Posts
Nearly 2 decades of War in Afghanistan: Shows Muslim women the heights they can attain if only they would dump the Chador.
The Art of The Pimp: The "My Two" Movement.
Even Rock Album covers seem downright Puritanical compared to the baring of the Presidential Sweets.
While Trump slides down in the polls ("It can't be all bad", he quips, "That's how I met Melania"), and Corona virus continues its Groundhog Day-like monopolization of the airwaves, scant attention is being paid to the escalating costs the climate changing gasses of the fracking industry is having on the states around the Gulf and in the Four Corners region.
As you can see from the US gov't's chart from the EIA, the Bush US opened the 21'st century burning twice as much coal as it did in the 60's, an amount that went down only after Bush left office, and left the economy reeling from his mishandling of ... well, everything. Luckily for us, in terms of legibility of the above data, our usage in BTU's tracks right up to 100, making the percentages easy to determine. Such that it is child's play to see that the percentage of those BTU's derived from coal, are, at ten%, exactly the same as the number of BTU's derived from what they call "renewables", within which they include biomass (at 43% of all renewables, easily the largest ... with wind a close second).
Between those two extremes lie the mass of US generative capacity at 80% Oil and Gas, and 30% overall growth from Reagonomics that has remained relatively unchanged, peaking in the Bush years and peaking once again now, as the US has gone on a massive binge of fracturing the landscape to scrape the bottom of the oil barrel, in order, not to make America "Energy Independent" but to sell to countries like China, thereby destroying any hope America had of being Energy Independent in the future in order to make a handful of well-connected insiders billionaires. In other words, from the onset of the Fracking bonanza until the current day, a period in which the production of US petroleum products has more than doubled from some 5 mln bpd's to > 12 mln bpd's at the beginning of 2020 (again, the EIA's figures), not a drop of that burgeoning output in petroleum production has contributed to energy production in the US: As you can see from the graph, petroleum provided ~ 35quadrillion BTU's of energy in 2010 when Fracking began to really increase, until present day, when it provides that almost exact same number: ~ 35quadrillion BTU's of energy. Many of which are used up to drill, build rigs, build roads to carry the heavy loads of sand and fracking water, build pipelines, fill cargo trains, to ship the oil to ports where it is exported to the rest of the world, all supposedly to make America "Energy Independent", which it most assuredly has not done.
The Bloomberg article sited explains how the Wilks brothers helped bilk the US out of its last remaining fossil fuel reserves, including a chart, which I'm unable to provide as it's in Excel, so I settled for the following from the EIA:
and more currently, here, which illustrates the amount of crude oil exports, which were stable from 1985 until 2010 at ~ .5mln bpd, when they began their inexorable climb, reaching 1 million bpd by 2014, when prices crashed just in time for the US ramp up, tripling its output of exports to 3mln bpd's when the profitability of doing so was non-existent, leaving the industry where it is today: flat on its back, laiden with debt, and, like the Fed that ballooned its balance sheet to provide the "industry" with trillions in investment cash, exposed for the fraud it has perpetuated on the American people.
In other words, the billionaire class, like the Wilks mentioned above, rake in billions, while not a nickel of those ill-gotten gains will they use to seal the leaks of the thousands of wells leaking methane ... instead it has been proposed in an article in Gizmodo penned by Dharna Noor, that the Federal Government, a federal government that denies Climate Change in order to deny any liability to the oil and gas interests that are accorded the leeway to release as much methane and CO2, and flare as much of our potential future natural gas into the air, pay for the expensive work of stopping these leaks that are driving up the temperature of the entire Gulf Coast. Instead they get to lay off tens of thousands of workers and throw them onto the unemployment lines with no health insurance while the country is in the grips of a pandemic, instead of using them to clean up their own mess: a mess made, not, as our lying president claims, to "Make America Great Again", but to leave Americans holding the gasbag of an atmosphere sodden with CO2 and ever-increasing load of the more powerful methane in order to sell the last of US petroleum reserves to .... wait for it ... China. To which country we, as in the USA, have exported an increasing amounts of oil and LNG year after year, decreasing the trade deficit with China, but enabling all those jobs our Chief Executive claims they have "stolen" even as his administration provides them the cheap energy resources without which they would be unable to do so.
Ina vicious circle, American wages get suppressed in order to siphon profits to the "job creators". The jobs they have been creating, however, have been in China, because, it is there that industry can operate in an environment that disregards environmental degradation, while back home, the US uses the profits of its entire business sector to pour into the oil fields, copying the dynamic of the ethanol industry, where federal funds are slathered all over the corn fields of Iowa, the same is true for the oilfields of Texas, skewing the economy toward the billionaire class that reaps the benefits while we reap the whirlwind their activities put into motion.
And now, as the rig count collapses, the methane leaks get worse, and the much-vaunted oil revolution in US shale starts unraveling, the entire economy is set to unravel with it, since it has been leveraged off of the increased production: LNG terminals to export the far more copious amounts of natural gas fracturing produces, petrochemicals plants to take advantage of that fact will now not be fed with the voluminous amounts of cheap feedstock they need to operate, oil services companies and myriad other ancillary businesses, all suffering major losses and bankruptcies while federal deficits calculated on revenues that have now disappeared will balloon even more alarmingly than any figures we have been told about, as the deficit projections only account for the added fiscal stimulus the Congress has provided, never taking into account the collapse in federal receipts from leveraging the entire economy on one Market "play": Freakin' Fracking.
So now, one country after the other is drowning in climate deranged flooding: India, Bangladesh, Korea, Japan, China, Italy, Indochina, the USA, not-so-Great Britain, Spain, Yemen, Mexico, Central America, with the number of submerged cars floating down the road promising to deliver that Paula Krugman fantasy economic miracle of increasing demand to spur our moribund Covid country in to a manufacturing renaissance to replace all those soggy, moldy, broken autos ... EV's don't float either, ya know. And as the Arctic is in flames, along with much of Arizona, and soon enough, California, as the heat continues to build, threatening a long destructive hurricane season, the prospect of paying for all the damage that the continued burning of copious amounts of fossil fuels causes, the ability of the economy to do so has been severely crippled: the stock market may not reflect the decline of America's economic engine, but federal tax receipts, not capable of the same legerdemain, do, as they are based on actual profits made in the real economy, which Wall St. is not, and so most companies are hard-put to come up with those profits the Federal Government is anxious to tax them on .
Meanwhile in "This will never be a Socialist country", every citizen is required to fund the continued existence of the industries that are completely dedicated to the rich: Airlines that were buying up their own stock with the "Tax reform" dollars the Republicans larded them with are now stealing the public's tax dollars to line their pockets even as they lay off workers and keep flights to nowhere flying. From Tesla to the Healthcare system, from Amazon and Whole Foods to yacht and Bunker-building "Enterprises" the economy has been skewed heavily to cater to the rich, leaving the rest of us to shop at Walmarts for the cheap Chinese-made goods filling its shelves.
But without those dollars being used to buoy up the mistakes of the past, the enterprises of the future, or even of today, have no capital ... it has all been pre-allocated to the crashing enterprises that operate on the same principal that the Wilks made "their" fortune on: risk the public's money, if you lose, they lose, and then foist the true costs, once you've skimmed off your own billions, onto the public to pay to clean up your mess, while pouring campaign dollars into the re-election campaign of the avatar of pseudo-Capitalism, that serial bankrupt, run-the-country-for-my-own-personal-aggrandizement, Trump.
No wonder you have to call out the Gestapo to send into American cities to quell the unrest. Corruption on this scale would have made Marie Antoinette blush. Something the current crop of swindlers are incapable of, as they have absolutely no shame. So when you hear the News dutifully claim "We're all in this together", run.
