Dreamliner Economy: Creative Destruction = Planned Demolition

We are much more Out There than what we admit.

There is a fine filament running through the tapestry of life that weaves all mankind together with the  rest of nature, this inconvenient truth we prefer to ignore. Even as we pull the eye of the needle through what we consider to be a mere rough patch, we are breaking the thread of our existence to return to "normal". It's as though the entire cloth of humanity has been cut from remnants of the pre-WW1 monarchies who thought they could simply assume anew their Divine mantle of Despotic, religion-enabled ascendancy over their subjects, and continue to treat their subjects as disposable objects. Like the tenuous, invisible link that enjoins my computer to the whirled, wide-eyed web, it takes but the slightest perturbation to shudder through the matrix to snap the thin connection leaving me isolated from the rest of the hyper-centralized universe of man-made knowledge, one  to which access is more and more dependent upon that flimsiest of connections, the fiber optic cable, the snapping of which renders one blind and alone should they have the misfortune to let their cells die.  

But something else has already snapped. And although the sound of its twanging reverberates around the world in a deadly wave of viral infections, humanity, overcome by its addiction to folly, blithely shoulders on, having built an economic system to insure the welfare of multi-billionaire oligarchs, swollen to grotesque proportions like ticks feeding on the morbidly obese body of a bed-ridden epicure, attaining such obscene dimensions that their only option is apparently to fling members of the human race uselessly to the edge of space, at great risk and costs, yet that have as their point, nothing buut a few seconds of zero g's. They need zero justification, zero accountability, and certainly not net zero emissions. But who cares about that? They serve their purpose of distracting a population with zero clue to their being played, even as it's so magnificently, in-their-face displayed, they remain remarkably unafraid of several looming crises, each of which is completely billionaire-made.

One of my go-to blogspots on the internet is https://climateandeconomy.com/, a compendium of the disasters we are churning, each day alternating economic headlines with those churning in the atmosphere the next, it's one of the few sites left on the internet that reports these impacts from all around the globe. 

One of these, you may be surprised to read, is the affect the energy crisis is having on e-merging economies. The reason I conjecture that you may be surprised is that although I've been reading about the globaloney energy crisis for weeks now, I've not heard or seen a word of it on "the news", which I admittedly watch only sporadically, so, was somewhat surprised when I queried someone, who does watch it  more regularly, about said crisis: he knew naught of what I spoke.

But as Europe pushes the price of LNG to record highs, and China does the same for coal, while the US re-invigorates its climate-change-on-steroids fracturing of the very ground beneath our feet to continue to pretend there's no end to the fossil-fueled rampage of capitalism-gone-wild, more vulnerable economies are unable to afford the high price of fossil fuel, and having no 'Green Solution' installed, no safety net zero emission technologies to fill the gap left from depleted fossil fuel stocks, resort to rolling blackouts and rationed fuel to keep their economies limping along through a worldwide pandemic: a phenomenon Globaloney has yet to own up to its own implication in surreptitiously delivering Covid to every port in the world like fleas on a rat. 

The same can be said for the HFC's and CO2 molecules that the Globaloney economy releases in ever-larger quantities into the atmosphere each year, such that each nail driven into the coffin of 'productivity' is a boon to the future of the generation we have saddled with an economic system completely devoted to their destruction in order to enrich The Bloat:

1) The oversized, over-amped, and increasingly destabilizing Military. This enormous Bloat should be at the forefront of any climate change legislation or innovation, yet is instead completely ignored, even as the majority of the population acknowledges that we went to war in Iraq for the oil, and the entity in the most need of that resource was, and is, the military, which completely collapses, no plan B, without it. As witness to which I would like to call your attention to the recently deceased War Criminal and renowned liar, Colin Powell, who decided Nobody's Lives Matter as he played the Stooge for Bush. Even as Brazil wishes to try its own clown-president, Bolsonaro for crimes against humanity, the Bush regime and its enablers sit in their over-stuffed chairs with their over-stuffed families in barcaloungers being waited on hand and foot, yet no such charges are even contemplated for anyone in the regime that stole the election, sat reading goat stories to kids while the Capital was being bombed, and threw us into two wars from which every single Bush appointee had positioned themselves to benefit from, each of them now millionaires, fattened on the unaudited profits of militarized procurement contracts and insider information. No one more than Colin Powell. How fitting that it should be Brazil's President, who is constantly being upbraided for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest while the US receives not  a whisper of acrimony, nary a threat of a single lawsuit for letting loose, and then bragging, a la Bolsonaro, about the billions of tons of "Freedom Molecules" being exhausted into the air by fracturing every stone on the continent and leaving methane seeps to accelerate the destructive impact of every storm the amped-up weather regime delivers. 

2) Asset "Appreciation". While no one appreciates a nice asset more than I, the Central Bank-enabled explosion of home values around the globe is a Bloat afloat on a leaky raft of graft. In our Auntie Mame economy, where the Central Banks have orchestrated a putsch whereby the lives of the rich are a gluttonous banquet while the rest of the world's poor suckers starve to death, the deliberate remaking of the economy such that the military (see above) receives the R&D dollars from taxing the citizenry, then "spins off" that technology to its insiders who waltz off to make a fortune on Government-paid for R&D and the contracts that technology delivers, and the boon it gives them is higher productivity of the work force which it then forces to accept lower wages even as their per-unit cost declines: doubling productivity only means halving of the workforce, but that rise in productivity comes at a cost: higher energy use. Robots don't negotiate for higher wages, they don't have to; higher energy costs have to be paid upfront, or there's a work outage, one that no amount of negotiation can smooth over. It's the Dreamliner economy, so over-engineered in order to shave off the least remnant of "inefficiency" that there's not the slightest margin of error; should one feature of the sleek, impressive machine prove fallible, the whole ship tanks, taking its payload, which is us, down with it into the darkest ocean depths. Disaster Capitalism doesn't just happen: it is planned. The passengers assume all the risk, the engineers go for a joyride into the stratosphere on the profits.

While China Real Estate implodes, quite literally, as they employ planned demolition to destroy highrises by the dozens that no one has ever lived in (a more apt name for our economic system that Schumpeter glowingly referred to as "creative (as in planned) destruction") as there's no means to pay for them ... ever.

3) Electrification of everything under the sun. By which is really meant computerization and centralized control. One of the boons that the dearth of microprocessors has brought is the slowdown in car robofactory. Yet it wasn't that long ago that cars had NO microprocessors in them, and ran just fine .. for decades. The Globaloney economy is that Car: spiffy and impressive but far more vulnerable, like the upper classes who brought it about. With the militarization of the economy, instead of mankind's needs being met, the Supply-side economics with which we've been saddled builds a Field of Dreams to which it knows "they will come", because in building that field they have destroyed the alternatives to it. Then they point to the consumers flocking to said field as proof of their far-sightedness, ignoring the inconvenient truth that they left them no choice. That's why it's called Supply-side: we decide; you take what we offer: It's Ourweh or the highway.

So what's their answer? AI. Cars no one but a small minority has any demand for but for which the rest of humanity is being burdened with the cost of  development. Simultaneous to which, as the winter sets in and energy prices go through the roof like all that heat from uninsulated homes, large amounts of energy are being devoted to crypto-currency, building factories to build EV's, building factories to build solar panels and wind turbines, AI (with my spotting no less than eight Wayco AI-EV's negotiating San Francisco streets in a short walk home in one of its neighborhoods yesterday .. the same neighborhood in which I've seen these vehicles plying their way for months now ... all burning energy, EV's or no, in a useless, Class War experiment, developing the tech to make your life more of a nightmare, (like shooting stars on a trek into near-space), by spending what should be workers' wages on high-tech toys for the wealthy: The supply-side Economy of The Sharper Image, where the goods are displayed in a roundhouse constructed of glass walls and the public that paid for the development of the marvels displayed are left on the outside gawking in through the plate glass at the toys designed to make their betters' lives more Fun.

Thus do we, on the cusp of our Climate Discord conference, COPout 26, find ourselves facing mankind's future beset with the conundrum represented by a slew of headlines that means bad news for the economy while simultaneously presenting good news for the world's ability to slow the pace of fossil-fuel-enabled extinction: 

“A sharp rise in the price of fuel is threatening the airline industry’s slow recovery from the coronavirus crisis." This is excellent news for the environment and the conference devoted to it, yet is bewailed as though it were the end of the whirled.

"How Much Oil Can OPEC Realistically Add?

“…maybe we have been overestimating how much power the cartel has to jack up production on the fly."

Our thirst for oil: The more we make the more we slake, so any dearth of production is a boon for mammals' continued existence (PS ... humans, although we like to ignore the fact ... are mammals).

“Inflation Or Deflation – End Result Is Still Depression…

“A credit collapse such as occurred in 2008 is an overnight risk that heightens with each passing day… Regardless of whether we experience hyperinflation or not, a credit collapse now or later, or further attempts to circumvent impending catastrophe – a full-scale depression will be the end result.”

Funny they should mention 2008, as that depression was still ongoing when the pandemic arrived. Although I realize that most people would disagree with that fact, the ongoing Central BAnk stimulus, means that that part of the economy that now commands center stage, finance, cannot pay for the most vital resource, cash, for which it pays its depositors absolutely ZERO. That means the economy is wallowing in a depression: without the Fed's legerdemain, there would be no cash to do business, yet the price banks are able ... not willing, able ... to pay for their only commodity is $0.00, da nada. This  doesn't stop there. All that cash the Central Banks snub their collective (as in  communism?) nose at is then compelled to go elsewhere, propping up that other parasitic Bloat, the stockmarket, whose unmoored valuations depend on its "investors" having no place else to put their savings ... which means there are no savings anymore, every currency compels its users to plow their hopes for the future into a casino market that invests  in a future built for The Bloat, there's no more moat, it disappeared with the float.

Yet the 2008 depression was the first time in two generations that, despite all the talk of emissions reductions, achieved none of them until the Bush-engineered collapse that brought a halt to the steady 1.5% increase in the USA's consumption of oil. So once again, what's is good for the globe, is bad for the economy, which is almost exclusively used to enable, via whatever means necessary, humanity's desire to pretend it isn't part of the ecosystem on which its very life depends.

“Europe’s Energy Crisis Is Hurting Metal Producers" ... Excellent!

"Temporary shutdowns of European fertilizer plants in the face of soaring natural gas prices could become permanent." Bonus!

Each and everyone of these bad for the economy, good for the planet, headlines are ushered in courtesy of one ignored phenomenon: The upsurge in demand for fossil fuels occasioned by the gangrenous green wrought by the belief that there is anything in the universe called clean, green, or zero emissions energy. No matter how much you may believe that these technologies of renewable energy (all energy is renewable, it is the fuel that is/isn't, and that difference isn't merely semantics) might somehow "Save the Planet", one can't get around the fact impacting both the supply and price of our energy supplies right now: they require enormous energy inputs, inputs that can be derived only from the INcreased combustion of fossil fuels to ever get realized in the first place, and that this increase is on top of the increase needed to bring every one of the industries cited above, back into the realm of viability, never mind profitability. And that CO2 doesn't leave the atmosphere simply because in two decades everyone will be driving an EV (as if): it stays there for centuries, millennia, even, continuing the heating of the planet at a far faster pace now that all those Green Machines, and the heroic investment in the grid necessary to empower them, have been built by the only means available to do so, namely by burning billions of tons of fossil fuels as their feedstock.

That isn't clean, it isn't green, and it's not zero emissions, net or otherwise, as there is no formula yet derived to actually demonstrate that the life-cycle CO2 savings derived from driving an EV are of such mind-boggling dimensions that they can even remotely justify the necessary additional CO2 burden they are already making the atmosphere pay upfront. What they are doing is increasing the cost of energy, and that too is not only bad for the economy, but good for the atmosphere. But they come at a political price that a ruling class promising a rosy future of guilt-free renewable motoring is in no position to countenance. The problem of the Gilets Jaunes has not gone away, it has only gone silent. For now. But as the pandemic has shown us, even when millions of their fellow earthlings are dying, their corpses piling so high they need refrigerated trucks to stop their stench from sickening the healthy, humans will not put up with even a simple strip of cloth if they perceive that it will impinge on their god-given Freedom to plunder, which is all Freedom has come to mean in this, our New Century, our doomed New Millennium, ushered in, as it was, by the harbinger of the Y2K scam. So the much greater sacrifices that will be demanded by the curtailment of affordable energy can hardly be suggested without eliciting an understandable, "Yeah, right," response.

But it is the only mechanism by which the all-knowing, all-encompassing, Market can curtail the rising consumption of energy: price. It is the only form of rationing allowed, assuming, as it does, that if you can afford it and I can't, you deserve it; even if while my children shiver in the cold, the only use you can think to put it to is to "mine" crypto currencies or blast your celebrity-of-the-week to the edge of the very atmosphere every such blast imperils. Thus does destroying Creation become creative destruction's swan song, as there's nothing anyone knows of to employ to stop the continued planned demolition the geo-engineering of the atmosphere, occasioned by the untrammeled combustion of fossil fuels, is effectuating right in front of our i-phone-averted eyes. But this byte of the Apple may well prove our last.

 

The Surrealism of Clean Energy: WindfaIl Profits.

 In piece about the electrical grid published in Undark (originally published by WIRED), the author suggests that in order to smooth out the demand cycle for electric juice so as to match the grid's renewable production, consumers should modify their behavior and put on the A/C in their homes hours before actually needing it later on when they arrive home from work in their spiffy new electric car, which, being electric, they would have to then plug into that self-same grid if they wish to return to work the next day ... a fact she deems unnecessary to mention until much later in the piece. He instead stresses the need to be using clean energy, something that exists nowhere in the known universe. The only "clean" energy is energy that needn't be generated in the first place, and Arizona is the only state that exemplifies such an easily attainable feat:

Arizona, being Arizona, refuses to use summertime daylight savings time. Yet the solution offered by the author of the above article specifically mentions the time of 6:00 as the hour people are returning home from work to plug in their EV's and start the A/C. Everywhere else in the sun-drenched West, the millions of people returning home are returning, not at six, but a full hour earlier in real time, not at the daylight-savings-engineered pseudo-time of six, but at five o'clock, so the sun's intensity will last an entire hour longer after their return, meaning that solar's peak generation is closer, by an all-important hour, to the peak utilization, a fact that would help, for a good six months, to give the grid and its users a better match, such that even today, with no solar installed, it would save on the peak amount of electricity needed to be generated, smoothing out the spike in usage. A feat accomplished already in every western state that is not Arizona. Now that is a clean energy solution.

These are the kinds of solutions we need, but are presented with exactly none, as no corporation profits by such solutions. Therefore instead we get the proposed blowout increase in energy combustion the switch to an all-EV auto fleet would engender. This "solution", should it actually work, will not be known until well into the 2030's, by which time the atmosphere will have been burdened with the additional tonnage of CO2 such a manufacturing extravaganza would engender. But the shareholders of GM, Ford, and a host of other Corporations will already have been amply rewarded with trillions in revenue, and the fact that the solution was worse than the problem, will never need be addressed. Nor will the Corpornations, having simply done what they were asked to, ever be held accountable. All this, if all goes according to plan, will be occurring as Europe sucks the Permian dry of its last natural gas resources while Washington sits silent, when not actively encouraging, via billions in oil, coal and natural gas tax give-aways and the assumption of the clean-up expenses incurred by the extraction and retailing of the last of the United States' fossil fuels reserves, at, until recently, the lowest price possible, the US is holding a clearance sale on one of the most vital resource in the world, the resultant shortfall of which is already wreaking havoc on the price of electricity as it starts its ramp up to actually align it price with it real costs of production. 

But as with capitalism per se, which has demonstrated, to a population blinded by its desires, that it can ill afford the cost of its enterprises, and so must slough its costs off onto the public ... not the consumers, mind you, the public ... so as to then payout those monies to their own shareholders. This is what we call private enterprise: Gerry-rigging the government so that your own costs of production and R&D are borne by the public so as to increase your profits and thereby shareholders' dividends. Ever since the Pentagon decided that the cost of highways are a part of the onus of the public, even as the profits to be derived from them are raked in by private interests, many of which use their monopoly and lobbying power to off-load their costs of doing business onto the shoulders of the public, such as Exxon laying off tens of thousands of workers, depriving them of health insurance and income in the middle of a pandemic, even as the rigs they built leak methane into the atmosphere with the only suggestion by our wonderfully free press being that the public, as in the Republic, should hire those workers, to clean up the mess they made while working for a private company, by plugging all those climate-changing leaks.  

The result of such policies were starkly illustrated by the Texas fiasco, one that will be repeated around the globe and the country this winter. Allowing Exxon to run rampant over the Permian, Marcellus, and other shale formations to extricate the last of America's fossil fuels without incurring the real costs that such extraction results in means that they can then sell those reserves off at a price that has no monetary relation to their actual value. It only means  they are able to sell them at price beneficial to their stock holders, and thereby, all those public monies that now need to be expended to clean up their mess, are in the hands of their shareholders who Exxon dutifully paid dividends to, yet whose shareholders will shelter those returns from the taxman, no one being more miserly about paying their share of taxes than those who do not a jot of labor to amass their income.

It's called a set-up, and Germany is set-up to be flayed with high prices, but Germany, unlike the US, specifically Texas, has a more egalitarian system, whereby those incurring the costs are also the people who pay a lower price for their fuel. But a glance around the globe, in this, our Globaloney economy, tells another story. In that sad tale, it is the very people who receive none of the benefits of low fuel prices who are most burdened with the real costs of them. But like cloud-seeding in China, (where the resultant deluge is washing the family home down the street, no one is in a position to connect the dots between a country being the most avid cloud-seeding nation on the globe and the same country being subjected to such horrendous downpours it is forced to shut down its entire coal mining industry in the middle of a power crisis), once the dire consequences of our actions are visited upon us, it is too late to question the wisdom of our actions, and for the most part, those actions are completely forgotten anyway, and any mention of them is censored, something both Texans and the Chinese are quite adept at.   

As the US announces to great fanfare, a pledge to reduce its methane emissions, the NYT article, penned by yet another tiresome Friedman, reporting that fact shows a rig flaring natural gas in North Dakota. A deceptive picture, by design. But North Dakota is so far out on the peak oil curve, that it's flaring operations are but a fraction of what they were when such a pledge may have actually helped. One must also consider the atmosphere of intentional deception all Corporations actively engage in, using language gone over by a phalanx of lawyers so as to say one thing and mean another, which may well be  the case here. Flaring has nothing to do with methane emissions. Flaring, in fact, is engaged in specifically to burn methane, so there are no methane emissions from a rig that is flaring natural gas: the emissions, by virtue of the flaring pictured by the NYT, are CO2 and H2O, not methane. Lest you find this too cynical:

"John Kerry, Mr. Biden’s climate envoy, said on Monday that scientists had found that methane emissions accounted for about half of that temperature rise. He called cutting methane the “single fastest strategy that we have to keep a safer, 1.5-degree Centigrade future within reach.”

What that means in reverse is that INcreasing methane production, a process inseparable from hydraulic fracturing, is the "single fastest strategy that we have to insure a safer 1.5 degree future" remains beyond our reach.

It really is that simple. As I have been saying for more than a decade, US fracturing technology is deployed on such a continent-spanning scale that it has brought climate change forward. That is exactly what that statement about methane emissions implies: no fracking, the current temperature increase would have been half of what it is today, and the climate chaos we are experiencing, and which is getting worse by the day, would not have millions of our fellow humans staring starvation in the face. The world, via the earth-fracturing technologies currently being used in both Russia and the USA in order to supply the globe with sufficient hydrocarbons to sustain the current immoral level of gas-guzzling-enabled mobility, is much further along the climate-change curve than any prognostication envisioned we would be by this time precisely because of the America first policies of the US and its military (which military was the impetus behind the R&D that developed hydraulic fracturing technology and that used the GW Bush administration to wage an illegal war to lock in Iraq's prodigious reserves, reserves that were abundant enough to have kept oil prices low, which would have made fracking uneconomical (Cheney wasn't appointed Halliburton's CEO for nothing. He was still receiving checks from Halliburton well into his stint as VP in the criminal Bush administration)). 

Yet when Foreign Affairs asked the idiotic question, "Why has climate policy failed even with all of the international agreements of the last three decades?" Their only answers were: 

"the price of carbon dioxide emissions across the world is essentially zero, so there is no real market incentive (and, the markets, being all-knowing and all-encompassing, means that there are no real incentives: Nothing Else Matters ... don'tcha get that?!) to decarbonize." 

Second, our economies suffer from inadequate investment in low-carbon technologies.

"Which means that the two-degree target cannot happen without an immediate and steep drop in emissions." (Translation: the two-degree target will not happen ... but we already know that, don't we? We have simply become suicidally insouciant about that realization, so much so that  an estimated 30,000(!) participants are set to jet to a "Climate Conference", an irony so absurd it doesn't register so much as comical as criminal).

But an entirely new infrastructure of what they call "low carbon" technologies has to be built by burning hi-carbon fossil fuels, so emissions will, as they have been, continue to rise; ergo, the reason that "climate policy has failed even with all of the international agreements of the last three decades" is the additional CO2 generated by instituting so-called low-carbon technologies on such a massive scale  that when they fail to produce the desired de-carbonization, they have become so entrenched, the investment in them, leveraged as it is on borrowed monies that have paid not a nickel in return to pay back the bad loans procured to realize them, that they remain in place nonetheless, exactly as if they had delivered a resounding success. Which, from a Corporate perspective they have: the more CO2 the deployment of these ersatz "low-carbon technologies" pour into the atmosphere, the greater the need to develop the next boondoggle to increase Corporate profits: CSS. Carbon storage and Sequestration; which uses the same legerdemain that the so-called low-carbon technologies use: massage the science to produce on paper the results you need to push your profitable solution onto a complaisant, Climate Change is a hoax public, and by the time they realize they are actually having the opposite effect from the ones cited, it will be too late, and country after country will continue to throw good money after bad, all to the benefit of the Corporate bottom line, and therefore to their shareholders, with the result that, far from the Green New Deal's aspirational increase in equality, they will, each and every one of them, have the opposite effect and accelerate the INcrease in inequality already baked into the paradigm of private interests assuming government responsibilities for profit ... an acceleration they have already played a hand in accomplishing. Meanwhile the ravages of climate change-amped weather disasters will continue to extract its own price from the polity, and further underwrite corporate bottom lines by the resultant climate chaos that inflicts multi-billion dollar price tags at regular intervals, those billion dollars always going from the public purse into the coffers of the Corponations.

The first push to de-carbonize was the food-to-fuel programs that were instituted all over the world, each of which only gets larger even as each and every one of them has utterly failed to, not only DEcrease emissions but have markedly increased them while simultaneously wiping out enormous tracts of carbon-sequestering forests. Forests that had, naturally enough, worked to decrease the atmosphere's carbon content, making it (as planned) more and more essential that expensive technologies be developed to remove the increasingly large load of carbon in the atmosphere that the implementation of badly conceived low-carbon technologies have put there. This will in turn, further INcrease the CO2 content of the atmosphere, as the implementation of any new technology in a fossil-fueled system would, without any real proof that they will do anything other than, as the food-to-fuel program continues to do, enrich the vested interests and INcrease further the CO2 burden we are asking the atmosphere to shoulder. Remember, the world is driven, even unto its destruction, by a capitalist model, and the only criterion capitalism knows, is allowed to know by law, is Profit: Profit is ROI, as in King and Return on Investment).

Nowhere in their article do the authors bother to mention Crypto-currencies, those enablers of financial criminality and tax evasion. Of what good is it to develop all these pseudo "low-carbon technologies", they're always talking about (but each of which is no more than a boondoggle), when an entirely new technology, one that adds nothing to anyone's well-being, can simply spring up overnight and produce more CO2 than any of those low carbon technologies even promised to rid us of? Three decades of promised reductions can simply be wiped out to achieve exactly zero.

This literal insanity is not confined to such "low-carbon technologies" as wind and solar (hydro, too? I'm not sure as the authors, despite putting all our eggs in the basket of "low-carbon technologies", don't bother to mention exactly which of those technologies they are referring to, so it's impossible to refute their claims). Natural gas is also included in their "solution", which pretty much answers their own question. Because the one claim they do make is that natural gas is less CO2 intensive than coal, a fantasy that has long ago been tossed as nothing more than industry propaganda. Perhaps you've noticed there are no more "Clean Gas" ads, as there is no such thing. The dimming effects aerosols produce when burning coal disappear when it is replaced by the combustion of natural gas. Also the bulk of natural gas exports are LNG, meaning that the energy expended to first freeze it, then thaw it, as well as the previously non-existent infrastructure it was necessary to build not only to perform that task but then to deliver the product thus produced (Burning dirty bunker fuel all along the way) must take place in vehicles that simply didn't exist, and can be used for nothing else but that one purpose, which all adds to the CO2 burden dumped into the atmosphere by switching to NatGas. Nor does that take into account the rise in methane production that goes hand-in-hand with fracturing the tight geologic formations keeping those molecules underground. Those "Freedom Molecules" are either released directly into the troposphere, or are burned to produce CO2 and H2O, yet nowhere in the claim that "Natural Gas's contribution to global warming are less than coal's" are those emission amounts included. But those amounts are not trivial, and the upfront costs in CO2 production to retrofit a landscape dotted with coal-fired power plants to burn natural gas are likewise not included, yet those plans also need fossil fuel combustion to be realized. As the press harps on the melting of the permafrost and the resultant release of carbon from previously-frozen soil, not a word is uttered to point out the similarly large release occasioned by fracturing rock in that exact same stratum to purposely release previously sequestered carbon, only some of which is actually burned for commercial purposes.

Not surprisingly, the real issue, the monopolization that goes hand in hand with a globalized economy,  is totally ignored. But monopolies are not nations. They are wealth redistribution systems that operate best, as the militarization of the Capitalist system has made abundantly clear, under the exact kind of mandates that the article is calling on to fix our problems but that will continue to, as they have for the last 30 years, exacerbate, not remedy, the situation ... and there is no real will to change this paradigm. Countries will continue to do what they keep saying they'll do: ACT on climate change, which performance has thus far met with resounding success as it pours monies into "the right hands", depriving the world of any possible escape from the strait-jacket of fiduciary obligations with which the monopolized TBTF financial system has trussed it in. Yet the authors suggest that governments, ie the public sphere, not the private sphere that is salivating to receive the 100-300 TRILION dollars in R&D investment in "low carbon" (a category in which they include natural gas) tech research that the authors insist is necessary, but which will only place an (additional, as in plus one) unpayable monetary burden on the public: it is like taking the paradigm of student loans, together with all the destruction of the lives it has enslaved in debt bondage, and impose it on every citizen of the world, with no escape from either the usurious rates charged for the debt, nor from one's parents' basement. Yet the end result, when you remember that they are including natural gas as a "low carbon solution", will be a world in which everyone is now burdened not only with intractable debt, but with an atmosphere suffused with a minimum of 500ppm of CO2 and its concomitant rise in methane accumulation (at current rates, 2030 will be ushered in with ~450ppm's, 2100 > 600ppm).

Nor will you seen any journalists write the truth about the conundrum staring us in the face with the smugness of a bully taunting a queer. Because when a free press is not free, but paid for by its advertisers, there is no such thing as "All the News fit to print" there is only, "Only the Views our advertisers deem fit to print", resulting in our authors answering the very question they asked. When an article asking why climate policies have failed, classifies the combustion of a fossil fuel, natural gas, as a "low carbon solution", they have answered their question for us. The amount of carbon in the world's enormous stores of natural gas is, by itself, even were we to incinerate not another drop of oil nor burn another lump of coal, enough to push us over the 2 degree limit, the 1.5 being already baked in, as it were, the useless Paris Accords suggested we keep our emissions down to to avoid disastrous warming.    

The solution is simple: mankind must reduce its energy needs. It's its implementation that is problematic. 

Yet when the question, "Why has climate policy failed even with all of the international agreements of the last three decades?" is asked, nowhere in the answer is it noted that in those last three decades, mankind's energy use has not just grown, it has soared. That couldn't have anything to do with it now, could it? And even a pandemic has done nothing but fuel growth in the most energy-intensive industries, accelerating the use of robofacturing, while continuing to depend on the behavioral sink of providing the least productive populations of the world with energy so cheap they jump on jets, sign up for cruises, procure gas-guzzling SUV's, and REC's, which wrecks any possible amelioration and wreak havoc on the rest of the globe all so boatloads of retirees can be the last people to see the coral reefs before the heat-trapping gases released by people traveling to be the last person to see the coral reefs results in their total destruction. What a Brave New World has Mankind wrought.

 

‘Buy Christmas dinner now and freeze it’

To emphasize the disconnect between the realities of our future and our perception of that reality, I would posit that the statement I used to entitle this post, ‘Buy Christmas dinner now and freeze it’ , encapsulates it nicely. Plagued by a driver shortage of their own making, one easily predicable but for which there was no advanced planning, one can see the inevitable crash with reality that the world is in the process of undergoing.

Those retailers advising that the residents of the UK to burn fossil fuels to freeze a meal because otherwise they can't guarantee them enough pigs in blankets for the holidays is the last word in the undeveloping, (or "demerging," perhaps? Unraveling?) economies of the world's myopic vision of post-pandemic existence as they struggle to return to a "normal" that was anything but.

Our love of motility is getting us nowhere, it only insures that we live with a dagger in our heart:

Even as prices for all forms of energy all around the world are skyrocketing (except for renewables, the price of which is plummeting, to great hurrahs, nobody bothering to note that that's what happens when demand drops, prices drop along with them, while fossil fuel prices spiking indicates, as far as I've ever understood how rationing works in our Vampire Capitalism economy, that demand can't be met without increases in supply), British retailers, in the same country that is to host the COPout26 Climate Showboating Spectacular, suggest their customers keep junk food frozen for three months in the middle of an energy crisis, pushing up demand for natural gas that not-so-Great Britain will have dire need for in the coming months if they're not to suffer a Texas-on-Ice disaster. 

With predictions of $100/bbl oil, from BofA, LNG at prices far higher than a year, or even a month, ago, and coal prices doubling amid soaring demand from none other than that stalwart of Wind energy, Germany, which now finds itself needing to import thermal coal to keep its industry from shutting down (which may occur anyways, as silicon's price rocket to the stratosphere, along with William Shatner apparently, by300%), the realities of Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the unspoken-of conundrum of burning fuel solely for its heat content (that heat usually being but an unwanted by-product of energy-generation) get woven into a tapestry whose weave is getting so tight there is not the tiniest chink left for a little compassion to slip through.

Meanwhile China has its own non-Covid problems, such as an energy crisis in the midst of its slowest post-Reagan economic growth ever, which along with India's resurgent demand has helped push coal prices higher, the OECD nations chastising them for their use of it turns around and increases its own combustion of the black rock in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile Evergrande's implosion, a conglomerate who specializes in defalcation and rehypothecation scams, is being referred to as a possible Lehman's moment. But if anything, it more closely resembles that GW Bush enabler and co-conspirator, Enron. For although Evergrande's grand experiment with shadow banking, property speculation and bad mortgage underwriting, may look Lehman-esque, its criminal obfuscation of its activities behind a wall of specially designed vehicles built to deliberately hide risk from investors and customers alike, building an entire business entity whose only real "product" was Fraud, has Enron as its template; specifically Enron's recipe for cooking books while offering tickets in roller coaster cars dubbed, "Special Purpose Vehicles". Those vehicles having been specifically dreamed up to take its investors for a ride that would end up incinerating their investments, watching them go up in flames as high as a torched Tesla, while the company's exec's move their families, along with their fortunes, to California, that safe haven for Chinese millionaires where insanely rich Asians with piles of investors' ill-gotten cash continue to rocket home prices into the stratosphere, perhaps to give the Space-X cosmonauts neighbors in the clouds. 

The game's a Foote:

Meanwhile headlines ask, "Could Fossil Fuel Companies Ever Be Tried for Crimes Against Humanity?" But this attempt to continue to do nothing that will impact the energy-intensity of the OECD nations and the deliberate Pentagon-fueled addiction to increasingly large utilization of electron excitation to do the simplest of tasks, so as to sell the dream of "effortless living" (Oh, you mean like life in a Coma?), gets ever more absurd, its need for a bogeyman to point its fickle finger of fate at, ever more desperate.  

However, in 1856, the American scientist Eunice Newton Foote, augmenting the work of Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist who had, in 1824, described what we know as the greenhouse effect, had announced her experiments demonstrating that water vapor and CO2 absorb heat from solar radiation. In 1862, John Tyndall discovered that certain gases (water and carbon dioxide) help trap heat from escaping the atmosphere, and then, in 1895, Swedish Chemist Svante Arrhenius observed the infrared-absorbing properties of carbon dioxide and water molecules. Which observation led him to demonstrate how even a slight rise in CO2 would bring disproportionate increases in the earth's temperatures.

So in the fifties, when the US Dept. of defense shoved a Republican President's plan through Congress to build the Interstate Highway System, making the future of carbon pollution a guarantee, it was not just the oil companies who were cognizant of the inevitable rise in the global temperature that would ensue as a result. Even as the system that would seal the fate of the USA and the world in a fossil-fueled carapace of invisible gases was being built, NASA was designing rockets and the AEC was commissioning nuclear reactors to be constructed around the country, and the globe. No amount of corporate propaganda would have been sufficient to disabuse these talented professionals of the knowledge of what the inevitable result would be of the accumulation of CO2 such activities would engender. It would be generations before such deleterious effects would be made manifest, while the Jetson-like fantasies of flying by the seat of your pants would be irresistible to a nation enamored of technology and speed. To suggest they did not possess the capacity to recognize the wrongness of their actions is spurious. This emphasis on lawsuits against fossil fuel companies is made for the exact same reason as a conjuror uses distraction to keep the audience from discovering his tricks. It's like trying to compensate for the hollowness of a hole by putting a dome over it.

Otherwise, if they actually wanted to DO something, they could sue those exact same companies to force them to stop the fracking. They could sue those exact same companies to stop plowing up the prairies and processing food into fuel to power ICE machines. But the exact same problem lies with those: it's the government that PAID those companies, with public monies: dozens of them following the Pentagon template, of guaranteeing mega-Corparations profits if they deliver, and, often as not, even if they don't. As Obama intoned, "WE built those bridges." For fracking, as well as the food-to-fuel programs, are not fossil-fuel company enabled: they lobby to get them passed, that is true, but they don't actually create the mandates: Congress does. They don't create the demand: consumers do. Of course, when I make those statements, I am forgetting that the same could be said for the tobacco companies, whose products the US DOD was handing out to its soldiers during WW2, making smoking a hallmark of masculinity, and then continuing to shovel boatloads of cash to the tobacco conglomerates for decades after the War. It was only by going after them for the harm their products do to NON-smokers that they were able to change the world ... which they did, amidst loud grumbling and dark threats. But those threats all came to naught and thus has the atmosphere we have today, wherein it is the addicts who have to go outside to smoke instead of the non-smoking public having to go outside to breathe, evolved.

So you can see why the lawsuits against the fossil fuel companies persist. But the analogy is only on the surface. If for no other reason than that there are no non-smokers - in terms of fossil fuel combustion - among us. A fact well known to government officials, who have consequently morphed into little more than a kind of civilian soldiery who try to get the best of us at every opportunity with the brazen politeness of a cat sitting up a tree looking down at a dog. They are well aware that there is no one for whom the curtailment of the combustion of fossil fuels to create energy, or, a fact the fast-approaching winter seems to be re-acquainting us with, its byproduct, heat, won't negatively impact.

While the world is being shaken by all sorts of happenings, resembling, and including, seething volcanism, even so, there is a universal, as it were hypnotic, belief, originating in the ubiquity of fossil-fuel-derived entertainment, that this volcano will never, even as several actual ones do, erupt again. Thus are the events of reality kept as far off as the roar of traffic beyond a garden wall, while simultaneously they remain physically as close as traffic beyond a garden wall. For if Covid has taught us nothing, it has demonstrated a disconnect between liberal Democracies' "End Of History" claims and the reality bites it's evinced of the ungovernability imposed by catering/cratering to entrenched special interests: the best horseman on the best horse, if at loggerheads with his mount, is more likely to get thrown over a fence than is a less seasoned rider who adjusts himself to the pace of his nag. Liberal democracies believe they're the former, while the autocrats realize the growing futility of beating a dead horse. 

Demonstrating that there's something impossible in all of us.

As I write here, as I work away in my garden, as I create artwork from the mundane detritus of our throwaway lives, all the while fomenting against the escalation of energy use in the every day anyday, I demonstrate the above axiom. Only with the manipulation of the price of fossil fuels has the US found in its possession the surest method of managing all relationships because this method can be as hard and as accurate as a guillotine, but it can also be as touchily sensitive as a sufferer from arthritis - you only need look at the aching and limping repo markets' taper tantrums at the slightest hint of withdrawal of  Fed stimulus, or the bond market - to see how energy is most delicately bound up with everything over which it rules. It is only through the delicate interlocking of all forms of life, which only the blind arrogance of the ideologue can dismiss (which includes Green aficionadas as much as Climate Change deniers), that reveals commerce in energy products as the synthesis of revolution and permanence, of our Wehrmacht-centered economics and consumer civilization, of pie-in-the-sky visionaries and down-to-earth entrepreneurs, but essentially as a symbolic destructive force of  the democracy that it is now so busily pushing, as if it were just another of the animal species on earth, into extinction. But as the floor of time is giving way beneath us we are crashing through to the cellars below, yet we still imagine ourselves riding the elevator of the present to some Penthouse of the future!

....but a glance into it is like looking into a room where, at noon, the bed's still not made. 

Hence, we are not quite sure that this is not a dream. Is this really ours, this big marvelous marble? These two hemispheres, that sunshine in the greenery, that clump of trees silhouetted against the sky, this little plot of fertile earth, these birds flying overhead? Will they still be there when a new stasis is achieved, and, barring another shock to the  system, a balance is negotiated that is lasting because it adjusts to our ongoing perturbations and maintains enough stability to fend off chaos?

What chaos suggests is a great explosion, and that's what mankind so loves, thus do we see the burgeoning populations of the world arming themselves to the teeth even as their populations starve,  throwing out their be-medaled warchests in exaggerated, pumped-up-to-embarrassing-excess, Machismo. Which explains why the USA is so determined to take down every tin pot dictator in the world: like a sibling pulling his cap down low on his head as his brother pees his pants in public, it fears someone noticing and pointing out the family resemblance.  

So here we are, still reeling from Covid like a drunk on Quaaludes while no one's been able to discover how we've  gotten onto this roof where there's no ladder visible and the door to get into the building has been locked. Onlookers are mesmerized by our antics, as though they were watching Cirque du Soleil acrobats doing cartwheels on high-wires, the tension palpable, as this guy's working without a net, and I don't think most of those watching our performance, least of all those calling themselves "Progressives," are prepared for the gruesome reality they'll be splattered with should we fall. As comfortably numb as though it's all just a video they're watching on youtube.

We've demonstrated that we can treat mankind as a low rotten cad and in this way get it to do almost anything in the world; or we can make it enthusiastic and in this way get it to do almost anything in the world. We gyrate between these two extremes. But the world in which we operate cannot "pivot" as easily or as quickly as we can, and the denouement we so fear shows every sign of actualizing precisely because of our actions to forestall it, such as massive infrastructure plans, government subsidization of fossil fuel companies and the car culture they legitimize, or the insurance company encouragement of developers' building homes in floodplains, encroaching seashores and fire-ravaged landscapes, nevermind lawsuits against energy companies that result in our continued inaction in enacting any actual real change; they can't, as their sole purpose is to allow us to feel as smugly righteous as those Evangelical conmen we so love to deride.