"It is what it is": Translation: "So what?"

 

A cult: The Donald JimJones Trump occult belief in their own sanctity. It may not be cricket, but in this, our modern Dizzywhirled, only spin matters. Thus spake Spinocchio:

When you wish on star and stripes, 

makes no difference who it swipes

Anything your heart desires will come to you

If your heart is in your dream, no result is too extreme

When you wish on stars and stripes: blasphemers do

Fate is blind

She brings to all mankind

The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing

And worlds of pain to those they're wronging

Like a bolt out of the red white and blue, 

fate steps in and runs you through

When you wish on stars and stripes, your dreams come true

While the suffering they cause, you pretend's not due to you.

The Department of Agriculture has estimated that 550,000 acres of Iowa corn will not be harvested this fall due to damage caused by the Aug. 10 derecho that swept across the state. Billions of dollars in federal funds have since flowed to this Trumpelstiltskin State.

 In 2020, the American West, the Arctic, Siberia, Indonesia, Australia, Brazil and Argentina have all experienced their worst wildfires in decades.

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (R) wants the Justice Department to waste other States' taxpayers' money by hosting sham investigations of a host of environmental organizations to "determine" whether the groups are in league with Chinese and Russian government interests (Those same Chinese interests her father's Halliburton has enabled the sale of US fracked oil (the last remnants of US oil reserves) to run Chinese enterprises that take US jobs. While Exxon was "in league with" Russia's State-run oil company to enable it to drill in the Arctic and fracture Siberia. Fracking, Les Cheney, is a technology developed by the US government with US taxpayer dollars. No administration in US history has ever been more "in league with" , (or more accurately, in bed(rock) with) Russian and Chinese interests more than her own father's criminal administration was).

There are more than 6,000 bunker fuel-burning ships carrying containers around the world at any point in time.

Perhaps the greatest threat from climate change is the risk it poses for large-scale catastrophic disruptions of Earth systems … 

Business as usual amounts to conducting a one-time, irreversible experiment of unknown outcome with the habitability of the entire planet while the country contributing the most to the toxicity of the atmosphere maintains that the whole thing is a hoax. Even as Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter complains that, "I wish that this was some weird joke or form of deja vu," as Tropical storm Beta heads for landfall thereby threatening his community. Every one of the Gulf states being inundated by one eco-disaster after the other as a result of their support of the mindless conspiracy theory that "Global Warming is a hoax", a deliberate denial of a reality they know to be true, so as to pander to their religiously-addled, Elmer Gantrified populations of supernaturalists, while the havoc they wreak on others is always blamed on the victims. Only when the joke is on them do they even pretend there's something amiss. You shouldn't worry about those weather forecasts, Mayor Hunter. They're issued by the exact same scientists who are warning you about Climate Change, so consider them as just part of the hoax, sir. 

Now even Bloomberg has taken notice, publishing an article telling the story of the 3.2 million deserted oil and gas wells leaking methane into an atmosphere already besotted with excess CO2.

Although the article, and this post, concentrates on methane, I'd like to first touch on CO2 and the acceleration of its accumulation. During the years from 1970 to 2020, the ppm's of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen by 100, and that span, being 50 years, gives us a growth rate of ~ 2ppm per annum. Which like most stats, doesn't reflect the entire picture. When measurements were first taken, they were closer to a mere ~1ppm growth rate. They are now approaching 4ppm/annum. 

The reading in 1960 was about 315 ppm, it's now 415 ppm. From 1955 - 1965, (per NOAA's "Global Climate Change and Carbon Dioxide Lesson – Earth & Environmental Science"), CO2 rose from 315ppm to 320ppm, yet by 2015 it was 400ppm. Now, a scant five years after 2015, it's high was ~420pm. Not only an undeniable accumulation, but a rarely mentioned acceleration in that accumulation; hardly surprising, given the deliberate movement of the industrial base of the world's largest economy to a country ruled by an intransigent Communist One-Party System in the pocket of international capital, its citizens silenced into submission by threats of "re-education" should they have the nerve to complain about their children's asthma, or their inability to see anything more than two blocks away; a country that was more than willing to pour vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere in order to "catch up" to the West (I guess 3500 years of concatenating dynastic rule simply wasn't enough time). Then, having amassed an enormous National Debt to build a Wehrmacht in order to "fight Communism", the USA, the nation that, despite moving its largest industrial polluters to China, kept increasing its own carbon footprint one decade after the other, joined itself at the hip to the only Communist power left on the globe. The same Communist power that it relied on to buy that debt it amassed to fight Communism ... oh the irony!

But even that legerdemain didn't sate the thirst for hydrocarbons of the energy-hog of the globe, so it first throttled the Mid-East to rake it of its underground wealth, and then used the capital thus pirated to test Cheney's Halliburton's horizontal fracturing technology in Kuwait to aid and abet that kingdom in its criminal purpose of drilling across its border to siphon the neighboring State of Iraq's petro. The USA then bottled up that county's reserves in a mock hunt for WMD's, precipitating a War in order to hold back Iraq's reserves from the marketplace, which, thus deprived of the world's largest source of oil outside of Saudi Arabia, sent, with the help of Wall St's market manipulation and speculation, the price of petroleum skyrocketing. This windfall was then used to deploy the prohibitively expensive fracturing technology to the testbed of North Dakota's Bakken where it proved spectacularly successful, making it the blueprint for spreading the fracturing of the earth's crust to the rest of the continent, from sea to rising sea, as  it were.

But Houston, we have a problem.

As I stated in a previous post, from years ago:

"I would first like to dwell for a minute on the "Ring of Fire". Because, whereas the coiners, well, if purloin and coin are synonymous, of that phrase were referring to the Marcellus shale and the natural gas bonanza that it's brought to the Pennsylvania area, I can't help but notice that around the Arctic, during the last generation, all through which the concept of anthropogenic Climate Change was accepted as fact by most of the world's thinking population, we have literally built a Ring of Fire, from Norway's North Sea, to Russian Siberia from Alaska's North Slope to Canada's Athabasca region, and all through North Dakota's Bakken, whose flaring of gas is so egregious you can see it from space, and is in such prodigious amounts you could fuel an entire energy-prolific United State with it."

That gas being flared is methane. And that's in only one of the now 26 Fracking States of America.

But as the Bloomberg article suggests, flaring has its drawbacks: you can flare a well that's drilled, but you can't flare a splintered landscape, whether it's below or on top of the ground: once it's fractured the gas seeps through the deliberately manufactured microcracks to do what the technology was designed to let them do: leak from stable formations that kept them confined to the surrounding rock and float upward, the plan being to garner the oil; the problem of leaked gas, now cynically monikered as "Freedom Molecules", was too far in the future to have to worry the wildcatters, the rest of us suckers be damned.

Meanwhile, as is also pointed out in the Bloomberg piece, scientsits' scenarios of future climate change were, each and every one of them, calculated in reference to CO2's accumulation, with methane barely even considered; nevermind methane on a continental scale, and so much of it that it would precipitate methane's release from Nature, anymore than they factored in CO2's increasing accumulation from Nature that would result in our warming world catching on fire. Vast wildfires on every continent except Antarctica. Fire that would gulp down enormous amounts of oxygen and transform it into CO2, simultaneously INcreasing the COntents of heat-trapping gases while every year, year after year, DEcreasing the concentration of life-giving O2 in the atmosphere. For although it's never mentioned in any of the Climate Change scenarios, every uptick in the amount of CO2 comes at the cost of an oxygen molecule being depleted. The fact that the number of carbon atoms sequestered and just waiting for mankind to set it free is of a magnitude far greater than the sum of all the O2 molecules the atmosphere contains is simply never discussed. And this process is accelerating as the world's largest emitter of CO2 and methane denies culpability: that is what the Trump administration is actually claiming by still maintaining its ludicrous assertion that Climate Change is a hoax, even as every littoral State of the Gulf of Mexico, all of them MAGA-cap-clenching in-their-cold-dead-hands GOP stalwarts, once again gets inundated by the consequences of their own untrammeled greed. But rather than face up to that, they whine instead that "It's some weird joke", because to admit otherwise would be to admit that the impacts felt by countries around the world could then be laid at the feet of the world's most notorious, and unabashed, Climate Criminal, the United Sates of America. 

Like the Bush administration fighting tooth and nail to keep the ICC from holding it accountable for the War Crimes committed during its tenure, the JimJones administration of Trump-a-dump is likewise intent on maintaining its blamelessness from the repercussions of its own earth-shattering policies.  

Also note that the piece I wrote, me but a lone lay person without access to the large volume of data and paid staff at that newspaper, was written more than six and a half years ago, since which time Bloomberg has been mute on the subject. For it is in the heart of Wall St that Bloomberg beats, and that beat is what pulses the lifeblood of a US recovering from the self-inflicted wound the last Republican administration lacerated the economy with: Everlasting Wars and Financial Swindles on a global scale. 

Yet the situation has only gotten starkly worse since then. And the leaks that Bloomberg writes of have become multiplied by the tens of thousands, the culpability of those creating them even less addressable as one after the other they go bankrupt, leaving the profits from the destruction firmly in the hands of the "job creators" and the burden of both capping the leaks and paying for devastation wrought by the whirlwind unleashed onto the idiot citizens driving around in their air-conditioned three-ton SUV's while, no longer content to simply incinerate the fuel they carry with them in the fuel tank, texting continuously, or GPS'ng daily, sucking juice, ie, burning yet more fuel, not only to power their own devices, but to actuate the panoply of earth stations, satellites, server farms and myriad other energy-dependent electronic slaves all kept out of their purview, all immune to the least amount of consideration, and all kept cool enough to function only by powering up highly energy-intensive Air conditioning units without which they become molten lumps of silicone, melted by their own prodigious energy consumption and therefore waste heat creation.

All of which was bad enough when the US had a GDP that was less than its National Debt, or an economy that generated enough capital to shower the fracturing industry with the trillions it needed to pump its money-losing product out of the ground. But now the price that can be fetched for that "bonanza" of oil doesn't even pay for the cost of its extraction, transport and refinement, never mind to pay for cleaning up the mess it's left in its wake. And all along, as the fuel needed to drive the economy got harder to find, more expensive to ship, and impossible to refine in the US, the dependency of the economy and its citizens on that fuel become ever greater. Now people can't even enter their "Smart" cars without summoning electrons to do their bidding via their Smart phones and unlock the door. You can't even look for a job without access to the internet. Gone are the days when a down-and-out job seeker could peruse a discarded newspaper's classifieds to hunt for employment and call their prospective employer with one thin dime. 

But as our celebrity chef concocts another dish to serve his acolytes, this sorcerer's Apprentice, far from being Fired, will waltz right back into the Offal Office to enable the continued criminal enterprises of the USA to wreak its worse havoc on its own supporters who will simply continue to blame the Blue States without which they would never see the billions in funds flowing to their own benighted economies, which are so constrained by false promise of future Boomtowns (Like West, Tx?) they earn a quick paycheck only to then be left with a pincushioned moonscape seeping gas just waiting to be sparked into ignition to bring them their own version of California's Paradise from Hell. 

But the chimera of oil revenues, LNG profits, and petrochemical plants amply provided with nearly-free ethane that the administration envisioned would bring foreign exchange in to perhaps balance the crushing trade deficit and fill federal coffers, shimmers unreachable on the distant horizon; a mirage imagined by a political class desperate to continue burning through what it no longer has the wherewithal to pay for: the rest of the world's petroleum reserves.   

The Water Sermon: "It's God's Swill"

                                           The Trump dump: "à cause de moi, encore Le Deluge".

 The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf clutch and sink into the wet morass. The wind crosses the brown land making an unbearable roar, tosses the downed tree branches like twigs, tears up bridges, chews through tarmac, floods empty parking lots whose remaining vehicles stand in silent testament to the ravaging being dealt as the Gulf moves inland, temporarily claiming as its own what is rightfully the province of landlubbing humanity. The resultant inundation carries in it the flotsam and jetsam of the consumerist culture of throwaway lives. Empty bottles and ragged papers, used tissues and cardboard boxes, cigarette butts and baby diapers all mix in a disposal of brown swirling waters lashed by relentless winds insisting on tearing down any vestige of habitable structures still standing. The natives have departed. 

Along with other testimonies of warm southern nights; departed and left no addresses, now have no addresses to which to return. Drowned rats float by, downed poles intermittently crackle with blue sparks, as if to inform one that the entire coast is now shipwrecked; hunkered down we dare not Sally forth. The few with radios can still hear the forecasts of continuing deluge on one station while the other blares out the malicious Limbaugh cant, the Trucker Carlson rant, the fracking regimes crescendo of denial of reality intermixes and gets confused with its anger over government mandates to wear a strip of cotton to cover one's nose, one's mouth, lest you transmit a microbe that will kill someone else while leaving you unaffected. Right to Life is only extended to the unborn: Your right to life ends with the snip that frees you from your mother's placental mooring.

Churning churning churning. Oh Lord thou pluckest me out.  My feet are in sopping sneakers; my heart is in my mouth. After the event we wept. Were promised a "new start". I made no comment. I connect nothing with nothing. Neither broken fingernails with dirty hands, nor Nature's fury with acts of Man. Kind's cruel onslaught on nature as we progress from the path of benign indifference down the road to malign animosity; repaying Nature’s indifference with this machine-enabled suicidal rampage that life in the 21’st century has thus far proven to be.

At this violet hour the skies are painted an angry hue, humans shelter in place idling in wait like a taxi's throbbing engine, hesitant to return home and see what's been left by the receding sea. The promise to drain the swamp has never sounded so hollow as everyone, everything, has instead become the swamp. The mosquitos that savaged Louisiana are the next item on our disaster menu, as swarms of them descend on man and beast alike to worry your livestock, bite your babies, hamper your efforts to return to the new normal that has yet again moved a step further away. Trying to perceive it is akin to looking through a telescope backwards. Your brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over ... But for how long? The river sweats oil and chemicals; the barges drift, old and terrible, with the turning tides; the debris rides out to sea, its disposal free; but along with escaped gators, it's taken our refrigerators, yet we're all in the same position: no jobs, no money to pay back the loans that enabled their acquisition.  

The sense of loss is overwhelming, as though a current under the sea had picked our pockets and took their contents out to sea with the tide. The myth of Sisyphus is now our daily guide. We chew the tough meat of reality sandwiches grilled on a melting tarmac. The taste of oil, the smell of asphalt permeates everything yet we fail to see any of the impacts mankind's abuse of the most precious resources of modern man has wrought. Rickety electrikity will be restored haphazardly; knowing as we do that its chances of weathering the next inevitable onslaught are as slim as the poles its wires are festooned from.  As the energy costs to deliver energy fast approach those needed to produce it, their sunk costs get sunk like pirate treasure at the bottom of the sea as the inundation nation sees its shorelines swallowed up as fast as and with as little to show for one's outlay and trouble as a government budget deficit.

Arbitrary Nature has left the windshield full of tears while bleak rainy gaps of time get lost in desolation's speculation as we espy the ruin left of our lives by their sporadic supernatural illumination from lightening flashes while entertaining ourselves with visions of Our Lady of the Freeway trundling toward us with open arms; her garments cascade down like cataracts into the swirling rivulets of muck lapping at her knees and muddying her celestial raiment. Perhaps Jesus saves, but Mary spends. While us, with ignorant judgments, created this mistaken world from which we avert our eyes and make up lies to blanket the bed we made and in which we can now get no sleep; so we lie in its despoliation rather than face our worst nightmares. The truth be told we can't behold the wonders we have wrought, nevermind the blunders they've begot.

Water slips down the broken glass of a movie marquee, (children under five get in for free), in what's left of our second-hand city while down at harborside the ships, once aligned in quiet dignity now lie on their sides in yards, their masts splintered rails; seen from faraway, obscured in grey mists, they look like the Western Front, mindless destruction on a monumental scale. While enter the seagull with an inhuman shriek like a vulture, sentinels watching over rusty harbor iron dockworks, barnacled rocks dripping under shattered wharves, slime on the wall where an unmanned rowboat was docked and chained; it floats by still moored to its now unmoored piling that it pulls in tow. Under our watch we watch what we have wrought rot from the center; only the shopping mall remains there enshrined, full of fur coats and fishing equipment, while mad commission-only salesmen in polyblend suits will soon hawk their wares on the thoroughfares wondering why customers won't buy as they float by and their children cry and they shoo away flies from their forlorn offspring's eyes. The world's pre-eminent shithole country will soon offer them soup from rotting docks while six thousand anti-tax Tea Party members demand Federal government assistance, sick already of the daily plate of compassionate conservatives' meal of hopeful beans.