We've All Joined the 450 Club: Now on to 600 PPM by 2100.

 

OhMy! The game is rigged, Derrick.

While mankind continues to grapple with COvid in its usual feckless way, the parallels with its similarly clueless handling of the conundrum of how to increase energy usage ad infinitum without cooking ourselves and the other poor creatures condemned to occupy the planet with marauding mankind, becomes more stark with each passing decade. GRETA (Globalization Reduces Everything To Ashes) notwithstanding, our pitiful, mostly showboating efforts, have had dire consequences, largely because we have decided that the very entities that have brought us to the brink of destruction are those  who will provide us the solutions: the supra-governing bodies referred to as Multi-National Corporations, who insist the business-as-usual approach will solve the non-existent problem. For it is incumbent upon us to remember that the "Climate Change is a Hoax" hoax may have been championed by the former failed president, but the monies flowing into his campaign chest to maintain that big Lie, a much bigger lie than the one that is now being called the big lie, and yet was never railed against with nearly the ferocity as the current Lie is inspiring, came from Multi-National Corporations. And the 600 ppm world we are on a trajectory toward is not one they care to give up one penny of profit to avoid.

Au contraire. 

As a study by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California, found:

"between 2000 and 2004, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions increased by 3.1 percent a year, about three times as fast as the 1.1 percent rate of increase in the 1990s."

The 1990s was the decade during which the Kyoto Protocols were first suggested, designed, and enacted to great fanfare. The following decade, as you can see from the study, showing their startling achievement, as they instituted the largest most energy-intensive redesign of the business, political, educational, defense and consumer environments in world history, in little more than a decade's time, all while calling it eco-friendly. The internet was the answer to how we would staunch our crazy gung-ho burning through of the earths reserves of fossil fuels. Younger people don't know this, because our famously free MNC-run-and-owned press deems it not newsworthy.

Besides, the MNC's had only just begun their decades-long strategy of inflaming Climate Change concerns in order to goose Corporate profits, thus making the actual problem exponentially worse. 

Having successfully used government coffers to enable the fracking miracle in the Bakken, they turned to the Centrally Planned and enforced bio-fuel production in country after country, reaping enormous tax breaks and taxpayer subsidies to enable the "green" solution that turned the sky black with acrid smoke that was the cause of that tripling of the CO2 emissions and accumulation in the atmosphere:

Corn, sugar, palm oil, each wreaking enormous environmental destruction and poisoning, pouring CO2 into the troposphere by plowing up the prairie, burning down rainforests in both Brazil and Indonesia in order to make "renewable" fuels. But given the size of the fossil fuel input to realize this renewable idyll, gasoline is just as renewable: you crack a barrel of oil and make gasoline or you crack it to make the petrochemicals, tractor fuel, coal-mining equipment (no coal, no fuel from food in the corn belt), fertilizers and pesticides; in either situation, no fossil fuel, no renewables. So how renewable is that?

But why stop there? The public's susceptibility to schemes whose efficacy they could be rah-rah-rah'd into blindly accepting, since they looked so quiet, so serene, so harmless, as solar panels and windmills do, was so irresistibly naïve, how could they help themselves but gouge "people's" ("Corpornations are people too, my friend") governments for ever larger tax-payer-funded enterprises, the profits from which  they could then divvie up among themselves, yet then, as we saw in Texas, not only not provide the promised benefits, but instead use that incapacity to do what was contracted for to then gouge their customers who, through their taxes, paid for the installation of the wind power those same MNC's blamed for their inability to ensure electricity delivery during cold weather. In other words, through their own admission, they didn't think the desired result was feasible, but took the money and built it anyway, knowing it wouldn't work ... to judge by their own response to the understandable question, "What the Hell is going on here?"  Which was basically, that we used all the monies on wind, so couldn't afford the necessary gas backup to meet even the limited specs of Texas' "oversight" boards, all of whose members are industry hand-picked, the palm oil greasing their palms an acceptably green hue. 

All the while, as their  (krug) man at the NYT's was carrying their water for them, by lying to his readers that "We can have growth and Renewables too." Of course we can, but not just economic growth, but growth in the production of carbon dioxide and growth in its concentrations in the atmosphere, which grew faster, per the Stanford study quoted above, than the GDP of any of the OECD countries that benefited the most from the acceleration of carbon dioxide production. For CO2 ppm's were growing ever faster. So that by 2020 they were closing in on 420ppm's, an increase of 50ppm's in less than a generation.

“We thus drift (drive ourselves in shiny new EV's) toward unparalleled catastrophe.” (Albert Einstein) 

The Meteorological Organization has reached these conclusions: 

The year 2020 was very warm, one of the three warmest ever, with the average temperature of the planet already at about 1.2° C above the pre-industrial era. The six years following 2015 have been the warmest on record. The decade 2011-2020 has also been the warmest decade we know. 

In addition, the Meteorological Organization says that the perpetuation of the current dependence on fossil fuels makes certain that the world will exceed the temperature thresholds of 1.5° C or 2° C above the temperature of pre-industrial societies. And renewable fuels are as fossil fuel-dependent as gasoline, so the chimera that the answer lies in producing bio-fuels by razing the lungs of the planet to make "bio" fuels by burning fossil fuels to be able to run our own little personal transportation modules to carry our ever-expanding asses around in is simply a mindgame we play on ourselves, disregarding as we have the accelerating rise in CO2 that exactly corresponds to the worldwide production of renewables, of both fuels and energy.

Yet even as climate change is systematically dismantling the foundations of life on Earth, the next boondoggle, this one the coup de grace, making the others look like what the Bakken was for Fracking: the firing pistol in the race to begin an orgy of growth that will leave, as the next decade's crowning achievement, an atmosphere loaded with 450ppm's of CO2, with the most likely scenario being an accumulation of 500ppm by the century's halfway point in 2050, 2100 most likely being ushered in with 600ppm's as a testament to mankind's industriousness in building a zero emissions energy infrastructure. Quite a legacy. A monumental achievement. But to our credit, at least we made sure it was OK with Mr. Green Genes first.

We Can't get off the Carbon Cycle We're Riding.

Biofuel of the Future.

 As economic cycles ebb and flow, the energy use, and  therefore carbon exhalation, expands and contracts. Or at least it has historically, But now, India, thanks to our globalized paradigm of capitalism everywhere, is bucking the trend. While the US is on its own rampage of carbon production, India is burning on three fronts: it is the largest burner of coal in the world, the biggest customer for US Permian output of light/tight oil, and now, with the burning of 4000 corpses a day, the largest incinerator of biomass products, surpassing the EU, which is burning down more of the US southeast than Sherman did on his famed flaming trek to Atlanta, as the US Southeast churns its forests into woodchips and the EU, having been forced to face  up to the failure of wind to provide its energy needs, turns to biomass and brown coal to provide it with the electricity it requires to run its energy-intensive economies.

Whereas the onset of  a global pandemic brought the predicted reduction of the pace at which CO2 was being exhausted into the atmosphere, it didn't come down close to the amount predicted, and, more ominously, only slowed, for a time, the pace of acceleration, not the tonnage in excess of the biosphere's ability to absorb it. In other words, even with the reduction in economic activity the virus imposed on the world, mankind still managed, with the help of the collapse of the carbon sinks due to the destruction of rain forests' capacity to absorb our effluents, greasing palms to produce palm oil, an ongoing enterprise, and then burning the fossil fuels necessary to process the biomass into liquid fuel and transport it, via the burning of bunker fuel, the dirtiest of all transport fuels, and finally burning it thousands of miles away in  the internal combustion engines of the world's motorized fleet of vehicles.

However, as the world begins to shake its groggy head to clear it from the fog of its Corona hangover, the visual of the Indian bonfires of the crematoria is a stark reminder of the re-ignition of the Carbon Cycle on steroids that is similarly being relit in the hidden chambers under the hoods of the billion automobiles in the world, putting to the torch their own fuel fires, more sequestered from view perhaps, but flaming as ominously as the wood-fired corpses of India's Covid casualties.

Seven years ago, in 2014, during the Obama/Biden tenure in the White House, I challenged Polyanna Krugman's assertion that there's "no link between economic growth and ever-rising emissions of greenhouse gases", wherein he accused anyone holding such views as indulging in what he moronically claimed was "climate despair", while insisting that "renewable energy" would enable the world to grow without fouling the atmosphere with its effluents.   

Well, nothing has changed, except the CO2 content of the atmosphere, which was 400ppm's then and is 420 now, all while renewable energy was propelling automobiles worldwide on their daily commutes, since, beginning this month, you are providing your car with renewable energy every time you fill your car's gas tank. Part of what constitutes its fuel being ethanol derived from the processing of vast plains of corn via coal-fired power plants, into the product that's mixed with gasoline. Now, putting aside the disastrous economic and environmental ramifications of this scheme, at this point I wish to focus on the third "E" of the triad of always entwined Triple-E's of the true wealth of nations, Economy, Environment, and Energy, for it was for the Energy that the ruse of fuel-from-food would provide that had been its selling point, as it would make America "Energy Independent".

 Mmm-hmmm. However, what the Bush administration, that concocted and foisted this plan onto the American public, failed to mention was that the means by which it would make the US, if not actually energy independent, less reliant on foreign oil reserves, was the inclusion of our vast stores of coal in the plan. This would not only create the jobs the Bush administration needed in coal country to win him its votes, it would burn coal instead of oil to fuel our ever-growing, (in both size and numbers), fleet of  ICE (internal combustion engine) machines. Consequently during  the Bush regime, while we were waging wars in the Middle East "to take the oil", the tons of coal incinerated for energy production doubled, while the the number of coal-fired power plants in the US increased by a third: from 1024 to 1420, which amounted to adding one coal-fired power plant each week during the smirking chimp's disastrous tenure in office. 

E=MC squared, n'est-ce pas? Yet unlike energy, which is radiant, matter comes in three distinct forms: gas, liquid and solid. Coincidentally enough (or not) the matter we burn for energy also comes in those same three forms, natural gas, oil, and coal. And the US had started its long bumpy ride down the wrong side of the oil production curve in the seventies, so, the switch to power our vehicles from coal was made for that, not for environmental, or "renewable energy" reasons. The dependence on fossil fuels to produce the crops in the quantities needed was on such a vast scale it made their production without it impossible, so fuel-from-food could hardly be considered renewable. What the hope was instead, was that by figuratively slathering a layer of oil over the Midwest's plains, we could leverage that layer of oil into more gallons of gasoline than if we were to simply drop it off at a refinery to be cracked into gasoline and other light fuels such as propane and benzene.

However, being as the main driver of the entire scheme was to make us more energy independent, thereby decreasing our trade deficit, which was heavily weighted with oil imports, since at that time the US was importing two of every three barrels it set afire, the fact that "energy in" was greater than "energy out" wasn't really a game-stopper; au contraire, since it created jobs, "No Worries", and so the ill-conceived plan proceeded.

Now, as the economy starts to be revved up in the hopes to vault it to pre-pandemic levels and greater, Pollyanna Krugman's words in 2014 came back to haunt me. For despite Krugman's claims, it wasn't renewable energy that sparked growth in Obama's economy anymore than it did for Trump's; in fact one could argue that the Trump economy grew renewables faster than Obama's, Texas being a prime example, selling off the oil production from the Permian basin to India and China, to fund the erection of a vast Wind Energy infrastructure that is now the largest in the country. Which is what the Trump administration did as a whole: sold off the dregs of our fossil fuel reserves to other nations (Exxon, the target of a lawsuit for providing America with the energy it needed to drive itself around in circles everyday, wisely deciding to sell their products to countries that won't sue it for selling them a product for which they have a voracious appetite) to enable the investment in a renewable infrastructure, while Obama's depended on making good on the vast American investment already made in fracturing technology by successive Bush regimes.  

But it's not 2014 anymore. No longer is coal ready and able to step up and provide energy to the great American economic system. Besides, it's dirty. Next, the fracking infrastructure is itself fractured, and will require large inputs of energy itself, as it always has, before it's back to its peak production numbers, some years from now, if ever, given the hundreds of billions of dollars in investment dollars it burned through, burning investors and leaving them a tad hesitant to place their bets on that horse again; while natural gas, that transition fuel, our bridge to the future, is now ballyhooed so loudly that here in San Francisco, there is a ban on the installation of  gas ranges in newly installed homes. Thus the most energy-efficient method of cooking, burning the fuel directly in situ, is made illegal so that the same fuel can be burned hundreds of miles away and the electricity generated therefrom transported via miles of transmission wires to then be changed, via high resistance to its flow, to heat, with losses all along those long miles of copper wires, wires that can only be strung with tons of copper from newly opened copper mines, and those transmission losses = generated heat, heat that adds directly to the West's already overheated atmosphere from whence it can't escape. So the only source of energy during what are now the new normal of rolling blackout periods, is to be eliminated. Gas Lighting the public, however easy it may be, we now know from the Texas imbroglio, has dire consequences. Oh well. If it makes you look Green, rally behind any ill-conceived plan, no matter how obtuse.

To replace the fossil fuel regime, we have concocted alternatives though. A solar farm in the desert, a windfarm off of Martha's vineyard, excavating a new lithium mine in Nevada to supply EV's with batteries, all of them from-the-ground-up infrastructure that will not, because it cannot, be built with renewable fuel, it will need oil, it will need coal, as the tons of steel and aluminum need coke to manufacture, and it will need gas to back up those systems when the sun don't shine and the wind won't blow, but that oil, after we have spent the last seven years selling our own fracked reserves off at bargain basement prices, (following the example of Britain, that sold its North Sea reserves off at a mere $11/bbl), are now on the verge of the largest price spike since the Bush administration used its army of speculators to push its price up to a hair's breadth of $150/bbl. So one should be taking the hike in fuel prices in the southeast as a harbinger of our future. 

Now, it came as quite a shock to me when I recently mentioned the Gilets Jaunes to someone, that they had no idea what I meant nor who the yellow vests even were, despite them having filled the streets of French cities every weekend for almost a year in 2019, purportedly in reaction to a rise in the price of fuel (the tax rise mentioned below is on diesel fuel), however, to which the BBC gave a more nuanced motivation:

 “The movement started around a tax rise,” says Christophe Guilluy, “but I think it’s simply a pretext, in the same way that Brexit is not fundamentally a confrontation with Europe, but first and foremost a way for people to say ‘we exist’. “In France, people are using the gilets jaunes as a way to say ‘we exist’ to the elites, to the political class, to those who have forgotten about them for the past 20 years, for the simple reason that they no longer live in the same place.”

One could easily apply such a statement to the sTrumpettes, who feel the same sense of abandonment from both the economy and the political class; and the rapid rise in fuel prices, exacerbated as it will be by the push to use energy reserves to build the economy of the future with the dwindling energy supplies available in the present, will only make their existence one that will be increasingly harder to bear, yet, from all indications, whose cries of pain will be answered only with prescriptions to enable them to join the latest dance craze, the OxiContinental.

And that's only here in the US. The rest of the globe is about to have its own price of existence, never mind growth, handed a bill far in excess of its ability to pay, and the waves of protest have already begun as The Arab Spring threatens to surge into a raging torrent, turning a bubbling brook into a Rocky's rapids of foaming hazards.

 As in so many other instances, the Corona virus has demonstrated how cock-eyed our response to crises tends to be:

It was recommended that we sneeze into the crux of our arms made by bending it at the elbow, and refrain from hand-shaking and do the "elbow-bump" instead. But now that makes no sense whatsoever. By elbow-bumping, one brings the foci of infection, our faces, to within less than a meter of each other, whereas a handshake, the average length of an arm being a meter, grants the two parties the requisite 2 meters social distancing. But no. Instead, since it looks cool and provides an optic that says we're "doing something" to stop the spread of the virus, the public is still being encouraged to elbow bump, which forces the parties to within less than a meter of each other's faces, while the crook of their arms, into which they have been recommended to sneeze, now touch each other within inches of where they have been expelling virus particles. 

We are similarly clueless about our means of energy generation, use and its impact on climate change, preferring to believe we can make an appreciable difference by switching to an EV fleet in a country in which the largest selling vehicle is the Ford 150 Commander, a pickup truck the sales of which the switch to a fleet of EV's will have no effect on, one whose weight comes in at the same as the military vehicle the Humvee: close to three tons with nothing in its cab (Which is generally how they're driven around).

As I see gasoline prices closing in on $5/gal here in San Francisco, even without handsome wear shutting down supply, I can't help but wonder how this is going to work for anybody, as I have yet to hear one single explanation, or even heard the question asked for that matter, as to how CO2's growth will be impacted by the proposed surge in growth that is already putting the torch to  more fossil fuels than last year, with its record-breaking hangover of 420 ppm of CO2. Remember last year when Limbaugh and his echo chamber adherents were claiming Corona was less deadly than the flu? Well, one astute doctor on youtube made the enlightened remark that the deaths from Covid were a plus one, it was a new source of mortality to be added to the already existing ones. Well that's the source of my hesitancy about this Green New Deal. Nobody seems to have considered that it is a plus one. All that fossil-fuel-derived energy needed to build just the three planned projects mentioned above is a plus one on top of the surging fossil fuel burning going on as people jump into their cars for summer "drives", hop onto airplanes, book their trips on Ocean Cruises, or stream movies, "mine" bitcoins, and flock back via long commutes to their in-person occupations. 

I don't pretend to know the answer; what worries me is that nobody is asking the question. Well, except me; but if there's one thing I know, buddy, it's that I'm a nobody.