It has far more potential to blow up in our faces like Paradise that was purportedly caused by a transmission line and had nothing to do with the myriad hotspots caused by methane not being flared, as California law dictates, thus leaving it to accumulate, increasing the probability it would ignite in a 100degree plus environment.

(As if money weren't enough to blame as the underlying culprit in the Corona virus's rapid spread within China and now the rest of the world, the actual reason for its being "weaponized" isn't even being discussed ... it wasn't as a bio-weapon it was being tested as, but as a VAccine. But because the pharmaceutical companies already have plans for a vaccine against it in the future, this fact is never mentioned. But among non-government scientists, it is the # 1 suspect for the corona virus's explosive growth, and the most obvious reason that the Chinese Communist Party leadership cared more to keep that secret than to stop its spread. Which brings up a second, related, query:

Why, when deaths from the virus first became known, was it universally accepted that the numbers were being down-played, yet right now, as the world chomps at the bit to get back to "normal", are the figures from that same Chinese Communist Party, figures that claim the number of  new cases is declining, accepted as Gospel? Since when do we believe numbers circulated by apparatchiks working for a totalitarian regime? 

While the USA, as explained on the Desmog blog, continues its investor fraud to pump up its oil industry, the largest, and most appropriately named, pump 'N dump operation in history, aided and abetted, as surely as the housing fraud under Plump's predecessor was a scam, so too, and on as continent-spanning a scale, more akin to a GSE than any Company, is the fracturing bonanza set to fracture into myriad shards of loss.

Yet for all its evil, the housing Ponzi hadn't that extra kick in the groin that the shale leash hales:

Environmental destruction and weather calamities of unprecedented scale as the Southeast US and much of the farmbelt is turned into a watery swamp to enable the exponential growth in flaring, which growth rate now far exceeds that of actual oil output. In fact, as the fracturing boom ages, the growth in the output of gas balloons while the amount of oil per drilled rig declines. This is following such a path that the increase in flaring is becoming an embarrassment even to the Texas oil industry. But one thing they fail to inform the public of, but of which the Furor is well aware, is that as this condition continues, and it only promises to worsen, the prospect of the US in and of itself, ratcheting up the extreme consequences caused by such extreme measures would, you might think, cure Americans of their fondness for everything Extreme (it won't of course, or maybe like the Afghanistan and Iraqi Wars, will do so only when it is in the rear view mirror and all the harm's already baked into the yellow cake).

This doesn't simply court disaster, it ensures it.

As OPEC has now dropped its price for oil, a price kept artificially high to enable US fracking to continue despite its non-profitability in this our Markets know everything world, the prospect that the Plumped economy would end in the same crack-up and depression that the Bush (both père and fils) presidencies ended in will come as a surprise only because nobody has bothered to point out that  what's being said now, (or was being said ) about the resilience of the US economy, even before its defalcations threatened to come to light, were exactly what was being said then. And by exactly, I mean verbatim; yet as GW so adroitly pointed out, 

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again". 

...and just like our smirking chimp president, we can't quite bring ourselves to say the real corollary. They laughed at GW because he couldn't remember the 2'nd part, but that's not how I read it. He remembered it alright, and then it flashed into his little pea-brain exactly what he was about to say and he choked not so much on the very idea of HIM being fooled twice, but on the tacit admission that he could be held responsible for any possible events that the "Fool me Twice, Shame on me" conclusion would  have left him culpable for. Well, you know what?

 We will be (as in are being) fooled again.

And then, "Who could have seen it coming?",  that bromide of our mass suicide, will be trotted out yet again.