AntiFa
and Uncle Sam.
The rig count surpassed a thousand during the last
days of 2019.
As Covid-19 started to tighten its clammy grip on Wuhan, and
wildfires raged across Australia, "Drill, baby, Drill" was
all the rage in the USA!USA!, as Americans by the droves signed on
the dotted line to resign themselves to 7 years of indenture to pay
for a gas-guzzling SUV whose utility will not outlast its predicted
lifecycle, at which time they will be heard-pressed to get any cash
for trash, or fuel, for that matter, for their behemoths.
A nation whose citizens have to push taxi-drivers out of a job so
as to leave their customers desperate enough to use uninsured
amateurs to drive them around, as said amateurs have no other
way to pay for their own basic transportation, somehow found nothing amiss that a lame ride-hailing service became a Wall St. Superstar. It's almost as though they would have thought someone a genius because he realized you could use a computer to construct a spreadsheet. Brilliant! So millions looked to the
Presidential debates to see if either candidate had any input as to
how they might plan for the future (the "they" in this case
meaning the citizens, but would work just as well if it referred to
the debaters).
As the pundits argue endlessly about who lost the Debate, the
obvious answer is, of course, We the People lost them. There are no
more Presidential debates, there is only the Presidential seal
and his trainers. But outlining the path forward from our pandemic pandemonium was
nowhere on the agenda. Like climate change itself, it was/is mostly
regarded by all as a hoax, by none more so than the media who
sees it as one more crisis to exploit while endlessly berating anyone
else trying to make notoriety from the disease that has become their new favorite cash-cow, the
clowning antics of the chief Executive having become a bit overplayed
of late.
Surprisingly, though, it seems to be of no one's concern that the
rig count declared in the first sentence of this piece has plummeted
by a factor of four, from > 1000 to less than 250, in the space of
but a few months. In a country that has, unbeknownst to its benighted
and feckless citizens, rigged its economy to be more and more, via
mountains of debt as high as the Rockies that have no hope/plan of
being repaid, dependent on the last gasps of the fossil fuel
industries, there seems to be not the slightest anxiety as to how we are to pay off the enormous debt assumed to exploit a resource that can't fetch a price high enough to even pay for its extraction. The Jenga analogy of Naked Shorts doesn't even begin to illustrate the disastrous mountains of derivatives left precariously teetering over the abyss that unreconcilable contracts leveraged on an asset for which their is no market are currently balanced.
An industry that is already lining up for ever-more subsidies
while the Fed busily concocts "cash" flows of investment
dollars to replace the ice floes of an Arctic Ocean that is, (as part
of the hoax?), rapidly becoming just a colder tributary of the Atlantic Ocean.
Perhaps it will be renamed the Exxon Sea.
Meanwhile, the tax receipts from those dwindled oil revenues have collapsed, while the nation's chief executive tries to conflate tax
deductions as though they are revenue to the federal government in
order to justify his billionaire's contribution to the nation's
coffers of a mere pittance, the size of which, even my own tax bill,
moi, a "senior" with nothing to tax but a meager income from Social Security
and pension, surpasses.
As Malaria teetered over to her husband's side on her whore heels,
the shadow of Imelda Marcos darkened a debate stage where the ongoing
economic collapse of the USA!USA! was never addressed.
Yet it was the President himself who spit into the microphone in
March that, "This was an attack! An ATTACK!" Well, so was
9/11 Mr. President. But that Chief Executive used it to his
advantage. He used it to UNITE the country behind him. So much so that they
trusted him enough to allow the instigation of two Wars in less than
two years, even while the Neocons that drove him were salivating over the prospects of even more
wars to come. USA!USA!
As I watch the handling of this crisis, it is hard not to name it
after Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, the exposé of the Bush mishandling of the
Iraq War, and yet GW's re-election, even as he "bungled" one aspect of
the war after the other, ensuring that the US would be mired down in a
quagmire, he and his own little Darth Vader VP gambled it would
leave Americans still too shaken to change their President ... and
so instituted a regime of red and yellow “alerts” (that disappeared completely after the election) to keep the polity in constant fear ...
a gamble that paid off, and one which the Trumpelstiltskin had hopes
of replicating by allowing Corona virus to run rampant and instilling the same fear so as to manipulate the same levers as his predecessor.
Thus does the inexplicable, "When the looting starts the
shooting starts", exclamation in the face of mass protests, from the Offal Office's Occupant
make sense, aping, as it did, the GW Bush gauntlet thrown to the
incipient insurgency in Iraq by goading them to "Bring it ON",
when he was warned about the growing danger to OUR troops (the army is under
the command of the Commander -in-Chief, but it is the People's army,
not the Chief Executive's) that the strategic errors being made in Iraq
was fostering. As they were planned to, as it turned out. Who knows how many American soldiers' lives were lost
by virtue of GW's schoolyard taunt. But more importantly, from
Trump-a-dump's point of view, who cares now? Who even remembers?
That's what Trump-a-Dump has counted on right from the start of his
campaign: all the rhetoric about the right or wrong about what the
President does, is swept under the carpet and, à la Poppy Bush, a
hagiographic memory is always construed to enhance the most
reprehensible behavior. Had Hitler himself been a US President, he
would have been immortalized as a Christian Nationalist, a saver of
fetuses, an economic miracle worker and military genius.
Thus can 200,000 dead be so blithely dismissed, by the specious claim that it would have
been 2 million if not for the actions taken by his administration ...
actions implemented despite the fact that Trump-a-dump fought
them tooth and nail. "Open the country for Easter ... wouldn't that be nice?"
So where to from here?
His guidance on the virus having been so vilified, his advise to
use UV rays to bathe your children in, or bleaching your lungs as a
prophylactic, having been scoffed at during the debate by the President as obvious
sarcasm, which I suppose means that using verbal irony that mocks,
ridicules, and expresses contempt for all the efforts made to combat
the spread of a pandemic is preferable to plain stupidity ... Really?
Are you sure about that? Because it doesn't seem to me that, during a
pandemic caused by a virus that is propagated via airborne droplets
needs the added insult of the country's Chief Executive figuratively
spitting in our collective faces, which is what making sarcastic
remarks during a "Presidential" briefing on a pandemic that
had made it necessary to line up refrigerated big rig trailers to ferry the heaps of dead bodies
to Potter's field, amounts to.
So, okay. No help on that front is a given. Just ask Herman Cain.
Oh that 's right, you can't. Because he's dead. Having contracted the
virus at one of Trump's maskless, indoor rallies. But they talk about
losing a colleague with less regret than they talk about losing their
I-phone. So there's that.
But even on the economy, Trump-a-dump's supposed strong suit, Cain was at least Abel to come up with his moronic 9-9-9. That
was his economic plan, for those who don't have a memory for the
ridiculous. However, a ridiculous plan would be a delight right now,
as it is far better than the current lack of any economic
plan. Do you have one Mr. President? Nein! Nein! Nein!
Because, given the county's outsized dependence on the fossil fuel
regime it has fostered, its collapse, along with the price of oil,
gone all but uncommented on, leaves the Nation's finances in the
worst straits since the last time we decided to trust the reins of
its stewardship to a Republican administration: all but hopeless.
The trade deficit, already disastrous, has ballooned; since there are no buyers for the all-but-Free natural gas we were planning to sell. And with the collapse of oil pumping, the gas being but a side effect, the supply is contracting. Supply needed for input to both the generation of electricity and the
feedstock for the petrochemical plants dotting the nation's
landscapes, as well as the yet-to-be-paid for LNG ports and ships, into which
billions upon billions of borrowed dollars have been poured, for
our glorious, fossil-fueled future, as one politician after the other
lined their pockets to construct a platform from which to sell for a
pittance the rest of the country's oil and natural gas supply, even while we
ship one tanker of oil after the other to China to fuel the expansion
of their economy while ours contracts. It has by now become apparent that the strategy of fracturing the landscape and releasing
weather-changing (yes Mr. President, you were right: such an egregious
belching of gases doesn't just change the climate, it changes the
WEATHER, too!) gases that result in multiple multi-billion dollar catastrophes
year after year, is a loser's game.
The Fed, once again magically conjuring up funny money, has surely
lost its mind. The damaged assets it purchased to pull the rich out
of the abyss they had shoved the rest of us into, are still on its
books, the lame attempt in 2019 to redress the imbalance having
immediately spawned a credit crunch and an emergency in the repo
market that sent them scurrying back to their corners, months before
there was any whisper of any pandemic. Meaning? Well, meaning that
even were the economy to turn in stellar performances in the next ten
years' time, the amount of liabilities, now double what they were when
Trump took office, will still be on its unbalanced balance sheet,
while the number for the nation's budget deficit has already doubled
what it was in the worst year of President Obama's fiscal years.
The Green new deal likewise has nothing to offer. Gavin Newsom has just mandated that 2035 will be the year California will only allow EV's
to be sold. Yet Biden named 2030 - as recently as the DNC
Presidential debates - as the year by which a complete replacement
fleet of EV's would replace the ICE machines currently burning their
way across the nation's byways and highways. Let's see now, that
means the entire nation will have moved ahead of its most populous, ambitiously Green State by a good five years, were one to give the slightest credence
(no one did ... least of all fellow Democrat, Governor Gavin Newsom)
to Biden's declaration. At this rate, 5 years tacked on for every six
months we get nearer to 2030 (the DNC debates were in March), means that
by the end of the next President's term, whomsoever that may be, we would be looking at 2075 (4 year term = 8 six month periods X's 5years delay for
each 6 mos = 40 years) as the year by which EV's will have replaced ICE machines. Which basically means it ain't gonna happen ... ever.
Likewise wind, solar, and even hydro. Because Climate Change is still
spoken of as though it were some theoretical outcome that will occur
in the future, but that is not the case. It has occurred already; and
there's no reason to believe that it won't continue to do so. The
disservice science has done us is to talk of Climate Change as though it were an event, but it is not: it is a process. As heat is added to the earth system ... to any closed
system ... it causes instability as the closed system reconfigures
itself into a new stasis consistent with its new reality. But the
reality of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere keeps changing, so the
weather/climate regime has to keep changing to
accommodate itself to each new set of parameters under which it
operates. But it can't keep up. As soon as it rejiggers itself, more
CO2 is added to the mix, thus more heat is trapped, and the system has no
opportunity to stabilize itself, so its near-term predictability is
no longer based on anything beyond speculation. You can no longer use the past to predict the future. So its long-term
predictability is already beyond the scope of science. Derechos
flattening fields into which we have poured billions in investment
are now the future. Oops. No they're not. There a present of
the present. Yes, the main hit comes to agriculture
(Syria knows a little about that), but eating seems to be so last
week. Even the acres of corn destroyed weren't for food: we prefer to burn what's left of our oil supply and to drain what's let of our groundwater to fuel our runs to the grocery store. Obviously we are mainly worried about keeping the juice
flowing, the current surging to energize our high voltage lifestyle.
The only solution seems to be, "Let them eat yellowcake".
Yet even nuclear needs predictable sea levels and weather patterns
for the cooling of their hotrods. So what are we to do?
The problem this makes for the co-generation of green energy is that
wind is a weather phenomenon: as the climate changes and gets hotter,
wind patterns change, its being a function of temperature gradients
and entropy, so the not slight problem, given their immensity and the
cost in energy to install them and the electric infrastructure needed to
carry the current they generate, of just exactly where to locate
them, becomes an enigma. Where the wind is blowing strong enough to
turn those giant blades today is very unlikely to be the same place
in as little as ten years' time (just ask Germany), so just like with
fossil fuels, you end up with multi-billion dollar stranded assets,
built with borrowed monies that still have the payments to meet with
nothing to show for it but an incredibly expensive cleanup ... a mirror
image of the fracturing of the economy the collapse of oil prices has
engendered for the US economy. It has left millions of leaking abandoned
wells for the public to pay for while the keptocracy keeps their
graft.
It may seem like a lifetime ago, but even as war raged in Iraq and
Afghanistan, then-President Bush was photographed walking hand-in-hand
with the then-King of bone-Sawdi Arabia while the headline promised
our return to $20/barrel oil thanks to their negotiations. Now,
however, the double-that-amount of $40/bbl is still not even close to being enough so the industry struggles desperately to goose it back up by yet another
third to at least $60/bbl. So in the span of but a few short years, far from assuring the consumers that they
will work mightily to get gas prices down, this administration's strategy has been to
promise to get the price of a barrel of oil up, up, up! With nary a
whisper of dissent! Which doesn't, however, alter the fact that the price paid for the energy required to run our
now-de-industrialized (somehow, even as it runs more and more on
energy-intensive industrialized processes ... go figure that one out)
has tripled while the profits to be derived from investing in that
enterprise look more like Uber and Lyft: the investors pay the
lion's share of the "earnings" since the rates one is able
to charge a cash-strapped customer base remain stymied. Thus the
"business" models of both Uber and Fracturing remained
dependent on investors losing their shirts. Without new blood, what the pump-and-dump industry calls suckers, to
finance the "plays", thus are they both flailing.
So given just these metrics, it seems unlikely any economic
miracle is going to be coming even from our Genius President ... It' won't come until well after 2050, if ever, by which time, at the current rate of CO2 forcing, there will be, summing
up the additional ~3ppm's of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere on an annual
basis, the gas-load of CO2 alone will be: 3ppm X's 30yrs = 90 + 420
(approximate current burden) = 515ppm's. That figure doesn't take
into account all that leaking methane, nor methane's hydroxylation into CO2 after a
decade's lapse, nor the decrease in the oceans' uptake of the gas as
it becomes more and more saturated with it, nor the decrease in
Nature's uptake of CO2 as we burn down one rainforest after the other
to make "Green" (yes they really call it that) fuel.
But there is no plan, and no one wants to hear any of what I
just wrote, so instead we get the antics we prefer to even a dollop
of truth, or any serious consideration of our future. And as the economic
engine of US hegemony continues its razing of the globe for the
impoverishment of our allies and foes alike, the benefits of that destruction will
continue to flow at a faster and faster pace to a smaller and smaller
number of our own citizenry, who will continue the status quo while the rest of us, chided and goaded by a
political class system that sees our squabbling as a cover under
which they can continue their own defalcations with impunity, fly at
each other with bared fangs while our leaders offer nothing but
platitudes and promises of change that aren't even slated to take place for decades, even as the processes that call for that change are already now again
ravaging Paradise.
Now they're scheduling a second debate? Whatever for?
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