Empowering Infernos: Blazing Addles The US West.

 

 As scientists keep predicting the onslaught that the changed climate will work on our pathetic little lives as we drive the earth's system into overdrive by annually injecting billions of tons of what was once sequestered CO2 into its troposphere, and then adding a healthy dollop of methane into the mix just to spice it up a bit, the continued refrain of, "Nobody could have seen it coming," is once again being taken up as fires char an ever greater acreages of The American West's parched lands and the concatenation of catastrophic failures lays bare the fact that systems put in place to present a facade of emergency preparation collapse like a house of cards when confronting actual dire situations. 

The Keystone Kops approach to the corona virus pandemic spread the disease throughout the prison system of California, a population it depends on to fight the fires savaging its lands, jumping its freeways and flaming its citizens homes into charred skeletal remains, as failure begets failure. 

Choking on the smoke and driving through flaming landscapes gives Californians little time to ponder the scale, never mind the cause, of the environmental derangement manifesting itself around them to have time to clear the smoke from their bleary eyes long enough to catch a glimpse of the historic weather occurrences transpiring elsewhere on their continent. No time to notice the historic twin tropical systems churning their way toward the US Southeast, nor wonder how can a storm that was so historic in its genesis, as Faustus certainly was, be followed so quickly by Genevieve threatening to follow the same track. Regardless of which, it is unheard of for there to be hurricanes/tropical systems churning up both sides of the continent simultaneously: one side threatening even more raging infernos while the other two systems come ripping through the Caribbean and racing toward the gulf on the other side, even as the center of the country wails about still not having electricity restored to thousands from the unprecedented 100 mph windstorm that went barreling through the country's hinterland. 

As the Democratic convention winds down, Gavin Newsom almost made an historic first connection by a politician between climate change and the mauling of the continent. However, he stopped short of linking the US and Siberia's burning to the methane monster that massive oil exploration, excavation and transportation on such a vast destructive scale has created. It is my thesis, as readers of this blog will attest to, that the manic pace of fracking, done as it is, to pay down debt, enrich investors, and fill government coffers with the resultant tax bonanza, is such that its production has come completely unmoored from actual demand. So much so that methane leaks are left to seep into the atmosphere unplugged, and wells are dug that release so much natural gas it is flared in ever greater amounts, so much so it is even beginning to embarrass Texas where they still hold firm to the belief that bigger is better: the more you flare, the greater you make America. Yet oil sits filling every storage nook available such that ships burdened with it run aground in Mauritius simply because they have no choice but to meander the globe aimlessly searching for somewhere, anywhere, to offload their cargo. Until it finally ends up in the ocean. While cargo trains full of petro production derail, spilling their contents onto North  Dakota's frack frack fractured surface ... all despite the fact that demand is so constrained that it could be met far more efficiently with supplies from cleaner sources that require far less energy-intensive production methods.

Following in the path of both the Bush and Obama administration, Donald had decided that he would amp up America's status as a petro-state - choosing an economic future for the country that best served his own needs. Oil and gas could be wielded as an international cudgel to force other countries to respect and deal with America no matter anything else the Donald's administration did. The industry historically generated enough easy cash to generate almost instant, almost limitless corruption wherever needed … without the need for endless active Wars. And when you have those kinds of goals to make one indispensable industry, and you run that industry like a Mafia chop shop, eventually the actual business side of your dark little authoritarian scheme is going to suffer. But bankruptcy is what Donald does best. It is all  his resume consists of. Skim the proceeds as you suck the country dry of its last hydrocarbons, selling them to the very country, CHInuh, that your castigating out of the other side of your malignant mouth.

Donald uses American natural gas and oil not only to make money for the State but also to keep neighboring countries corrupt and dependent. It solves so many problems. It reduces expectations for democratic governance and the rule of law while it creates a corruptly empowered political class invested in preserving the fossil-fuel-dependent system that has enriched its practitioners and their families. It also created comfortable space for organized white collar, Wall St, and Fed-enabled crime to flourish. The US government, under Donald’s control, has steadily become more integrated with all kinds of transnational organized crime and right-wing government autocracies. The beauty of Donald’s ever-deepening kinship with the world's dictators gave him a whole new set of levers with which to settle problems—and to make problematic people go away—whenever it might be unseemly to wield the overt powers of the state.

Fraud is now America’s most profitable export in world affairs. The counterfeiting for which George Lloyd was murdered by the state is penny-ante when compared to that perpetrated by the Fed. This can be clearly seen as the nation's dwindling GDP starts approaches the size of the Fed's balance sheet which has exploded to such an extent that on their current trajectory, they will meet: but you needn't wait for that to happen to see the enormity of the counterfeiting operation: close to half of the GDP is now accounted for by Fed printing. And the GDP of a country is what determines the interest rate at which investors in its debt are paid. So simply conjuring up half of the GDP is now at the heart of what they still laughingly refer to as Free Enterprise, because it comes, as it does, free of any enterprise. So only those concerns with ties to the Central Bank have any hope of continuing their businesses. The term, "Don't fight the Fed", takes on an entirely different character under such a regime.

Donald's America has become warped and stunted— monetary malfeasance on such a massive industrial scale it can bring down the whole nation - the entire world ... again. And when coupled with exotic assassinations by drone, weapons systems sold to the richest country in the world to use against the poorest, illegal out-of-uniform military incursions onto a State's soil, and the dissolution of bonds and treaties and Western norms whenever they’re considered inconvenient, it confers close to dictatorial powers onto a President that is inclined to usurp them anyway. 

When the Resource Curse takes hold in a country as big and influential and aggressive as 21st century America, it turns out to be the entire world’s problem. America's fracking mania has become a malignant tumor, spreading CO2 and methane throughout the rest of the world. But it has currently decided to come home to roost, and the guns of August weren't ever as apocalyptic as the fires of 2020; fires similar to those which started the year off a world away in what seems a lifetime ago, on the continent of Australia … another country, not coincidentally, afflicted with the resource curse. One that, like Donald ordering pupils back into schools rife with Covid, continued to entice tourists to its beaches even as its citizens floated offshore under hellish skies, forced there to escape the flames engulfing their homes. Fires similar to those that have raging all over that other Petro-State - Russia - in Siberia since early spring, releasing enough CO2 in the process to more than make-up for the decreased CO2 generation caused by the economic slowdown resulting from Covid-afflicted populations. 

The United States is in the grips of payback. It is being buffeted by forces of its own creation while its citizens are kept in the dark as to the enormity of the experiment they have been unwittingly made subjects of. As the corona virus started its rampage though the American States there were many who observed that we were part of an experiment as they saw cities devoid of activity, highways empty of traffic, streets silenced by inactivity, yet nowhere do we see the like comparison to the fracturing of the entire North American continent as being likened to that exact same thing: an experiment to which we have all been subjected to like caged rats in a mad scientist's laboratory. What I would like to suggest is that the experiment is not going well. Oil production, like viral reproduction, continues apace. Whereas the destruction it is wreaking, is either ignored, white-washed, or denied: the parallels are striking because they are aspects of the same phenomenon: the deliberate separation of activities from their consequences: Denial and delusion. Globalization and hydraulic fracturing on a continental scale. But the masking effect of these two all-too-human tendencies last only so long before reality, denied or blamed on other reasons, must finally become so obvious to all but the most greed-obsessed that they must bow to their awesome power to destroy everything they were initially hailed as saving.

Whether a change of administration has any hope of reversing the whirlwind we have yet to see. But it could hardly, barring some military madness (which is always a possibility in War-addled America), make the current state of derangement any worse.