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.