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.