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.