"The science is clear ... ":

 

Hey! ... No one Mentioned the 2'nd Coming included this!

"The science is clear: we need to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century,” the UN Secretary-General has declared.

Oh. Well then; glad that's settled. Of course, that's been settled since the Reagan era, but has changed nothing, well, alright, it has. It has accelerated the rush by every OECD nation to allocate to itself the remaining stores of fossil fuels so that their citizens can lord it over the rest of humanity. 

The science is clear all right.

I still remember my first so-called "holy" Communion as a 7-year-old little Catholic boy. My mother was explaining the drill. I'd had frightening dreams the night before and she was trying to  assuage my trepidation, completely baffled by my hesitancy at participating in such a bloody ritual. Pre- Pope John the XXIII, Catholic dogma wasn't the loose arrangement it is today. The year before I had witnessed Rosemary Casey walking down the aisle and, finding the taste of the Eucharist not to her liking, spat it out. The panic and consternation of the adults around her was frightening ... the priest had to halt the service and performed an entire ritual complete with holy water and ablutions along with brandishing the censers burning church incense to purify the area and to pacify the deity so as to atone for the blasphemy a seven-year-old had committed. You see, in Catholic dogma to this day, the bread and wine are not symbolic; they are, through the miraculous process of transubstantiation, the bread made flesh and the wine turned into the blood of the Christ, your holy redeemer.

Even in 1959 we had TV. Saturday morning TV meant my parents could have a break from the kids who were transfixed by the new medium (my Mom was pregnant with her seventh by the time I was 7). But although Saturday morning cartoons became a fixture, it was Tarzan we really liked ... swinging through the trees on those vines, he could traverse huge swaths of jungle and arrive as though by magic in the midst of the startled natives who somehow had never devised, nor copied, this mode of transport. What he had swung down to stop the Saturday before my first communion was a group of predatory white folk from being boiled in a pot for the cannibals' evening meal.

And there was Mom telling me with astonishing sangfroid that the next morning I was to ingest the flesh of a dead man who was god ... somehow. In an effort to comprehend why, and how this was a good thing, I asked the simple, and, to me, obvious question, "But isn't that cannibalism?" 

I had no idea how I'd ended up on the floor halfway across the room until I felt my cheek smarting and my mother towering over me reaching down to grab me by the scruff of the neck and bestow a hail of blows while her face, red with rage, was distorted into a mask of malevolence. Why, I had no idea. All I'd done was asked a simple question.

Well, like today, in 1959, the science was clear. Outside of Tales from the Crypt, the deceased don't get up and sashay forth from the tomb. Should they do so, it can only be because they had been buried alive. And should that be so, you can't take a piece of bread and turn it into a lump of flesh, and even if you could, you wouldn't/shouldn't be chowing down on it.

But none of that mattered.

Yes, the science is clear. But that doesn't make the science rite, and rite is might, so parents across the globe still tell their children the same stories, still beat their little helpless bodies if they question the absurd "truths" they impart that make no sense to a child that is trying to form a picture of the world and reality and piece together the puzzle that is Nature and its relationship to it.

The science is clear.

But if children try to comprehend it, and try to make clear how fairy tales of supernatural beings living in their midst, sitting on their shoulders and telling them, tempting them, or guardian angels protecting them invisibly although they're denizens from a celestial realm, doing battle for your soul, why is never exactly explained (what do they get out of it? the praise of the yahweh?). What good is this god they're always talking about when he is the reason your parents, who you thought loved and protected you, throw you around the room like a rag doll if you wonder why this being would want you to eat his flesh and drink his blood? Activities, it was apparent from the Tarzan films, that only primitive savages indulge in?  

You may say that that was then, this is now.

Really?

A group of maddened zealots, adults, mind you, not feeble-minded children, fed on tales that a lard-assed pot-bellied, balding conman, liar, convicted fraudster and tax cheat, is the second coming of that same Christ who my mother couldn't understand why I wasn't relishing the thought of taking a nice chunk of his flesh to chew on (we weren't allowed a swig of his blood in those days, that was a privilege only the priests enjoyed), laid siege to the Nation's Capital with all the maniacal relish of a medieval mob hurling stones at a heretic that took the name of the lord thy god in vain.

Hordes of humans rallied to this blasphemous (even to a lapsed catholic, the very idea of The Donald as The Christ is so off the chart, I can think of no other word for it than blasphemy) apostate, and the "fathers" of the evangelical churches simply laughed up their sleeves. There came no outraged howl against this heresy; au contraire, they welcome the news that this bully Christ, now so weighed down by corpulence that a crucifixion would be impossible, is walking amongst us.

And the UN Secretary-General thinks that because "The science is clear", the human race will somehow curtail its self-immolation on the altar of Greed? Greed that has replaced God in the churches around the world, so much so that the very term christianity now means the freedom to crush entire countries, as GW Bush proclaimed he had been instructed to do, again without the least outcry from the so-called religious community, into the dust to satisfy religion's lust for gold and thirst for oil, conquest and rapine?

Millions of ADULTS, without it having to be beaten into them, have adopted the belief that the Christ came to earth, and as Commander-in-Chief of the largest military machine mankind has ever amassed, dropped a tonnage of bombs on the helpless heads of innocent women and children to the tune of, by 2018, one bomb every twelve minutes (well after he declared that ISIS was "Completely destroyed"), according to Lee Camp as published by Truthdig. Yet grownups, who believe they are holier than thou, fully embrace this murderous mayhem as the Will of God, while an ocean away in a different country a teacher is stalked through the streets of Paris and his head savagely hewn from his body because yet another true believer, of yet another religion, has been affronted by science.

Yet despite all this, it is not the people of faith who are the most egregious in their rejection of science, but the corporatized citizenry, the Corporate suits, the corporate-bought legislatures of the world, who all excel at rejecting the scientific truths staring them in the face as they rush to, in the exact same way they did after 9/11, use a calamity to further cement in place the future we have baked into the yellowcake.

Even as I type this scribes are writing articles bemoaning the dearth of computer chips that is holding up the manufacture of this years' plethora of automobiles. With barely a pause, they are champing at the bit-coin to exceed 2019's output of 92 million motor vehicles with which they hope to burden the well-paved roads of the world, which already carries an estimated 1.4 billion cars and trucks: an additional total of close to 100,000,000, of which not even two per-cent (2%!, lol; I doubt that it's even 1%!) will be their much ballyhooed EV's. No, the vast majority will be ICE machines, and the science is clear: without those ICE machine being driven willy-nilly all over creation, the economies of the OECD nations will shudder to a devastating collapse. Financial instruments as high as Mt. Everest are leveraged on the manufacture and maintenance of not only the machines themselves but on the assumed liabilities of their purchasers and the entire oil industry, along with the vast military infrastructure necessary to assure the uninterrupted flow of the fuel necessary to power both them, and the vast war machine itself, thereby consuming more than a thousand billion liters of fossil fuel every year.

The science is clear; that even as the combustion of oil has been somewhat curtailed by the impacts of the corona virus, the burning of the "bridge fuel" of natural gas has substantially increased (with two of the largest petro-states, Russia and the USA, simply flaring an ever-growing amount of it, to no productive purpose, into the atmosphere), and the burning of coal, by economies not as well-situated as those of the OECD nations, is likewise on the increase, as underdeveloped nations struggle to pay the debts amassed during the pandemic. Straight-jacketed into the growth paradigm, utter collapse can be averted only by  burning up coal, and burning down rainforests, the combustion of which has already started to accelerate, the accelerant being the unrest of their unfed and unhoused citizens, their lives already being savaged by the ravages of a climate-changed weather regime that promises to make a mockery of their most desperate efforts to "Build Back Better".

It wasn't until I saw, as an adult, the scene from "Raisin in the Sun" when the mother in that movie did pretty much the same thing to her adult daughter as mine did to little me, that I realized how widespread and acceptable physical violence in the name of a godhead, who could care less about the blasphemy only humans react to so viscerally, was. Their beliefs allow them to inflict punishment on those innocent of not knowing that an all-powerful entity is capable of being affronted by the words of those trying to understand its nature. It is the violence in the name of god that is the blasphemy, not anything uttered by an apostate.

Similarly, it is the words of the Secretary of the UN that inflicts real harm, as it makes it sound as though, since the science is clear, things will change; that we'll halt, even reverse, the continued growth in the amount of combustion of the only sources on the earth of such densely-packed stores of energy.

But just the opposite has proven to be the case:

Three decades after the the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that committed state parties to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, based on scientific consensus (ie, "the science was clear") the world's most advanced countries with the most modern economies continue to vie with one another to be the top automobile manufacturer, the top airplane manufacturer, the premier petro State, the largest hi-tech hub, the hottest tourist spots (completely dependent on the geo-engineering flights of speeding metallic hulks crammed with humans, burning jet fuel at 30,000 feet, creating a veritable rain of carbon down to the troposphere in which dwell billions who will never sit fuming on a tarmac, but will be sentenced to a shortened lifetime from inhaling the airborne pollutants produced by their clueless "betters"), while one nation stands alone as the largest predatory military Empire in world history, igniting vast stores of fossil fuel to attain the unreachable goal of being able to fight a fantasized three adversaries on three fronts simultaneously, even while citizens, living in the very hub of fossil fuel extraction and production, succumb to hyperthermia in their own homes from lack of electricity because the state of Texas, the state that burns off daily enough natural gas to provide electricity to the entire state, hadn't enough natural gas to generate juice for a cold spell that the science made clear would happen, and so had predicted, weeks ago. 

They did nothing. Why would they? The predicted outcome only had them whetting their teeth for the sky-high profits they knew such an event would enable them to squeeze their customers for. 

So believing that because "the science is clear", mankind will suddenly reverse its behavior now, despite its knowing that the same science was clear three long decades ago, and will henceforth start to decrease, when all it's done so far has been to increase, the global release of carbon dioxide, is every bit as delusional as thinking a piece of wafer is magically transformed into the flesh of a man that died more than two millennia ago. But it is a far more deadly delusion. 

It would do well to remember, that when you hear the term, the Green New Deal, that it was coined solely to deceive you and fleece you by preying on your lack of knowledge every bit as much as Trump University was; and to recall that, at the heart of the like-named Green Revolution, flamed just as large an increase in the sustained combustion of fossil fuel as World War Two. And much like that War, the Green Revolution was only the beginning of the world's economies enslaving themselves to unsustainable energy-dependence. Bound to the mast of a sinking ship, the world's human cargo has refused to acknowledge the iceberg it has struck, pretending the music they hear isn't being played by a band that knows their future is taking on water faster than a Texas basement in an electric power outage. One gander at the "Savior" elected in 2016 by the world's Soulless Super Power to lead them to the Promised Land should be enough to wake you up to the reality show you're playing a bit part in. One in which no matter how good a job you do, no matter how hard you try, the boss will scream in your face with a scowl on his own heavily made-up face that , "You're Fired!"

And you will get no empathy from your co-workers, who will chortle and sneer up their sleeve at your fate. Because they blandly accept the adage that the price of freedom is eternal violence.

Which the silence of science in the face of Fallujah, or Mosul, or Idlib, or Aleppo, or ... makes clear (and, like Climate Change, made possible).

 

E-Missions: The 2-bit-coincident of the Dodge in the Night.

 The New York Times, the newspaper of broken record, in a title darkly hinting at a news story of revelatory importance on Climate Change, conspiratorially asked this morning, 

What’s Really Behind Corporate Promises on Climate Change?

As though the authors, Clifford Krauss and  Peter Eavis, were about to, in this one article, explain evry you need to know about Corporate intransigence on doing a single thing to mitigate the accelerating accumulation of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere from the excessive burning of fossil fuels, which is directly related to the explosive use of motorized transport and electric generation via fossil fuel combustion that mankind has indulged in for the last 80 years or so, starting with the advent of WW2, and, in order to then keep the worlds' economies from sinking back into a 1930's-style Depression, have continued ever since. 

Perhaps to no one's surprise, that wasn't even close to being the case.

Instead we get an anodyne list of companies who are not keeping their targets, or making any targets at all, ending with the statement by Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, Lucas Joppa, that,

“If we are going to achieve a net-zero carbon economy for real, we will need everyone to act.”

Which is an outright lie, as it is exactly because everyone is simply acting, but in actuality doing nothing, on emissions reduction, that they have continued. What we really need is for everyone to stop acting, even in the face of the largest economic downturn in economic activity since the afore-mentioned Great Depression, since, because that's all we're doing, we are still venting increasingly larger amounts of CO2 into the air. From the NOAA:

January 2021:    415.52 ppm

January 2020:    413.61 ppm

But not to worry, 

'"BlackRock will continue to focus on this important issue,” Mr. Sweeney said in an email'.

Whew! Now isn't that a relief? Of course, focusing on something always helps, doesn't it? Especially when done with a magnifying glass.

Our intrepid reporters (one of whom is based in Houston (Lol) so that should give you a clue right there as to how lame this "Expose" is going to be) then bravely confront Levi Strauss, as their jean therapy is such an outlier in CO2 emissions:

"Consider the apparel industry. Much of its contribution to climate change comes from its supply chain. The clothes that Levi Strauss and others put their labels on are often made in factories in places like China, Pakistan and India that remain reliant on coal-fired power plants. The clothes are transported on ships and planes that burn diesel and jet fuel."

Each one of the "sins" they attribute to Levi's are the result of Globalization, a phenomenon for which the NYT has been an unstinting cheerleader for decades, as though it were a gift from God, none more so than that, "Conscience of a Liberal", Paula Krugman. Levi's is based in San Francisco, and as a network tech in the 90's they were one of my customers, and no one fought the relocation of their manufacturing sites overseas as desperately as Levi's, hoping that brand loyalty (remember that?) to their name would help justify the higher prices they needed to charge in order to keep their factories in the good ole USA. But their jean therapy didn't work, so to remain competitive (ie stay in business) with manufacturers that did move their plants to China, Pakistan and India, all able to do so because of the ridiculously low price of shipping their products thousands of miles to the markets of the US. Free trade: they had to get on board the Free Trade bandwagon. That was the only path to the glorious future, and one had best not question it, or else, get lambasted by Krugman (just ask William Greider:

"It makes no sense for American taxpayers to subsidize the dismantling of their own industrial base to support the balance sheets of companies determined to globalize their employment base. If the MNC's (multinational firms ... (which they are not ... they are Transnational firms ...) feel they are unable to make concrete commitments to the country, they should also be freed of the generous financial support they draw from the government and taxpayers.")

Exactly the opposite position of the NYT's Paula Krugman. Even while so-called Entrepreneurs, such as Enron Musk, rake in that same "generous financial support they draw from the government and taxpayers" to this day, only now sans even the slightest "concrete commitments to the country."

The authors also mention Netflix (but not Bitcoin which, as we all know, don't we?, emits more carbon dioxide than entire industrialized economies) and Cargill, which they lambast because it has "has extended its target to 2030." Yet, the climate conference referred to as Cop(out)27, which was cancelled in 2020,  is now scheduled to occur in 2021 in Glasgow. So whereas the World Economic Forum, a conference that assembles the world's dictators, billionaires, and oligarchs to discuss how to further concentrate the reins of power and economic control into fewer and fewer hands, opts to not assemble in Davos in 2021, the so-called "Climate Conference" has no problem with jetting its participants around the globe and providing them with fossil-fueled lavish accommodations instead of Zooming, even as a pandemic continues to ravage the globe. Well, since "optics" has become the media's latest meme, and that same media had no trouble pointing out dumpy Trumpy's not wearing a mask as being  conducive to his followers not doing the same, a gang of Climate-change stalwarts eagerly hopping into jets to burn their way to a conference on reducing the number of people hopping into jets, on an issue far more devastating than the current pandemic has been, is far more conducive to demonstrating that the conference itself is but an optic'al illusion: held more to stoke the egos and provide a luxury junket for its politically well-connected participants than to do a damn thing to ameliorate the gung-ho stoking of the Globalized economy whose untrammeled release of deleterious emissions those junkets depend on. 

Now, that's not to say that Levi's and Cargill's couldn't "Do more", but similarly to how what the NYT didn't print in its pages running up to the financial crisis was far more important than what it did, the same holds true here. I see, since I live in San Francisco, a veritable tidal wave of bicyclists flowing through its streets during rush hour commute that was never apparent, well, was non-existent, when I moved here in the seventies. On most of my pedaling outings, I was the lone cyclist wending my way through the Streets of San Francisco. The purported reasoning of a lot of these modern young men and women is that they are "doing something" to help in emissions reduction (although the fact that their jobs don't pay them enough to actually afford to buy a car, never mind insure and fuel one may play a tiny role in their decision-making process) . Which for the city of San Francisco, is true, despite the steady stream composed of shiny metal rolling boxes that daily brings its own cloud of carbon particles with it. However, one can look at any picture of China from the year 1989, the year of their infamous Tiananmen Square massacre of its own citizens, and see a steady stream of bicyclists wending their way through its thoroughfares. A stream that is now a river of enshrouded metal boxes, barely visible in the thick haze of carbon, ozone and nitrous oxide befouling the atmosphere and creating a cloud of noxious gas that dwarfs that of any American city; Americans can cut down on their greenhouse gas emissions all that they want, but America is a country of but 330 million people. If it released not a single carbon molecule into the air, the billions and billions of Asian drivers would more than compensate for our own reduction in Greenhouse gases vented into the atmosphere, by following Beijing's lead and changing from bicycles and rickshaws to multi-ton SUV's fueled by subsidized low gas prices.

Similarly, Netflix and Levi's can reduce their carbon footprint all they want, but as long as the largest emitter (by far, on the same scale of Asian emissions vs. American), the War Department and its multiple ancillary MNC's, continue to accelerate theirs, it won't do a bit of good toward getting the USA, or the world, closer to the emissions target agreed upon in the Paris accords. But because the newspaper of broken record is the propaganda arm of the War Machine, there is nary a mention of Lockheed Martin, nor a word about Boeing. Somehow Raytheon is missing from their list of CO2 transgressors, and General Dynamics? Well who cares about their emissions? Certainly not the Pentagon. Northrop Grumman, the Harris Corp. and Texton? Well, why bother to mention them as go-to vendors for the US war machine? As for Huntington Ingalls, well, they couldn't have an outsized contribution to the country's outsized CO2 venting, now could they? Honeywell, well honey, c'mon. GE? Gee, e-commerce is swell, so what the hell?.

None of these War Department entities are called out by the Times article, despite being the top providers of the corporatized US Dept. of War, one of the globe's worst polluters and prodigious burners of fossil fuels, putting the torch to more gasoline and diesel fuel than entire countries and yet, unlike Levi's and Cargill's, which supply us with clothes to wear and food to eat, do not cater to the needs of a single US citizen, but exist solely to feed the insatiable hunger for profits of the corporate behemoths that comprise our War Machine, only a few of which I've listed above, (which I gleaned from Christian Sorensen's Understanding the War Industry, a tome that exposes the squalid underbelly of the US War Machine's control of the economy, that is as well-written and documented as Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, and brings up to date many of the dynamics of centralized control of the economy by the military-industrial complex documented by Seymour Melman's, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, which Sorensen cites in his introduction).

As if to demonstrate their cynicism, at end of their puff-piece are listed four additional articles that feature other carbon boondoggles of our Carbonaceous error as though they were hopeful signs of an emissions-reduced future:

Oil Giants Win Offshore Wind Leases in Britain

Feb. 8, 2021

G.M. Announcement Shakes Up U.S. Automakers’ Transition to Electric Cars

Jan. 29, 2021

 

G.M. Will Sell Only Zero-Emission Vehicles by 2035

Jan. 28, 2021

Businesses Aim to Pull Greenhouse Gases From the Air. It’s a Gamble.

Jan. 18, 2021

Each of these endeavors will pay it forward. They will all add, by virtue of the enormous expenditure of fossil-fuel-derived energy needed in order to bring them to pass,  their own carbon contribution to the current carbon emissions an increased amount such that their sum total will guarantee that none of the Climate Conference's goals will be met. Copout will then instead "extend its target to 2030," and then 2040, 2050, etc, never to be met. But by that time (2050 = 3 decades hence), the current 415ppm's will be, following the current trajectory of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere the more we keep on literally "acting" to reduce those emissions (the world has gone from ~2.0/annum to ~3.0/annum since the Kyoto protocols were fist signed in 1992 or so), be higher than (415 + (3 x 30) 90 = ) 505ppm. And that is of CO2 alone. No methane is taken into account, which is increasing at a far faster clip, and is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, and its rapid accumulation is concentrated in the USA and Russia, the two countries fracturing the earth at a frenetic pace and building the energy-intensive infrastructure needed to sustain its blistering depletion rate, such that the world is now crowing already, as early as 2021, of history's first February Arctic shipment from Russia to China through the usually frozen waters of the Arctic Ocean ...  as though that were something to be as celebrated as the Perseverance's landing on Mars. They are, after all, related. Earth's mission to Mars: change Earth's atmosphere until it is as unsuitable to life as the atmosphere on Mars. It proceeds apace. And Enron Musk will sell you the means to be a partner in both.

"Stop The Steal": Freeze the Unbridled Plundering of America's Energy Resources.

      Once upon a time the telephone industry had their own

 independent power infrastructure, one that included back-up 

generators the size of those that power Ocean Liners.  

Stop the Steal.

The untold story, at least so far, of the big Texas freezer frisson is that not only was the resulting chaos predictable ... it was predicted. But instead of providing a buffer against the expected spike in demand, the Texas energy barons started salivating and planning for a profit bonanza not seen since the California debacle that Bush contributor Kenneth Lay's Enron engineered under another Texas governor, one whom they had ensconced in the White House together with his still-on-Halliburton's-payroll Vice President, the Dick Cheney, who purposely told FERC to stand down, as the Dubya had plans for California, at the center of which stood The Terminator, that included the recall of Democratic Governor Gray Davis and his replacement by GOP yes man, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

No such fate will befall the hapless Greg Abbot, of course, as he is the handmaiden of Texas energy interests.

In late December/early January the Arctic was experiencing an event referred to as an SSW - a Sudden Stratospheric Warming -  the result of which is that the polar vortex is significantly weakened. Thus, it was not surprising that the weather prediction for February would include sub-zero temperatures, a fact reinforced by the February 12'th warning that:

"Temperatures will be 20 to 50 degrees colder than average throughout the Plains and into the Midwest early next week. Low temperatures will plunge into the single digits as far south as Texas, with subzero temperatures expected in both Texas and Oklahoma. This arctic outbreak resulted from a late December through early January sudden stratospheric warming event, which occurs when temperatures in the polar region's stratosphere rise dramatically.

Sudden stratospheric warming causes the polar vortex to weaken, which then affects the jet stream pattern. There can be a lag of several weeks between when the polar vortex gets disrupted to when it affects the jet stream and then brings colder weather. In this case, the change in the jet stream led to a blocking pattern in the upper levels of the atmosphere near Greenland, allowing arctic air to surge southward into the Lower 48."

So this event, one that was predicted, not just in January and early February, but one that was known even to a non-meteorologist such as myself (no lie ... I read about it in mid-December and had been monitoring it since then, just because that's the kind of nerd I am) were acquainted with, had no impact on the not only continued, but increased amount of Texas' bonanza of  natural gas that has been the bane of the fracturing industry, being exported out of the State of Texas by companies using LNG technology. While simultaneously, the flaring of "excess" natural gas continued to such an egregious degree that in January, which, as you may note, was long after the SSW in the Arctic, so it was already common knowledge what was heading their way, the Texas Railroad Commission yet again delayed a decision on flaring permits, as it just couldn't bring itself to step on the industry's toes by denying them the right to simply burnoff the store of Texas' natural gas reserves so that Texxon could continue to supply China with oil from the Permian basin. Which in no way faults China. China is filling its energy reserve as we dredge out the last dregs of our own to sell them at rockbottom prices. There they are considered the property of the public, here they belong to private interests. Any country that cares about the well-being of its citizens would jump at the chance to leverage a scarce resource to provide a broad-based industrial platform to create jobs from ... not just sell the energy resources to a competitive economy to use so that a few billionaires can further allocate the country's wealth for their own aggrandizement. For crimes of such enormity, knowingly impoverishing the vast underclass, Chinese business executives have actually been executed. Capital crimes there beget Capital punishment. Here, nowhere more than in Texas, they earn you an enormous bonus. 

Thus can one of the major political parties proffer theories so ridiculous and absurd that the non-white populations, whose intelligence the members of these avatars of so-called white Supremacy abjure, are smart enough to know to ridicule the infantilism such theories make manifest in those who adopt them as facts.

It is not only that energy companies in Texas supposedly didn't know what was coming, the suggestion, at least to one who was cognizant of the predictions of the SSW and the science behind them, that they didn't, is of course, absurd. However, it is not the bailiwick of unregulated companies to buffer against such prognosticated events, but to instead profit from them. It is in every Corporate charter to run their businesses so as to provide their shareholders with the maximum payout in dividends, and such payouts are dependent on profits, and those profits were going to get a nice surge from the frigid air surging down from the Arctic. As in Enron before them, they simply used their knowledge of what was going to happen to the spot price of electricity, ie its 300% increase, to maximize their customers' pain, and thereby maximize their gain. Just ask Ted Cruz missile, who flew off to Mexico on the monies flowing into his campaign chest from Texas' energy companies he aids and abets in their untrammeled exportation of America's energy reserves to countries he then calls our enemies (which they may or may not be, but they most assuredly are our competitors), one of which holds more than 80% of the rare earth elements needed to power our future, since the USA will have neither any energy reserves of its own, having sold them at rock-bottom prices to counties inimical to our interests, but, because the Reagan/Bush administration instigated the off-shoring (the word didn't even exist before the 80's) of our industrial base, few industries are left with which to earn the foreign reserves to pay for the energy resources we will need to import in the next decade, since, by that time, our own will have been sold off to the lowest bidders. 

The mayor of a small Texas town told residents they were owed "NOTHING" as many went without power, heat, and water during this deadly cold snap:

 “No one owes you [or] your family anything,” Tim Boyd, the mayor of Colorado City, Texas , wrote Tuesday in a since-deleted Facebook post. "Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic) not the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this Sink or swim, it’s your choice I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout [ we ] owe you nothing Quit crying Think outside of the box." 

That is the Corporate stance not only toward Americans, but the world, to which they imagine they don't belong. To leave the entire populace to the predations of such mendacious entities has predictable results. The state of Texas is living through them now. We should read the Texas Tea leaves as they predict the future our so-called leaders are setting us up for.  But not to worry. As the USA did after 9/11, we will take a path exactly the opposite of the one this event has done us the favor of illuminating. Besides, the whole thing is fake news, it is just a hoax, Texans. Like the corona virus and climate change, SSW's and the polar vortex are but the products of fervid imaginations. Just ignore them. "Just wait ... it'll get warmer soon", to paraphrase the remark your anti-hero made while California was choking on the smoke from its wildfires. Fires that were caused, (per Qanon, which now is the propaganda arm of the GOP, since science, you know, is the province of (shudder) "elites" who went to college and stuff), by jews in alien spaceships firing laser beams into the wilderness to set it ablaze. Yeah. 

V= IR: The Nation's Electorate's potential Current Resistance to facts leaves future generations' power capacitance farad away from where it should be. That's Sherlock Ohm's Law, Henry, well, mho or less.

Now that makes sense, right?

  

The Nexus and the Banditry: Musk Rat Poison.

 

The Starling.

Now that ethanol from biofuel has been cemented into the national economy via an ever-growing deluge of federal dollars into the very same Red States that despise the Federal Government from which it receives its life's blood in order to produce a product no one either wants or needs, the Elon-gated musk of Green sanctimoniousness has taken on a fetid stench of its own.

Perhaps watching the National Maul gave the Musk-atel the balls to proceed with his nefarious plans ... having seen the success enjoyed by those who bit the hand that feeds them, he figured he'd one-up them and bit-coin the fans that eased him into such a high-flying stock from such a low-performing company. The dynamic is the same. And by seeing the success of the tactic despite the failure of the strategy, Musk has opted for sweetening the pot, upping the ante, and gaming the bored by adopting the same template.

Dropping the Potemkin-esque facade of clean energy, Musk has adopted bit-coin payments and jumped on the band-wagon of the dirtiest currency on the globe to cash in on the fortune to be reaped by the burning of enormous amounts of fossil fuel, as much as the entire economy of Argentina by some estimates, Chile by others, or, should you prefer Europe, the Netherlands, while still maintaining his Green imprimatur, while adding to the CO2 forcing with a product, much like his own Gaussian bargain with the devil, Tesla, contrived solely as a plaything for the rich.

But like producing ethanol from biofuels, ie, foodplants, accepting the filthiest lucre to pay for a product, the manufacture of which is the largest source of atmospheric carbon emissions, while simultaneously putting his hand out for "research" dollars to develop CSS plants (that's Carbon Storage and Sequestration ... another energy-intensive boondoggle designed to demonstrate that the corporate sector is "doing something" ... which it is, paying it forward: dragging what should be tomorrow's carbon pollution forward, releasing it today instead). Musk has moved on, to that place where he can, using his free use of tax-payer funded astronauts for his Space-cadet endeavors as a tactic, to open up a channel of free-flowing federal funds to his own personal fortune, siphoning off more tax-payer dollars for his own aggrandizement than the entire State of Iowa.

Now that the bloviating blowhard of bilious blather's basking in baleful banishment, his fake facts flared into freedom molecules by fracking's failure to fuel the fabulous future fancied by fossil-fueled fanatics, Biden's plan for Billing the Bettor's Back-breaking future takes the stage, even before the plans for it are back-of-the-napkin flushed out. That is the Enron Musk future, the one that combines the triple E's I've mentioned in previous posts: Economics, Energy and Environment, this time in a dance to the death, using the new milieu of Creditism, still pretending to be Capitalism, as the anvil on which to hammer out his axles of evil. Because thanks to The Way We Live now, any well-connected trollope can convince any desperate lender to advance enormous piles of ersatz capital, at low-to-no interest, to finance boondoggle ideas such as EV's that no one can afford without a rather sizeable Federal subsidy. It helps if, like the food-for-machines scam, it has the support of well-connected politicos and well-meaning, but scientifically-challenged greens, such that it sucks up so much cash so fast, and grows so large that any attempt by either party to dismantle it will result in very real economic pain that will result in that representative, or even the entire Party to which that Rep belongs, in losing power, with the result that the boondoggle will not only then be allowed to continue, but will be larded with additional pork-barrel cash, and the damage it wreaks be either outright denied or cleverly obfuscated.

 Like ethanol from food is full of corn, promoted by hucksters, Wind is the source of vaporous lies, as evinced by the collapse of the Texas electic grid from a winter storm. A winter storm caused by the meandering jetstream predicted by Jennifer Francis as a result of the uneven warming of the Arctic vis-à-vis the lower latitudes, which leaves the temperature differential between the two not strong enough to keep the polar vortex powerful enough to contain the Arctic's bitter cold from descending into the lower reaches of the earth's land masses. A future of EV's would leave the current problem a future current problem for the already-rickety electric grid. Not only would Texan's homes be frigid, their cars would be immobilized as well. 

As accelerating volumes of carbon are exhausted into the atmosphere in the vain attempt to build a carbon-free future, the carbon having been excavated from the ground and forced into the air in building it, the problems being experienced now in Texas will multiply, as the changes in the jetstream wrought by the changes in the concentration in carbon in the atmosphere wrought by the overwrought attempts to keep Americans, and now billions and billions of Asians, flying around by the seat of their pants far into their Jetson-esque future, become increasingly manifest. How do you locate windfarms when you don't know where the winds of the future, unpredictable now because of the volumes of carbon added to the atmosphere in order to build windfarms, are to be located? As soon as they are built, the changes in wind patterns caused by the changes in climate, leave them as much of a stranded asset as any oil reserve is now. How is that, anymore than ethanol that requires enormous amounts of fossil fuels be burned in every stage of its production, "renewable"?

Wind turbines accounted for almost a quarter of Texas’s energy in 2020, making it the second-largest power source after natural gas, natural gas that Texas flares enough of to power the electric demands of the entire State, all in order to export the oil in the Permian basin that, during the Trump administration, was shipped (in 2020 at a price so low it didn't even pay for the cost of extracting it) to China to power the enterprises that that same administration accused of stealing American jobs ... but you'll not hear any "Stop the Steal" rhetoric applied here. Not even by the Democrats, nor from Rachel Madcow and her journalistic ilk, because it involves energy and the continued wasteful use of it to power the tax receipts the Federal Government needs to power the continued yearly expansion of  a military still intent on the expansion of its nuclear weapons programs and Full-Spectrum Domination, even as it turns the economy into a full rectum abomination.

Thus does Texas show us the future of green energy.

Building windfarms to tout their green credentials with the proceeds from oil that could be obtained only by flaring another precious fossil fuel straight into the atmosphere at such a prodigious rate it pays climate change forward, wreaking one climate-change-induced catastrophe after another. The takeaway being that had Texas not used the criminal Bush family to confiscate the savings of the American public and then Darth Cheney's Halliburton to pour those monies into fracturing the entire continent (note that this is the same dynamic the same administration used to foist its ethanol scam onto the public: so big so fast, that, like its Wars, it is not possible to stop without extreme economic dislocation), moving in such a rush that they simply flared off the resulting bonanza of natural gas to no purpose whatsoever other than to pour money into the pockets of Texan billionaires and their  political cronies, such as Texan Rick "the Dick" Perry, who, as dumpy Trumpy's head of the DOE, cynically referred to the gas flared as "Freedom Molecules". Texans would not now be shivering in their homes, as all that flared gas could have been burned for a purpose other than amassing billions of dollars into the pockets of men who had  already amassed mountains of money. All financed by the legerdemain of Fed-enabled banksters backed by GOP hucksters who were in turn enabled by the silence of Democrats who quietly bought in to the entire scheme and feathered their nests while clucking at the irresponsibility of their confreres across the aisle.

This is the dynamic we have in place as we face a future blackened by Reaganomics, bedeviled by a pandemic, and trumped by conspiracy-theory-addled mobs, all while being distracted by Pentagon-derived techno-geek pseudo-solutions contrived to put a Green face on a Blue Party hawking Red politics. What could go wrong?

Spinning the Color Wheel of Misfortune.

A drab Spring.

                                                                   War is never Civil

Arab Spring

It may be only February, but out here in California the spring has sprung, and it's  glorious ... and frightening. If one were to look at the state of the State's water supplies as of this time last year, it gave one reason to be optimistic about the fire season as there was no part of it in serious drought. You would , however have been wrong to assume that meant that we would have a better outcome than the year before, as instead it was the worst, by far, than any other preceding year in recorded history. This spring, as the ground has already begun to dry from intense insolation, the picture is indeed grim. Much of the State is red, meaning it is way dry, and some of it seriously so, even as but a pittance of moisture is forecast for the foreseeable future.

Right now, though, the sight in the back yard is one of growth and vigor, the birds are chirping as they go about their chores of building nests, gathering twigs and bits here and there and weaving them into repositories for their offspring, it lends an air of hopefulness to the gloom of Life in the Time of Corona. But as the polar vortex sweeps down out of the Arctic enveloping the Midwest in an icy blanket, the cooling effect of El Nina comes to mind, in this, the year that followed the 3'rd hottest year in history despite the coolness. What also has me wondering is the escape of all that frigid air a mere month before the spring solstice. Doesn't that mean that as the sun starts shining in the far north, there will be less cold air up there to keep its ice frozen over the summer season?  

That would make Rosneft happy, as they are at the forefront of the push to exploit the Arctic's trove of natural resources, damn the consequences, as they believe in their fervid imaginations that Russia, since its vast plains will be warmed in the changed climate (is already being warmed by the already changed climate), its forests burned to a cinder enabling planting without the necessity of having to first clear, a la Brazil and Indochina, all those pesky rainforests to make a few billionaires happy by planting sugarcane to make "biofuel" (biofuel is for biological entities: mammals and birds, for example; using food crops (all food crops are biofuel: it is only when enormous amounts of exogenous energy, supplied by burning fossil fuels, are used to process them are they transformed into machine fuel) to manufacture machine fuels doesn't magically transform machines into biological entities: fuel from foodcrops is using biofuels to actuate machine combustion, robbing the biological world of sustenance to power the ongoing domination and destruction of anything left of the natural world by mechanical means: it relies on not only the combustion of the rainforests themselves, but of the fuel derived therefrom in order to power ICE machines, which are the only machines it is manufactured to fuel. The use of so-called biofuels prolongs the utilization of the internal combustion engine, not curtails it, as the Green meanies would have you believe).

Of course Rosneft isn't alone in their despoliation of nature. Together with Russia, the USA is a major fracking state, a petro power by dint of the extraordinary measures it is willing to take in order to make a few oligarchs rich and keep its citizens zipping around in their magical car pets. But the USA is a Democracy and must therefore make up elaborate lies to get its populace to ignore the ramifications of their increasingly power-hungry existence, one in which denial plays the central role. Thus do we see the main divide between the two camps of denialists: those who believe the eco-nonsense that turning food crops into combustible material to power machines is a "green" solution, so as to enable them to keep driving guilt-free, and those who pretend to believe that there is no such thing as climate change, despite it having already taken place right in front of their eyes, so that they can drive guilt-free.

As the two camps of denialists get further divided, with neither recognizing the absurdity of their own position, while ridiculing that of their antagonists, we increasingly hear talk of civil war being inevitable, and in fact, desirable, and now being cheerled as "Taking back the country" by the failed loser, our ex-45'th president. Yet what we never hear mentioned, even by those who are dead-set against the Furor's rabble-rousing rhetoric, are the civil wars spawned by the Arab Spring with citizens screaming the same demands for a nebulous "Freedom". Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Ukraine, and prior to that, Afghanistan and Iraq, or any of the other nations into which the USA has ploughed trillions of dollars to keep their civil wars active and bloody are now, ten, and twenty years later, smoking ruins with nary a one even pretending any longer that they are now democratic countries. Civil War has left them, each and every one, bastions of despair. Never do the US leaders point to these countries to which we, as citizens, who are never consulted as to the deployment of the armies we are answerable for, have been forced to send our soldiers, contractors, life's blood and treasure, bother to bring to our attention the total depravity and utter privation that these so-called civil wars, all fought with outsider monies supplied by Democratic governments, from entities as uncivil as can be imagined, left in their wake. Never do we hear our politicians decry what happens when countries descend into Civil War, not even while the failed ex-45'th President maliciously incites it in his own country, not even while the famously failed Furor is on trial for using his position of Power to foment uncivil unrest. 

Photos of emaciated grey whales swimming away from their feeding spots in the Arctic toward their breeding grounds in Baja, California emphasize the repercussions in Nature of mankind's relentless growth in its consumption of energy. The pictures from these war-ravaged countries should be telling us the same story, that their future is our future, one that demagogues like the lard-ass from the thighs of Mar-a Largo will be more than happy to steer us toward, with him watching the debacle on TV, stuffing his smug face with Doritos while we tear each other's to pieces for his amusement; just another chapter in his game of thrown elections.

So let's never mind the empty phrase of Speaking truth to power. What we need far more than that is to start speaking the truth about Power, and what that truth suggests as to how we should be planning our environment and its infrastructure for the future. Because the way we're currently behaving isn't going to end in anything but grief. Should you doubt this, I invite you to look back over the past year, the one in which you witnessed the way mankind handled the corona virus. Compared to how we are handling the Climate crisis, it was a sterling performance. No exaggeration. Yet it is the climate crisis that is far more dire, its ramifications reaching farther into the future, one that has already shown signs of providing us lives of unending privation and dread. Privation Enterprise ... Das Capitalism of the future.  

Does anybody know what we are living for?

                                                                    No Won Nose.

An anti-hero, another mindless crime

One thing's for certain, your life's not worth a dime.

On and on 

Does anybody know what we are living for?

Africa's colonized by China

While Putin lectures the world

Twin 21'st century reincarnations

Of countries that in the 20'th hurled

Millions into their graves by deliberate mass starvation.

 Whatever happens, We leave it all to chance

Life's one long heartache

One long failed romance;

It goes on and on and on and yet

Does anybody know what we are living for?

The Roaring 20's meant madness and Euphoria

The roaring 21'st means roaring rivers and raging wildfires;

Exploding tundra in Siberia;

Landslides causing tsunami's in Greenland;

Snowstorms in the desert;

Humans breeding like rabbits.

 Whatever happens we'll never change this dance.

Just watch the landscape bake

Destroy wildlife and plants;

We just go on as though it's ours to take, yet

There's not a one can say what we are living for.

Some say it started with Reaganism:

That turned Christianity into paganism,

Used Wahhabism to stir up the mujahedeen.

Once Religion preached eternal love

But now it's just plain mean.

Squabbling tribes of irreconcilable sects

Leave entire countries devastated, smoldering wrecks.

 Whatever happens We don't change our stance

Life's one long heartache

Where love don't stand a chance;

It goes on and on, you bet but 

Nobody can say what we are living for.

 

While people starve, their militaries grow

With mounting rhetoric, whirlwinds are all they sow;

Gnashionalism sharpens their dragon's teeth;

Inevitable War the gift that we bequeath

To our children, who, like god, we claim to love,  

Then send them early to their reward in heaven above.

 Whatever happens we claim to have free will

Yet its never-ending heartbreak

Makes our lives a Nightmare still.

Must we then let cruel Destiny be

The only one that knows what we are living for?

"A plague on both your houses", was his curse

Then Covid came, turned things from bad to worse;

With headaches and pneumonia our lives leak away,

Yet ads for Revlon, SUV's, Camay

Assail us every minute of every day.  

 Who penned the notes for this, our Dance Macabre?

Who conducts performers in the orchestra?

Plying instruments of torture

That play on and on 

Do antibodies know what we are living for?

Mass media blares noise at us each day

Yet rarely if ever has anything to say

It mesmerizes minds, enthralls our eyes,

But its main objective is to polarize;

Sets us adrift, each in our separate boats

Otherwise, we're at each other's throats.

 Whatever happenstance should send our way

Life 's one long heartache

From birth to dying day

It goes on and on and yet

Does anybody know what we are living for?

If we found out would it shake us to our nasty core?

A big black hole that screams out, "Nevermore!"?

A blissful Eden, an ever-roaring Hell 

Dante's Inferno, everlasting Nirvana

Stranded on Mars or sub-tropical Botswana,

Hieronymus Bosch, eternal Inquisition

Aushwitz, Dachau, Roman crucifixion

A purple haze, unending opium daze?

More than any of these we dread,

Naught.

Governor Public Nuisance Airs His French Laundry.

 

                           (Daniel Kim/The Sacramento Bee via AP, Pool) From an SF Chronicle editorial:

Politics trumps Reality.

Hmmm ... What's wrong with this picture? Well, let's see, is that not the Governor of California, in the midst of a pandemic in which the State he governs is faring far worse than most of the other States in the Union, using the hood of an electric car to sign an executive order that would require all new passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035? 

And is that Governor, even as infection numbers soar and deaths escalate, doing so without wearing a mask, while those who are masked stand side-by-side completely disregarding the social distancing guidelines published by his own administration for the public to adhere to in order to stop the spread of a deadly virus?

Why, yes it is.

Signing said order is a move the governor says would achieve a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. (Lol) The trillions in costs to do so eclipse the cost of a high-speed rail to Southern California, but the costs to replace the Golden State's entire gas-powered fleet of vehicles in both monetary and CO2 terms is never mentioned. After all, the vehicles are all manufactured out-of-State, so the legerdemain is easily pulled off, and the wool pulled over our proverbial eyes ... mostly because we want it to be. 

But his predecessor lorded over the Climate Conference even as he presided over the largest expansion of fracking in the country, while the State he governed refused to report its flaring stats to the EIA. And like a REIT-a-day Brown, Governor Public Nuisance speaks in half-truths and wears his green credentials on his sleeve, while up it he slides his American Express Card:

Governor Greensleeves

Alas, my guv, you do us wrong,

To cast us off discourteously.

For I have voted you into power,

And in return got perfidy.

 

Greensleeves was all my joy

Greensleeves was my delight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

 

Your vows you've broken, like my heart,

Oh, why did you so enrapture me?

Now I'm in a world that's falling apart

While your heart bleeds duplicity.

 

Greensleeves uses me like a toy

Greensleeves is just a blight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

 

I have been ready at your hand,

To grant whatever you would crave,

I have both wagered life and land,

While false hope is all you've Gaven me.

 

Greensleeves was all my joy

Greensleeves was my delight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

 

While you continue to disdain,

It does the more enrage me,

And even so, I still remain

A captive to your trumpery.

 

Greensleeves uses me like a toy

Greensleeves is just a blight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

 

Your supporters are all clothed in green,

And they didst ever wait on thee;

All this was gallant to be seen,

Even as you turned your back on me.

 

Greensleeves was all my joy

Greensleeves was my delight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

Thou pretends to desire no earthly thing,

but yet thou hadst it readily.

Thy promises you still play and sing;

Even as you turn your back on me.

 

Greensleeves used me like a toy

Greensleeves is just a blight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

 

Well, legal marijuana may keep me high,

that thou inconstancy I may not see,

Yet while more San Quentin's inmates die,

Their deaths unmask your snobbery.

 

Greensleeves was all my joy

Greensleeves was my delight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

 

Ah, Greensleeves, now farewell, good-bye,

Dissembling is the way you thrive,

For to all your supporters you ever lie,

Hiding the black future awaiting them in '35.

 

Greensleeves used me like a toy

Greensleeves is just a blight,

Greensleeves took my heart of gold,

And crushed it, did Governor Greensleeves.

https://lyricstranslate.com

Hello Out There.

 

Photo posted by Naked capitalism via: https://twitter.com/Nature_Is_Lit/status/1354172287507976193?s=20), inspiration for lyrics,  John Prine.

The Walking Dead

He said, when asked, "My only distinction, is to, by you, be targeted for extinction". 

"Hello In There"

We had a treehouse in the jungle,

With a family that liked living there.

Well, it's been years since the kids were drowned,

Their lives overthrown, left us alone.

Now we mostly live in terror,

While machines churn our jungle into road.

Our once wild places look like a Nuclear War,

And we still don't know what for, don't matter anymore.

Ya' know old trees are there no longer,

While old rivers grow dryer ev'ry day.

Old habitats have all grown lonesome

No longer any one to say, "Hello in there, hello."

Me and my lifemate, we can't walk far any more,

She sits and stares through her silent scream.

While all the views are now completely razed

Life's some forgotten dream, just some past moonbeam.

Someday you'll burn it down completely,

To fuel your mad rush to be Free.

So what would I say if someone asks, "What's new?"

"Nothing, what's with you? Nothing left to do."

Ya' know, old growth's there no longer,

While old rivers grow dryer ev'ry day.

Old habitats have all grown lonesome

Now that there's no one to say, "Hello in there, hello."

So if you're walking through some zoo sometime

And spot some hollow lonesome eyes,

Please don't just pass 'em by and stare

Just 'cause you don't care; say, "Hello in there, hello."