The Capitolist (sic) Experiment Continues Unabated.

 In yet another article about raging infernos in the far north, this time Canada, the authors opined:

"This is all the more evidence that climate breakdown (sorry, the climate isn't "breaking down"; if it were, it wouldn't be doing exactly what we predicted it would do upon adding ever-increasing tons of carbon to the atmosphere year after year) isn’t waiting for us in the distant future. It’s already here."

Like the pandemic which humankind is spreading over the globe again and again, as evidenced by the different variants, the passive voice is used to express how the virus "spreads", as though it were an amoeba, an  uncontrollable voracious blob eating its way through humanity that is left helpless to stop it. That, as you know, is a lie. It is how we prefer to think of life, as though it delivers us a never-ending series of blows we valiantly stand up against, like a gale in the night blowing down our strongest structures.

But that's not quite accurate. 

Time and again mankind has whisked the variants  of a deadly virus from one continent to another, enabling its mutation and rendering the vaccines, developed with such fanfare and at such great cost, useless at stopping its virulent spread. 

Yet whenever such reckless disbursement of a pathogen is referred to, it is announced that the virus "has spread" from the UK, for example, to Colorado ... as the alpha variant was reported to have done. But Covid, for all its tenacity and adaptive capabilities, has yet to find a way to cross oceans and trek over mountain ranges and into far-flung communities. It didn't "spread" to Colorado, it was brought there, and it was allowed to be brought there by humans; well-off, rich humans who don't cotton to being told when or to where they are allowed to fly.

The new variants are spreading ever faster as the G-20 nations give a collective shrug of their shoulders, insisting, not especially surprisingly, that their "right" to live lives unfettered by the restrictions of nature, supersedes the rights of the hordes of poor Asian and African people who toil in sweatshops and dangerous factory conditions to manufacture the luxuries without which their inhabitants can't face existence. Life without Lipstick? Unthinkable!

The same editorial stance is taken for climate change, of course, leading to the observation cited previously. But the fact that "climate breakdown isn’t waiting for us in the distant future," isn't because, "It’s already here." It's because We have already ushered it in, and continue to live now and plan for a future in which the very manner of how we have engineered our existence, brings about the disasters that one after the other "happen" to us. But like children playing with matches that time and again burn down one after the other of their houses, we insist that the allure of ignition is irresistible, and so every morning billions of arsonists on every continent on the globe scurries out their front door and slides into the front seat of their cars, trucks, and SUV's and turns a key that ignites a blaze under the hoods that pours GHG exhaust into their neighbor's face. All in order to go work for a Corponational that requires they not only poison their own air in order to reach their place of employment, but spend hours of their own unpaid time simply to get there. Even now, despite the above-mentioned virus, no one has come to realize that the vast army of workers must somehow pay dearly with a sizeable fraction of their after-tax income for the privilege of driving to their place of employment, whether or not their presence is actually required there in order to do their job. We spend hours in traffic, wasting what's supposedly our own time to burn-up enormous amounts of our own energy resources, thereby increasing our own carbon footprint while the Corponationals wash their hands of any of the responsibility for what is done to pay their shareholders larger dividends, yet for which they pay not a nickel in reimbursement to those whose shoulders are burdened with the weight of rising transit costs. Nor is there a cent of compensation for the space in your home that's been taken over for the pursuit of profits to be amassed to send dividend checks to Corponational "investors" (they are not investors ... when the risk of failure is sloughed onto the State, the risk those investment dollars pay to those who buy a company's securities for assuming, don't belong to the holders of those securities, but to the taxpayers who they depend on to bail them out of the failed enterprises the so-called investors have sunk their money into. Should said enterprise fail they're supposed to lose their investment: that's the deal society made with the Wall St's barons to allow their private enterprise system to run roughshod over the polity, and yet when these so-called investors face losses from lack of what they would call, if it were to happen to you, lack of due diligence, they renege on that deal, something  they have done over and over again, one decade after the other, yet they still collect their dividends as though they "earn" them, when it is you and I who are entitled to those dividend checks, as it is we who back up their foolish, losing bets. This has resulted in a global economy that is so laden down with intractable onerous debt to keep zombie "enterprises" going (a feature of communist regimes the USA has adopted, yet insists on referring to its economy as Capitalist ... it is instead Capitolist: it's kept teetering along via infusions of funny money from its State and Federal Capitols) that the so-called free market must hijack Central banks and force them to keep interest rates at/below zero so as to funnel torrents of cash into "free" markets, (regardless of whether said capital's owners would prefer to place it somewhere safer), into what Wall St. still has the audacity to call "securities",  paper issued by the  private sector whose sale would be impossible if not for the fact that it is only by assuring its buyers of the ease with which the public sector can be blackmailed into making their bad paper good, that anyone buys it at all.

Yet it is this system that hundreds of millions of people are completely convinced has their interests at heart when it offers them, as an alternative to their gas-fueled dream machine-turned-nightmare vehicle, a "clean" electric alternative. As though burning the fires that fuel them hundreds of miles away and out of sight somehow renders those noxious combustions innocuous. 

Now, it is nice, even healthful, that those fumes are no longer concentrated exactly where the majority of the world's population has been gathered: large megacities. But the idea that EV's are in any way shape or form expected to replace, as opposed to supplement, the existing ICE machines and the infrastructure that supports them is completely contradicted by mankind's past, present and future plans, which plans are outlined by investment decisions and the outlay those decisions have caused. 

While there has been numerous articles and oceans of ink spent describing our brave new world of the future of electrified everything, from cars and trucks, to the "internet of everything", even as mankind lacks the capacity to manufacture the chips necessary even for its current use (no pun intended), barely a word has been uttered in regards to the ecological disaster that manufacturing a "renewable" fuel that is entirely dependent upon non-renewable inputs to provide the additive for what's cynically referred to as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS):

1) Water from the Ogallala aquifer that is being inexorably, and non-renewably, drained to nurture those crops for a fuel that a nation of EV drivers will have absolutely no need for;

2) Natural gas to fertilize those "renewable" fuel crops, without which the impoverished, overworked soil can't provide the necessary nutrients to grow said crop;

3) Oil to provide the fuels to power the mechanized agricultural combines to sow and harvest those crops;

4) Coal without which the thousand coal-fired power plants constructed during the Bush administration can't process all that food into fuel;

Four non-renewable resources are being simultaneously exhausted to manufacture   this "renewable" additive to your gasoline; an additive that can only be concocted using up the  four non-renewable sources itemized above to provide the 3.6 billion gallons per year representing close to 40% of the nation's corn crop, (5.1 billion bushels per EIA estimates), for an additive that reduces the number of miles you can drive by burning the same volume of fuel, is considered okay by you, I assume, since it is your tax dollars that are siphoned off via the Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP; Section 9010), to the States that grow it via ever-larger federal tax subsidies, which are the only inputs that are actually renewable, as they are simply dreamt up by the Fed's unending QE which buys the Treasury bonds that are issued to disburse the federal dollars to Corponationals that don't believe the federal government should have the ability to tax them, only to tax you to transfer those monies into their own coffers from which they disburse them, yet again, to their shareholders, who, as explained above, have no legitimate claim to them. Granted, they have a legal claim to them, but that is simply because the Keptocracy buys the legislators who write the rules, or, as is more often the case nowadays, write the rules they pay their bought representatives to enact into Law, and so can, with just as much aplomb, break them: they apply to you, not to them.

If there were any truth whatsoever to the concern about the growth in the CO2 component of the atmosphere, leaders in Congress and of major corponations would be demanding the cessation of, or at least an outline for the eventual dismantling of, the vast state-sponsored food-to fuel imbroglio and the continent-wide fracturing of the earth's crust necessary to provide the energy to power it. This evisceration of the prairies has resulted in release of the earth's enormous stores of CO2 along with a veil of methane that enshrouds the communities into which it is vented:

North Dakota

California's Central Valley

The four Corner's region

Texas and the Gulf of Mexico  

Every place where out-of-control hydraulic fracturing is occurring directly corresponds with an environment of increased heat and drought, yet the only response to the calamities that fracturing has visited upon mankind is to suggest a radical increase in the amount of energy delivered by captured governments in the form of tax subsidies and R&D paid for by the public and simply handed over gratis to the Corponations of the world. Not one single idea that has anything to do with reducing our carbon pollution NOW has been suggested. Not one. While every single one of them increases it with promises, that are as useless as a Trumpian marriage vow, to offset that "temporary" increase with decreases somewhere in a far off future, to a someday that never arrives.

But, as you know, during the recklessness of the years of the Bush administration, easily the most calamitous presidency in the history of the United Sates, (despite the rabid Trump-haters' insistence that the big gas bag from the Empire State's administration was worse, simply because they find him odious), NEO Cons, , ie, the Deep State, set policies that still continue to damage not only the continental United States, but the entire globe (of which the corn-for-fuel fiasco, deploying coal, and thereby doubling its use, as its fossil-fuel enabler, is only one). GDubya also double-crossed ya when he ramped up the hydraulic fracturing of the vast surface of the US such that any place that was left undisturbed by the army of plows tearing up the prairies of the great  plains, releasing their enormous stores of carbon sequestered over millennia into the atmosphere, has instead been covered with millions of miles of pipeline, with millions of oil rigs peppering its surface, most of which long ago reached their peak of production. They continue to deliver the earth's once-sequestered stores of hydrocarbons and methane to the atmosphere, and will continue seeping those GHG's for decades to come. As an example, North Dakota's Bakken was first fractured to smithereens in the late nineties, so it has already been decades, yet they continue to leak what methane they didn't flare in such prodigious quantities they not only outdid Texas, the State with the most outrageous flair for Flaring, but caused the USA to overtake Russia as the #1 flarer of combustible gas in the world. To this day, quite literally decades, as in an entire generation, later, both the flaring and the unplugged leaks go unaddressed, save sporadically in a buried editorial in one or two of the country's newspapers.

Were any of the EV advocates actually serious about anything besides making money, or creating "good" jobs, they would instead be fomenting to have the energy companies that left this mess clean it up. The only role government should be playing is monitoring, so as to ensure the companies are doing the job which they, as we can see, fail to do unless actual LAW is brought to bear against them, compelling them to Stop the Steal. Not by imposing fines that are simply posted on their books as a cost of doing business, and thereby deducted from their profits, and therefore, their taxes, shifting the burden, as is their wont, onto the taxpaying public (with the full cooperation of their representatives in Congress: "So you think you have a Congressperson? ... The Corponationals know better").

But what the GWBush administration is best known for we are all being treated to this week with the denouement of his War on Afghanistan. We rallied 'round the flag with cries of, "BOMB them back into the Stone Age!", (No one remembers the Enduring Freedom they were promised, instead they have been enduring the freedom imposed by occupation) as the premier spreader of Terror around the globe started the War of Terror, which, given its name, would have to redound onto the nation holding the rest of the world in thrall to its Nuclear Arsenal, one now being redesigned to wage small-scale nuclear strikes anywhere on the globe. Shock and Awe as a national war cry is bare-faced Terrorism, plain and simple.

But lest we forget about Russia, and Norway, or Canada in this experiment, we should take a look at the arctic Circle, and realize that every one of the nations surrounding its once ice-encased waters have built their economies around the continued excavation of permafrost souls by sinking oil rigs in frigid waters to keep their countries' economies from collapsing. The UK is so desperate for energy now that they have burned their way through their own share of the North Seas' stores of hydrocarbons, that they want to start their own fracturing enterprises.  

Although the ecologically disastrous Canadian tar sands is still the largest industrial project on earth, the new fossil fuel projects unfolding in the Russian North that represent  the country’s development plans for the Arctic and Northern Sea Route, are far more dangerous, yet are completely removed from any international pressure, as, much like the US, Russia makes no pretense about the invincibility its nuclear arsenal confers upon it. So by the year 2024, the year California's Governor Nuisance has claimed he will outlaw fracking in the State (the real reason Republicans have determined to oust him via a spurious recall effort), the Barents Observer reports that Russia intends to boost shipments on the Arctic route to 80 million tons per year, and by 2030 - to 150 million tons of fossil fuels:

LNG: "Over the past year, up to 50 ships have crowded along the coast of the Gydan Peninsula where natural gas company Novatek is developing its new Arctic LNG 2 project. Massive volumes of construction goods are needed for the building of the port terminal that ultimately will handle almost 20 million tons of liquified natural gas per year."

OIL: "In addition, another 100 vessels are located in other parts of the Ob Bay (the Gulf of Ob and the adjacent peninsulas of Yamal and Gydan are top priority regions of Russia’s oil and gas industries) most of them near Sabetta port, the Novy Port oil terminal is the drill site of jackup rig Perro Negro 8 where several dredgers are engaged in deepening shipping lanes.

In addition, Oil company Rosneft is building its Sever sea terminal to serve the Vostok Oil project. It will handle as much as 30 million tons of oil by 2024, and is planned, by the end of the decade (that's within the same timeframe during which the USA will have replaced half of its ICE machines with EV's (Yeah, right))  to handle 100 million tons per year.

COAL: On the Taymyr Peninsula, both oilmen and coal miners are busy with the development of terminal facilities for major new projects. Simultaneously, coal mining company North Star (Severnaya Zvezda) is building its Yenisey seaport. The new terminal will serve the Syradasaysky coal field. It is due to be ready by 2023, with a production capacity of 7 million tons per year. All of this activity is taking place as the taiga pours blackened smoke, that reaches all the way to the North Pole, from its many raging uncontrolled wildfires .

This is Russia's future. It, as you may have noticed, is a carbon copy of the GWBush  fossil-fueled resource extraction economy of the aughts. There is no force on earth able to put a damper on Putin's plans to incinerate the taiga to enable Russia to burn through its Arctic stores. Why should they care? Did Scotland? Norway? Not-so-Great Britain? Will China (their intended customer) hesitate to set the Arctic stores aflame? Will India deprive its caste-away population the privilege of offering the grand life modernity dangles in front of its Keptocracy? And all simply to satisfy energy-coddled environmentalists, when the USA has shown them just how easy it is to override their dire prognostications by simply telling their deliberately ignorant masses that Climate Change is but a hoax? (Even as hurricanes tore through their Red states, they cheered their Furor on). Hell, even as a virus that was rampaging through the nations of our closest allies, the US President was claiming, still claims, that it too was a hoax (seriously, Anti-vaxxer Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan administration hack with a blog, still makes that claim to this day in a post he just published titled, "How the Covid scam is perpetrated"). 

This is why I insist, and think you should as well, that all this blather about EV's as a way to control carbon emissions is a bunch of globaloney. The same coterie of concerned citizens are the same ones who are all for suing Exxon. EXXON? Their damage is done. It's like suing BP. It's ROSNEFT that should be attracting the ire of environmentalists mesmerized by the fumes emanating from the ABA's cesspool. Law suits that actually want to STOP carbon from entering the atmosphere in the first place should be aimed at trying to stop projects BEFORE they are attracting investment dollars. Any suit that's brought after the fact will only insure that whatever monies awarded to the plaintiffs will INcrease carbon output, because there is no way other than that for the losing Corponational to earn the dough that'll pay all those lawyers. Lawyers who are by nature uninterested in stopping carbon pollution, and concentrate instead on generating deep-pocket inputs to their lawfirms' bank accounts.

The train wreck we insist on calling Capitalism has little to do with the economics of Adam Smith. The wealth of nations wasn't ever considered by the Father of economics to be something a Corponational entity above the rule of law should be enabled to siphon off into offshore tax havens or used for FDI  into an economy that has no use for the rules of Capitalist economies. And a one-party, totalitarian Communist country, by definition, doesn't. Communist regimes using forced labor that is subject to beatings, constant surveillance and "re-education" to "compete" with salaried employees producing the same goods are, again, by definition, non-competitive, they can always undercut the costs of capitalist enterprises and thereby bring down employees wages around the globe to their own niggardly pittance, robbing labor of any constraints of capital such that the competing interests that Adam Smith described are so unevenly matched as to give the ascendant force of capital, freed from all constraints, full sway over the very labor that generates it. After all, that was the reason the Corponations moved their manufacturing capacity there in the first place. 

Perhaps this haphazard concoction of half-truths and poorly derived conclusions is not to your liking. Who can fault you for that? But there's something we've wroughten, and it isn't just in the state of Denmark. And the state of our lame response to Covid should have brought to our attention the likewise half-hearted  measures taken to control that other "hoax", the one that has uncontrollable wildfires blazing all around the world. We are faced with the reality we can no longer ignore that the economic system under which we all toil has glaring deficiencies that we aren't addressing, such that it is not only killing off so many species that we are currently in the 6'th extinction, but that it is changing not only the seasons, but how we feel about them. The advent of summer that used to bring such relief and was looked forward to with almost childlike anticipation, now brings instead an undercurrent of dread, a palpable fear of losing life and limb along with our homes to monstrous blazes so hot and fierce only a tsunami is capable of quelling them, while floods ravage the most prosperous of nations, swallowing entire villages whole, even as on the other side of the same country, fires engulf townships to leave nothing but charred skeletal remains of what was, just the day before, a thriving community. Yet the TV ads for SUVs, ATV's, F-150 Commander pick-ups, all still stoke your innate desire to be better, to show off your affluence by riding around in a metal cage spewing your refuse in your neighbor's face as a sign of your own superiority and ascendancy, they play over the airwaves as though nothing has changed, as though this is the only way we know how to sell things, by playing on the weak human's envy, avarice and vanity. And nothing must be allowed to change that. 

But this field of dreams they have built  ... "Build it and they will Come" ... the mantra of supply-side economics, has turned out to be a minefield, and the corpses and body parts it strews over the landscape are destined to eclipse those even the pandemic has occasioned. But unlike the Pandemic, which can in fact get better, Capitolism-induced, Corponational-churned Climate Calamity, given our utterly feckless "efforts"(all of them laughable ... pathetic ...  when not downright, as in the  Bushes' case, unabashedly Evil) to allay it, can only get worse.