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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?
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.
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