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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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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