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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.
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