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.