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| Increase Transmissions = Increased Emissions. |
As the slime of the green wash being liberally poured over the body politic leaves us as green in the gills as one-dollar bills, a garish tint is accentuating the ghoulish hue already tainting our lives in the time of Corona. It is the color of money, other people's money, OPM for our new dance, the Oxicontinental, a sad Sackler tune of betrayal and profiting from pain, apt for our moderna times, when those who are wiser would rather try Pfizer. Now the energy paradigm has plans to spread that pain, multiplied, all through the body politic as it plays the music while we dance the Oxicontinental. This time in a more concentrated form, so there is no escaping the pain.
A like tune is being played by the green zero emission renewable energy sirens (they seemed to have dropped the zero NET emissions as too cumbersome; who'll notice anyways? ... it all being nonsense and all). And just like oxycontin, the pain will come only after it's too late, after the patient is addicted and other treatment options have been discarded. But in a sense that's almost beside the point. This month's federal deficit hit a milestone, only the second time it has been so high, at $660 billion and change, but that's not the milestone. I'm unaware of any other time in our economic past that the government and the trade deficits have been so nearly equal in value, as the trade deficit last month also came in at $660 billion or so, leaving the American people in hock for close to $1.5 trillion dollars in a single month. Perhaps you're not alarmed by this, but there are rather large flies in the ointment, one of which is the collapse of the fracking output, which is to say, of the US energy picture. With the US no longer able to act as the swing oil producer, and therefore control the price of oil, OPEC is once again in the driver's seat, and the price of oil, which now has to be imported in larger amounts, (not for industrial production, so not a fulcrum on which to leverage productivity, but as a consumable item), pure expense. The ramifications are already being seen at the pump, but the rise in electricity prices we have already seen in California, and that Germany and the more well-heeled Euro countries have experienced, a rise their citizens are better able to countenance than their poorer US counterparts, is like yeast rising in a solar oven. It'll bubble up throughout the economy and make everything that is electric, which is everything now ... even getting passed your front door ... more costly.
Moving electrons around to do our bidding, without the luxury of poisoning ourselves and everything around us in the process, is, as we are already finding out, not cheap. As the USA starts to ramp up to build the gleaming eco-nomy of the future, the demand for oil may be zero by 2035 (yeah right), but in the meantime there's 2025 to think about, and electric rates will be astronomical by then. So whether or not the renewable future is one that is pie-in-the-sky or not, it will take a rapid increase in the burning of the remaining fossil fuels to get there, and those fuels, sans fracking, are not available in nearly the quantity the USA will need them domestically. In order to get them, it must increase its imports, putting pressure on the world oil supply so the cost of living for those in developing nations, is going to increase. But as Texas has so aptly demonstrated, the USA is now close to being one of those developing nations itself, having used the profits of labor to voluntarily export its industrial base to an unfriendly communist regime. A regime that just happens to control the supply of rare earth elements we need to implement our grand plan of exponentially increasing our dependence on electrical generation, storage, and transmission, and storage again, to fuel the economy (the only way forward for the US, as Texas and California, our two largest, most populous, and most energy-intensive States have obligingly demonstrated, without storage at the termini, customers are left at the mercy of energy companies' cuts in power, affected by rolling blackouts at the roll of the dice, so you must have installed storage capacity onsite. Using your cell phone battery to provide light simply won't cut it; you'll just lose power AND communication).
This translates into an escalation of the cost of living, usually referred to as inflation, in the USA, sparked by the deliberate implementation of an infrastructure that will leave us a future of Expensive Electricity (Just ask the Germans). Which on one hand, is a good thing. The fastest route to energy conservation is price escalation. A fact one would think would be obvious in a capitalistic consumer-driven economy. Which it is, of course ... obvious, that is. Instead they are suing the fossil fuels companies yet again, despite the inevitable failure of such frivolous lawsuits (how can a company that produces a product that everybody wants, which they themselves don't incinerate (why would they, when you'll pay them dearly for the privilege of doing it yourself?) be held liable, when gun manufacturers have made it more than clear that the manufacturer holds no liability for the use of a product whose manufacture has one use and one use only: to murder other human beings?):
"Various suits attempt to rein in carbon emissions and hold oil companies financially liable for the damage their products have wrought as the climate crisis worsens."
As they remind us that,
"Biden has promised to hold polluters accountable for the damage they knowingly caused" (But not the people who actually incinerated the fuel? That is insane).
So let's get this straight; the only companies in the world that can provide the vast energy resources needed to build the all-electric infrastructure envisioned and to provide fuel to build the fleet of 250,000,000 EV's needed to replace the current fleet of ICE machines, is being sued to stop them from enabling us to burn those fuels in order to accomplish our goal of zero net emissions? How are we then to build the EV fleet now mandated? Then, once that fleet is built (Lol ... it never will be), "to hold oil companies financially liable for the damage their products have wrought", to pave the roads over which those electrified vehicles must drive, roads constructed of asphalt, a product of fossil fuel companies as well. And how to manufacture the oil-based tires on which they roll? Or mine the copper for the transmission lines across which the juice must jump? What rot.
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| Before a single barrel is cracked, the earth's crust must first be fracked. Note that the trajectory of growth of the rig count at the beginning of the Biden presidency strongly parallels that of the previous failed administration's trajectory. One president pulled us out of the Paris Climate Accords, the other signed us back up again. So much for the relevancy of the Paris Climate Accords. When we then recall that the reason the former failed president started out with a rig count so much higher than what Biden is starting out with was that the Obama administration used the expansion of hydraulic fracturing to power the economic recovery from the Bush/Cheney-engineered financial imbroglio, it must be remembered that our current President was a part of that administration. So one is left to wonder, does Biden plan to hold Biden and the Obama administration "accountable for the damage they knowingly caused"? Somehow, I suspect not. Additionally, how does one reconcile holding a private company responsible "for the damage they knowingly caused", when those private companies are the largest recipients of the government's corporate subsidies? Subsidies larded out for the express purpose of offering incentives for oil companies to produce a product that said government knows, "Worsens the climate crisis?" (At a time when we were signatories of the afore-mentioned Accords). The path forward from where we find ourselves at present is as obscure to me as it is to everyone else. What I do know, is that when the world as a whole acknowledges, as it did by signing the Kyoto Protocols in the nineties, that the burning of fossil fuels is at the heart of the increasing rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, and then initiates one scheme after the other the result of which is to increase the amount of energy every single household must use simply to, let's say, make a phone call, or drive to work, the probability that more than a generation later any new schemes, which must then provide, somehow, that juice at the now much higher per household amounts, while eliminating the emissions of the fuel necessary to power it, methinks a bit of skepticism is called for. That phone you clutch in your hands and refer to obsessively is only a phone because we have opted to call it that. It is actually a mini-computer with telephony components. But more accurately, it's a camera, a calculator, a game console, funds transfer interface, etc. In other words, hundreds of millions of people have been forced (Yes forced. I watched Brokeback Mountain on Netflix the other night, and Ennis calls from Wyoming to Texas on a humble public payphone. A device made available to the general public such that for one thin dime, anyone, no matter their state of indigence, could access the best telephone network in the world ... this network was targeted for destruction by our War Department, to be replaced with the spy network everyone must now sign-in to to do the most trivial of tasks, but which is completely unavailable to anyone without the means to purchase, at the cost of hundreds of dollars, the terminal necessary, and then pay the fees demanded by the ISP's, to access this once public now privately monopolized network ... whew!) to invest in the Universal Remote Control devise you have in your pocket. That is the more accurate description of the gadget everyone carries around with them. The network of old that I partially described above required no electricity be provided by the end user in order to maintain your connection with it. Only when you lifted the receiver and got a dial-tone from your Central Office was any energy used. Now, of course, your "phone" burns energy just to exist, and then must burn energy to transmit. But that's just the start. When I watched Netflix the other night, I initiated the transmission of a stream of bits from a Netflix server. In other words, just as your TV remote actuates your set, your phone now actuates servers and a multitude of other devices in multiple locations around the globe, to send a stream of electrons down a PVC to your device of choice. That means billions of people have a Universal Remote Control doing their bidding, actuating devices, all of which must be powered up and biased to receive commands from your Universal Remote Control. (Siri-ously: think of coal-fired power plants in Mongolia providing juice for a Supercomputer in Beijing that's been actuated by a user's App to "mine" some 2-Bitcoins to be deposited in their off-shore account in Nassau, and the electricity demanded by the host of servers, routers, ATM switches, and other ancillary devices whose services are enabled by the simple push of your "send" button). Ergo, what you may still call your phone bill is an addendum to your electric bill. As is the bill you pay for your wireless device for your home entertainment center. By fracturing consumers' electric bill in to disparate elements the escalating per capita costs of energy, and specifically electricity, have been made palatable, and easier to disguise. But that doesn't change, it only obscures, the fact that we have been paying an ever growing price for electricity, and bound ourselves to its burgeoning use and associated environmental costs, all the while knowing "the damage (these) products have wrought as the climate crisis worsens." Should not Apple be included in the suit against the Oil majors, then? |
As it becomes increasingly obvious that a return to normal, a normal that included cheap air travel for the masses in a rapidly heating world where the main culprit is cheap air travel for the masses, is not going to happen ... ever. Voltaire's elegiac philosophy behind Professor Pangloss's dictum of "tending ones own garden" as a means to a happier, or at least more content, existence, would do far more to achieving a kind of equilibrium with nature than any major government-subsidized manufacturing extravaganza that ladles out subsidies to privately-owned "enterprises", and therefore whose profits are privately allocated only to shareholders via dividend distributions, while the rest of us bear the burden of costs and risks associated with such a gargantuan undertaking. So naturally, given the bills an overarching world-wide Military force consisting of a trillion dollars worth of nuclear arms that must never be used, but must be expensively maintained and "refreshed" must incur, we are trapped in a worldwide web of the Pentagon's design and "private" Industry's construction. Meaning that nothing that can't be taxed by the central government, will ever be actively encouraged. And expansion of the central government is one of the effects of implementing the green new deal; but expanding the outlay of the federal and state governments while contracting the profits, via frivolous lawsuits intent on confiscating their wealth, on which they exercise taxing authority, is a strategy with its own failure baked in.
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