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On Accuweather.com this morning, they treated us to startling news: A group of scientists says climate change is intensifying rapidly and directly contributing to extreme heat waves and unprecedented wildfires. No! Well, luckily, I guess, they have nothing to do with the raging floods and torrential rains being experienced in almost every single country that is being simultaneously ravaged by out of control raging infernos.
That piece coincided with a Times headline that claimed "Climate Change Is a ‘Hammer Hitting Us on the Head,’ Developing Nations Say", each of which depends on demand from those economies it blames for their dilemma. That's our modern illness: don't address your own attitudes and contribution to disaster, but instead do everything in your power to deflect blame onto others, despite its having zero affect on their behavior. It couldn't, or all those planes bringing the tourists on which you've built your entire economic future, would stop flying, and there goes every resort islands' life's blood. Jet to see a coral reef before the mobs of tourists jetting to see a coral reef destroys all the coral reefs. Nyah nyah da nyah nyah ... I got to see it and you didn't.
Everyone wants somebody else, not only to blame, but to actually do something. So instead, no one does anything, because, as someone finally stated the obvious: There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change. As in Will of the people, but it is the people who, in far less time than a mere year ago, numbering in the hundreds of thousands in the USA, the one country that could have actually made a difference had it chosen to forego the position of being "Saudi America" (whatta f***in' joke) , who simply didn't care enough to bother to vote out the World Leader, by either sitting out the election, or actively voting for the only stinking turd left on the planet who, to this day, pretends that Climate Change is a Hoax, while his opponents, even as this over-stuffed blob of self-adulation who called the election The Big Lie, said not a word about the biggest Lie in extant today, even while the wildfires ravaging California were still smoldering from their summertime carnage and scientists kept insisting that you can't blame any single event on climate change. So afraid were they of being blamed for inciting panic. But even a sense of urgency can't save us now.
There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change.
"The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society," the scientists stated.
The implication, well, no, the fact, inherent in this statement is that until now, we, as in they, haven't, up to this point, been being honest. So it's not until NOW you've decided to be honest? You are asking everyone to make sacrifices that will result in their lives being impacted, while you are silent about the billionaire class that is the most responsible for wreaking havoc, even as they have decided to create an entire new Industry: Space Shots for the Insanely Rich, and nothing greets this absurd, navel-gazing proposal other than breathless admiration. No, Moon of Alabama, the site whence the statement There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change came, is right-on: There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change. There is, however plenty of will to make profits from people's desire to feel they're doing something by, let's say, taking federal funds to help you buy a brand new car, as Cash for Clunkers morphs into "Be Selectric and Buy Electric; Obsolete before it hits the Street." And even if there were the Will To Fight Climate Change, it would be stamped out with far more efficiency than any of the out-of-control infernos blazing around the globe.
Build back BIGGER. California currently has no ground-based mass transit between its largest cities ... none. You must fly or drive. So let's build a spanking new high speed rail no one will use. We'll naturally use only energy derived from the California's sunshine, right? Wrong. Should this boondoggle get built, which had it been done a generation or two ago, would have been great, it would have paid for its carbon footprint with the carbon it saved. But now? Too late, Mate. We would have to burn up the rest of the oil we have. Oil to be gained only by what we see right in front of our eyes, mile upon mile of fractured landscape crawling with a labyrinthine complex of pipelines to tease out of reluctant shale the dribblings of petroleum left buried underground. The Green Machine needs that oil to build back BIGGER, and not for lube: that carbon is being dragged from under the earth's surface for one reason and one reason only: to set it ablaze to release its energy ... along with its carbon. Carbon that could only be accessed by first burning tons of carbon gleaned elsewhere to enable its extraction. Atom for atom the America and Russian fracturing extravaganza has added more carbon to the atmosphere than all other industries combined. And not just as CO2, but also CH4, methane, a molecule that heats the earth far more efficiently than CO2, and leaves us its legacy: upon hydrolization in the atmosphere: MORE CO2. A hidden store that accelerates the rate at which carbon is building up. An amount not included in the IPCC's calculations, even to this day.
Build back BIGGER. So why stop there? The electric grid that currently can't deliver to the two largest energy-producing states in the country the requisite juice to its customers without rolling blackouts and periodic weather-related outages, is to be grown to gargantuan proportions in order to charge the electric fleet that will never be built. And charge is the operative word. For it won't be paid for, it will go on our charge card. So like the hundreds of thousand of flood-damaged Chinese automobiles sitting in humungous parking lots in the People's Republik (If the USA can call its Imperial self a Republik, why can't the CCP call China one?) waiting to be demolished, we will still be paying for the charges of building our fleet even after floods have ripped down its supports, fires have swept through its substations, and triple-digit heat waves have melted its charging stations into plastic blobs.
Build back BIGGER. And, lest we forget, simultaneously with these mega-projects, the largest upgrade to the USA's nuclear armamentaria to date has been undertaken. You know, to provide that "Defense" we churlishly hide behind so we can continue to pour prodigious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere unmolested by those to whom we do harm in the process. We don't care, we don't have to: We're the Exceptional nation.
The US has built the largest War machine to have ever existed on the face of the earth, and did so for the purported reason of maintaining the peace. A Wehrmacht that has been used to impose its will onto the rest of mankind for generations by "defending" its interests. Imperial interests for a country that sells itself to the world as a Republic, a Democracy. So for such a political entity to decide that it will cut down its energy usage by borrowing trillions to burn through the last of its fossil fuels to build the largest energy infrastructure in the world should come as no surprise. That its best-educated, most affluent citizens should accept this cant as gospel does, however, take one somewhat aback. Cynicism such as this is rarely so starry-eyed. Looking at you out of orbs as dewy-eyed as Bambi's, they really believe such an energy-intensive build-out will "Save the Planet" (if we can borrow their self-proclaimed conscience, Paula Krugman's, moronic term).
There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change.
As though to emphasize that point, we have become determined to make manifest the fact that There Is No Will even To Fight the Corona Virus. A threat far more immediate, with its ramifications stalking us across the globe, but that we have abetted as much as any arsonist has aided wildfires' destruction. As the Vaccine Wars rage and its casualties line up outside hospital ER's, the terrible truth that the vaccine was developed to flatten the curve, not stop the spread of Covid, becomes clear. As predicted, vaccination has not only facilitated the spread of the virus, but also its mutation into vaccine-resistant strains. Like the lockdowns, it gives the hospitals, (private Corporations, let's not forget, whose first responsibility are to shareholders) breathing room to be able to line up their boards before the next big wave. Far from eradicating the virus, vaccinations have guaranteed that it will spread far more efficiently, as vaccinated carriers are encouraged by the pronouncements of the Biden administration to mix with the unvaccinated and unmasked, giving variants as conducive an environment in which to mutate and explore more possible avenues for adaptation as if they were being manipulated in a lab, which, of course, they are. We are the little white mice, lorded over by sewer rats in thrall to the sharp-clawed cat lurking in the shadows, its teeth bared for ripping flesh, a warning that death's coming for you; Fear has moved in and betrayal stalks the trusting as malevolently as an insurance salesman for AIG.
Perhaps all of this will end differently, but the story of hookworm in the South at the turn of the last century doesn't offer much hope. The tale, as told by a certain Daniel Immerwahr in his sometimes entertaining, How to Hide an Empire, starts out in PR, as in Puerto Rico, not Madison Ave.
We have to travel down some Dusty Rhoads to discover the story of hookworm, a one-time malady of the Puerto Ricans discovered by Bailey Ashford, and whose campaign against it was taken over by Dr. Rhoads, a physician who described his patients as being, "Beyond a doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever ..." An epithet either side of the Vaccine Wars would find quite close to how they feel about their confreres across the isle, c'est-à-dire.
Meanwhile, Ashford's boss, Charles Stiles, took a trip to the South where he discovered that white men were suffering from the same pallor and posture that were the result of the hookworm-produced anemia he had seen in PR. "Is that where the "lazy white Southerner" stereotype had come from?", He wondered. But even with cheap deworming pills as the easy remedy, upon trying to kickoff an anti-hookworm campaign, the good doctor was chased out of Dodge, escaping unscathed only thanks to a local sheriff. "They would rather die of hookworm than be told by any northerner what to do."
Sound familiar?
A recent headline announced that Southerners would rather read their spouse's eulogy than allow them to be vaccinated, because ... Freedom.
People such as this do not listen to pronouncements from the IPCC with anything but derision. Far from simply Having No Will To Fight Climate Change, they are wrapped in a steel jacket of determination to fight tooth and nail any steps taken to "fight" climate change (whatever that means. Are we going to blow up tornadoes? Strafe hailstorms? Set up machine-gun nests to open fire on floods? The only language we use these days must be peppered with military terms that make no sense whatsoever, but that's the only language we understand anymore. Not a surprising fact when one considers that the person who discovered the most widely used chemical weapon of mass destruction, dynamite, has the world's most eminent prize named after him: The Nobel Peace Prize).
"Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to".
And vaccines will never confer on us herd immunity, "because they were never intended to".
"Large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now."
Instead, large and sustained additional emissions are already planned, and by none other than those claiming they want to Save the Planet.
"The time for wishful thinking is over."
Au contraire: It has only just begun.
The piece on MoonofAlabama ended with the statement that, " It does not mean that we should give up. All of us, personally and politically, should try to reduce our environmental footprint as much as we can".
That, my dear, is a lesson in futility. We have constructed an economic engine at the heart of which lie Corponationals, entities as impervious to mankind's dilemma as a tank to a fusillade from spears and slingshots. Reduce your environmental footprint as much as you might, their capacity to pick up the slack is only thereby enhanced. Your very tax dollars, and even those you refuse to pay, as the Fed can just add to the already $120 Billion it arbitrarily pours into the economy every month, will effectuate the ongoing excavation and incineration of every last atom of carbon you so heroically refrain from burning yourself.
The pandemic seems to be the only thing scientists have come up with to stop us. Our own mendacity and short-sightedness seem to be the only barriers to our continued assault on our own well-being. But unlike the cooperation of the Corponationals, those are things that can be relied on. And that's a good thing. Because they're our only hope.
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