Poised on The Edge of Night: FiasCOvid.

                                                                 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?