Ever Riven: The Red Ink Sea: Ignorance is Strength

Solar-powered EV's ... 

 Moonbeam for the misbegotten.

so bedazzled with the sun that everything I look on seemeth green”.

POISONED Part 1: The Factory , published by Tampa Bay Times, explains how at Gopherresources,

"Workers, hundreds of them, sweat through 12-hour shifts at Gopher Resource in Tampa. They extract lead from used car batteries, melt it down and turn it into blocks of metal to resell."

Despite the exponential increase in the number of used car batteries that EV's will dump onto the world, there is  no known method of recycling those environmental nightmares, which will lead, as lead has led, to Gophers poisoning the ground, the water, their employees and neighbors ...

Germany's wind industry disaster has left  thousands of tons of wind turbine litter to be shipped to third world countries where it won't have to be added to Germany's energy or environmental costs when claiming wind energy as clean energy, or as a zero emissions electrickity source:

"thousands of these turbines will lose their subsidies with each passing year, which means they will be taken offline and mothballed. (Because, like EV's they have no market without subsidies, and subsidies translates in to an exogenous energy source: it's taking tax dollars generated by no one cares how, so of necessity includes every industry that makes its profits via the combustion of fossil fuels). 

"the large blades, which are made of fiberglass composite materials and whose components cannot be separated from each other: Burning the blades is extremely difficult, toxic, and energy-intensive.

"That’s Germany’s Energiewende", (German for energy transition) and contribution to protecting the environment and climate!

Energy transition has a nice ring to it, but what it brings to mind is energy conversion, a process that everywhere in the universe, everywhere other than in the minds of EV enthusiasts and apologists, means an energy loss. And that loss is usually translated in to heat. That loss is best demonstrated by the ginormous cooling towers associated with nuclear reactors. When a chain reaction is started in a reactor, it is stymied so as not to result in a Chernobyl, so the only energy available to do actual work from the splitting of atoms is the heat that the alchemy of transforming one element into another creates: waste heat, which we earthlings bask in, or roast in, every day from the waste heat the sun's nuclear reactions creates. Energy, whether from the sun, the wind, or the waves, loses a percentage of the total energy in the system to the process of converting it from one form into another. What we call fuel is merely a substance that emits a high amount of heat when its state is changed from one state into the other. Is it that we simply prefer to forget that natural gas and liquid oil, and solid coal are all simply matter in each of its different forms? Do we all simply jettison all that knowledge we've learned in school once we're handed a diploma? Ask any seventh grader for the three forms of matter, and they'll say, Solid, Liquid and Gas; ask that same student a decade later, as an adult, that same question, and, at least here in the US, all you'll receive is a puzzled look. After all, Why remember anything like that when you can just google-it? So they don't know the answer, they've unlearned it. The vast majority also don't know that the vehicle they pilot is powered by controlled explosions under the hood. A lack of comprehension that is difficult to grasp, given that it's power is derived from an internal combustion engine.

When the power is derived from solar, wind/hydro, much of that heat is lost to the generator, the spinning blades of which, as in those wind turbines, generate heat, much of it ameliorated by lubricants (fossil-fuel-derived), the less friction the more efficient (by which is meant, instead of losing 30% to it only loses 25% in the process of turning mechanical energy into electrical energy, which is basically what a turbine does: they are jet engines specifically designed to act as dynamos.

Now when the energy generated is greater than the current need, one can, with fossil-fueled generators, feed less fuel to the fire, but in a solar array or windfarm, the last thing you want to do is waste the precious sunlight or windpower as long as it is being, gratis, provided, so what needs to be done instead is store it, in batteries, or some other scenario (the Germans are trying hydrogen, which I hope to have a word on later), which means that not only does the solar energy need to be converted into electricity in situ, that electricity then has to be converted into DC power (transmission facilities are generally AC: voltage is a force, and that force must overcome the resistance of the wires it travels over, much like your car has to overcome the friction of the rubber meeting the road to propel it, something cyclists are far more familiar with than are drivers, as a tap of the toe delivers such an over abundance of the force needed, it's never even observed, but cyclists have to use their own muscle power, so are quite aware that the thinner the tire, the less friction, so the further they can pedal on a given amount of carbo-fuel, otherwise kown as food). But in the case of electricity travelling over a wire, the resistance is proportional to the distance traveled and the gauge of the wire, but with Direct Current, that resistance mounts to ridiculous levels once you exceed a certain distance, and Alternating Current helps overcome, but doesn't eliminate, that obstacle. So the loss of energy to heat rises with distance).

Date: 31/03/21Die Welt:

Green energy transition has turned into an existential threat to German economy, Federal Audit Office warns:

“The Federal Audit Office sees the danger that the energy transition in this form will endanger Germany as a business location and overwhelm the financial strength of electricity-consuming companies and private households. This can ultimately jeopardise social acceptance of the energy transition.”

It took decades for Europe to build up its vast wind network, which currently produces 80% of the world’s offshore wind energy (85 gigawatts) and employs over 210,000 people. The Biden administration’s plan anticipates playing catch-up, injecting $3 billion in loans into the industry, $230 million to ready ports, $8 million for research and development projects, and urging the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to speed along a review of 16 construction plans. That last portion is a reversal from the Trump era; a report from the Center for American Progress found that, during the pandemic, the DOI gave oil and gas companies rent breaks on public lands while slapping wind and solar with bills.

The new normal ... nothing to co2 here, folks.

Which reveals the nature of our relationship with nature and the disconnect between it and the economic system that seeks to wrest, gratis, pushing the consequences of its neglect of the externalities onto entire populations that never get the benefits of the destruction thus wrought, "cheap" energy.

In the prologue to his paean to Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris describes the effect of unfettered Capitalism on the US citizenry of Pennsylvania's coalfields:

"Valley after valley, as the train snaked through, disclosed communities as squalid as any these people had fled from in Europe. Thousands of sooty shacks on stilts, gutters buzzing with garbage; mules clopping to the mineheads, hock-deep in fine gray dust. Beneath that dust, men were scrabbling in wet, gassy gloom, earning a dollar or so for every ton of coal they hacked. In a year they might earn 500 in cash, but that cash was subject to confiscation via compulsory deductions for rent, fuel, medical bills, and food that could only be had at inflated price from the company stores: they aged faster and ailed longer than any other workers in American industry. 

Mere boys, they began their "careers" at eight or nine, picking splinters from out of the coal breakers until their hands were scarred for life. These men worked ten ours/day, six days/week. They ate coal dust in their bread and drank it in their milk; they breathed and coughed it up until it lay them in their early graves. At forty-five, most were so ravaged by black-lung disease that they had to return to the breakers to pick slate with their grandchildren, contracting fresh black scars until they died a painful death."

Children at Work for the Zero-Emission economy.

Like Covid patients, they suffocated from lungs destroyed by disease. Externalities no one outside of the pits cared to think about. Like energy in the modern world of Capitalistic legerdemain, it could only survive if its true costs were subsidized, in this case by the lives of those no one would know about, using the same conjuring trick then that it does today, misdirection:

"The subtle, deceptive art of directing the public's attention towards one thing (electricity) so it does not notice another (the inhumane methods and environmental ravaging). It can refer to both the effect of a spectator’s mind being focused on an unimportant thing, or the action that causes it".

 

We marvel at the poetic fantasy of the flapping of a butterfly's wing on one continent causing a hurricane on another, yet think this, multiplied myriad times around the globe, will have no impact.

And each generation  thinks they have "moved beyond" the destructiveness and exploitation of the past:

" .... the science fiction of the "golden age" (the 1940s-1970s) was basically technology-oriented. It was hard for authors to include limits to growth in a worldview that saw atomic energy and space travel as an obvious feature of the future. 

Both of which proved to be more hype, more misdirection. Space travel today, a full four generations later, is still only for machines, used to spy on us and wage our Star Wars onslaughts against the Flintstones in Afghanistan, bombing "back to the stone age" a country we used and abused most despicably ... and that was before we invaded them ... and yet still managing to be still losing, after 20 years of gore and treasure poured into the Grave of Empires; while atomic energy turned out to be nothing more than children playing with matches, burning down the house simply to fire up the kettle for a nice cuppa.

Volkswagen Accused of Illegally Selling Prototypes Not Fit for the Road

By NEAL E. BOUDETTE

"The automaker, which is trying to regain the trust of car buyers after an emissions scandal in 2015, has acknowledged improperly selling preproduction cars. 

The company sold 10.74 million vehicles and made 11.6 billion euros ($14.3 billion) in profit. Volkswagen are racing with industry outsiders such as Waymo and Uber to dominate new ways of getting around (yeah, new ways of getting around environmental regulations and OTHER laws that get in the way of profits). 

Volkswagen’s Porsche sports car division recalled about 60,000 diesel-engined Cayenne and Macan sport utility vehicles:

The recall came after inspections revealed that the SUVs contain software designed to reduce the emissions controls for nitrogen oxide.

VW itself settled with Braunschweig prosecutors in June, paying a fine of 1 billion euros.

Which leaves them more than 10 billion euros to fund the development of EV's.

 Who, after all, is going to trust any VW-manufactured ICE machine? It was a move of pure self interest. Which is all the push to an all-electric fleet amounts to. Like fracking, the rush to make the US fleet all-electric is a desperate attempt, despite any long-range effects that will never be proven, as the result of private enterprise's perfidy is never a problem, whether in a banking industry that deliberately makes bad loans and then shuffles them off onto the public, ratings agencies that are funded by the exact same entities they rate,  stock brokers who recommend a stock that their own firm is selling short, insurance companies that take kickbacks from developers to offer insurance in flood plains, tornado alleys, and coastal communities being inundated from rising seas those same industries, via their landslide of financial support of the "Climate Change is a Hoax" hucksterism, are responsible for, as it sanctions their unfettered release of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, but for which they will never lose a nickel of their profits. Similar to VW, they cynically calculate the likely loss should they get caught, and know the only price they will ever have to pay is in a hit to their profits, but one that makes their illegal shenanigans a very profitable endeavor.  

All of which is to say that fraud is at the center of the beast because sloughing off risks and the real costs of doing business on to the public sphere you deride is part and parcel of any capitalist system. That is why this is a War economy, as that is exactly what a War economy does. It allocates resources and manpower to what Putin refers to as "Champions", which in wartime means the difference between winning and losing, but during wartime the central government's role in the economy is assumed and the taxation of those favored companies never questioned, as everyone accepts their contribution to the war effort, and therefore their "favored corpornation status", and therefore the necessity of the warring government to tax them as payback for their government assist. 

After WW2 this attitude was still alive ... until Reagan skewered it on the altar of the false god of Greed. That was when the transformation of the capitalistic system to one of outright fraud began in earnest, as best illustrated by the Reagan avowal of small government whereas he supervised the greatest expansion of federal debt, and "Defense" budgets, budgets used to pour American taxpayer dollars into the arming and deployment of troops throughout the Mideast into Afghanistan to the detriment of every American citizen, all to do Israel's bidding, the War Department being, as far as I can recall, part of the government, that part least able to be audited, questioned, or investigated for yup, that's right, Fraud. Part of that fraud being AIPAC's moronic claim that being anti War is anti-Semitic. Which points out the importance of words. When the War dept. is renamed the "Defense" dept., even as it steps up its war efforts and spending during a time of peace, AIPAC can claim that objections to increasing the "Defense" dept.'s budget are anti-Semitic are met with barely a raised eyebrow, as "Defense" is hard to object to. But the US War machine is not a defensive machine by any stretch of the imagination, it is a well-honed, all-consuming enterprise that is in the driver's seat of the US economy. So it is to the War Department's spending that objections are raised and to which AIPAC slanders its detractors with the ever-on-their-lips accusations of "Anti-Semitism", even as they sit silent to the failed former president's Muslim ban, which, being directed at Arab countries, actually was anti-Semitic. Countless Jews are not Semites, all Arabs are. A ban against Arab countries is anti-Semitic, but Jews care only about Jews, not their fellow Semites as evinced by their tacit acceptance of the Muslim ban. The great trick of the most conniving religion in mankind's history is to have infiltrated the organs of the media, government, banking and finance, by pretending that they are an ethnic group when they are in fact a religious group. The Muslim ban was more anti-Semitic than any US government  policy since WW2, yet the Jews sat silent. By disguising religion as ethnicity, raising cries of "Anti-Semitism" whenever anyone should object to paying so much in taxes they can't afford to send their own children to university so that the US can spend billions on supporting the Israeli apartheid state, Jewry sidles next to Power in a way that Popery never can, as calling someone anti-Catholic as opposed to anti-Semitic carries close to zero opprobrium in a Protestant country that insists on the separation of Church and State but silently allows the infiltration of the Synagogue into matters of state with nary a whisper in protest: Fraud.

So it's not just Germany's VW:

A study by the monitoring organization Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN) found that refined oil imported from Europe (made from Texas oil sucked up from the Permian) “exceeded EU pollution limits by as much as 204 times, and by 43 times the level for gasoline.” Approximately 80% of oil imported by Nigeria comes from the Netherlands and Belgium alone. Dumping dirty fuel is no doubt an important factor in Nigeria's air quality that is among the worst on the planet.

Selling poorly refined product to developing economies to keep both your CO2 (further refining translates into more energy required) numbers and refinery byproduct pollutants below Europe's tough limits. Misdirection. Nigeria reaps the opprobrium of the world and its own citizens while the nations causing their suffering use the profits derived therefrom to tilt at windmills all the while garnering praise from a world willfully blind to their conjuring tricks.

Why fraud has become the most intractable part of modern Transnational Corponations bottom line is that fraud is built into every aspect of capitalism. It is at the heart of the former failed President's hoax that claimed that climate change was a hoax and the elimination of CO2 as a pollutant from the EPA's list. Economists and Environmental writers alike refer to these as "externalities" but they become more and more often, as in the case of shipping badly refined products to countries whose citizens have no say about what industry befouls their air with, a case of Corporate malfeasance and playing one country's laws against the others (for example shipping ethanol back and forth across the US-Canadian border to collect a "Green" fee for renewable fuel).

The average American uses over 12,000 kilowatts of energy per hour, the average Chinese person uses 3,500. The emphasis on building a zero-emissions electrical grid only means that the average American's energy usage will increase, as it has done ever since the Kyoto protocols were introduced. It has, in fact, gone up at a faster rate after the protocols were passed than it ever did before they were. The computerization of everything under the sun has been achieved via a massive increase in per capita energy consumption, an increase the industry denied, claiming tele-commuting would replace the necessity of the daily commute, saving energy instead of raising the demand for it to unparalleled heights: Fraud. It took a pandemic to show the fallacy of that equation to the public, as the CO2 in the 2021 atmosphere still accumulated at a higher rate than it had in any year prior to the passage of the Kyoto protocols. 

There are two other reasons having nothing to do with consumer consumption:

1)The Military: the transport sector of the military alone consumes as much fossil fuels as  the modern state of Sweden: an entire country's consumption of energy that sits on top of the averaged consumption of every American, making it more than it actually is, and 

2) Fracking: Energy invested to produce energy resources. The price of extraction is the highest in energy terms when the resources are obtained by fracking. The only process more energy -intensive is the extraction of oil from tar sands from Canada's Athabasca region. But fracking's tight oil is unusable by most US refiners because they have been tooled to process the heavy tar-like product of Canada, the heaviest of the heavy oils.  

As the first fifth of the New Century is now behind us, it would do us well to notice that we can split it into two Fraudulent schemes, not counting the two Wars the USA initiated in order to supply itself with fossil fuel hegemony, both of which required enormous inputs of fossil fuels, and that therefore left large carbon footprints that we can pretend didn't happen, but the atmosphere can't:

First came the GW Bush admiration's selling of the food to fuel program of planting entire States with corn so as to feed the ever-growing appetite of the American automobile fleet, a fleet that was expanding its per-vehicle footprint and weight, necessitating an ever expanding supply of gasoline to keep it motoring along. Any rational country that had to take such draconian steps in order to keep its automobiles running would surely encourage its citizens to purchase fuel-efficient vehicles, yet here, in the country that has had every safety measure installed by engineers to serve as backup at points of failure removed in the name of an ersatz efficiency, has instead marketed to the public the exact opposite: gas-guzzling SUV's that look more like aggressive military vehicles than a mere means of civilian transport.

The result of which, thanks to all the greenhouse gases exhausted in to the atmosphere to first plant, then harvest, then transport countless tons of corn across a vast landscape to the coal-fired power plants needed for processing all those plants, more than a thousand of which sprung up like mushrooms in a dank basement during the Bush regime, all in the name of renewable fuel to make America "Energy Independent". A renewable fuel that requires non-renewable resources of oil and coal in order to manufacture it is of course, a misnomer, to put it mildly. And burning up American coal, coal that was "mined" by blowing the tops off mountains, far from making America Energy Independent, leaves it instead, with far less energy resources than it had before it started producing its bonanza of "renewable" fuel. The entire endeavor was not only large-scale, climate altering fraud, it was fraud that is now so entwined in the Red States' economies that without the federal subsidies they reap the economy of Iowa, to name but one of the anti-big Washington government poseurs of Midwest federal boondoggle's largesse, would collapse.

The next continent-spanning fraud was of course, the fracking of the entire continental plate to sell the resultant light-tight oil to Asian economies all while claiming it would make America Great again. It didn't. Instead, most of that tight oil that was going to make America Energy Independent had to find a home out in the global market, along with the LNG the industry was creating as a side-effect.

So while every American's carbon footprint was getting larger, the actual amount of energy they consumed was not. Because the economy's footprint, super-sized by waging two generation-long Wars while ripping up the plains and fracturing the earth to smithereens, grew to that of a staggering drunken giant as Corporate America burned up everything in sight, billowing clouds of CO2, flaring steady streams of natural gas, and leaking ever larger quantities of methane from leaking wells and active rigs.

And now, as the century's third decade starts to unfold, a third, another Green fraud, is being perpetuated onto a mostly catatonic public sitting in their driver's seats, their hands clinging to the wheel of their mobile prisons while plans are made to replace those fuel-thirsty vehicles with electric ones. An entire fleet replacement of a quarter of a billion automobiles, 250 million battery-powered EV's, will come at a steep, never-mentioned expansion of our already out-sized carbon footprint, as this latest plan, going hand-in-hand, as it must, (similar to the Bush plan: no coal-fired processing plants, no corn-into-fuel), likewise, no multi-trillion dollar expansion of the grid, no electric cars, no trillion dollar installation of charging stations across the nation, (proprietary stations, no less, so that like Starbucks, you'll have one every corner to accommodate the different plugs: no plug-compatible standard has even been proposed, never mind one being on the drawing table), no EV's. All in a country that can't get its citizens to wear a strip of cloth across their face to keep 500,000 of their fellow citizens from dying a lonely excruciating death. This is the country you think can switch to an expensive all-electric fleet, with their range limitations and time-consuming re-charging rates at electric rates that have already escalated to put them out of the reach of the country's growing ranks of impoverished citizens? Personally, I just don't see it.

I recently read a question asked from an article I read a coupl'a years ago:

We need to answer a question that we barely even know how to ask: what will we do with ourselves as a species if we choose not to go extinct?

It was clear then, and has only become clearer since, that that is the wrong question. We have already satisfied the "if", having chosen to drive oursleves extinct, so the question is now, "What will we do with ourselves"? 

As we face yet another in a string of long, hot, fiery summers, it's plain that mostly we will continue to lose years off our life expectancy, points off the GINI coefficient, no matter where you live or what your material circumstances are. In the dead of winter we used to look forward to a summer's day at the beach; now the prospect of summer fills us with dread. It is the season of the Witch, the super-sized Hurricane, the fiery inferno, the all-consuming deluge. Rolling power outages imposed on the hottest of days.

Just as the fracking economy was brought to its knees by a pandemic that laid bare the mountains of debt it had amassed, an avalanche of bad loans as hidden as the defaulting NPL's buried in MBS-stuffed CDO's that fueled the Bush fraudulent Wars of Terror, paying for the dropping of untold tonnage of Weapons of Mass Destruction simply because we accused our "enemy" of having, not threatening anyone with them, just suspected of having, Weapons of Mass Destruction. None of which, even if he'd had them, came close to the killing power and soil and water poisoning capacity of the Depleted Uranium we dropped with abandon on the civilians of Iraq so as to inspire Shock and Awe in them (ie to Terrorize them). The Green economy is still the greenback economy, built on the back of the green dollar, trillions of which must be generated, using the only energy source available: fossil fuels, to pay for this fleet conversion to all EV's. Billions of additional tons of CO2 will be added to an atmosphere that's already toasting us like marshmallows on a stick held over a blazing campfire. All sold to a gullible public as a way to reduce its carbon footprint, but will instead do exactly the opposite. So no, we have not chosen to not go extinct, so the question now is, what will we do with ourselves as we continue to lead lives that ensure that we do?

What is WRONG with us? This is what is wrong with us:

Almost a year ago, I ended this blog entry with the question in the title of this post: https://robertlowrey.blogspot.com/2020/05/never-come-morning-imnotok-yru.html

Until we answer that question, (which will only happen after we ask it, which we haven't as yet), we will continue to mow each other down for fun and profit, just as we do so all around the globe. Perhaps sending missiles screaming into sovereign states' territories to murder our target of the day and feeling perfectly fine about it creates a mindset in all of us that we have the right to do so (we don't).

 Closely related to these incidents, and occurring simultaneously with the attacks on Chinese and other Oriental minorities (not simply oh so PC, simply Asians; Jews are Asian, fer crissakes (look at a map, Israel is in the Mideast, a part of ASIA) AND NOBODY IS ATTACKING JEWS (I hit capslock by mistake but decided to leave it) at least at the moment. We are allowed, and should be allowed, to discuss Chinese intransigence, Chinese Communist propaganda and ridicule everything from chopsticks to Kung POW! Chicken. Only in the United States does casting aspersions on another nation, race (a rather difficult thing to do, as there is only one human race; so, there's that) or creed create the impression that it's alright to hunt them down and do them grievous harm. Or physically attack them in any way.  People in every nation are racist, people in every other country in the world name their country after the dominant, as in majority, population that inhabits it; France is not named Russia nor is China Japan, for one and one reason only, there are only Chinese/Japanese there. America is the least racist of countries, but it is the most murderous ... by far. 

So, what is wrong with us?

What is wrong with us?

What is wrong with us?

If we can answer those three simple questions, we won't have to worry about making fun of people, like people in every other country on the globe do quite regularly, without grabbing a firearm and hunting them down or beating their face to a pulp. Don Rickles made the most caustic remarks I've ever heard anyone hurl in someone else's face. Did he offend people? Damn straight he did. Did they therefore feel they had the right to beat his face to a pulp or shoot him in the back? Never. And  he was, as he told us over and over and over and over and over again, a Jew. And I do believe there were then, as there are now, anti-Jewish people. It is only now that we feel justified to address our personal sense of offense with violence. Such fragile egos, such self-pity-filled, self-indulgent infants. 

That's at least one thing that's wrong with us. 

2099 ... does anybody know what we are killing for?

Capped in America

 On and on ... does anybody know what we are killing for?

While grocery shopping, 

Another killing spree;

American murder

it's just one long melee.

Ritual hand-wringing 

The media's ratings grab

They're almost singing

As they count the body bags.

He came, he saw, they died;

American militarism

Springs from its countryside

On and on ...

US domination

it means imposition of will

Despoliation,

Indulges the urge to kill ...

Any foreign leader, 

by assassination or coup

The Sole Super Power

Never stops to rue

A single invasion

A single missile strike;

It's all for Freedom

Our most inalienable Right.

We bask in carnage

In War we take delight

With mindless barrage

We fight and fight and fight.

Then sell them weapons

They use to shoot our troops

More flag-draped coffins,

To leave on parents' stoops.

Unlike rampages,

we never stop to think

 ... Those kids in cages

We never make the link

Between guns and butter,

Profit and prophecy;

A Butterfly's wings flutter

And there's a storm at sea.

Yet "random" killings

We'll always refuse to see

Results from thrilling

To acts of depravity.

Like kids spoiled rotten

Their only thought is "Me",

To not be forgotten,

To live in infamy.

And we oblige them

We whet our appetite

Watch acts of violence

Night after gory night.

It's entertainment,

On TV it's  harmless fun

The riddled raiment

The smashed-in cranium.

Just you move on folks

There's nothing here to see

It's just more mayhem,

Another gunman's set us Free.

...  I just saw it on TV.

Poem de la Terre.

 

Spring Fever

  

                                                                       Spring Back

Sown seeds start germinating

The pandemic's been somewhat abating

Though the end's not yet quite in focus

From befouled snow pokes out a crocus.

Bringing hope that this year'll be kinder

Or at least offers us a reminder:

Just as it's still too cool to bask,

Keep chill and distant and wear your mask.

The places mankind left deserted

Nature's stepped in and reasserted

Her right to life, her floribundance;

While mankind let's out a restive cry

Where to be happy, can I now fly?

When every nickel is spent on getaway

Precious little's left to entice one to stay

in the land of your birth, the home of the free

where the greatest desire is to pack up and flee.

The last rain of the season has sprinkled the earth 

The results so immediate, it seems like magic

The land's in its annual throes of re-birth

While the humans bewail as though it were tragic.

Into everyone's life some rain must fall

Into everyday strife some pain must crawl

From such adversity we create great art,

Like compassion, it springs from a broken heart.

Hope springs eternal, I can read it in Palms,

Bubbles up from the earth, giving Nature her charms,

Yet a spring in your step won't give you wet feet,

 while a spring on your steps is a Slinky's retreat.

A spring chicken is one that struts its stuff

A mattress without them means you're sleeping rough;

Spring time ensues when you wind your watch,

Springtime for Hitler's Hieronymus Bosch.

From the box of our lockdown the spring has been sprung

A springer spaniel down the gauntlet has flung

We use this season to dawn our spring dress,

Spring into action to forget the duress

Shed the Covid winter of isolation,

Spring forward to daylight, green, buds, and elation.

Suck down gulps of fresh air from the sheltering sky

And pray we're all vaccinated by

The Fourth of July.

Firewaterworks.

All about EV: A Bunch of Greenhorns Blowing their own Green Horns.

 

Addison DeWitt: We all come into this world with our little egos equipped with individual horns . If we don't blow them, who else will?

The Green Party's zero-emission plan is ...

BROKEN

Refusing to face the facts that there is no such thing as either clean energy or green automobiles, the NYT today ponders how we, as in the US, can effectuate “fleet turnover”, something that sounds like a pastry at an evacuation center. Which perhaps isn't by accident, as the entire concept is half-baked, it's most remote possibility so last-century, it belies science, political reality, and economics. But because it is considered, also despite science, reality or economics, the Green thing to do, none of that enters into their calculations. Instead, the main concern of the post's appropriately-named author, Brad Plumer, is how soon it can be accomplished, as he worries that any ICE machines still on the road in 2035 may still be plying them in the year 2050, by which time we are going to be a zero-emissions economy (I'll pause for a moment to give you time to stop laughing).

The air pollution that is right now, in 2021, so egregious that it is described as a slow-moving pandemic, in that it kills oh, I don't know, 5 million people a year, is apparently not high enough to satisfy the morbid wishes of the Green meanies.

The bestselling vehicle in North America is the F-150 pickup truck. There are no pickup trucks in what is called the fleet, which pertains to cars.  

The manufacture of cars, a category that, although it doesn't include pickup trucks, does include EV's, is the largest contributor to CO2 production in the industrial world, it is the sine qua non of consumer-driven manufacturing, one whose supply chain is the longest, and therefore, most impacted by the pandemic, and for a variety of reasons:

Cars are computers on wheels, housing thousands of semiconductors in each vehicle, they control the windows, the power train, infotainment system, even the doorlock mechanism, and that doesn't even include the A/C, which ,as the temperature in 2035, never mind 2050, is already going to be so much  hotter in the summer, will vie with range as the largest drain on an EV's battery: windows up, the heat chokes you, windows down, you suffocate without A/C. Semi-conductors have an energy and hydro-intensive manufacturing cycle of their own, and it is not a green one, their silicone base alone requires extensive mining to produce the requisite sand, and mining is one of the most CO2-intensive activities in industry. Yet in order to even scratch the surface of an entire fleet replacement, before one molecule of CO2 from an ICE machine is kept out of the atmosphere, CO2 from the INcrease in mining for lithium, for the batteries; cobalt, from slave and child-labor Chad; and copper, to begin the multi-trillion dollar rebuild of the current electrickety infrastructure, alone would punish the atmosphere with billions of tons of additional CO2.

Yet that doesn't even take into account the plastic content of EV's, which have every bit of much of it as ICE machines do. Plastics require petrochemical plants, and petrochemical plants require ethane, a fossil fuel, for cheap feedstock to form all those man-made hydrocarbon chains from nature's hydrocarbon chains. Using sequestered carbon dug out of the ground to manufacture sequestered carbon that will end up polluting the ground and befouling the air. Green air to match the green algae-choked waters of the Gulf and numerous lakes.

And speaking of chains, the supply chain for the manufacturing of cars is the longest for any consumer good. That supply chain requires the manufacture and shipment of storage containers, all of which are metal which requires more carbon-intensive processes be undergone before the dirtiest one, that of transporting the goods to ports and then inland to factories, has even begun. There are right now so many of theses containers sitting off the coast of California that China can't ship any more of their finished products to the US. 

Now you may argue that those processes occur anyway, even with ICE machines; I would counter, however, that were that pipedream of an all-EV fleet to come true by 2035, which it won't, in the meantime, it will be a plus one: both will be manufactured together, and, as I've pointed out, the largest selling vehicle in the USSA isn't even a car, so it isn't even counted in the "fleet".

Like Ford, GM is trying to protect the production of its highly profitable full-size pickup trucks and SUV's. Remember, the EPA mpg rules were hand-written by industry to exclude trucks. Having won this concession in the eighties, the manufacturers started using truck chasses to build their SUV's, thus resulting in more CO2 being exhausted into the atmosphere, sanctioned by the very law meant to reduce it ... (sound familiar? It should, Because that's the exact same dynamic that is going on with EV's while the green crowd gives it their unthinking support).

Right now in 2021, while we are concocting plans to pour additional billions of tons/year of CO2 into the atmosphere, plans that would abrogate any reduction goal we have agreed to under the auspices of the Paris Accords, the Great 2021 Melt in the Arctic has already begun. As optimistically-termed "Perma" frost starts to melt, and the zombie fires in Siberia flame up, the fracking industry is beginning to shake off the Covid doldrums and the rig count is already rising, up to more than 400 from the 250 it had sunk to during the worst days of the crisis. Yet the CO2 content in the atmosphere, a year after the largest reduction in manmade GHG in ... well, Ever, has never been higher, the amount added to the running total, never larger in one year, as one carbon sink after the other gets turned into a carbon generator:

The fires in the rainforests in Indochina have already begun choking Malaysia

The above-mentioned Siberian fires have started igniting

Brazil's rainforests have never emitted more CO2, yet it has already started increasing 

 

All of these are, well, were, major carbon sinks, and they are now carbon generators, explaining why the biggest drop in manmade emissions evinced no reduction in the inexorable growth in CO2 accumulation.

No wonder Beijing is already smogged in.

And this is the time that a political group calling themselves "Green" have picked to institute a manufacturing renaissance; one for not only an entirely new line of vehicles, but the energy infrastructure necessary to power them: 

Texas is the one of the richest States in the United States, with more natural gas than most countries, natural gas, that, with the increase in the rig counts, means more CO2, because rather than use it, Texas opts to flare it, which basically translates into each and every rig being a CO2 production facility; it generates more electricity from wind facilities that any other state, and is the country's refining hub and center of petroleum production, yet Texas Transmission capability is so stymied, so rifled with graft and corruption that it is in the same sorry state as that of many "developing" economies (can an economy that can't weather a temperature drop of tens of degrees (The Russian economy weathers drops of more than 80 degrees every year) really be considered a "developed" economy?)

But wait ... there's More!

All that electrical grid upgrading is necessary for a reason: to charge batteries; batteries that don't exist, so that will require yet another plus one, yet another entirety new highly polluting manufacturing industry, together with its mining components, be created from the ground plane up to be added to the mix, all so that we can Decrease our carbon footprint ... somehow ... by 2050. By which time, given that we are adding, at the minimum, (as this year most surely must have been at, given the more than half of a million dead in the country whose industries  produce $600billion dollars shy of what its citizens consume each and every year), 3.1 ppm's of CO2, will be 20 X 3.1 = 62.0, added to the current ~ 418 = 480 ppm ... at minimum ... and we'll be (well, you'll be, I'll be long gone by then) only halfway through this century.

At the current 418ppm, the Arctic is already thawed enough in winter to allow a shipment of LNG to be transported from Russia to China to great fanfare ... in other words, the world thinks that it's a great reason for celebration, like the launching of the Titanic, and Russia is using the great thaw to implement its plans for resource extraction from the Arctic, a push that  will result in an ecological disaster that makes the Exxon Valdez spill look like a minor blip, the Deep  Horizon's disaster a frat brat party gone a little sideways. So what will it be like in 2050 when there will be 480 ppm?  ...and that's just CO2; as you know, the growth in methane being released into the atmosphere is growing at a much faster pace than that of CO2. You know, methane, whose heat-trapping capability far exceeds that of CO2? And it is being released from the ESAS (East Siberian Arctic Shelf) in exactly what's probably the worst place on the globe for it to be concentrating methane in: The Arctic.

                                                     

Note how the escalation of methane exactly coincides with the ramp up of the USA’s fracking production.

EV's are indeed a great technological marvel. But, guess what? So were nuclear reactors, the internal combustion engine, the Green Revolution, and the internet, but for every other species on planet earth besides man, they've also all been disasters. So is it really such a good idea to add yet another marvelous machine, along with its requisite infrastructure, to the list of ecological nightmares created by mankind? The biggest bane of the automobile is how it has become vital to run even the simplest errand (as a boy, I used to deliver newspapers, now they’re driven to my door, wrapped in a plastic bag in a State that is in “exceptional” drought ... all across the parched West, millions of plastic bags, every single day, designed to keep newspaper dry, are needlessly choking landfills) yet the EV will if anything, only make that situation worse. So must we really go on pretending that this one will cut down on fossil fuel use (a claim also made by pushers of the internet, btw, yet the internet-enabled mining of bitcoins alone adds the CO2 of an entire country the size of Chile/Argentina to the already onerous accumulation, likewise the so-called Green Revolution), and therefore CO2 generation, when it is already doing exactly the opposite?   

This Page Unintentionally Left Blank.

The precepts of "State Capitalism and Freidman" reminded me of the absurd statement, occasionally still read on corporate documents, that states, "This Page Intentionally Left Blank", which is one of my favorite examples of corporate-speak, as it does what corporations do best: lies to your face. But corporate-speak isn't satisfied to only tell lies, it compounds the falsehood by stating the exact opposite of what is true. The referenced page, always having been intentionally written on so as to inform you of what reality was before they changed it, by which time, the reality they so strongly present to you, has been altered, such that what they insist is true is now, precisely because of their mindless, faceless corporate actions, obviously not true.

In the interplay of the triple-E's of modern societies: Energy, Economics, and Environment, there is a veritable cornucopia of pages intentionally left blank, yet the only person who's actually made a film in an attempt to point that out, Jeff Gibbs, has been more or less vilified for pointing out in his documentary, Planet of the Humans, what I said a dozen years ago: As we pretend that "doing Something" about climate change is better than the status quo, none of the steps we have taken to do so have been investigated to see if they are having the decidedly opposite effect: instead of ameliorating the problem, they are compounding it. 

There is no better example of this than the US corn for ethanol program. Whereas most people consider farming or agriculture to have to do with the growing of food, the definition of neither of them mentions the word: 

"The art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of livestock; tillage; husbandry; farming."

Think cotton. And now, corn.

Which is subsidized by billions and billions of dollars funneled to the large agri-businesses (which are basically GSE's, much like all corporate conglomerates ... just take your pick: Big Pharma, Aerospace, Walled St, SillyCon Valley, the Auto Industry, Big Steal, all are products of Central Planning and Federal subsidization, so you can add any of the energy industries to that list, whether it be Big Coal, Big Oil, or NatGas and the related LNG industry, not to mention, but I will, Solar, Wind, Hydro, and Nuclear), yet we brag about the USA's supposedly "free-enterprise system", ignoring that the term has been so distorted that it means that the only thing any of these enterprises are free from is any risk for the corporations that run them, while what the ethanol production was mostly free from was markets, until the federal government stepped in and mandated them. Now that's what I call a free market, it's simply created out of thin air and then just handed over to you, since there's absolutely no demand for what you're producing. US State Capitalism, on as large a scale as any Communist country's State Capitalist organizations, not only sanctioned, but instigated by the so-called "Free-market" (in that they didn't have to pay a nickel to obtain it) the corn-to-ethanol program to create a product for which there was no demand, that destroyed vast swaths of prairies, releasing their large stores of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process ... CO2 that was conveniently not included in the ad campaign used to sell the concept to a naïve public. Ethanol from corn was advocated by the GW Bush administration, which then instituted it at a great cost to the American public and the environment, thus insuring the plunge into poverty of some of their staunchest supporters along the US Gulf coast, as the runoff from the intensive fertilization of the plains get carried down the Mississippi and engulfs the gulf with nitrogen-rich waters, giving growth to algae that rapidly depletes the waters of oxygen, killing off the shrimp that so many family-run businesses had for generation depended upon for their livelihoods. An economic Dead Zone to correlate with the dead zone that food-for-fuel has created in the waters of the Gulf. And, considering the color of algae, it can claim that all that death and destruction is Green! So, of course, as Martha Stewart would say, "It's good thing".

This is a misapplication of Energy in Economics that distorts the Environment so egregiously that an entire industry is wiped out, yet, because of the lack of any responsibility for the externalities of industry, the EROI of ethanol can still be, or rather, is still, despite the fallacy of not including the energy costs of externalities, cited as 1:1 ... a bad enough ratio as it stands.

What's EROI, you ask? Energy Returned on Investment. For oil, during its heyday in the US, peaking in 1965, it was 30:1, it has since declined by 2/3's to 10:1, and that was before fracking took over oil production in the US, since which time it has fallen further. Simultaneously with this decline in the EROI (which varies markedly from one country to the other, such that Canada's, which relies on the energy-intensive, and thereby environmentally disastrous, tar sands, it is closer to 4:1) of US oil, the energy intensity of its mobile fleet of personal ICE machines has close to doubled, such that the transport sector, in which employees drive themselves around in circles on a daily basis, has needed to consume more fuel (for those who forget, the slogan behind the food-for-fuel campaign claimed it would ensure US Energy Independence) to do the completely unnecessary work of hauling around twice the tonnage to carry its lone passenger than was required when EROI was 30:1: burning twice the fuel to do the exact same job of driving around in circles to meet employer expectations, which are completely unhinged from the damage they do, since that damage need never be entered onto corporate ledgers of profits and loss. But the loss is still there: it's just that instead of the corporations, we're the fools eating it. While countless others aren't eating at all ...  but what do we care about that? Our desire to haul around three tons of glass and metal with us everywhere we go surely outweighs their selfish demand for nutrition. Worse than Marie Antoinette, an entire country punks the hungry and simply laughs, while it quips, "Let them eat my dust." All so that automobiles' insatiable thirst for fuel, and politicians' voracious hunger for graft, can be quenched.

Death Comes for the March Bitch-up.

     

Just take a little off the ides.

The Covid death March.

As let-them-shiver-to-death Texas drop its mask mandate, and Florida hosts a grand re-opening for bikers, letting Hells' Angels run rampant and thereby earn their sobriquet, lawlessness being the adopted New strategy of a failed Grandpa's Old Party, they are spreading death among the unvaccinated. Thus does the refrain of late last year, that 2020 was the year from hell, and 2021's arrival was a sign of springtime for Hitler, there's a sobering, yet ignored, statistic that in the short two and a half months of 2021, the USA has lost more than  half as many of its citizens to Covid-19 than it did in all of the ten months it swept across the country in 2020. With more than 200,000 deaths in 2021 as of today, the falling rate they point at is indeed something to cheer about, the re-opening while a variant spreads all over the world however, is somewhat less Cheerio and more Post Toasties, as at this rate we will double 2020's number of deaths to more than a million in 2021 (100,000 per month x's 12 = 1,200,000.

It doesn't bode well.

Millions more are already climbing onto planes, and Mexico has already suffered the ignominy of having the USA accuse its citizens of "bringing it across the border", when in fact, Like Hell's Angels on planes, it is the stale upper crust of the well-bred who are actuating its continued spread, a fact that can be gleaned from where the new variant has spread, and the rapidity with which it has leaped the boundaries of the OECD nations, each of which prefers to open its borders to wayfarers, having structured their economies in such a manner that, without a constant flow of currencies from other countries not their own, they suffer economic collapse. Despite the supposed adoption of Adam Smith's  economic rostrums  in the eighties, each of the richest nations in the world generates sparse income in their own economies, preferring to vacuum the Wealth of Other Nations into their coffers than dirty their hands, befoul their air, and poison their water with the wastes from the modern technologies that make their lives comfy, by exporting their industrial polluting processes to "developing" (as though they were Fotomat kiosks) nations, than expose their own citizens to the environmental consequences of their lives of leisure, and then, as a final slap in the face, accusing those nations of achieving economic growth by burning dirty fossil fuels, while they bask in their Green and Clean glory.  

All of which is to say, in my usually long-winded way, that, as wonderful as the vaccines are, the overall picture is far from sanguine. On the contrary, to watch as the world pretends that dropping a mandate in Texas has no effect on their own citizens, it is like watching yet another sequel in the Back to the Future franchise. As the virus was wending its way through the US  population, its failed president was assuring its citizens that "it would be like a miracle", assuring them the virus would disappear over the horizon. Now that the oxymoronic "Miracle of Science" has been achieved, and countries are vaccinating their citizens, they turn their back on the very science that promises to deliver them out the other side of this nightmare by dropping mask mandates and social-distancing recommendations, opening bars, massage parlors, gyms, big-crowd events, and, most ominously, their borders. Thus does the worst-performing, such as Brazil, quickly infect even the countries most rigidly adhering to anti-contagion protocols, with a vicious new variant.

Our European allies, those nations that a year ago were the source of infection for the eastern seaboard of the US, have one by one, closed their borders as the speed of contagion from one variant or another overwhelms the rollout of their vaccine programs.  Yet the US ignores the "lessons learned" (lol) in 2020 and pretends that Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium, have their problems, but exactly as one year ago, we continue to insist that we are the Exceptional Nation, and can go on willy-nilly opening ourselves up to disaster, simply because this just isn't fun any more.

I saw a visual the other day, well, weeks ago now, as it turns out, but it has stuck with me, so I wonder what you think about it:

Although they were wearing masks when I witnessed this, they soon enough won't be, and so it made me ponder. Even though the fomite transmission of the Covid virus has now proven to have been somewhat exaggerated, it would probably behoove us not to go back to shaking hands anytime soon. However, I saw two people greeting each other using the "elbow-bump". By pure happenstance, a handshake, the average length of an adult's arm being close to a meter, keeps the parties the recommended two meters apart, while the elbow bump assures that that distance is more than halved, which thus brings their faces, and the focal point of transmission, closer together, not farther apart, arguably making the elbow bump far more likely to transmit the virus that a handshake. So although we didn't know last year that the virus was aerosolized (although there was evidence printed as early as late January 2020 in both China's SCMP and the India Times, suggesting exactly that, but, well, you know, we being exceptional and all, we ignored every single lesson learned in Asia) we spent both countless hours and millions of dollars "deep-cleaning" everything under the sun, despite the inefficacy of it. The two people who I mentioned above were in awkward positions vis-à-vis each other, so in order to bump elbows, they had to bring their faces ridiculously close in order to greet each other "safely". To assure that what we know now does the good that it should, the elbow bump, instigated because of the panic over fomite contagion, should be abandoned. 

Likewise with mask mandates. If a State, such as Texas, abandons the mask, then in that State, and all others that drop the mask mandate, wouldn't it be wiser to inoculate everyone with at least the first shot before anyone in that State receives the second? Adhering to the science is all well and good, but since that's not being done in the one instance, by dropping the mask mandate, thus purposely giving the  virus a shot in the arm, shouldn't twice the number of citizens in those arrogant States of America be given one as well? Our Aryan failed former president was the ultimate germ-man, he presided over the largest loss of his own county's citizens' lives in one year since Hitler's holocaust cost that German leader a similar annual death toll. And at the rate we are going, averaging more than 100,000 deaths/month in this "New" year, worse than the old year, maybe it's time we stopped champing at the bit to "get back to normal" and instead started addressing just exactly what that "normal" has delivered up to us.

Spic and Spandemic of Clean Energy Meme a Mask of Red Death.

 

“You can vaccinate your whole population and control the problem only for a short period if, in another place in the world, a new variant appears,” she said. “It will get here one day.”

Similarly, you can jerry-rig your own economy so it appears that it is "Green", and control the problem for a short period in your own country, but since you've done so by moving that pollution to another place in the world, it's impact is not only not lessened, it is exacerbated by the carbon costs of off-shoring. Like the virus, CO2 knows no national boundaries, but  unlike the virus, there is no possibility that "It will just go away ... it'll be like a miracle".

In a Corporate puff piece for EV's, the NYT recently published an article by Hiroko Tabuchi and Brad Plumer in which they ask, 

"How Green Are Electric Vehicles?"

A question that sounds like it's out of one of Dr. Seuss' children's books. But this one won't be banned, as they answer their own question, stating, despite its obvious falsehood:

"In short: Very green."

As commented on ad nauseum, but quite accurately, by Caitlin Johnstone, self-styled "Rogue Journalist", in articles highlighted on Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site, when NYT's and other MSM outlets publish such garbage they're responsible for lending credence to the former failed president's accusations of "Fake News".

There is no green electric vehicle anywhere in the world, or for that matter, in the entire universe. So a VERY green vehicle is just a slap in the face, an offhanded backhand to your intelligence and a paid-for advertisement for the EV industry. Half of the weight in modern vehicles comes from composite materials such as plastic. A hybrid SUV weighs more than the block-long Cadillac's of the 70's, and that weight is from more than a ton and a half of plastic, a burden of weight no EV will be asked to carry less of ... so now we're being asked to believe that plastic is not just green, but, that it's, "Very green"?

This dynamic duo of yellow-green journalism is the Chartreuse Goose and the Gilets val Jaunes.

Chartreuse Chanteuse.

They then proceed to build a case for their outright lie: 

"General Motors has said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and will pivot to battery-powered models. This week, Volvo said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030." 

Really? That's it? "GM has said"? Oh! ... Well then ... 

I know these kids are young, but are they so young they never heard about the financial debacle of 2008, where, right in the middle sat GM and their lending arm, GMAC, with lies they filled their investor statements with? There is an entire new financial company called ALLY Finance, started in the wake of the financial crisis because GMAC was so riddled with corruption and peppered with fake loans that would never be paid that GM needed an entirely different entity to finance the purchase of their vehicles by customers that can't afford them. And THIS is the corporation your basing your prognostications on? And worse, that you expect us to believe is a reliable source of data, taking it for granted that all your readers are as clueless as you are?

But let's forget about that for a moment, and look at what it is they're saying, namely, that,

 "General Motors has said it aims to stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 ... 

Notice the verbal legerdemain in that statement? 

It is careful not to state that "General Motors will stop manufacturing new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035", for the simple reason that it won't. 

Just as GMAC was the only part of General Motors that was making a profit by 2008, the wholly-owned subsidiary that GM will start in order to sell the fleet of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks it will still be manufacturing in 2035, will be the source of its profits, as it sells EV's at cost, the price tag otherwise being too onerous for the pocketbooks of the vast majority of working Americans. The higher price tags of EV's having been completely left out of the Tabuchi/Plumer puff-piece.

As if Corporations do what they say they'll do a full decade hence. They'll just move ICE machine production to another company, continent, offshore haven ... and there's nothing to stop them, au contraire, everything is in place already to enable them to do exactly that. Perfectly legally.

As for Volvo, who they state,

 " ... said it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030." 

Once again, it's "They said"; did they now? Alrighty then, what is it they said? That 

 " ... it would move even faster and introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030." 

There are currently three types of automobiles on the market, ICE machines, powered by internal combustion engines, EV, electric vehicles running on batteries that need to be charged up, and hybrids; so an all-electric line-up simply means they will have a line-up of all-electric vehicles by 2030. That doesn't even imply that they won't have a similar line-up of all-Internal combustion engine, or an all-hybrid line-up of vehicles to sell right along side of them.

However, I have seen it phrased less ambiguously elsewhere, that Volvo says it will sell only electric vehicles by 2030.

Okay. But can it really be a coincidence that both manufacturers are careful not to say they will only manufacture EV's? That both of them say they will only sell EV's? There's nothing that actually  commits them to it, so the same argument goes for any Corporation that applies to GM, they simply "spinoff" a division that manufactures ICE machines, or buys a brand in China that will be able to pollute to their hearts' content. Every one of the OECD nations has been off-shoring their polluting industries for decades, and now claim that, using the same twisted logic of our authors here, that a nation can be green and still have economic growth, even though all the pollution they were responsible for before is still occurring, in order to satisfy OECD demand, not that of the country to which the plants have been moved, and so the global production of CO2 is in fact aggravated by the lax, if any, laws controlling such pollution in the country they moved their worst polluters to, and added to that is the onerous cost, environmentally as well as economically, of shipping those self-same products thousands and thousand of miles in shipping containers loaded onto cargo ships burning the dirtiest fuel on the planet. Like The Knights who Say "Ni", Corporations merely need to demand you "Bring me some Greenery" (and make it pretty ... and not too expensive) and any sleight of hand is accepted, even though the net result is the creation of an even more ponderous load of CO2 being vented into the atmosphere. 

So yes, Volvo has said it would introduce an all-electric lineup by 2030, and they may even do so, but in order to make it true, they will make the carbon footprint of their manufacturing industry that much larger, but because they place ads in newspapers of record whose "journalists" will cover for them, lest it jeopardize the only source of their profits, paid advertising by corporations, that matters not a jot. They have their green vehicles and their green credentials, so science can just take a holiday ... except of course, it actually can't. 

"Are they really as green as advertised?", they dare ask (the key word being "Advertised" ... one manufacturer would have you believe that ICE machines are made with "Love", so there's that). Of course they aren't as advertised. Advertisements are paid-for corporate propaganda, so what in the world makes one think anything would be "as advertised"? An entire industry devoted to making specious claims carefully worded to avoid saying anything as obviously false as the failed former President's rally cries, why would anything be taken for more than a grain of salt from such a source?)

 "Electric vehicles are more emissions-intensive to make because of their batteries."

 "An all-electric Chevrolet Bolt, for instance, can be expected to produce 189 grams of carbon dioxide for every mile driven over its lifetime, on average. By contrast, a new gasoline-fueled Toyota Camry is estimated to produce 385 grams of carbon dioxide per mile. A new Ford F-150 pickup truck, which is even less fuel-efficient, produces 636 grams of carbon dioxide per mile."

Okay ... but unless the savings in emissions adds up to the extra carbon-cost incurred during manufacturing, a cost that doesn't include the enormous carbon footprint made by the increase in mining necessary to provide the host of REE's, lithium, and cobalt, as well as to supply the grid with the exponential increase in demand for copper such a rapid boost in demand for electricity would necessitate, the overall emissions won't decrease.  The authors also don't bother to publish the CO2 produced by an EV the size of an SUV. Anyone penning an article about emissions and EV's knows that the fastest-growing segment of the American automotive market is SUV's, so a Chevy Bolt's emissions are hardly relevant when the lion's share of vehicles bought will weigh in at twice the Bolt's weight. It's like comparing apples to watermelons.

In a world where the CO2 content has jumped 2ppm in just a week, despite the economies of every  nation in that same world, (with the lone exception of China) experiencing such slow growth rates that the richest State in the richest country on earth has dropped the mandate for its citizens to wear masks, insuring that thousands more will die, solely in order to restart the largest generator of methane and CO2 production in the world, the emissions generated by the transition to a nation of electrified personal conveyances fantasized by the greenies is actually more dangerous than the continued excavation of fossil fuels. The counter to which argument is, "Yes, but in the long run .... "

But that is exactly my contention ... The amount of CO2-forcing the zero-emission economy will create -has already created - despite being but a nascent phenomenon, in order to eventuate its realization will ensure that there will be no long run. How else to explain the authors insistence, along with China's, that natural gas is "Clean"? The amount of natural gas flared by just the two states of North Dakota and Texas amounts to enough natural gas as would satisfy the entire electricity demand for their respective states. This outsized amount of combustion, with its attendant CO2 pollution powers not a single EV. You cannot say natural gas is "clean" simply because the pollutants coming out of the generating plant's chimney contain less CO2 than coal. 

There are two more problems associated with our authors' vision of a "very" green exogenously-fueled vehicle, one they dismiss, the other, like the carbon footprint of the mining industry expansion needed to build the transmission infrastructure to sustain the burdensome load of juicing up all those EV's, they simply ignore.

The first is batteries. They admit that the estimated recycling rates for lithium-ion batteries is only about 5 percent ... "but with time and innovation, that’s going to increase.” But "increase" doesn't quite cut it, does it? If it were to double, which in any process is quite a jump (but that's not what they claim ... recycling isn't going to "jump"; at best, it will only increase), but even if it were to double, the recycling rate would still be only 10%. But that's not a problem, per our intrepid reporters, as there is a promising approach wherein used batteries are re-used as backup for grid storage. There are a raft  of problems with this, that include logistics and fire hazards being conglomerated at the heart of our energy system, but let's just look at the suggested scenario and ask ourselves, "What's wrong with this picture?"

The reason we have the need for a large increase in the capacity for backup in the electric grid storage is the inclusion in the power mix of solar and wind, with solar's contribution dropping to zero after nightfall. At that time, when all the EV's are being plugged into the system to recharge their batteries, the phalanx of old, used EV batteries will then be called upon to send their stored loads across miles of transmission lines, generating waste heat and losing at the least 10% of their already depleted load along the way, to charge up their newer counterparts encased in their owners' EV's. But why would you do that? (And by "you", I don't mean you, but an industry, a country, a society). Why would you not simply take the battery out of your EV, replace it with a new one, then plug in the old battery during the day to allow it to charge up, then use the old battery to charge your new battery when you return in the evening? The energy savings would be enormous, for both the system and the individual, since, having the battery locally recharged during off-peak demand hours would help make the overall system more resilient, and for the same reason, the off-peak rates being that mush lower, save the consumer money (ie energy. Remember, all money, as far as I've bee able to ascertain, is generated via the application of energy resources, so the more money you save, the less energy you're using. An equation completely missing from any of the so-called Green solutions for the simple reason that it isn't in Corporate interest to have a polity aware of such an obvious truism. The Green solution is the Corporate solution because it keeps the status quo of cocooning the populace in a comfortable electric blanket).

And that brings me to the second problem they chose to ignore. Those batteries, according to the article, have to be recycled while they can still recharge to 80% of their capacity because, unsurprisingly, the EV's range is thereby reduced by 20%, and I guess more than that is unacceptable.

But how long before that happens, and how expensive is it to replace? Well, because of thieves already cashing in on the fact that stealing the battery pack basically is stealing the heart of the car, it's become apparent that owners will be called on to replace that heart well before they have paid off the loan it was necessary to take out to procure the vehicle.

And that's the second problem the article ignores: demand.

Or more specifically, the lack thereof. 

Although there is a sizeable segment of the population that wants to want EV's, they can't justify the extra expense and inconvenience they would have to incur to actually own one. The protest movement in France of the Gilets Jaunes mentioned above was spurred by an increase in the tax on diesel fuel. A tax that required nothing close to the increase in outlay that owning an EV vis-à-vis an ICE machine requires. And that's in France, where a nuclear-powered grid would require no extra CO2 be generated to increase the electric supply to recharge the nation's EV fleet. So, here in the US, where SUV's rule the road, how on earth are you going to prod a population convinced it is their god-given right to drive, such that they spend $50 to fuel up an out-sized vehicle occupied by exactly one person (but fitted out to carry nine), to drive to a foodbank and wait for hours, burning up that fuel, to collect $45-worth of "free" food?

In other words, far from having a pent-up demand for these vehicles, there is a lot of resistance (well, they are electric, after all) for a host of reasons but that are very real.

Perhaps you consider, when perusing my posts on the green economy, wherein I state my objections, that I am against the implementation of clean tech. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. In the years I was employed by the telecom/computer industry, I spent many ours aboard planes, and, living in California, got to look down at the vast sun-drenched landscape, and wonder, why isn't the West powered by solar? Or, while driving by the windfarm in Altamont Pass, wondering, "Why aren't there more windfarms?" In terms of pollution, eyesore, environmental destruction, how is there any comparison? Well, then I researched how many households that scenic 576 megawatts (MW)  power generator served, and discovered it was less than 50,000, in a State with 40 million people in it. I was sorely disappointed.  

More digging revealed that when demands are made on wind to displace fossil fuel plant production, the question that must be asked is: what is providing wind shadowing/backup? (as wind, which our authors have demonstrated by their own voluble blowing of it up our ass, is unreliable). So system reliability and power quality considerations come to the fore, such that the shadowing/backup is what is displacing the fossil fuel production, and wind is displacing some small measure of the shadowing/backup. But a wind project that relies on fossil generators to shadow the wind machines may provide little net fuel or CO2 displacement and in some cases may actually increase fuel use and emissions. The same, of course, applies to solar.

So what we have ended up with is two camps, each relying on a chimera. The one denies that climate change has happened, and is now ongoing and, from all indications, some of which they actually have to float on or bake under, is not only ongoing, but intensifying. The other camp is the one expressed by our authors in this article. That there is a green solution, a clean energy, zero emission future that we can drive to in our ICE machines, build toward with solar plants, attain by moving the carbon-generation out of our sight, into our past.

Neither is possible because both insist on the same paradigm: unending growth, untrammeled access to energy, and uninhibited mobilization via the mass marketing of a vast fleet of automobiles, relying on the government to provide the upkeep and construction of a boundless, all-encompassing highway system, literally using highway robbery to force non-drivers to pay for its support. A highway system that means one Lone Star State can decide its citizens no longer should be required to give up their freedom by virtue of a mask mandate, enabling them to thereby deliberately spread a deadly microbe to every other state in the union, a virus they idiotically insist to be a Hoax, while more than half a million people are no longer laughing, will never laugh again, because they are corpses. And onto this pile of deceased humanity, more bodies are destined to accrue, as it takes but one state to decide they no longer give a flying fuck, to destroy the efforts of all the others. With intransigence such as this, inspired by the requirement to wear a simple strip of cloth in front of your nose and mouth, is it really conceivable that such people will pay even a nickel more to switch from their gas-guzzling SUV's to the constraints to their Freedom, required by the use of EV's? That simply doesn't seem at all likely to me.

 I have been searching for decades, ever since the oil shocks in the 70's, to see what science and industry has to offer on the aspect of decreasing energy demand, and a cleaner way to satisfy it, and every single one of them has ended up being just another boondoggle, a pseudo-solution such as ethanol from food, that not only costs billions of dollars, but creates so much CO2 in its realization that it never has time to make up for the extra burden it's created via the reduced emissions it promised. Yet precisely because of that, once it's in place, it continues to get subsidized with yet more billions of dollars (ie, remembering that dollars are amassed only by the combustion of energy resources, by generating even more CO2 pollution). Not the least of reasons is that the science of its ability to reduce emissions was flawed right from the start (I would argue purposely so ... there were, after all, as in the case of not only EV's, but also solar, hydro, nuclear, and wind, billions in federal funds to be garnered; there have been no, in this Vampire Capitalistic society, efforts, not one, by even a single Corporation, to provide any substitute energy source for fossil fuels that hasn't used public monies to fund research to boost their private gain. That should tell you something right there), but most of all we've lost precious time. Time such articles as this make clear we think we still have plenty of. But that lost time can't be gotten back. 

Mais il n'y a aucun moyen de rattraper le Temps Perdu: we've built our own rat trap, eh?

 Last year I remember watching the CO2 emissions to see if we'd get to 420ppm by 4/20/2020. A year later, after the worst rate of economic growth in  each and every one of the most polluting countries in the history of the world, reflected by the largest drop in  recorded man-made emissions ... ever ... there is every sign that we will reach 420ppm by March 20'th. Who knows how much we'll be at by April 20? But at this rate, it'd be 430ppm, which is quite alarming, as China has already recorded a temperature anomaly of +40(!) in Beijing one day last month. Meanwhile the rapid accumulation of the even more powerful GHG of methane goes all-but ignored. Even as Texas is champing at the bit to restore its facilities for CO2 and water vapor production, euphemized as "flaring", to their pre-pandemic levels.

If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, you must have just come from a Masque of Red Death CPAC rally. Poe thang.