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With the Blob's sequestration at Look Ma, a-Lardo, the press has quickly become reacquainted, during this, our Covid nightmare, with the so-called climate emergency. That's the new word replacing climate crisis, since that appellation did nothing to infuse a sense of urgency to the climate derangement we're living through (so far .... most of us). However, if the staff in an Emergency Room of even the slackest of hospitals reacted with the same lack of "STAT!"-ness as States do to the climate emergency, there would be no reason to go to one, as you could get a more urgent response to your pressing needs at your local dry cleaners.
While, during their third night of mayhem, rioters burn down a Covid vaccination site in Amsterdam, right across that thin expanse of ocean known as the English Channel, deaths from the dreaded disease are at an all-time high, its newest variant racing through its population faster than a streaker at a wintry NFL game.
The blitzkrieg of dumpy Trumpy's four-year twitter-storm having been blockaded by its enabler, the strong signal of accelerating climate derangement can at last be discerned without the noisy static of temper tantrums and untempered hooliganism wrought by an overwrought, deeply disturbed psyche onto the heavily tattooed body politic.
As the corona virus was cutting the life expectancy of the most scientifically advanced nations of the globe by a decade in the span of months, it went uncommented on that in the cryosphere, a new number had emerged. Whereas it had been accepted knowledge, at least in the scientific community, that the rate of what they referred to as Arctic amplification, meaning that the Arctic was warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, had ramped up. The Arctic is now warming at three times the global average. This acceleration, in my own estimation, but unproven hypothesis, bro, has been brought about by the big American BOT: Bush/Obama/Trump and their corporate sponsors' frackapalooza.
It is the reason that Trumpy could declare climate change a hoax and have the ramifications of such a belief, other than his withdrawing of the USA from the completely ineffectual Paris Accords, go, for the most part, unremarked. But the amount of energy required to extract not only the energy for our immediate usage, but for the energy requirements of our future, ie solar panels, wind farms and bio-fuel production, as well as the gargantuan energy sinks of fracturing and Canadian tar sands, all means that industrialized civilization, far from reducing its carbon footprint, has increased it by an alarming degree, even as it delivers its energy, not for productive purposes, but simply for consumption: heating and A/C, driving around in circles on a daily basis, and air travel, or flying around in circles purely for its entertainment value, and of course, mining and energy extraction itself.
Now, what the corona virus should have pointed out to us, is that were we to curtail such activities on a world wide basis, our economic system would collapse, as it is in the process of doing now, since all the ancillary activities, such as restaurants, hotels, the airline industry along with its ancillary activities, all of which have been artificially stimulated in this quasi-capitalistic state, has, far from creating an economic system that is "resilient", as its ardent supporters claim, has on the contrary, devised a system that leaves the vast hordes of mankind living in a state of precarious debt bondage as it recruits the best minds of the over-educated elites to devise ever more plays on stock market listings, and toys for the rich, who consider the rest of us as some alien growth ... they've never taken a lichen to us.
Yet, were it to be otherwise, the amount of CO2 vented into the atmosphere by a more well-heeled public would zoom to stratospheric heights: the US has demonstrated, along with other OECD nations, that the cheaper energy prices are, the more fuel is burned: that is the derelict logic of demand-side economics: build it and they will come, they opined (yeah, because in order to build it, you tore down everything else of value, and sucked up all the dollars needed to finance any chance of building anything else, leaving them no alternative ... but that's just me). Well, Okay. So they built SUV's, eg, and thereby doubled the fuel requirements of the most energy-intensive nation in the world without anyone having to drive a single mile farther; they built, and continue to build, homes in floodplains, in firetraps, in deserts, on remote islands, all of which stomp out a far larger carbon footprint even without the usual modern amenities, and the building of the infrastructure needed to deliver those amenities, to their living rooms.
And just as the corona virus is spread willy-nilly around the globe, with no travel restrictions imposed on the rich while the poor are kept in enforced isolation in their cramped quarters, the cognitive dissonance of those warning about climate change even as they build an economy that no one can use if we were to heed what they are warning us will be the result if we do, they jet one variant of the virus from one continent to another with as little regard for the consequences as they do when they hop in to a plane to attend their grandson's graduation from kindergarten: both activities require a level of denial that is just as mind-boggling as those of Climate Change deniers, yet it is only the deniers that get bally-hooed, we having decide that what the rich do is what WE want to do, so it must be OK.
Which pretty much puts me on the same page as Jeff Gibbs. It's not that I don't find the aesthetics of an offshore windfarm more appealing than a fossil-fueled power plant belching its blackened effluents into the atmosphere as though it's their inalienable right, which it apparently is, but the bromide that building them all over the world while simultaneously increasing the energy-intensity of the already energy-intensive lifestyle of an ever-expanding middle class will somehow make the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere decrease, or at least not keep increasing at its current trajectory, is pure hokum. It's as anti-science as any Kraken head or Qanon conspiracy theorist, and it is in fact such nonsense that furnishes the anvil on which such nutjob theories are forged.
As Elon Musk teases millions out of investors to build a carbon storage and sequestration plant, it never occurs to any of them that the country is already dotted with them ... they're called Petrochemical plants, and they sequester so much carbon that it has gathered itself together into enormous gyres in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, stuffed landfills with so much of it that they can no longer be used to hold the other detritus of modern life, and they wreak havoc on poorer countries that get inundated with it from container ships piling it up on their shores: all that carbon (they're not called hydrocarbon chains for nothing), is stored and sequestered more securely than it is in now not-so-permanent permafrost.
The energy transition holds out the promise for a better, cleaner world, but the journey will come at a steep energy cost and would take quite a lot of time ... time we no longer have. Just as the vaccine has been held out as a miracle cure for Covid, (another phrase that exemplifies the cognitive dissonance of the public, "Miracle Cure" is a nonsensical contradiction in terms, one related to the equally absurd term, "Miracle of Science", since science's fundamental philosophy is that there is no such thing as a miracle) the very specter of it loosens peoples behavior, such that now the virus is infecting more people per day than the number who get inoculated against it each day, the rush to install a renewable energy regime without a lockdown on our energy consumption until it gets in place, promises to do the same thing the vaccine rollout is doing: cost us all the resources we have left in order to build an infrastructure that in its very building causes as much damage to the atmosphere as all the collective power plants have to date. There's just no getting around the science: the amount of fossil fuel consumption necessary to get us to just an EV future will leave us not only ICEless, but, as far as the cryosphere is concerned, iceless, as well.
The events in the Netherlands overshadow and obscure the larger truth that the 2019 French Yellow Vest protests, all but forgotten, reflected about climate change: in the same country who's capitol lent its name to the Climate Accords, the populace refuses to submit to a future in which they will have to pay the exorbitant price for energy that it would have were we actually serious about curtailing our wanton use and waste of it. It is that same refusal that allowed dumpy Trumpy to declare that climate change simply didn't exist and get elected on little more than that platform, one he then applied to the Corona Virus. "Just a hoax folks, and if you disagree I'll fracture you as irreparably as a geological plate, mate."
Too many teardrops
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