Globaloney: Countries the "Spare Us" Climate Discords Ignore.

 

The Siberian fires, it is estimated, have already this year, as early as mid August, added as much CO2 to the atmosphere's mix as the industrial nation of Germany, the world's fourth largest economy;

The amount of bunker fuel burned by container ships plying the world's sea lanes release more CO2 than the country of Japan, the world's third largest economy; 

And we already know that crypto-miners add more CO2 than the country of Chile;

The US military in and of itself burns more fossil fuel than the country of Sweden;

The State of Texas flares every day more natural gas than would be burned to supply its entire electricity demand;

Ditto for the State of North Dakota;

California claims it flares Zero, yet has more earth-fracturing oil pads than any State other than Texas, so its figures must be even higher.

Note that none of the countries named are small little entities, but are all major Industrialized nations with a sizeable carbon footprint.

 Danse Macabre: Our Dance With Death.

Yet we add one after the other of these countries to the world's carbon emitters year after year. Five years ago there was no such thing as crytpo-mining, so we have added, overnight, a CO2 equivalent of an entire major industrialized nation that exists completely outside the Paris Accords ... for no productive reason whatsoever. Likewise with the adoption of SUV's and F-150 pick-up trucks and ATV's to the list of passenger vehicles purchased by commuters. To perform the same task as sedans, these vehicles add another ton and a half of weight, resulting in the necessity of burning so much more fuel that the additional emissions thus created add yet another G-20 nation's equivalence of CO2 to the troposphere as the above-listed activities. Millions of tons of steel hauled around to no purpose. Yet nary a whisper of protest from the so-called "green" new dealers to protest this ridiculous, callous addition stoking the world's Climate Carnage. Nor would it have to be legislated: simply allow the true price of fuel be reflected at he pump along with a climate tax to go to fund FEMA to help the victims of SUV owners' dismissal of anyone else's rights but  their own.

But Mother Nature is tired of being ignored, so this year, she has upped the ante and made us sit up and take notice by showing us just what rank amateurs we are once she decides to get in the game: 

“…global wildfires have unleashed 4.7 gigatons (4.3 gigatonnes) of CO2 as of August 16. In comparison, the 27 member nations of the European Union generated a relatively scant 2.7 gigatons…”

So not only do we add the equivalent of several large Industrialized Nations' Carbon footprints to the already onerous emissions to the G-20 nations' output each year, it now turns out that they can reduce their economies' use of hydrocarbons all they want, mankind has already assured that Mother Nature will pick up the slack. Of what use is the COPout26 Climate Conference when the largest industrial states' carbon output is not only added to by six or seven more Nations' equivalence they simply choose to ignore, since no single nation can be held responsible for them, but are dwarfed by the burgeoning output, stoked by the warming humans have already caused, of the very Planet it is trying to "Save"?  

The question of carbon sequestration arises as well: all those burning forests sequestered carbon, so their conflagrations' impact is 2-fold: it not only releases their stored carbon into the atmosphere, it removes their carbon-sequestering photosynthesis' contribution to the annual CO2 drawdown. 

This May, we achieved the dubious distinction of reaching an historical 420 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, a figure that is currently 414.47 ppm. It is the increase in the northern hemisphere's rate of photosynthesis during the summer months that brings that CO2 level down from its May peak each year. But as forest fires continue to diminish the earth's forests, eventually turning carbon sinks (healthy viable forests) into carbon pumps (blackened landscapes searing under a blazing sun that leaches even the soil's CO2 stores), that annual drawdown from May's peak will diminish, accelerating the rate of Climate Carnage even further by compounding it faster.

Now what does that suggest about our contemplation of Life after fossil fuels? Well, that phrase has always referred not life, so much as to the problem of human life, the gist of it being, what would, or more accurately, will, our lives be like after the withdrawal of the energy inputs the combustion of hydrocarbons supplies them? What it never addresses, because we simply don't care, is the question the phrase actually asks: What will LIFE be like after Fossil Fuels?  

What will LIFE itself be like after the naked ape has finished with the planned excavation and incineration of every last hydrocarbon the planet has taken billions of years to sequester, which sequestration being what gave this once-lifeless orb the ability to nurture and sustain Life in the first place? 

As you can see from the manner in which the questions is answered, that even though the question has been asked, it has been ignored, and those attempting to answer it, change it to one they would rather answer than the one so starkly posed. What, indeed, will Life be like, should it even endure, after the remaining stores of sequestered carbon, not only in the form of so-called fossil fuels, but in the living environment (for as the current impulse to chop down, reduce to woodchips, and burn every living forest on the planet in the name of Green Energy as "bio-fuel", demonstrates, humanity's rapaciousness is all-encompassing) as the carbon stores of forests, and of permafrost, and of  methane hydrates from around the globe are added to the atmosphere year after year in such great amounts that even the vast oceans are unable to marshal it back into sequestration?

In contemplating the answer to that question, it seems that perhaps in the short timeframe mankind has left itself, it should, instead of building Voyagers to span the galaxies, it should instead be building equally durable earth-based systems that will be able to function after we've destroyed the ability that the earth has so obligingly provided for life to exist on its surface by cooling it to a livable temperature by sequestering all that carbon we are now in the process of so feverishly reintroducing into the atmosphere in, geologically speaking, the blink of an eye. The god so many billions of people pretend they believe in as they destroy what is, to our current level of knowledge, Its greatest Creation, can amuse Itself periodically as It checks the readings to see when Earth will once again be ready to sustain complex, multi-cellular biological creatures.