Flu Over Country: The American Heartless Land

                                                                     Partietag!

A Novel Danse Macabre.

Just as George W. Bush was the champion of climate change, dropping the GDP of the entire globe by sending the global economy into a tailspin, one so steep we have yet to truly recover from it, his environmental successor, in the form of DJ, continues to spin that disk, at an even faster pace.

As I have mentioned previously in this blog, specifically when GW was still in office, in order to contract the levels of CO2 exhaust into the atmosphere, the OECD countries, specifically the exceptional USA, (If everyone consumed like the US, global resource use would run up to a staggering 260 billion tons per year) must slow both their rates of growth and the combustion of the fuel of that growth: excavated hydrocarbons. What that basically means is that demand destruction must occur on a grand scale, and GW delivered the greatest hit to both domestic and global demand since the Great Depression. Now the DJ has outdone even him. GW got people thrown out of their homes at a previously unseen level, created mass unemployment in the one country whose consumers were far above any in the world for resource consumption, and curtailed the steady annual rise of 1.5%  in oil demand that had risen steadily for more than a generation before he crashed the ship of state, blinded by the continual fog of War, onto the rocks. Reef-er Madness, if you will. Bad for the citizens of the USA, a major gain for citizens and ecosystems of the World.

Obama trashed that model, and built back the failed system to clunk along on the last fumes of fossil -fuel extraction called fracturing, to hobble together a centralized economy built on the basis of Putin's Champions: Halliburton, Exxon, Silicone Valley, etc, all the usual suspects received federal subsidies, none more than greens. We must pretend we're green, like Europe, so Obama dutifully signed on to the useless Paris Climate Accords that did precisely nothing, and all-in-all got the economy back on track., That it was the wrong track seemed not to matter, it was the one that created jobs, and jobs together with resource extraction , creates the stream of federal tax revenues that keeps the belief in the bedrock strength of the US dollar and US debt intact.

But now DJ has trumped that by an astounding grand slam, not only following step-by-step China's policy on how not to stop a virus from spreading in your country (we should by now know this was a deliberate policy by his own pronouncements on the subject: he has blamed China for their bungled response, then followed it as a blueprint for his own administration's handling of it, having been shown its effectiveness in killing off that part of the population he and his Republican colleagues have time and again pointed to as a Liability on the USA's balance sheet: one that must be eliminated. Can't eliminate Social Security and Medicare, as the GW administration, following the Reagan administration's example, tried to do? Simple. Just use the virus to eliminate its recipients instead). However, the rampage of the virus through the country was causing the news media to focus their attention on the virus, taking the spotlight off him for the first time in his presidency, and he couldn't have that. So we were treated to the Corona Clown Circus for weeks, while the economy tanked at a breathtaking speed while the deaths of those parasitic oldsters climbed faster than his wildest dreams.

Unfortunately for him , but great for the environment, it brought down every single program he has championed. From the ecologically disastrous corn-based ethanol, demand for which has plummeted along with gasoline demand, to the fracking companies his Fed had provided cheap, ready-made dollars for, to the Petrochemical plants all lined up along the banks of the Gulf and the shores of the Mississippi to take advantage of that cheap ethane from the Permian basin's overproduction of natural gas, to the LNG industry, that heavily subsidized loans to politically well-connected companies like soon-to-be-bankrupt Chesapeake Energy, had enabled. The entire US economic future, having been configured to exploit the last fumes of fossil fuels exploitation to cover the world in cheap unbiodegradable plastic, was coming down around his ears, our ears. All of which meant that their combustion has been curtailed to a greater extent than any other time in the nation's history: DJ is a Climate Champion! Almost 46 million Americans have now filed for unemployment claims while 85,000 jobs have been shed by the In U.S. oilfield services companies thanks to the plunge in demand for oil.

But wait! There's more!

Not content with the slowing rise in the rate of infections, the administration has decided to host its own spectacular spectacular, congregating a crowd of cheering yahoos in one of the States with the fastest rising rates of infection so as to goose the slaughter of the innocents to a higher power.

Perhaps he saw the Mauna Loa, Hawaii readings of CO2 from May and noticed how they were still climbing. They actually did reach 420ppm at one point, but not on 4/20 ... it took another month, but they are stabilized at ~418ppm, well above last May's reading of 414.14 ppm, a good, in fact historical, 4.18 ppm higher than a mere year ago:

Daily average CO₂ on June 1, 2019: 414.14 ppm
Daily average CO₂ on June 1, 2020: 418.32 ppm

That clocks the largest acceleration in CO2 accumulation since such measurements were started.

Meanwhile methane leaks from abandoned wells, of which there are an ever-growing number, since rig count has plummeted (U.S. shale production is slated to fall by half over the next year due to the massive drop in the rig count, putting overall American oil production below 8 mb/d within a year’s time and it will take years, if ever, before production will rebound anywhere close to pre-pandemic levels).

Yet CO2 and methane atmospheric readings have never been higher, while aerosols, thanks to the curtailment of the combustion of coal, have never been lower, a harbinger of a long hot, and fiery, summer. All of which suggests a Perfect Storm for a summer in which temperatures have never been higher, not even those of last year, which literally had never been higher (in the timeframe of human existence).

That's because, although we may have already forgotten about the unprecedented intensity, scale and duration of the fires in Australia at the end of last year and the beginning of this, the atmosphere isn't allowed that luxury. Nor can it discount the fires raging in Siberia, in that other Petro State, Russia, where Putin doesn't actually deny climate change, he extols it, suggesting it will make the vast plains of the tundra suitable for farming ... a supposition, that, like the cock-eyed pronouncements of our own Head of State, have consequences. Because many of Russia's fires, fires that have consumed already ten times the area of last year's already extensive burns, were started deliberately by farmers anxious to make Vlad's predictions reality by burning down swaths of the taiga forest, much as Bolsanaro's Brazilian mafia is simultaneously burning down the Amazon rainforests.

This is a triple whammy that most don't take into account: not only do these fires pour enormous quantities of stored carbon into the atmosphere, they destroy a major resource that was not only performing carbon sequestration, but deprives us of the oxygen those forests were producing, not to mention the prodigious amount of oxygen they are voraciously consuming during their conflagration. Oxygen they will never replenish, because they will never regrow.

Simultaneously America is deliberately burning down its own forests in the Southeast by strip mining them to send to Europe where they are burned as biomass to generate electricity: but whether or not they are burned in situ ,or burned in an incinerator, they are still burned, their carbon still exhausted into the atmosphere, their O2-generating and carbon sequestration capacities destroyed. And to add fuel to the fire, they have to be harvested, transported to ports, and shipped overseas, where they must be unloaded, transported to the combustion chambers of Germany and not-so-Great Britain, each step of which has its own carbon footprint, making their conflagration a far greater calamity than the similar destruction that is now happening on the other side of the county where Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and California are all hosts to wildfires that are already (it's only June!) busy billowing enormous plumes of CO2 into the atmosphere, while further north the Alaskan permafrost releases ever-increasing amounts of its carbon store into the air right on the threshold of the Arctic, which is already warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe.

Now usually, the Mauna Loa readings of CO2 concentration go down from their June 1'st high, but given that the economies of the world have yet to truly fully open back up, perhaps the extra load that opening will result in will keep that from happening to the extent that it usually does. So instead of slowing down, carbon accumulation will again speed up.

Oh, but wait. That's right.We have the US President actively ensuring that the US economy will never again attain the growth rate it has enjoyed in the past. So The Donald is our ray of hope, his ploy to use his Partietags as Super Spreader events, sure to keep the economy shrinking, since he has already stated it will not be shutdown again, no matter how many "warriors" have to die; shrinking it like Grover Norquisling's vision of Government: until its small enough to throw out with the Ba'ath water. And the smaller the US economy, the better chances for curtailment of the burning of the fossil fuels that are making the planet hostile to life as we know it. Bad thing for Americans. Good thing for the world. Just like our President, n'est-ce pas?