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.