Survivors' Gilt Cage: Making Gain from Others' Pain.

Energy Use: The Elephant in the Zoom.

 This week, China’s State Grid and National Development and Reform Commission (The three names alone demonstrating the problem with State bureaucracies, as The State Grid (which provides power to Private Companies), National Development, and Reform, should their names be taken literally, would each have contradictory agendas) pledged to ensure power, especially for residents, and said they would take measures such as allowing greater production of coal and increasing coal imports.

Luckily here in the US we have no Socialism, and private enterprises can shutdown the grid so as to hike prices and create an atmosphere rife with possibilities for even more price-gouging energy-outage plays in the future:

Unconventional oil is more expensive and slow, with a small energy balance and a large environmental footprint, one, were it to be objectively measured, easily surpasses that of coal. But just as no one has named the elephant in the room of hydraulic fracturing as causing the sudden surge in climate-derangement events, neither have you heard a single news source mention the curtailment of the burning of coal by China, along with its concomitant cessation of the release of cooling aerosols into the atmosphere that are therefore not delivering their benefits, as a factor in the Climate chaos visited upon China this past summer. (Henan province was experiencing floods yet again this week, although not as horrendous as those caused by July's torrential downpours).

Energy-saving measures in China include suspended elevator services! So how do the markets, those entities relied on to inform everything, the Stock Market itself the only measure our disgraced ex-president gave any credence to, react to such news? Like this:

On reporting the news that China is facing an energy crisis, with more than 10 provinces and regions imposing restricted power use, the only thing Reuters reported on was how to "play the market", the most important resource in our existence being but a game to them, while Morgan Stanley picks 5 global stocks to "play" the gas price (Natural and automobile gas prices, it doesn't matter, they will position themselves, with the help of their elected stooges, to make gain from your pain). "Play" being a Wall St euphemism for how to profit from the pain and suffering you inflict on that same society without which your business wouldn't exist. Par example, both the New Orleans power outage following Hurricane Ida and the Texas freeze outage were events each of those states' molly-coddled energy sectors positioned themselves to profit from. That is how Corponations are structured now, their largest windfall profits are gleaned from their own failure and the bonanza to be reaped by raking their own customers over the coals of the resulting outages. Enron was, as you may recall, a Texas entity entirely backed by its then Governor, GW Bush, whose CEO, Kenneth Lay, then helped put into the White House, with the expectation of being named to a Cabinet position by the man on whom he'd larded huge piles of criminally-procured cash. Stop the steal, indeed: but only after it gets one illegally elected:

If the main source of campaign funds are illegally obtained, then the Presidency it secured one's election to was, like the cash itself, stolen. Using the Texas Mafia's cash to ensure your election is not politically correct, yet that is exactly what GW Bush did).

 In the tight oil fields of Texas and North Dakota (both now sizzling, by the purest of coincidences, in triple-digit heat having nothing to do with the fact that they are both not only the two State where fracking's contribution to their economies is the largest, but that allow the most prodigious amount of flaring, unrivalled by anywhere else on the continent. The GOP elephant is not only in the room, it's ensconced in the seat of power) with North Dakota, (despite being one of the states situated in the highest latitudes of any state in the continental US), currently the hottest spot in the Northern Hemisphere. Oil drillers must replace about 40 percent of their production PER YEAR just to maintain their output. The decline rates for shale gas are no more encouraging: 79 to 95 percent depleted after three years according to a comprehensive survey of 65,000 oil and gas wells in 31 shale "plays". Shale natural gas and tight oil drillers face a task similar to climbing up a down escalator.

 "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Each must frequently replace enormous fractions of their current production, via enormous outlays of both money and energy, just to keep production from falling flat. A path to persistently rising global production of oil and gas, and the resulting low consumer prices for them, as we face our energy-constrained future, cannot be built on production from such fields. A fact staring us in the face as winter approaches and the output from both renewables and coal falters.

So while China takes measures to beef up its energy supplies, the US, scraping the bottom of the barrel of its own energy resources, is exporting them hand over fist to the energy-hungry Asians and Europeans, while my own little useless endeavor here shouts, "Stop the Steal!" only to land on, I would say deaf ears, but blind eyes would be more appropriate, although equally nonsensical, yet strangely enough, I think you get my drift, which ain't snow, blind or no.

What the US politicians and media, no matter how far left or how wrongly right, refuse to report on is the fact that the US is exporting the last of its fossil fuel legacy, well, not quite, "its legacy", as per, according to our blind adoption of self-destructive Vampire Capitalism, they are not "ours," as in US citizens', resources, at all. They are all in private  hands to be "played" with howsoever the Corponations see fit to play with them. And if that means exporting them all to China, excavating the last dregs of US energy resources from our own soil to deliver them over stormy seas to China to add them, at today's rockbottom prices, to their own Strategic Oil Reserves (while we deplete our own to cover private enterprises' failures), all while simultaneously blaming that same China for everything from Covid to Climate Change. This comes on the high heels of  our US-based corponationals positioning the People's Republic as the chokehold on every manufactured good necessary to run, not only our everyday lives, but our War Industry as well. Everything from semiconductors and drams, roms and rams to soldiers' uniforms and ammo are produced in the country we have increasingly singled out as our "enemy".

How smart is that?

You scream how China is our enemy, that Communism is Evil, and then you excavate your most precious resources, resources without which we cannot run our ever-increasingly energy-reliant economy, and deliver them to Communist China, the only nation in the world completely under the control of its Communist Party, while kowtowing to their demands for technology transfers from R&D, paid for by extorting money from US workers by claiming it was necessary, why?: to defend us from Communism.

How smart is that?  (Smartest Elephants in the Room: the Story of ENRON; now the story of the USA).

Luckily the vast majority of the US population is too befuddled to even make the connection.

Our disgraced ex-president likened the Covid crisis, for which he explicitly blamed China, as a War.

So, taking the big fat liar at his word, what does the US war machine offer its citizens to protect them from the virus manufactured by a Communist country in a time of War? KN-95 masks manufactured in China! A country which eschews standards control to enhance profits. Delivering to the US pet food that poisons pets, and to its own citizens, baby formula that poisons infants (it was adulterated with melamine to increase the nitrogen content of diluted milk, giving it the appearance of higher protein content so as to pass quality control testing, thereby making money for its manufacturers). It's akin to the USA, during WW1, buying gas masks manufactured by  BASF,  Bayer and IG Farben, the manufacturers of the poison gas choking its soldiers, and distributing them to combatants whose lives would depend on them, and expecting them to protect them, despite their being manufactured by the same country that the virus, I mean the gas, came from.  

How smart is that?

MAGA: Make American Gas Available ... to the rest of the world. So that when the fracking stopped (or was even curtailed, since then the US gas supply would contract disastrously), it would ensure fossil fuel manufacturers a bonanza while US corporations, such as Morgan Stanley, advises the richest of US citizens on how to "play" the gas price so as to profit from their fellow-countrymen's pain and suffering ... even unto death, as Texas so heartlessly demonstrated while its citizens froze and its fossil fuel industries rose in value despite catastrophic failure. To paraphrase Zippy the Pinhead, "Are we 'all in this together' yet?"

LAME. As in, Leak America's Methane Egregiously, was the ignored result of MAGA, and as Covid continues to result in the deaths of 2000 US citizens a day, even as we approach the one-year anniversary of the vaccines' release, survivors' gilt cages are beginning to lose their luster, as we put our trust in Chinese-manufactured masks to protect us from a (purportedly) Chinese-manufactured pandemic: masks that may well be as ineffectual at protecting us from actually contracting Covid as the vaccines have proven to be. Making the casualties much worse, since people think they're protected when they're not. Yet while the disappointment over the vaccines' inefficacy at stopping the virus' spread is loud and wrathful, criticism of the sale by Amazon of an inferior Chinese product that may well prove just as disappointingly ineffective are totally absent.

And that's how Amazon and China one-up even Wall St on "How to Play the Pandemic."

 

Looking into the Depths: "We're Fucked".

Lebanon looks like North Korea at night now. A dark smudge, a black hole in the glittering sky of twinkling stars. As we look into the future, it reflects a dark victory, that of fossil fuel's combustion lengthening the shadow extinguishing the same lights it made possible in the first place in this, the Twilight of our World.  No. The world isn't coming to an end ... just ours.

In an interview in Esquire in 2015, Michael Mann, he of the Hockey Stick fame, admitted to having the idea that, "We can solve this problem in a way that doesn't disrupt our lifestyle," subsequent to which he stated that,  "About once a year he has nightmares of earth becoming a very alien planet."

In these two sentences he capsulizes for me my problem with the worldview of the very scientists we are depending on to come up with solutions to our Climate Conundrum.

The view from space that shows North Korea swathed in darkness is not an anomaly. It is what the planet looks like everywhere there are not humans turning the earth into a very alien planet. Like most scientists, Mann objectifies the effects marshalling the output of scientific discoveries to our business environment has wrought as though they were inevitable outcomes. But sans mankind, the balance the climate had settled into would not be getting thrown out of whack. It is therefore quite plain to see that humanity, or our lack of it, is MAKING the earth a very alien planet ... it is not just "becoming" a very alien planet. Like an experiment in a petri dish, the earth is a closed environment. And as every scientist knows, if you sequester an organism in a closed environment and let it loose to replicate while feeding it (injecting exogenous energy into the system) without removing the waste products of its biological processes, the organism chokes to death in its own waste. That's how we make wine, after all. The alcohol being the waste product that kills off the organisms that are turning the sugars into intoxicating spirits.

How long we can run our own little experiment on ourselves and the array of other unfortunate, innocent creatures we have involved in out little mad caper is anyone's guess, but as anyone enjoying a bottle of wine can tell you, it lends to our existence a euphoria and sense of well being we will never experience without it, but they are illusory, and the consequence of our continued indulgence are legion. The end result in overindulgence, delirium tremens and death. 

Mann's resolve to dismiss, or even contemplate, solutions that don't disrupt our lifestyles is exactly why we have not only not moved forward, but via the election of  "The Blob" in the USA  in 2016, have gone decidedly backward, accelerating not only our own increases of GHG's but now adding, via feedbacks kicking in, those of Nature to an extent unseen in the short course of homo sapiens' existence.  (But feedbacks aren't only found in nature: Hydro-electric plants not producing electricity while temperatures soar well into the triple digits means more hydrocarbons burned to power A/C units, so more CO2 resulting in warmer weather, making for yet even more A/C demand, etc).

Included in the Esquire interview was Jason Box, the Arctic scientist who, upon seeing the extent of the leakage of methane from the Arctic Ocean exclaimed in an e-mail that went viral, "We're Fucked".

This type of emotional reaction to phenomenon was declaimed by Mann as well as other scientists as alarmist. Right. Hence the reaction, including:

"He was investigated, was denounced in Congress, got death threats, was accused of fraud, received white powder in the mail, and got thousands of e-mails with suggestions like, You should be "shot, quartered, and fed to the pigs along with your whole damn families." Conservative legal foundations pressured his university, a British journalist suggested the electric chair. In 2003, Senator James Inhofe's committee called him to testify, flanking him with two professional climate-change deniers, and in 2011 the committee threatened him with federal prosecution, along with sixteen other scientists."

That same year, The Blob running for the Presidency of the United Sates declared that, "Climate Change is a Hoax," yet none of the opprobrium heaped on the heads of men telling the truth was forthcoming. To this day his assertion is treated as though it were a joke told at a Cocktail Party instead of the justification used to withdraw from the useless Paris Accords, ramp up the fracturing of the continental plate for its oil to such a frenzy that the natural gas any geologist knew would be released from such an expansion, flared to the high heavens, and the ancillary activities of an oil boom would all accelerate the exhaust into the atmosphere of gigatonnes of additional CO2, yet, specifically because Climate Change Denial "doesn't disrupt our lifestyle," there was no denouncement of this "candidate" from Congress, no threats to shoot him, or feed him to pigs (they are cannibalistic, so they would certainly have eaten one of their own), nor was an electric chair installed in what his presence turned into the Offal Office.

Perhaps it escaped my notice, but I don't remember noticing climatologists taking any advocacy message to the streets, demonstrating for some policy action, nor lobbying Congress to bring legal sanctions against policies that would impact not only their own children but Life itself. Such passivity only gave credence to The Blob's insistence that Climate Change was Fake News. 

Au contraire, in no time at all Marco Rubio and other GOP clowns of his cowardly ilk were mouthing the same idiocy once it became apparent that far from being laughed off the stage he was being lauded for his courageous exposure of the fake news that gases released in a closed system could have any effect on the system's equilibrium, since such conjectures required thinking and stuff.

In that 2015 article, Jason Box insisted that:

"We need the deniers to get out of the way. They are risking everyone's future. ... The Koch Brothers are criminals. ... They should be charged with criminal activity because they're "putting the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people" ... "and even life on earth." 

Instead the United States put The Koch Brothers' hitman in charge of the most powerful nation on earth, bringing the repercussions of climate change right down to the present.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that The Blob and his cohort of criminals was an anomaly. And that's a mistake we are making in spades. But  if you parse Jason's statement, it amounts to little more than:

"They're putting the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people" ... and even life on earth." 

Well, if Covid has taught us nothing about pandemics, what it has taught us about Capitalism itself is that its putting profits ahead of people isn't a bug, it's a feature; it does so by design. Well, not "taught us" exactly. Anyone from Marx to Obama could tell you that it is the business of every Corponation on the face of the earth to "put the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people". That was the entire point of the Decade of Greed Reagan ushered in, the Great Clearance of the landowners in Scotland in the18'th Century, the granting to Amazon of a monopoly, the entire internet, if one gets right down to it, all "put the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people." Again. By Design. I mean that's just how Cowboy Capitalism works. No corponation has any moral, ethical, nor, (thanks to the USA and its elevation of the economics espoused by Milton Friedman into practice via the voodoo economics eventually dubbed, "Reaganomix"), legal responsibility to put the lives, never mind the livelihoods, of any mere human beings above their Corporate profits. Short term Corporate profits, no less ... If it can't be monetized, it doesn't matter. In the long term, whatever malfeasance Corponationals commit in the goosing of those profits will be forgotten or swept under the rug once the paucity of planning exposes them for the shell corponations they are, or they will get Nationalized (and then "spun off"), the billions their executives stuffed into their pockets, hidden in their shoes, their wives' handbags, their children's trust funds, all stashed away while the businesses they steered onto the reef drown in an ocean of debt. 

As the repercussions from the license to kill that has been granted to the Corposphere, get closer to home, we need look no further than the ratings agencies to get a glimpse of how the Conspiracy of Dunces works. They think they're the Smartest guys in the room, of course, so would bristle at that phrase, but the denouement their so-called smarts brings about shines a light onto how their minds work that reflects anything but intelligence: it shows a squalid monomaniacal mindset bent on one object, tasked with but one end result: the creation of specious wealth. If the Koch brothers are criminals, if they should indeed be charged with criminal activity because they're "putting the profits of their business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people," there is no getting around the fact that criminal activity, fossil fuels being the dominant industry on earth, is at the heart of Globalization, which has also been consciously, deliberately, designed to "put the profits of  business ahead of the livelihoods of millions of people." So that "the right people" will be getting larger dividend checks in direct proportion to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people being wrung out of their enterprises like so much dirty water from a wet mop. Cutting the fat from the bone as they like to so gruesomely refer to it.

As we saw during the last financial imbroglio, sitting at the heart of the beast are the ratings agencies, and they, not a one, went out of business during the crash their business of taking the money from the very entities they rate made inevitable. And they not only didn't go out of business, they were instrumental in getting us back to where we are today, where a Globalized world, full of countries laden down with sovereign debt, are rated AAA even as the ravages of climate change make any prognostications about their future viability as economic entities unpredictable.

The same entities that rated subprime mortgages as AAA investments are now saying the same thing about nations that have amassed mountains of debt with no idea, as they voice their intentions of dismantling the system that enabled them to convince investors they could pay that debt, nor paint any picture of how they intend to generate the income necessary to justify their impeccable ratings without the energy provided by hydrocarbon ignition. 

Yet, just as in the years leading up to 2008, there are those who already know that without the fossil fuels the world can't burn without destroying vast irreplaceable investments along their coasts, or without the predictable weather necessary to grow crops, or the confidence in their false promises of "turning the corner on Covid", etc, etc, there is not the slightest chance that the current mountain of liabilities can be honored, yet they are still rated as though it were in fact feasible ... and that's with continued burning. Without it, there is simply multiple Lehman, not moments, but decades. We are in fact, although no one will say it, "Damned if we do, and damned if we don't." 

Exactly as with Covid the ratings agencies, and the world in general, is betting that the "transition to a green, zero-emissions" economy will occur with nary a bump in the returns to investors, but, as with Covid, such thinking is delusory. In March 2020, while The Blob was exhorting his countrymen, who he had taken an oath to protect, to hop onto planes, and celebrate Easter in crowded churches with people singing hymns, and getting together to spread deadly virus among their family members, I was, contrarily, suggesting that yes, a percentage of the population would blindly walk into the deathtrap he was inviting them into so as to keep the economy and his re-election prospects strong, but the vast majority of people weren't going to be lining up to board Covid cruises, or rushing out to watch movies in Corona Cinemascope, nor flying off to visit far off lands that offer them a nice end in the ICU of a foreign hospital that their health insurance won't cover. So Tourism is dead. That takes with it the Hotel Industry, AIRBnB, taxis, restaurants, Museums, Airlines, etc. As effectively as the Internet killed the  travel agencies, destroying the livelihoods of millions of people for profit, Covid has killed the prospects of, if not their existence, the growth of every enterprise enumerated above. And in our modern heavily leveraged, insanely indebted Capitalism, no growth = collapse. Evergrande is but the first casualty. Covid is the proverbial iceberg against which the  unsinkable Capitalism has blindly run into by ignoring with impregnable arrogance every flashing warning sign.

All those Corporate businesses, snug in the assurance that the accommodating Fed would bail them out, had pared themselves to the bone and borrowed heavily to pay dividends, and the US government obligingly covered their asses. With never a downgrade to the ratings of the sovereign debt of the nation that will never be a Socialist country yet was assuming the liabilities of businesses guilty of, not bad corporate planning, but no corporate planning, swelling not only its fiscal deficit and its trade deficit, but its Central Bank liabilities as well, allowing them to balloon like a bloated corpse floating down yet another flooded street. 

By still pretending Climate Change is a Hoax, not only ratings agencies, but insurance companies and a multitude of other enterprises are planning their future as though they can base projected earnings from those of the past, but as these climate scientists, as well as the vast majority of thinking people realize,  it isn't happening in some far distant time, but NOW, with the result that future costs aren't reflected in current realities, but are based on the still unrelenting lies of a curmudgeon so besotted with his own celebrity that he left office in disgrace in a state of denial so profound he still can't accept even the possibility that it wasn't any miscount by election officials, nor any stuffed ballot boxes, but his own "It is what it is," in the face of hundreds of thousands of deaths that derailed his re-election prospects. And so he runs his Party like it's 2024 and the return of the King who will Make America Great Again ... you know, 'cause he did such a bang-up job the first time ... is all but assured.

Yet none of the climate scientists that I've read had anything specific to say about the Canadian Tar sands, or the fracturing of America and Russia that continues unabated. But they are comparable to Covid and the flu: Hydraulic fracturing is to Oil what Covid is to the flu. Everybody sits around and pretends that hydraulic fracturing is just one more method of petroleum extraction; while I, nobody me, keeps screaming, "No! It isn't; it's about the same as saying "Covid ... it's no different than the flu."

And the reason for that deafening silence is the same as enumerated above about fossil fuels in general, and oil in  particular, you take away the supplies of oil generated by the Climate Change-on-steroids fracturing represents, and the mountain of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives leveraged onto the back of continued fracking operations blows up as sky high as a volcano when the Canary singes. You'll need AAA to tow the piles of ash left from AAA securities going up in smoke away to the landfill ... or to the shoreline so they'll both disappear together, washing out in the rising tide.

Are Inflation Concerns Inflated?

There is perhaps no phrase better known by non-economists than the Uncle "Milton-the-Monster" Friedman's quip that "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". Yet somehow those actually employed by the financial "industry" and the reporters writing about it have apparently never heard it before. 

There's a reason for that.

What economists, and their co-conspirators - politicians - are counting on is that their fellow bedfellows, the MSM (as in mainstream media, an acronym we seldom hear this decade but that was ubiquitous during the last two) will keep doing the bang-up job of conflating inflation with the cost of living. But, taking the quoted Friedman truism (everything the theorists of Free Market Totalitarianism stated, until 2008, were undebatable facts, kowtowed to with a religious fervor and not to be argued with ... akin to Paula Krugman's Nanny-like scolding of anyone daring to dissent from his Krugmaniacal postulations) into consideration, they are two separate, albeit related, phenomena.

With the collapse of the fracturing industry's money-losing extravaganza, where investors' cash was pumped-and-dumped, via the printing extravaganza at the Fed that pumped a tsunami of funny-money into their bank accounts, until those speculators were wrung as dry as a two-year-old fracked well, the firehose of natural gas that had been spewing from those wells as alarmingly as conspiracy theories from a MAGAts mouth, has been truncated, leaving the cheap input into, not only the petrochemical industry and fertilizer production, but electricity production, as well, cut off at the knees. 

On the face of it, this isn't very surprising. After all, we have the Republican Party, a party in the thrall of rabid conspiracy theorists and radical insurrectionists, still being referred to, by that always late-to-the-party aforementioned MSM, as "Conservative", while their Democratic counterparts, whose president just today detailed the economic outlook for the country by abandoning the working class to instead focus on ensuring the success of the disastrously resource-hungry middle class, as "Liberal," abandoning the working class, which is made up of essential workers, laboring in sweatshop conditions, for under the cost-of-living wages with no health insurance, pension plan, or even, often, any sick leave. It's no wonder people don't know their left hand from their right any more. I mean, "What's left when the right is wrong?"

All that Natural Gas was not being produced to satisfy demand, but as a side-effect of the effort to squeeze the very last drop of oil from the North American hinterland. This burgeoning oil production was considered so vital to the Empire's continued rampage through Afghanistan et al, with more federal dollars being slathered over a nation thousands of miles away than the amount allocated to any of the States over which it actually exercised sovereignty, that the leader of one of its political parties went essentially unchallenged when he declaimed that, "Climate Change is a hoax." While his opposition, that spent the better part of two years trying to prove the unprovable, namely that Russians had "attacked" (as declaimed by Rachel Madcow, time after time, after time ... ) our elections (all while completely ignoring China's SCMP newspaper where, to this day, you can read verbatim most of the GOP's conspiracy theories, which, given their own lack of imagination, they pick up and propagate, via Fox and Fiends, all over the US airwaves, spreading Red Party propaganda far more effectively than China ever could) sat silently by while said acclamation resulted in the escalation of an already ruinous energy policy that has turned the country into a hellscape of weather-related repercussions.

Now, although hydraulic fracturing of the continent proceeds apace, that pace isn't close to the frantic rush to strip the continent of all its oil that reigned while the GOP still held the reins of power and could therefore siphon the resultant bonanza of cash into their own pockets, which would leave  the Dems high and dry in 2024 when that output would have passed its peak. That didn't pan out quite as they had planned. Which is why the GOP has gone even more ape-shit crazy than it did when Clinton's victory put a similar crimp in the well-laid-out plans of the nascent Bush Dynasty in '92.

Today, rig count goes up at a level concomitant with a plateauing of production, not a steady push for more more more, and that, when coupled with an environment wherein investors are actually demanding a return on their investment, the burgeoning gas production that is generated with each new drill bit sunk into the earth, isn't forthcoming when the industry's strategy is to collect the steady dribbling of oil that results from the millions of rigs and is collected to brighten our energy picture, but such output is then not complemented with any bonanza of Natural Gas. Instead, the gas that is produced is considered too paltry to justify the investment in infrastructure required to collect it and is therefore flared, or simply allowed to leak, into the atmosphere. The result of this egregious loss is that the natural gas available to produce electricity is thereby severely curtailed. That translates into a hike in its price. And since the majority of power plants in the country and around the developed world are now retooled to fire up only with gas, that in turn translates into higher prices around the globe for electricity. 

And this is where we get back to inflation. 

The higher price that electric generation is continuing to extract from the environment must of necessity be reflected in its cost. Because, like a triple helix, energy, environment and economics, are inextricably entwined in a tight embrace, one that, logically enough, impacts the cost to produce, and therefore the price, of yet another "e", Electricity.

In speaking of helices, a spiral necessarily comes to mind, and it is an inflationary spiral that is a danger to economies, not inflation per se. And what has economists fretting is the current strength of the working class, not the climb in energy prices alone, because without the necessary bargaining power, labor's demands would continue to be suppressed, and the wage part of the inflationary spiral curtailed. That was the case in the eighties. As what we are witnessing may well be a repeat of the oil crises of the  seventies, although, I suspect, without its geopolitical intensification (although the Nordstream pipeline could possibly play the part that the Oil Embargo once did). 

As the China bashing continues unaffected by the change in the Party in control of the White House, the young men and women of the country are left in ignorance of the machinations of Reagonomics that ruled the country in the decade of Greed it ushered in. No longer tasked with creating jobs, but destroying them, as that task was shuffled off to where it didn't, and doesn't, belong ... to the Fed. So that the executive branch could start the process of lopping off jobs from the economy and increasing the financialization of it, putting money, as the man who termed the phrase Voodoo Economics, Bush père, promised his fellow GOP'rs, "into the right hands." Those hands being those of the "job creators." The jobs they were creating however, weren't in the US ... they were in China ... and they counted in the millions. This broke the back of labor and broke the inflationary price/wage spiral that had dominated the economy and was coined stagflation. 

Now, although they are loathe to mention it, that stagflation had another facet to it, and that was the price of oil. Before the 70's, it was around $3/bbl. Ridiculously cheap. When the price of a resource that drives the economic engine increases by a factor of 6, problems ensue.

During WW2 the US and its allies "Rode to victory on a wave of oil" (nowadays we'd say "surfed", but that was said well before the Beach Boys (who weren't "boys" at all)), to quote Lord Overstone (who actually said it about WW1), and Keynesian economies around the globe, none more so than the US, strove to keep the black gold flowing so as to float their economies via a raft of oil production, and ward off recession from the collapse in the demand for their Merchants of Death production. One of the US strategies for this transition was Eisenhower's Interstate highway system which would cement the automobile into place as the mainstay of an economic boom using the Defense budget as its mainstay, a side effect of which was to strengthen the war-time Unions' grip on industrial Corporations, which forced them to continue to cover health insurance, offer employee pensions, paid leave, and other gimmees. 

Now, with the government as your customer, as anyone who reads this blog knows, the contractor supplying them uses a cost-plus approach, taking their percentage of profit no matter how much their end products overrun their initial costs estimates, enabling them to pay their investors dividend amounts that are amped by citizens' tax dollars: a direct infusion into those non-existent Miltonian "Free Markets" from every tax-paying citizen whether they own stocks or no, and most of us don't and didn't then. 

But this dynamic can't so simply be extrapolated onto the civilian economy where those union demands and shareholder dividends must now be actually accounted for by actual production numbers and profits that can't be jerry-rigged simply by squeezing a Congressman. Instead customer prices have to be raised. But when those customers are wage-earners, they must in turn demand higher wages, which means the products they produce are more expensive, which leads to more demands for higher wages, and thus you see how it can so easily spiral out of control. 

By moving those industries to low-to-practically-no wage platforms via FDI into Communist China, Industry not only broke the wage/price spiral, but eliminated the need to spend on R&D to clean up industrial processes and manage their waste in an environmentally sound manner. Win-win, n'est-ce pas?

This crashed the earning power of the labor force, then mainly made up of males, but the side effect of this Republican ruse destroyed the ability to maintain a single-provider household resulting in a burgeoning  in the number of females joining the workforce so they could maintain the standard of living that a single-paycheck was once able to provide, but that Reaganomix successfully destroyed. So even as its Moral Majority minority held sway over its Party Platform, and rabid anti Communists roiled the polity with red-baiting and never-ending demands for increases in "Defense" spending to "fight the Communist Menace" (but really to continue to pay the cost-plus demands of its greedy contractors), its economic policies surreptitiously undermined the very policies that brought it to power, lending aid to Corporations to move their operations to a one-Party Communist Regime for the express purpose of destroying the bargaining power of unionized Labor, forcing women to join the workforce in numbers greater than during War time, making stay-at-home Moms practically obsolete.

If you wonder how the GOP can come up with and support the most outlandish conspiracy theories ever dreamed up, it may well be because that is what their party does, they mouth pabulum their constituents want to hear, while enacting economic policies that are in complete contradiction to their stated objectives ... over and over again, knowing full well their ill-educated masses will never grasp the connection, while the feckless opposition party sits silent.  

Thus it should come as no surprise that all of a sudden inflation is of such concern to a GOP that sowed its seeds. But the permanent rise in energy prices is not inflation, it is a reflection of those market dynamics the Red Party is so enamored of. As the environmental costs that the energy industries have historically sloughed off become too onerous for the environment to absorb, the costs don't simply evaporate like the former President's copious amounts of hairspray (he's bragged to his adoring, cheering fans that he used the aerosol sprays, caring not a jot what effect it has on the ozone layer).

Not to say that this in any way implies that I understand how this will ripple through the economic system, nor what effects it will have on our lives, other than make them an order of magnitude costlier. All I mean to emphasize is that the way in which their bandying about the term inflation has nothing to do with what their Hero, Milton Freidman, described it as (that hero being the architect of the Voodoo economics that precipitated not only the crash of the Savings and Loan industry in the eighties, but the crash of 1987, 1998, 2000, and the onset of the 2008 Depression from which we have yet to extricate ourselves). And no, although you will still, thirteen years later, hear economists say that we had not yet recovered from the Financial Crisis when Covid struck a body blow to economic output, crises, by their nature, are short-lived; otherwise it's not a crisis, it's the new normal ... much like the Climate Crisis. Which is not a crisis either, nor is it an emergency, it is our new normal. And the economy in a perma-depression is the new economic normal, and, if you believe that economics, energy, and the environment are as inextricably entwined as I do, then energy now predictably takes a hit in that its costs, going into the future, must now be absorbed, not by the environment, but by the economy, which must therefore increase the price its consumers bear for, well, consuming it.

That, to my understanding, is not inflation. That is a permanent increase in the cost. One that will of necessity ripple through the entire economy.

And That's what Friedman meant: price is a monetary phenomenon, whereas cost is intrinsic.

Even as costs escalate, which they have been doing, price can either be purposely manipulated, as in outright gov't subsidies to consumers, or become unhinged from them (in either direction) such that a gallon of gas can still, in the South, and Texas in particular, sell for less than $2/gallon. Because the real costs, the actual environmental costs associated with flaring a non-renewable energy source straight into the atmosphere, are not paid by those incurring them, so they can pass on those savings to their customers. The costs, of course, are absorbed by the rest of us, being, as we are, despite our penchant to deny it, part of the natural environment.

But whereas before the burden of those environmental costs were sustained by others, such as Pacific islanders whose geography is disappearing under rising seas, the costs are more and more being borne by the very customers who are saving money via low prices at the pump. When you have Shell Oil burdening its shareholders with CSS technology that will do nothing to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to change the constant search for a new equilibrium the earth's systems are climatologically engaged in, Shell Oil will do what Corponations do, what they are in business to do, they will shift that investment burden from the shoulders of its shareholders, where it belongs, onto those of its customers, by raising prices and thereby profits and shareholders' dividends. 

This paradigm shift in the dynamic of Corponational malfeasance is in full display in the Texas Electric outage that left its citizens freezing to death in their homes. The costs of the outage, and the subsequent outlay to insulate equipment against the inevitable recurrence, are borne by their ratepayers not by the utilities on whose books they belong, they simply, with the full blessing of the bought Governor Abbott, palmed off onto their customers the Capital outlay costs that should be borne be investors.   

That is my rambling explanation for why we hear nothing, not a word, about inflation being a monetary phenomenon. Prices and costs have been so separated from each other, in an economy that subjects to the whip anyone else in the world who doesn't adopt its Market-based system wherein those two gel, because nobody has remove the punch bowl just as the Red Party got started. So in many ways the USA resembles the sclerotic USSR far more than it does today's Mother Russia, which is a better example of an economy that lets the oligarchs rule and the polity languish in declining living standards and political repression. This state of affairs the GOP has wet dreams of replicating. (Yes, Rachel, that's right. They emulate Russia; but that's not a crime). 

Because America will ALWAYS be a Socialist Nation. That is, after all, what a Democracy is.

  

Adamant Eve of Creative Destruction: The Great Clearance.

Lebensraum. 

A naked field stretches off into the hazy horizon. Field after empty field awaits the tiny germ of life an industrial combine will drop into its fossil-fuel-charged soil. Even at this most basic level, the utter destructiveness of Capitalism lies fallow before our eyes; but they are eyes that cannot see. The only green the stewards of the soil are concerned about is that of the greenback, and that will be all the greenery that's left after another year leaves these fields in the same state they are in now: barren, lifeless stretches of land stripped bare, left bereft of its beauty, its flora and fauna, its humanity. An ugly scar of industrialized wasteland as inimical to life as a Superfund site. Except this one was made that way purposely as part of the plan for its exploitation, as what was once called farming has morphed into just another extraction industry. Take the money and run. 

The 20'th anniversary of 9/11 has passed. Yet the somber remembrance brought no dark whispers of blowback or how we did everything wrong in reaction to it, but we've learned no lessons from what the consequences of our own behavior had wrought. Somehow the nation that decreed Greed as its only measure of success, a nation that spurned its own much-ballyhooed religious "beliefs" in order to do so, still kicks around the term War on Terror (Terror, like Bush's "Shock and Awe", needn't actually kill; it's intention is to create Fear, whereas War has killing as its centerpiece, the Main Event, so a War on terror is akin to letting loose a murderous mob on a threatening neighbor. You could more accurately have called the Cold War a War on Terror, but the Bush wars were anything but cold, unless you mean cold-hearted. Killing and looting were their main components, it's just that the looting part was done on its own citizens ... like father, like son). All the so-called Christian virtues of compassion, empathy and forgiveness were nowhere to be found. How could they be, they had lain buried so deep for so long? We would hear nothing of Justice. We were too thirsty for revenge: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if you can't use it to obliterate shithole countries every now and then?"

Because Greed is the love of Money, and that love is the root of all Evil. Not Muslims, or Afghans, not Iraqi's nor Iranians. None of these cultures, for all their flaws, arrogantly wave a flag of Evil in the face of the world while claiming they are humanity's exceptional nation. It is only the USA that unabashedly thumbs its nose or crushes into the dirt anything that hopes to preserve anything of beauty and wildness in the world, preferring utter despoliation and ruin, since that's what it takes to squeeze every last cent of profit, no matter what the cost, which every year gets higher: after all, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

Adopting Greed as its mantra while claiming to be a Christian nation, means that it is not possible to deny the knowledge that the love of money is the source of all Evil, and that the Evil Empire, is therefore, by our own definition, The United States of America. Whether I myself believe that, as people say when I point this out to them, is not exactly the point, is it? What this blog proves more than anything is that what I think has no impact on the world whatsoever, so what difference does it make what I think? None. What I believe doesn't matter; but what the world believes does. And an Empire of greed, which is how America sees and sells itself as, is, by definition, an Evil Empire. And by definition, I mean specifically by definition of the "Christian" bible in which it is stated that Greed, the love of money (and a deadly sin to boot), is the source of all Evil. The year 2001 was the 20'th anniversary of America's election of the President that declared the United States was an Empire of Greed, or leastways, made it plain to its own citizens and the rest of the world, that Greed, sometimes euphemized as "animal spirits" was forthwith to be the sole ruler of its barbaric heart: Greed is god, I mean good. Except everyone knows that it isn't. Even us. Perhaps especially us. After all, no other country delivers a a bible belt in the mouth to those who disagree with it. But we do.

At its heart, Evil is about loss. So there should be no surprise that the USA is the champion of Disaster Capitalism, the economic system whose most fervent acolytes can think of no better selling point for it than to boast of its incomparable powers of Destruction. They prettify it a bit, calling it "creative" destruction, but as the empty field, devoid of any life for as far as the eye can see, is testament to, the destructive element of Capitalism is what drives it, what gives it its force, mowing down everything in its path so all other choices are destroyed, then presenting the clean slate on which they're "Free" to sketch out a vision of total domination and relentless extraction: an overwhelmingly negative force of ecological destruction, one which controls us when we should be controlling it; this is what we have loosed upon the world and forced it, via Blut und Stahl unmatched in the history of mankind, down the throat of every country, indigenous tribe, or other holdout. Those excoriated few who are living a life that doesn't promise but a bit of ease, (which promise is more often than not reneged on), in return for their total acquiescence to the rest of the living environment's complete annihilation. Blind to the fact that we need the earth, (dreams of space "conquest" notwithstanding: the idea that we can conquer space, which is time, is illustrative of how deeply our delusional thinking is embedded in our psyche) whereas the Earth has no need of us; we are gleefully ripping to shreds the fabric of existence to wrap our tender parts in silk underwear.

China's Evergrande's  investors shout, "Give us our money back!" To which Evergrande retorts, "What makes you think it's YOUR money?" It's in OUR possession, and possession is 9/10's of the law. You wanted Capitalism, well, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. 

I believe Marx stated that capitalism has the seeds of its own destruction sewn into it (with golden thread and silver needles). Many have said he's been proven wrong. Maybe. But I guess that's because he had it a little confused. At some point, capitalism can destroy itself, but our vicious form of Vampire Capitalism will destroy Nature first, and while our capitalist engine of destruction is steamrolling over Nature, our being a part of nature, no matter how much we like to deny that painfully obvious fact,  means that our proverbial goose will thus be cooked (as it turns out, quite literally). Then Marx will have been proven to be right. But who hears screaming trees in a forest fire?

USA's War Against The Climate: Greed kills.

There is a conspiracy of complacency around the world in which they still imagine that if we do a few minor things, minor adjustments and reduce our carbon dioxide emissions, then all will be well. But, it won’t; because we’ve already got too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And the rate at which the fracking giants, the US and Russia are leaking methane into the Arctic, including from the no-longer perma-frosted soils of Alaska and Siberia, The War Against the Climate the two countries are successfully waging is the first War either country has shown even the remotest sign of winning since their successful joint effort in WW2, that being, not coincidentally, the high point of each of the two wanna-be's Empires stature. 

"We’re already going to have more than 2C degrees of warming even if we don’t emit anymore because of the already existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So, we’ve got to not only stop emitting it or reducing it, reducing emissions, but find ways to take it out of the atmosphere, and that’s a technology that hasn’t been developed.” 

Notwithstanding Iceland's rather pathetic CSS experiment. 

Airstrike capitalism - also known as Reaganomics/Thatcherism/ - once our new religion, despite its massive failure, is still the USA's driving force and we remain just as fundamentalist about it as the Taliban are about Islam.  

So instead of nurturing the carbon sequestration regimes in place: rainforests, we, as in mankind, or, more specifically, the G-20 nations whose policies decide how the world is organized, started razing them to the ground to "grow" fuel, caring not a whit that the resultant CO2 such an endeavor would pour in to the atmosphere would wreak havoc with the world's weather and guarantee a future climate inimical to their own children's well-being. And not just economies' well-being:

“Methane gas oxidizes in the atmosphere first to a transitory toxic substance call methanol and then moves to formaldehyde and water vapor. Both are very dangerous gases, because formaldehyde (Formaldehyde (HCHO) is one of the heaviest gases out there, and it is the product of methane oxidation at high levels. As levels go higher it can cause hypothermia, asphyxiation, and ultimately acidosis, which literally eats you from the inside out.”  (This description matches what scientists have been describing in almost all cases where birds, geese, bats and other small animals have died mysteriously). Methane is toxic, and water vapor traps heat.” Silverthorne cites a report published in Science Daily, about methane levels increasing by 27 million tons in 2007 (European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). formaldehyde does not smell until it reaches 3ppm. Studies made in Brazil -one of the location affected by mass fish death- revealed that concentrations as low as 1.25 ppm, well below the countries legal limit, caused breath impairment.  Other studies completed earlier than the one in Brazil, determined that formaldehyde in water reduces oxygen levels. 

Methane's increase in its atmospheric composition grows at the precise rate that the drilling rigs fracturing the earth's surface grow, which in turn follow their own parallel path alongside the growth in the world's energy consumption. What you will never see enumerated is the fact that, as fast as the alternative energy generation technologies contribution to the energy mix increases, the world's overall energy use continues to grow even faster. 

Climate change has a progressive effect, slowly working throughout the world. But, all of the slowness is building up to a big change. Moreover, by the time anomalous weather patterns disrupt agriculture, causing worldwide starvation, it’ll be too late to do anything. We all know this. Unfortunately, global inertia is the problem. “The forces of inertia are so enormous … the use of fossil fuel is so built into our society, that everything in life, now including the vast destruction occurring from out-of-control wildfires and flooding, results from burning fossil fuels.” 

But we all already know that, too, don't we?

The biggest problem, though, our Green tech enthusiasts wish to, or wish you, to ignore, is waste. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), a San Francisco-based non-profit, has been tracking the waste created by solar panel manufacturers since 1982, and reports a disturbing upward trend in the amounts being generated annually. But that's no problem ... simply do with solar panel production what you've done with every toxic waste-producing manufacturing process: move it to China! They welcome poisoning of their workers for their Leaders' prosperity. It's the only country in the world where that's the entire underpinning of their economy: poison the masses, if they dare complain, (they don't ... they are so used to doing exactly as ordered  they make sheep look like rebels) "Reeducate" them. Solar panel makers in China can simply dump silicon tetrachloride on fields near their factories, yet, not to be outdone by a mere civilian industry, USA Merchants of Death stoked by the Pentagon, the deadly heart beating at the center of weapons manufactory, are the real champions of waste, especially radioactive waste, as the bomb-makers tolerate no limits to their perfidy:

The production, maintenance, and modernization of nuclear weapons are sources of super profits for what is, in essence, a cartel. One that doesn't receive any notice anywhere in the Green New Deal, which by its omission, leaves the entire military industrial complex intact, and with it, the onerous taxes necessary to maintain and expand it (it's never large enough). The business model these so-called "enterprises" but actually cartels, employ  is “cost-plus.” That means that no matter how high cost overruns may be compared to original bids, contractors receive a guaranteed profit percentage above their costs. These include a series of familiar Corpornations: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, GenCorp Aerojet, Huntington Ingalls, and Lockheed Martin. In other areas like nuclear design and production, the names at the top of the list will be less well known: Babcock & Wilcox, Bechtel, Honeywell International, and URS Corporation. When it comes to nuclear weapons testing and maintenance, contractors include Aecom, Flour, Jacobs Engineering, and SAIC; missile targeting and guidance firms include Alliant Techsystems and Rockwell Collins.

To name a few.

“The markets in China now are not really markets,” Donald Straszheim, head of China research at New York-based Evercore ISI, said on Bloomberg Television. “They are government operations.” 

(After reading the above paragraph, can you explain how that differs from here, having read the paragraph above that?) In both countries, it is the wealth of the billionaire Keptocracy that is protected, at the expense of actual workers, who must earn it while the elite burn it: literally in front of our face as they rocket up into the atmosphere on useless joyrides even while wildfires burn all over the globe; they can't resist adding their own polluted exhaust to an atmosphere already besotted with it. Money to burn money to burn, we get it from daddy, so we don't have to earn.

“They are government operations”:

Much of the responsibility for nuclear weapons development, production, and maintenance lies not with the Pentagon but the Department of Energy (DOE), which spends (and by spends, they mean lards Corponations' balance sheets with, they even have an acronym for them, so-called GOCO sites (“government owned, contractor operated”) more on nuclear weapons than it does on developing sustainable energy sources.  

Efficiency in production, the process whereby all backup and redundancies are destroyed in the name of a fast profit, needs to be replaced by equality of distribution as the goal of our national efforts. But, of course, that will never, even in the face of a crippling pandemic and horrendous climate destruction, making money purely for the sake of amassing wealth with no plan for its investment other than to amass yet more wealth into the hands of those who haven't a clue as to what to do with what they already have, is so deeply entrenched into the Reagonomic culture of greed that persists in no place more than New York City, its largest cheerleader, the City that gave us a con artist and serial bankrupt for a President:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Ida caused more than $50m in damage in that state after the storm’s record-breaking rainfall of 7.8cm (3.1 inches) per hour on Wednesday.

"The difference today is that the entire supply chain has been battered even before Ida’s occurrence."

 It wasn't "battered," it's been systematically deconstructed to replace resilience with "efficiency", ie to put quick profits ahead of robust construction. And the center of that impetus to squeeze every last quarter of a cent of resiliency out of the supply chain, forcing JIT rules down the throat of every manufacturer that's a link in that chain was NEWYORK City's Wall St.

 Climate Battle

Just another phrase in the unending spate of idiotic references to mankind's drive to destroy the Blue dot's ability to sustain life that the NYT has proliferated, referring to what is but a skirmish in the Climate War the West, spearheaded by NYC, has been waging on the world, a veritable War of Error in which those who don't take a knee in homage to the mantra that "There is no such thing as society," are subjected to crushing unilateral sanctions designed to cripple their economy.

"We’ve done a less good job of thinking about water coming from the sky."

Ahem. I believe they call that "rain".

The entity that thinks it's capable of ruling the entire globe, never thought of following the simplest of maxims, one that's known even to school children, to prepare for a rainy day:

"Starting at about a tenth of an inch of rain per hour, rainfall exceeds the system’s capacity." 

So in a city boasting the most expensive real estate in the United Sates of America, a mere tenth of an inch of rain overwhelms the system's capacity. If we discount everything else this pathetic number suggests, what we must come to realize is that the financial Center of the country in the forefront of waging a Climate War against the rest of the world has left its highly inflated property values, the most widely held and overpriced asset in the country, one that is used as leverage for countless securitized loans held by the banks around the world is left defenseless against the onslaught of the most predictable of weather events: a tenth of an inch of rain.

Their plan? More word soup:  Environmental Justice, climate watchers, stormwater resiliency. Because 

"This kind of radical change in weather (rain greater than a tenth of an inch) is beyond the understanding of our typical measuring tools,” (or should that be "fools"?)

Boasting, "the largest green infrastructure program in the country," according to the DEP’s (Dept of Environmental Protection) Timbers claims it includes small “rain gardens,” also known as bioswales, designed to absorb excess rainwater on city streets and other public spaces. Apparently the fact that it did nothing to allay the flooding means nothing to Timbers. Perhaps protecting the City from the environment should be someone's job now instead of the other way around. However, in a world of word soup where words are simply thrown together because they produce the desired somnambulance in the population, we should ask ourselves what exactly is "Green infrastructure"? In the NYT, in an article by Brad Plumer, the question was asked, "How Green are Electric Cars?" The answer to which was supplied: "Very Green." Following this logic, wherein a vehicle that's made with more than a ton and a half of plastic is considered "Very Green," a parking garage for electric vehicles would necessarily be included under the rubric of "green infrastructure," so it's little wonder that the city with, "the largest green infrastructure program in the country," is subject to flooding should a tenth of an inch/hr of rain fall onto its paved surface.

Their plan? Same as the old plan:

"Water is our wildfires, (until the wildfires erupt there).  When Congress passes a federal infrastructure bill, New York City would be poised to receive an influx of funds."

So the richest City in the country with the richest, most affluent tax base in the world, has as its plan to use the Federal government to force the rest of the country to pay for their upkeep. The city that houses the Wall St criminals that have eviscerated the "flyover" states' ability to provide jobs to their citizenry because they found it more profitable to abandon their industries and move them to a Communist regime, together with the technology that those citizens' taxes paid to develop, are now to have their income siphoned off by federal taxation to funnel them, once again, into the coffers of that City of Criminals, New York. Precious resources picked from pockets, leaving them defenseless to face the ravages of climate change-fueled disasters of their own, to waste on nonsense projects like "Green Infrastructure", which, evidenced by the fact that, as stated above, with the largest GI tract in the world, is still incapable of stopping disastrous flooding.  

 "It will be a race against time.” 

WILL be!? It IS a race against time, and the New York-blessed marriage of Washington and Wall St, once referred to as The Washington Consensus, and enforced by NeoCon Empiricists bent on creating an arc of instability to fuel, via forever Wars, US hegemony, fired the starting pistol.

Because of New York City, more than any other place in the world, Disaster Capitalism reigns. Yet when it rains disaster on NYC, the rest of the country is supposed to sit silent and pay up to make the city that bequeathed on it Donald Trump as its President, rainproof. Wow.  If that don't beat all for standing, sitting or running gall.

And the built environment that Disaster Capitalism has bequeathed on us isn't something we can simply decide to live without, as a flood of Capital, like a flood of rain, destroys everything in its path:

In 2005 the container fleet in total was under 2,000 vessels, the largest vessel capacity was 11,078 TEU with a Deadweight (dwt) value of 115,700 tonnes. By the close of 2020 it had rocketed to 5,234 vessels, with some boasting a capacity of 23,964 TEU and 232,606 dwt. This has driven overall Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) by 42%, from 44K TEU in 2005 to 8.82 million TEU in 2020. Various factors have driven the growth, notably economies of scale vs transportation costs, a dominant Asia Europe trade lane fuelling enough cargo, and fierce competition amongst owners. All have played into the burgeoning desire for more of what have become known as ‘mega’ container ships.”

You know, like the one that blocked the Suez canal. These monstrosities are sitting in blocked ports around the world as idle as the equally-absurd-sized Cruise Liners. What they have in common is that monies invested in their construction maintenance and deployment means (borrowed) monies that have been taken away from alternatives, which then go bankrupt and disappear. Resiliency is squeezed out in the name of profits from every aspect of the Globaloney Economy, and replaced with mountains of debt as colossal as the behemoths plying the oceans' waves burning highly polluting bunker fuel all along the way.  All fueled by  the Fed and the ECB, along with their subordinate's Central Banks that must follow suit. Which is a direct connection to:

The accelerated drop in homeownership rates. One that coincides with a sharp increase in home prices. An easy enough concept to understand, no? Yet the equally obvious observation that, "The accelerated rise in homelessness rates coincides with a sharp increase in home prices" is somehow overlooked. Perhaps because it makes it far too obvious that it is the Fed's asset acquisition programs, the ones keeping those NYC properties at such nosebleed valuations that far exceed their worth, especially given that their security has been left at the complete mercy of the fossil fuel-stoked elements, that are directly responsible for the rise in homelessness, and the billionaire class would rather keep the polity in the befuddled state they too seem to prefer to be in:

Since 2012, private equity firms bought several hundred thousand vacant single-family homes, from the Fed who used taxpayer-supplied funds to buy them at rock-bottom prices, in key markets, then further conspired with the Fed to drive up prices in the process, and started to rent them out. REIT cred.

Our society has been very well trained to turn two blind eyes to the big picture, and to simply spend their time and energies only on their own pursuit of personal pleasures. If this paradigm is not overturned, and people do not choose to stand and face the challenges closing in on us, we will have no chance. Ergo, we have no chance.

For, far from retooling, and building green infrastructure, the very city that is now frothing at the mouth for the rest of the country to pay to protect it from the ravages of the monster they have loosed on the rest of us, Wall ST, in the heart of the city that prospers only when Wall St prospers, has been funneling money, via pump and dump schemes and QE dollars, for at least the last fifteen years, trillions of investment dollars, most of them generating losses for their investors but billions for Wall St, the fracturing tsunami of millions of barrels of oil/day keeps the US balance of payments from total collapse, while warming cold hearts by lighting a Bonfire of the Vanities, igniting billions of cubic feet of  natural gas and flaring it into the atmosphere:

Countries (or states, such as Texas) that rely on black gold for revenue necessarily come to represent the interests of petroleum extractors. Cursed by oil, they become more belligerent and thumb their noses at international institutions. Terry Lynn Karl, who wrote that "Oil revenues are the catalyst for a chronic tendency of the state to become "overextended, over-centralized and captured by special interests." That is Texas to a "T", the Loan Tarsands State, although not so much as "captured" as "sold out to," and Trump's vision of the USA, making a nation of petroleurs, turning the country into a petro-State that is little more than a brigand, with Texas flaring so much of a natural energy-rich resource that its citizens are left freezing to death, their overabundance of natural resources sold for a pittance via LNG terminals that whisk the natural gas out of their state to sell to the highest bidder overseas while their own rates skyrocket from contractual scams that rob even their children of their earnings before they've even received them. The poor fossil fools, for them there will be no Freedom Molecules. 

“Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful — horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame.” (Well, no worries there, we have no shame).

— From the demon Screwtape, in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

See the common element to these lies: they arouse our fear. Why does fear have such an effect on us, despite officials' long history of lying to us about threats? How do you describe people ruled by their fears? We call them cowards. It’s the description of us that none of us dare say. Yet, together with greed, it is the entire basis of the Disaster Capitalist economic system we insist that every country in the world need adopt, or like Venezuela, or poor Cuba, we will unilaterally destroy them ... for absolutely no other reason, nor need we have one, for no other nation dare even question our right to do so. Their own internalized Fear and Greed (FaG) guarantees they will never do so.

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has  predicted a 5-degree Celsius increase by 2100 as its worst-case scenario." 

But they never took into account methane ... at all, nor NO2, neither did they predict that, far from reducing our combustion of fossil fuels we would dramatically increase them in every country around the globe ... every single one, or as they seem to prefer these daze: Every. Single. One. 

Luckily, though, if all the promises made by all the nations of the world to cut their carbon emissions are kept, the Earth will only heat up another 6° Fahrenheit. We don't care, we don't have to; we'll be gone by that point. No worries. According to the supernaturalists, who by virtue of their "religion", insist that this life is but a blip in our immortal existence, so why sweat it? Their new motto?:

Shut up and die, because WE believe in a truth that's a lie.

Little molecules of CO2 and a virus that's little more than the flu, are just god's gift to get closer to you.

"Hence, it is impossible to conceive of any credible (and no, the feckless "Green New Deal" doesn't count) scenario in which the mass die-off of billions of people will not occur in this century."

So if you're wondering why the pandemic is being handled so badly all around the world, you should remember that every single policy maker in every country knows this to be true. Extreme (well, what is rapidly becoming the normal) weather is now a greater direct cause of displacement and death than even the terrible racket of warfare.

The new normal is that there is no longer any "normal." People should understand that the planet's climate has not only changed, it’s still changing. No new normal is able to last because we continue to pump climate-changing gases into the atmosphere at an accelerating rate. Hence, it can never reach an equilibrium. And equilibrium is what climate and weather are all about: stasis and entropy rule the flow of air, commonly referred to as the wind, so as carbon continues its rise in its percentage of the composition of the atmosphere, geological-scale processes will eventually come to bear to pull it out and sequester it. Eventually. In geologic time. Not in our time, though. Sorry Iceland. Our time is close to being over. No one knows why the world sequesters carbon, thereby making life possible, we only know it has done this since the beginning of time, and excavating it and setting it aflame is exactly what one would do if one were bent on worldwide climate chaos. Exactly what the religions of the world are all agreed on stoking to further their own Creator myth's fairy tale. One that not even their children believe.

"The real issue is whether the country is controlled by its aristocracy (a dictatorship), or instead by its public (its residents). Let’s be frank and honest: an aristocratically controlled government is a dictatorship, regardless of whether that “aristocracy” is in fascist Italy, or in Nazi Germany, or in Communist USSR, or in North Korea, or in the United States of America."

For the last forty years, mind you, America, with NYC as its main driving force, has been moved steadily along an easily defined trajectory. We’ve moved step by step toward more political and economic inequality, with NY-based Wall St. leading the way to making us a petro-state, there's now more political corruption, more impoverishment, more malign neglect toward the national infrastructure, and more environmental "disruption" (disruption? So apparently, now "disruption " is synonymous with "unalterable destruction"), along with a steady decline in literacy and a rolling collapse in public health (among other equally grim trends). 

There is a bizarre divergence between this newborn eagerness of the mainstream to talk about the "Climate Battle" (whatever that means) and their utter unwillingness to talk about peak oil despite the fact that the entire economy is now skewered to pour resources into energy production, specifically fossil fuel energy production, which is what fracking, about which there is a complete silence from every media outlet. Yet if it were not for peak oil, there would BE no hydraulic fracturing, as it is energetically, environmentally and economically ruinous. It is only in an environment where all other sources of petroleum have been squandered, that hydraulic fracturing is even taken under serious consideration.

So one must tease out for oneself the reason for such a loud silence on what is the most important subject for future planning. And what then becomes glaringly obvious is that the end of the era of cheap and abundant energy means that something's gotta give. Yet the one thing that is also glaringly obvious is that what that one thing must be is the ubiquity of cars and the impossibility of living in our built environment, the one we designed for a world run for automobiles that is now gone, is the one thing that no politician anywhere, not just in the USA, but anywhere, has the stomach to address. Never mind the intelligence to devise a solution. But we have to change, because this blue dot in the vast emptiness of cold, dark space that we call home doesn't contain the resources that would be needed even to keep things going the way they were going in the past. So, given that, how the hell is it even remotely feasible that we will not only keep doing that, but also build on top of it an entirely new infrastructure capable of electrifying a billion vehicles that have yet to be built in order to reach a point somewhere decades hence where we will finally be exactly where we were, not today, as right now our situation is dire, but a generation ago, only to end up back here, with nothing different than a new drive train in our vehicles and a different, more energy-intensive overlay to keep those vehicles moving? Vehicles that, in a world that consistently floods our roadways, are to be powered by electric batteries that, when even slightly damaged, can rapidly discharge their stored energy in the form of heat, leading to an inferno. And the bigger the battery, the bigger the fire. And EV's the size of SUV's, the only vehicles Americans care to purchase, necessarily have a giant battery pack, so if the car suffers sufficiently severe impact, it  goes up in flames—as plenty of Tesla incidents, that have taken excess of 10,000 gallons of water to extinguish, have illustrated.

That's their plan for your future. Even as floods roar across highways, fill up car-packed tunnels and inundate city streets tossing multi-ton vehicles around like they're Tonka toys, the push to replace ICE machines with what are basically chemical weapons of mass destruction proceeds unabated. Goes forward as though we are ignorant of the future calamity we are hiding from sight under the hood.

It is because we have no answers to these questions that they are never allowed to enter the public discourse. On one of the ubiquitous cop shows that play ad nauseum on American TV, an officer advising a younger member of the police force tells him a secret, "Never ask a question you don't already know the answer to." That is the state of reportage in the country today. And since no one knows the answers, no one ever dares, being ruled by fear, as we all are, to pose the questions that society actually needs to have answered. While, not to be outdone, society never complains about this sorry state of affairs, because we don't want to hear answers we don't know how to deal with, specifically, answers that will threaten our own privileged status of flying around on our asses safely ensconced in our flying car pets.

When I first read the following, I thought it was written by the Evangelical pastors supporting the Presidency of The Blob:

"Not contentment, but more power, not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency. The weak and poorly formed shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice?  Active sympathy for the poorly formed and the weak— Christianity."

But it's from Friedrich Nietzsche's Der Antichrist, (1895).

I knew what they were calling "Christianity" these days had nothing to do with anything I've ever read in the bible about Christ, but I had no idea there was an actual formula they were following, nor that it was specifically called "The Antichrist."

American industrial infrastructure, which was progressively shifted to colonies and/or vassals, as well as to China, has left us with no expertise, as expertise is the province of Labor, not Capital, which can only buy it. We have watched as Wall St and the City that hosts it have changed the rules, turning an economy built via Industrialization into an economy of financialization. But having Banks and other financial institutions as "the backbone of the economy", means, since all bankers are spineless, that the economy no longer has a backbone. It is structurally set up to fail, held up only by rickety institutions that have been deemed TBTF to reassure the leery. But that means, not that they are indeed too big to fail, we already know that's not true, as each and every one of them already did fail in 2008, (and are still in operation today, not because of the brilliance of bankers, but because of the deep pockets, that would be yours, of the Federal government), but that when they do fail, and no one doubts they will, they will bring the entire edifice down with them; while all those bankers will flee to the safehavens they've stashed their stolen goods in, leaving the rest of us holding the bag. And that bag will be stuffed with IOU's that they have made in our name. You see, to them it's always just been another hand of Liar's Poker. But for the rest of us, it'll be Game Over. 

To Rein in the Rain's Reign, Halt the Flair to Flare.

 

Twenty tons in one Driveway.

Correlation does not = causation. A truism used to counter you-haven't-got-a-cluism. Okay. I get it. But isn't the opposite true as well? Isn't it possible that not correlating events that occur at the same time, at least in order to disprove that their simultaneity is related, can be just as clueless? That being blind to what's happening right in front of your eyes is perhaps simply denial? Waiting to be bit in the ass before you admit reality bites? 

Last May an equivalent to a Cat4 hurricane came ashore in India and inundated its West coast, yet the rain totals in India from that Cat4 major Hurricane dropped less rain than a storm system in the US Southeast that  measured 21" of precipitation. That means that a good three inches more rain than the heaviest rainfall from Cyclone Tauktae had dropped, has already fallen in parts of Texas and Louisiana, the two hardest hit States in the US.

What's the correlation?

The oil being produced by the escalation of fracturing the earth in Texas' Permian basin does not stay in the US, whose refineries are not tooled to process the light crude that is being wrested from the tight oil formations of the Permian. Contracted to be shipped to Iranian refineries during the Obama/Biden administration, the CEO of Exxon, (the company that has the largest presence in the Permian, having bought up all the companies that went bankrupt, leaving their investors with enormous losses (deductible from their income taxes, meaning the fracturing of the Permian is largely federally subsidized)), Rex Tillerson was made Secretary of State, in which position he rescinded those contracts, and renegotiated the destination for the Permian's output to India.

Now as we read about the anticipated escalation in oil prices, and remember that last year you could make a fortune by taking oil at minus $35/bbl off the hands of suppliers, the largest drag on oil prices' rise became India's Covid outbreak, which had speculators uncertain about the strength of the resurgence in demand, some even speculating whether peak demand hasn't already hit (a very dubious proposition).

And if we then contemplate that Mauna Loa, where the CO2 concentration, in the relatively clean air of the no man's land surrounding the Hawaiian Islands, had risen to 420ppm or thereabouts, then it is easy to understand that in the center of the most intensive oil extraction enterprise in the world, where the rig count is increasing on an almost daily basis in order to supply the vast energy resources necessary to power the US transition to clean energy (although it's exported, it provides the wherewithal to increase the amounts imported), the concentration of CO2 is going to be greater by a significant factor, and in places already exceeds, at our current rate, the more than 600ppm's the entire world could well be at by the turn of the century.  

It is fairly universally agreed upon that such high concentrations would raise global temperatures to a level that would be disastrous for the globe, so could it not be possible that they are already proving disastrous at both the source of that extraction, Texas, and the destination where that output will be incinerated, India, both of which literally exist under a cloud of GHG gases of their own creation, and might be experiencing their shared drenchings from the same source: Permian output? And in Texas, the faster the rig count goes up, the more natural gas they flare, turning increasing amounts of methane into CO2 and H2O, carbon dioxide and water vapor being the two most powerful the GreenHouse Gases; while the more they fracture the earth, Surprise! Surprise!, the more methane is able to leak out of the myriad network of fractured rocks they leave in their wake: you can plug a well, you can't plug a fracture. And, unlike CO2, methane provides a more localized warm-up, not needing centuries to provide the additional warmth, the effects are as predictable and immediate as turning up the dial on your electric blanket.

Simultaneous to the typhoon in India, where yet another cyclone is likely to form over the Bay of Bengal and is expected to hit the eastern coast on May 23,  and the continuing major downpours in the Southeast USA, it is hard not to notice that, according to the Moscow Times, temperatures in the Russian Arctic (that other epicenter of fracturing), where hundreds of fires are already raging, are now hotter than in the Mediterranean … Temperatures across this Arctic region are now 20-24 degrees Celsius [36 to 43.2F!] higher than normal for this time of year…

While in Scotland, they are set for a ‘very unusual’ temperature record… nowhere in Scotland has exceeded 20 degrees [64F] so far this year, which is very unusual by this point in May …

I remember reading that if it were not for the Gulf Stream, London would experience about the same temperature as Moscow, so such anomalies could portend it's slowing down. Something we really won't know except in hindsight. Lest I've not mentioned it before, although I can hardly see how I couldn't've, is it not curious that the same group of people that believe in the "butterfly effect", a concept of chaos theory in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world could create a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe, think it absurd of me to think, which I do, that Climate Chaos can be turned from an inconvenience into what we are seeing today, in less than a decade, by forcefully introducing the tons of added methane and CO2 production that fracking engenders? It is only because fracking is the only way it is possible to keep the illusion of prosperity that our continued untrammeled energy use bestows, that hydraulic fracturing remains a Verboten subject. An infrastructure bill that plans on spending  trillions of borrowed dollars joins and an offensive weapons bill of similar proportions, are wending their merry way through the Corponational-owned Congress; one that assiduously ignores the role hydraulic fracturing continues to  play in bringing Climate Chaos forward by decades. Without continued fracturing of the earth, the US, which just last month alone, rang up $1.2 Trillion in debt ($600 billion in trade deficit and 600 billion in gov't deficit spending) has no source of exportable manufactures ... otherwise the trade deficit would be a trade surplus. So, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a country's citizens to understand something when its revenue stream depends on its citizens not understanding it." Only that can explain why "Climate change is a hoax" could remain unquestioned National Policy for an entire four years, when even those pretending to believe it knew exactly why they had to keep up that pretense: their paycheck.

You Can't Fool Mother Nature!

                    So yes, Correlation  does not necessarily = Causation ... but sometimes it (tragically) does!

 

Emergency! Emergency! Everybody to get from Street!

We are in a climate emergency, a Covid emergency; a Declaration of Emergency has been made for the Southeast, New York City, Lake Tahoe. Sin City synchronicity. What does an emergency declared within another emergency that exists inside a third emergency say about the nature of emergency? Just another panic attack as Doomsday Epoch-a-lips predicked foreshadows of Righteous denouements resulting from the screed that Greed is all we need in order to succeed, an ethos that excess is the measure of your suckcess pool; a strange silence prevails over imminent Economic tipping points that the run-up to the Climactic ones will inevitably occasion.

Lebanon, anyone?

One could easily attest that in the case of Lebanon, the tipping point was caused by intractable corruption and the untrammeled looting of the economy by its Keptocracy. But that hardly matters. The point is, economic tipping points are demonstrably possible, no matter what their causes, and, as the State of California and its decades-long drought demonstrates, they can be reached with no one taking notice, never mind planning for the Afghanistan-like rout they will engender, even as we witness their effects in the form of waves of refugees crashing against our borders from economies that US policies have helped tip that tipping point to keep us in clover yet it's not over 'til the fat lady singes. 

Although the tight linkage between the Triple E's of Environment, Energy and Economics isn't  generally acknowledged, Climate Tipping Points, the ones getting all the press, are the last ones that will actually occur, as both energy and economic ones, (Lebanon being but one example) will have, long before, already raised their ugly heads. Covid merely pulled back the curtain to show the ugly reality hidden beneath our Potemkin Globaloney Façade of normalcy. A normalcy that had already been teetering on the precipice from oh-so-many grievous decisions, the most foolish and ugliest being the embrace of Milton Freidman-esque adulation of "the Market", and using the so-called "Free" press, that is bought and paid for by Corponational advertisers, more like Perma-press, no unsightly wrinkles and made-up of the synthetic fabric of society, concocted to lull the ignorant masses into surrendering to its Money Managers' dictates so as to retain the dubious distinction that the freedom to buy whichever brand of toothpaste one wants confers. 

Not to be outdone, the once-Tony blairs: "We Need to Start Traveling Again". Here’s How: Climate adaptation, I mean Covid adaptation, I mean herd immunity, no, heard 'im you knitty, me a shawl, serape, afghan, with a croquet mallet, all shouting together to raise the youser's fee. National Health or Corporate Wealth, distant learning or book-burning, Kindleburger is smoked, smoked meat served on a Kaiser role. To "manu"facture things with machines is like a broadcast with all male performers, fleeing abroad by joining a nunnery, or skanks with lamb shanks looking at a rack askance.

Unlike Taleb, Talib means educated student or to learn things, hence a Talib ban means learning is verboten. So tea with the Taliban's tillerman was the book-averse GW Bushes in evita hillbillity. The US president reading to a bunch of tots while his pals bombed the Twin Towers inspired not a whiff of the outrage a drag queen reading to them does to this day. Thousands killed while all the wily US president concerns himself with is whisking his Bin Laden buddies out of harm's way, even as its plain planes are being used to bomb the very citizenry he has vowed to protect ... and didn't. After ours after office he would still need his Arab contacts, whereas his use for the American polity would be through; a Texan through and threw at heart, he had no use for the rest of us US, eh?  Even as president he harrumphed around in the high heels of cowboy boots wearing cowboy-drag hats, donning caballero drag, while preening around his ranch dragging a branch for the photo-ops, his fans' sigh-ops, in his pressed genes showing lace along the coal seams, his slack-jawed ruminations juxtaposed with jackdaw's lubrications: pump pump pump pump extraction's not just distractions, it's chump chump climate change in action, geoengineering the war on terraform while knitting afghans' browse the library books Laura's Dewy decimals defiled.

We are all in this to gather ... dust to dustin Huffwoman, tootsie role.

We set the water table but it dropped while not a drop fell in the subsidized subsidence of the comedy central valley of the dolls where meth labs hauls their black labs and golden age retrievers, braking bad on offroad ruts, sitting pretty forming mesa dickson lines of coke while smoking cracks show guyser dolls in the trans Vaal's Salton Pepa Sea, where MEQ's provide electricity to a green State that's burned black and brown, but not Governor Brown who's moon Beamer's sleek lines followed the hulking Hummer's gas-guzzling track of the Schwartz- as in black - enegger's fractured fairy tail of hydro-lick high pressured injections of chemical soup to obtain the tar-black goop of light-tight petrocks' sequestered carbon if for us, it's all good. Grey slush. From cobalt lips to lithium sticks, all about EV’s as the nation grieves, one more disaster costing billions, on top of a viral loaded ICU, “it’s just the flu.”

The dead zone spreads, as amorphous as The Blob’s Jabba-like cred, every matrix you use, his followers refuse to see every worse case scenario he orchestrated like an impresario, spiking the punch with Jewdy, lacing the air with GHG’s from sea to rising sea, yet like his burning Bush predecessor left the cleanup to his throne’s successor, holding Dominion surrounded with wealth, all sequestered with financial stealth technologies, in off-shore havens and tax-sheltered shoals, from buddies he gave license to loose methane and burn kohl for mascara, while making sure masks scare ya.

Such that around the world, even as we approach two years into a pandemic, we are still in thrall to, 

"Emergency! Emergency!" 

"Everybody to get from Street!"