The Economy as a Soylent Green Machine.

Just Kuwait, Enron's Skilling, Just Kuwait. Through the Isis Crisis, Halliburton and oil rig's spurtin', the Contra' diction of  Free Market fiction, the defibrillation of a comatose nation and increasing hot air expended while floating hot air balloons of unprecedented heatwaves goodbye, the one activity that grew and grew, one that everyone knew, was fracking. 

Got an oil supply problem? Fracking.

Got a balance of payments problem? Fracking.

Got an unemployment problem? Fracking.

Got an investment dollar problem? Fracking.

Got a feedstock to petrochemical plant problem? Fracking.

Natural gas shortage looming? Fracking.

Want an LNG industry? Fracking.

What's the Problem with Fracking? Fracking.

Got a problem with all that fracking? The answer is more fracking.

That picture looking like a multi-flavored ice-cream cone dropped and left melting on a the tarmac is where the energy picture of US production sits, its output akin to the Red Queen, racing frantically to stay in the same place. Note the date when this chart started measuring US fracturing's output, then look at this graph:

    

Whirled Consumption: The Energy Mix

This chart begins in 1992. The year the Kyoto protocol conventions were first contemplated.

Notice that the chart runs from '92 to 2017, 25 years of climate awareness.

Then look at the three items that are considered renewable, hydro, nuclear and, lumped together, "Renewables" or what they at least consider to be such. There is much to be learned there.
 
But the most glaring fact is that the sheer volume of all three of the non-fossil fuel components, when added together, don't equal just the growth in just one of those fossil fuels, coal. The other inconvenient fact which the graph shouts out at us: the growth in the use of energy since the world first decided it needed to stop the growth in the use of fossil fuels, exceeds by a factor of ten the growth in the use of renewable fuels that are supposedly going to replace them (2017 means before the Trumpelstiltskin surge in US fracking production).

Shall I do the math for you doubting Thomases?:

 In 1992, as you can see, world energy production was ~ 8000; by 2017 it was 13,500, a difference of 5500; the amount of energy consumption provided by renewables by 2014 was ~ 500, which times 10 = 5000, (and that was during the eight years of the green-friendly Obama administration). Yet if you look at the far right, between 13000 and 14000, that little blip, that 500 represented by the tan shaded area above the 13,000, you can see that that equals almost exactly the total contribution to the world energy consumption represented by renewables (in orange), a figure that then grew smaller as a percentage, even as its growth in volume continued at the same pace during each year of the Trump-'N-Pump  administration.

Now, the point of the Kyoto protocols was to reduce overall energy usage to some pre-protocols amount, by which I mean to say, that in 1992, in order to keep the planet from heating up, the world needed to curtail its burning of fossil fuels to a more sustainable number, and what my question is, is how can that goal ever be attained via a switch to renewables if overall energy consumption exceeds the amount generated from renewables by a factor of ten 25 years after we decided to "switch to sustainable fuels"? The 2020 collapse in oil consumption caused by a worldwide pandemic didn't even bring us back to those 2017 level of consumption, yet already people are at each others throats from not being able to fly to far flung destinations around the world or drive to Vegas, or go on a cruise to nowhere in ginormous floating hotels.  

Because to attain our ever-greater level of consumption means generating ever-greater amounts of energy ... and as the pandemic has taught us, it is not human lives that matter, but the economy, and the same holds for climate change. So what if the economic system is destroying the prospects of life on earth? Life on earth is secondary to the economy, which, as the years between 1992 and 2017 starkly illustrate, must grow or it collapses, and therefore, energy consumption must grow, and the more people it kills in attaining that growth, the more we, well on our way to 9billion by 2050, will reproduce, and part of that economic growth is now the death industry.

That has been the biggest change wrought by the pandemic: death has become even more industrialized. Once the initial tidal wave of corpses was disposed of, the system was recalibrated to ease your passing away so as not to disturb the economy, au contraire, to feed the economic engine as much as if your body were simply biomass used to provide fuel for the renewable electricity its burning will thus generate, similar to how they used to burn mummies to power locomotives. Soylent Green got it wrong. Present energy generation supersedes future food production as a priority, and you can see that by the vast tracts of the US Midwest plowed up, draining the Oglala aquifer that waters the nations food crops so as to fuel its machines, and the burnt down wastes of the Amazon, or the razed rainforests of Indonesia: fuel me once shame on you, fuel me twice, I'll lie back in my Naugahide chair and light up a Lucky with a click of my Bic. The Matrix shows us a clearer picture of where we fit in in this Brave New World of Enron Musks and Just Bozos, one where we all live in SuckerBurg working for penneys, JC .