December Eve : Let the Season of Über-Greed Begin.

Now that we have had our Thanksgiving holiday to celebrate the abysmal failure of the Glasgow COPout26 conference, one that boasted a record number of air-travelers in the US to serve as a celebration of Fuck you economics, the eco-disaster of the Christmas season can finally start in earnest ... and we all know the importance of being earnest; never more important than during this, the most frivolous, ultimately purposeless, and annoyingly insincere season of the year. An appropriate denouement for the Climate Conference that was heralded with many of the same cynically frivolous, purposeless, and insincere bromides.

While the conference attendees were climbing back onto jets to return home for their holiday feast, they chose to ignore the fact that the problem they were so concerned about that they poured carbon into the air to pile up with that from their previous futile trips, isn’t going to be solved by one conference or 26 of them, but only by every country and every human being halting the practice of indulging in over-consumption without giving the least amount of thought to where the raw material comes from while ignoring the urgent need to use less. Hardly had the wheels hit the tarmac before the race was on. Besieged with a constant barrage of commercials, ads to make sure you buy loved ones presents festooned with straight-to-the-landfill gewgaws and wrapped in unrecyclable paper and ribbons, that were shipped thousands of miles across the rising seas aboard mammoth containers burning bunker fuel the entire way, along with millions of Christmas decorations of robofactured plastic that will outlast mankind itself, yet will be thrown away before ever we see 2022 ushered in. 

A good case in point, for me, is my term robofactured. There is no such word. Nor is there such a word as mechanofactured. Ironic, that. Since there is nary an item used by their customers, nor a single commodity produced by any transnational corporation that is actually "manufactured," "manu" being from the Latin for "hand", and "facto" meaning, "To make," hence manufactures, the word used in colonial parlance for goods made in the home, are literally hand-made. Yet nothing anyone buys from any corporation is hand-made. Consequently they are not manufactured goods, they are mechano, or robo-factured goods, completely produced by machines under the control of robotics and computerized processes. If this seems nit-picking, as it may well be, I would like to point out that overconsumption on the scale of today's modern populace is impossible without rampant overproduction, which overproduction results in the eradication of all truly manufactured products and their replacement with entirely robo/mechano-factured hyper-produced items, the vast majority of which mankind could far more easily do without.

Thus does it come as no surprise to read that, "Norilsk Nickel will increase production of metals by 30 percent to 40 percent by 2030 to supply “green economy manufacturers”. Specifically, EV's.

Norilsk Nickel is the Russian company in Siberia that you may have heard of in regards to the first Arctic oil spill to be blamed on permafrost melting. The linked NBC story associates their activity with what they wish to refer to as THE FIFTH CRIME:

"A global movement is rising to advocate for "ecocide" as a new crime before the International Criminal Court. The goal is draw a “moral line”.

But I live in the USA. So that makes me wonder, "If a nation can start two wars without provocation merely by describing in the campaigns to win support to start them as "pre-emptive strikes", one of which lasted 20 years, and there is no charge leveled against that country for the multitude of War Crimes, including Terrorism ("Shock and Awe" may sound catchy and sci-fi-ish, but it is nothing more than a euphemism for Terrorize), torture, dropping banned weaponry such as phosphorous bombs and depleted uranium, and starting a major international conflict on the basis of the known lie of WMD's, all in the face of world-wide demonstrations against the conflict, then what, I ask, is the point of declaring yet a fifth crime to be adjudicated before the same court, the ICC, whose rulings the world's Sole Superpower simply scoffs at? 

We already know. The fact that they are calling the metals to be produced by Norilsk Nickel, "green economy" metals, already demonstrates the greenwash so easily applied to the most egregiously polluting corporation on the face of the planet. (You can watch Ryabinin, who resigned in order to bring the spill to the world's attention, tell his story in a 45-minute video posted on the Norilchane YouTube channel).

Not to be outdone, on the other side of the planet, in the frozen snowscape of the Antarctic, 

"For more than 30 years, David Harwood, professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has been a leading scientist investigating how global temperature change affected Antarctic ecosystems and the stability of the large southern ice sheets over millions of years in the past. He and other Nebraska scientists, engineers, drillers and students have helped lead international efforts to understand Antarctica's past climate and what it portends for the future as the world warms in the coming decades."

Nebraska, you say? The corn belt? Where one of the worst eco-disasters of the century continues to unfold in order to grow "renewable" fuels to power the ever-burgeoning carbon footprint of America's vehicles of choice, SUV's and "pick-ups"? Apparently it's alright to totally ignore the actual cause of  the environmental  disaster you're investigating a world away as long as it's taking place right under your nose in your own backyard. What's ignored in the ramshackle program instituted for the purported reason (another forgotten Bush era lie) of "Energy Independence" is the fact that not a drop of fuel-from-food would have been necessary had even half of the gas-guzzling vehicles on US roads today  been fuel efficient (and they could even still have been SUV's had they been hybrids). But no. Instead, along with the disaster of draining an irreplaceable water source and razing, a la pre-Dust Bowl 30's, the delicate ecology of the prairies, the USA deliberately created a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that has decimated the livelihoods of what actually were sustainable enterprises in order to fill the coffers of the likes of Cargill and Deere, Exxon and West Virginia coal companies. But hey, it's green. It's renewable. So, how about making that the first eco-crime: greenwashing. (To show how you just can't win, Greenwashing itself is merely an industry-created word to substitute for what it acts as cover for: LIEING).

The continuing ecocide from just the food-for-fuel and fracking eco-disasters taking place on the American continent support such a vast array of government-supported corponational activity that any act taken to halt their depredations are as futile as the anti-War demonstrations against the cowardly attack on Iraq were.

It's so easy to forget that the entities reporting on the establishment of The Fifth Crime as though it will have an actual impact, are owned, or are an integral part of, the same Corporate power elite whose activities they pretend they wish to highlight, when in fact it is the vast media itself which propagates and fans, via shameless ads for the priciest, and most energy-wasting products on earth, the raging desire to have everything, and to have it in excess of what your neighbor has, regardless of need.

In 2005, well past the time when climate change denialism could be advocated by any but the most shameless among us, the EIA's report on World energy consumption was concerned about where the oil would come from to provide what was then calculated to be the world's energy needs by 2020 of 120 million bbl's/day. The impact on the carbon content of the atmosphere of an escalation of that magnitude was never mentioned. The world is instead burning ~100 million bbl's/day. Yet the population that that level of energy production was meant to support did not stop growing even though its energy consumption is at a level ~20% less than predicted. Efficiency? Hardly. Inequality, you see, isn't an accident, but an energy and climate necessity. Far from the middle class being destroyed, its privileged position in every Democracy is being enhanced as one government after the other lards public monies onto Corporate balance sheets with nary a cent of profit from those enterprises being used to fill up the government coffers that made those profits possible; all to enable their constituents' continued exorbitant use of energy. A use that grows all the faster with every new green/clean/renewable energy fiasco propagated by the Corporo-sphere to assuage the conscience while exacerbating the very problem they are supposedly receiving trillions in government money to fix. As GW's father said, he would ensure that the money (and energy resources) went to the "right People", setting the stage so the Poppy seed could laugh in the face of those who are the wrong people, by referring to those right people as "the haves and the have-mores". But, as the season of sharing kicks into high gear, having more never means you have enough. There is simply no such thing as that.

Pretty Lies.

Telling us All those pretty lies. 

 The wind called COPout's now blown through

The world's got reason to weep

Oh, I know it sure was hard to leave there Kerry

But it's really not your home

Fossil fuels are filthy, but we each tar every street

And we insist on clean white living like life's a fancy French salon

Oh Kerry you must be insane

You're hair's the finest silver

You've come back from the Glasgow Conference 

With naught but shite

I said, Oh, you're a mean old Daddy there's none like you

Get outta my sight

They flew down to the Glascow charade

Their will to act reduced to a whine,

Then they laughed and toasted nothing and smashed every hope of Greta down

Let's have a round for these sheiks and their soldiers

A round for each of their crimes

Let's have another round for the fossil fuel regime

That flew us to this tourist town

Come on Kerry you must be insane

Your hair's gone silver

Oh you're a mean old Daddy

An old worn shoe

They flew them in from Amsterdam

They flew them in from Rome 

They flew them in from every continent 

And put cut flowers 'round their rooms

But let's not talk about Climate Change now

The night is a starry dome

And they're playin' that scratchy rock and roll

Beneath the Glasgow Moon

Come on Kerry we're all insane

Bought for a few pieces of silver

A small price to pay so you can

Have fun tonight

Empty wind as hot as Africa's

Speech after empty speech

Oh you know it sure is hard to listen

They're just throwing a dog a bone

Maybe it's been too long a time

Since you was scramblin' down in the street

You've got too used to your clean white livin'

Being chauffeured ‘round like you're Peron

Oh Kerry you've gone insane

But your hair's the finest silver

You've come back from the Glasgow Conference 

With naught but shite

I said, Oh, you're a mean old Daddy there's none like you

Get outta my sight

 

COPout26 Hits Corporate Target: Expect Less, Pay More

 

As the Climate extravaganza winds down, the rhetoric detailing what's been accomplished is understandably muted, as it comes in at net zero. Despite a sad methane reduction pledge, on a gas that was all but ignored at the first conference when it was  just as dangerous as it is now, much as nitrogen dioxide's been ignored at this one, the reduction in methane has already occurred, since its largest emitter, fracking, is pushing the limits of its productive capabilities. The Canadian tar sands is expanding, as is the output of Iran and Iraq, as the USA's last gasp at oil production staggers to its inevitable conclusion: depletion. By 2030, btw. No coincidence that. Meanwhile the conference winds down, its members, having learned nothing, leave, with their illusion that the chemicals, electronics, and paper needed for this junket are ethereal substances, intact. They remain as abstract as the gas in a Gilets Jaunes protestor's car.   

Even as the meetings droned on, the rush in the real world to replace every human worker with a machine proceeds apace. In a world that actually had any intention of reducing its reliance on carbon, a surge to replace machines with working humans, labor that need not plow the prairie into a dust bowl or savage the world's rainforests to produce diesel, the carbon sequestration possibilities alone of actually burying the carbon units our dead bodies become at our demise, would have us sequestering those corpses' carbon underground for decomposition and re-sequestration in the wood of those same rainforests. But, despite the brouhaha, none of the "solutions" being paraded and lauded at the conference have anything to do with reducing hydrocarbon use, the use of which is profitable on such an exponentially game-changing scale from that possible with mere human beings as your labor input, that the chances of the multinational corporations that we have empowered to run the world of finding a way out of what is mankind's, not their, dilemma are basically nil.  

As can be seen by its "accomplishments" the conference is basically a way of selling the corporate-backed "solutions" to a clueless public begging to be duped into thinking that, despite the fact that the solutions to stop climate change are simply the other side of the coin of oil depletion, it  provides a means of denial of peak oil while blaming the downturn in everyone's standard of living on the green technologies without ever having to face the music for leading the world over the cliff of fossil fuel's incapacity to fuel their privileged lifestyle into the future. Which it can't do. But it will both cost more and you can expect less: less separation from those your greed disenfranchises, expect less freedom of movement as not only does the fuel to propel you along the way gets increasingly expensive, it becomes less available, and the infrastructure over which you wish to propel your $40,000 vehicle becomes drastically unreliable. Like driving your vehicle over a flooded road, it may not appear treacherous at first glance, but the hazards that lie undetected right in front of you can not only destroy your vehicle they can end your life, and certainly your Zoom-Zoom experience when around the next bend there may be no road, or it might be unpassable at the cruising speed you've come to not only expect, but demand, as part of your Freedom. Which suggests something the Conference of losers failed to even mention: it isn't just the vehicles, but the construction and maintenance needed to cover the prepared surfaces to make them suitable to "ride", by which we actually mean fly, over. For cars are closer to flying carpets than to a horse and buggy. With one failing: they must touch the earth's surface. And that surface, if the car and its contents aren't to be shaken to a mass of quivering jell-o during transit, must have a smooth surface to fly over, which in the US alone, amounts to more than 3.9 million miles of roads to keep paved, enough to circle the equator 157 times.

Which is a great place to look at the built reality in front of our eyes that we refuse to see. While the undeveloped/emerging economies' demand that the richer countries use less fuel, even the rich countries, such as France, must pay the price for the artificially-low energy prices the fossil fuel-purveying countries exact from their own citizens, despite humanity and the damage to the rest of the breathing lifeforms we share the planet with. But it is Americans themselves who have been set up as well. As gas prices went down after the last collapse in prices, SUV sales went up. That  means that as the prices rise again, the cost to keep them on the road goes up even faster then they came down, along with the costs of everything else, everything now being made of plastic, which has the same price/ubiquity paradigm as the SUV's: the cheaper natural gas become, the cheaper plastic, and thereby the cost of shipping things in plastic (that 's why your local eggs are in pulp (as in weighty) containers, while the Big Corporate-owned farms a thousand miles away are sheathed in a catafalque of light-weight plastic. I have saved a couple of them; they are just impossible for me to throw away, being as they are, such marvels of over-engineering in order to bring a simple egg over increasingly bumpy roads). As all the small suppliers get priced out of the market, the pulp containers disappear along with their manufacturers, and when rising natural gas prices make the plastic containers more costly than the pulp ones, there are no pulp manufacturers left, so the real shipping costs rise to pay for those extra miles, now that the local producers have been systematically squeezed out, so prices rise, and the Fed, just to name one example, blames it on "inflation," but it is not so much inflation , as monopolistic price-gouging now that the competition has been stomped into the dust. This happens in every industry, and is exacerbated by the loss of expertise, and the concomitant need for an increase in expertise in a silicon box, otherwise known as computerization. 

Hence the importance of this media event in Glasgow. For that is all it is. A stage provided with public funds for Private corporations to hawk their fares such that we have Tesla, a small, EV manufacturer showing up to sell their "solutions for a green planet", wherein its trillion dollar valuation leaves the legacy car makers, the companies that have the actual facilities and expertise to manufacture automobiles in a mass production environment, are now every single one of them combined, worth less than the market valuation of one highly dubious enterprise whose cars remain unsold unless the government steps in and provides a healthy chunk of the purchase price to their already well-healed customers. Because that's how Libertarians roll: nothing for "society" everything for themselves.

But if an EV were to replace every one of the 214 million motor vehicles (which alone would drive us way beyond the so-called "carbon budget"), in the US alone (1.4 billion ICE machines worldwide: the carbon footprint of replacing them is never mentioned, but at the pre-pandemic rate of world output (2019's 98 million), it would take until 2040 if every one of those vehicles, starting today, were EV's, which they aren't, they are basically all ICE machines), we would still need the more than 3.9 million miles of paved roads, (which extent represents 20% of the 20,505,249 miles (33 billion meters) of the entire globe's paved surfaces), yet carries but 5% of the globe's population through Motorland America. And, because the weight of that fleet is only going to increase, the necessary road upkeep will have to occur at a higher pace. In fact, even if the weight of the batteries were equal to that of a tank of gas, the tank of gas gets progressively lighter the further the vehicle goes, a not trivial factor when gas tanks keep getting bigger to power the extra tonnage they are expected to propel. At 180 lbs for a 30 gallon tank, the weight = the burden of carrying around a hefty passenger, but one who keeps shedding pounds as the trip progresses. Not so for an EV. Its fuel always requires it to carries the same amount of weight and that weight, when it's multiplied by 215 million, is substantial, as every pound carried requires more Carbon outlay. In other words, the math doesn't add up. Because the upfront carbon footprint of mining the metals, building the factories, manufacturing the vehicles, constructing the transmission infrastructure, delivering those vehicles, trashing the ever-growing mountain of ICE machines, and the countless other ramifications of a change so mammoth, means that the world will be adding all that carbon even as those 1.4 billion vehicles are still plying the world's highways. So, even were the switch to occur, it would be nowhere near to being effectuated until 2050, at the soonest, and the carbon savings not kicking in for another decade or so after that, China's 2060. Only now, well, by then, in an atmosphere bearing a CO2 burden substantially higher than its current ~420 ppm's (500 ppm's (twice the atmosphere's historical burden, a 100% increase we have no way, because we have no stomach for it apparently) of avoiding) is a  lowball figure if the world even comes close to replacing its 1.4 billion motorized fleet ... and keep in mind, that's just that one aspect of the modern industrial landscape: no shipping, home heating, etc, etc, just replacement of that one component of our modern, Jetson lifestyle would burden the atmosphere with so much carbon it would, or will, be game over).

Yet even now, with every dollar that gas prices escalate, the probability of a Trumpocalypse and a return to the absolutely insane, but unprotested, policy of "Climate Change is a Hoax", grows grimly greater (not once, through all the vaccine, Covid, BLM, "Russia attacked our election", etc., etc., not one anti-"Climate change is a hoax" protest of any size or duration ever occurred). In other words, there is no reason that the USA would not simply re-instate its stance that Climate Change is a hoax, goosing its release of Freedom Molecules once again, along with another resurgence to the height of the fracking operations of the American oil companies. All to  relieve "Pain at the pump", despite that pain coming not so much from higher prices, as from vehicles so much larger that the tanks to hold their fuel are themselves twice the capacity (and therefore weight) of a more reasonably-sized vehicle in which to drive ourselves to our doom ... comfortably. Hell, even with the BBB of Pres JB, coal combustion to provide electrical juice has, AFTER The Blob left office, risen, simply because natural gas has become more expensive, in the US by 22%. 

But that is the blessing of this most futile of COPouts, it serves as the perfect metaphor for my assertion that the more we purportedly do to "avert" climate change (Hello?! It's already here!), the worse we make it; the faster we "Bring it on."

With the CO2 from the first conference still in the atmosphere, where it will remain for the rest of our grandchildren's lives, every conference since then has only added that much more of a burden, yet not a one of them has provided anything more than vague promises in exchange for their very real input of CO2 fumes: just like every proposed green "solution" to the climate "crisis." But a Crisis, by definition, is "a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention." In other words, there is no climate crisis, as there is no serious attention, it is all but a Game investors "play" TO SEE WHO CAN GET RICH QUICKER on the profits from pseudo-green technology, despite no one having defined what "green" even means ... It's like food companies calling their products "Natural", when not a soul has any idea of what they actually mean by that ... that is NOT a crisis, by anyone's definition, it is an "opportunity" for the well-high-heeled to enrich themselves at the expense of the public (the private sector's forte) ie, business as usual, with the mass-transit-riding public paying for the private ownership of an over-priced vehicle so as to enable the manufacturers of said vehicles to take tax-payer money and lard their dividend checks with public monies. That, to reiterate, is the exact opposite of a crisis. It is literally, business as usual.

Even at  the beginning of the pandemic, the WW2 slogan that "we are all in this together" served more to rub salt in the wounds of every "essential worker" who was going out and risking being infected by a virus from which they had no immunity while their employers, safely anti-socially distanced, squeezed their salaries to 3'rd world levels, all the while demanding they work at "internet speed". There was no actual rolling up of sleeves by the well-to-do to pitch in and help those less well-situated. And that has  been the case during the Climate non-crisis. It has been right from the outset first conflated with peak oil, and then "Played" by Walled-Off St to enrich the rich via grifts offering blandishments and false promises to the science-challenged electorate, while stuffing their pocket with the government cash building solar farms and windmills and EV's no one would buy without the taxpayer providing them with a sizeable down payment the public will never be paid back for, just so the rich can tool around in Teslas while avoiding paying their fair share of the tax burden; one their purchases have made even more onerous for everybody else. So even as climate change rages on like a wildfire in a rainforest, the business climate, that has en-masse adopted the Pentagonesque strategy of using the government as an endlessly flowing teat for their nourishment alone, has not changed one iota, and until and unless it does, which it won't, 'cause we won't let it, it is Game Over. How will you "play" it?

 

Punk'd: Swallowing US Climate Lies.

It's being reported this week, as the COPout conference begins, that a wide-ranging probe by the US Congress would look into the oil companies' misleading of the public about the anthropogenic nature of the change our global climate is experiencing. Top executives from leading firms like Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell are being called on to testify at these hearings.

Yes, you read that right. The Congress is conducting this probe. That same Congress that includes Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. To name but the two most bare-faced liars in the group. That same Congress that is peopled by a minority of Republicans, the majority of which are all still backing the most outrageous lies about Climate Change spouted by anyone on the globe, along with the Stop the Steal, or any other conspiratorial idiocy the Blob from the previous Administration decides to champion. With barely a peep from Congressional leaders who all but rolled over with a shrug of their shoulders so as to profit from the fracking bonanza such an outrageous lie was propagated to enable, with the Blob's administration encouraging a dramatic increase of CO2 forcing, by proclaiming that it isn't a pollutant at all, along with methane, while the world whispered barely a syllable of protest until the Blob had slithered out of the Offal Orifice. His administration still referring to these powerful GHG's as Freedom Molecules, demonstrating the USA's intransigence even as their "Freedom" fries the planet. Yet it's not until NOW that they're instigating a "wide-ranging probe"? 

Why, may I ask, need it be wide-ranging when Congress need look no further than its own disgraced chambers to find the most egregious, the vilest, and the remaining intransigent purveyors of the cruel hoax that, "Climate Change is a Hoax"? Despite what industry leaders from all over the globe believed, and what the political leaders of all of our allies were professing, the US Congress and the Blob administration were disseminating lies about not only the causes of the change in the planet's climate regime, but even about the existence of that change, denying they were even occurring, even as the altered climate fueled torrential downpours that drowned their own constituents in roaring torrents of water or engulfed entire communities in raging wildfires.

This is the "deliberative body" that's going to expose the lies that nobody believed so long as they were being propagated by the fossil fuel industries?  But like tobacco companies insisting "nicotine isn't addictive", or that "smoking doesn't cause cancer", only those either already hooked, or those profiting from that addiction ever "believed" those lies. That is, until members of the Congress of the US accepted as truth the lie that Climate Change was a hoax, and actual candidates for the presidency of the US, the lily-livered Marco Rubio, and the cynical Ted Cruz missile, both of whom are from States where the ravages wrought by an amped-up weather regime are exacting ever-greater costs, was any credence given to industry propaganda. Because of course, as in the case of tobacco, the US, like a drug-pusher, was numbered among the three top suppliers of the product the rest of the world was hooked on, and members from both parties, via their support of hydraulic fracturing, were profiting nicely from that addiction. Thus it is only now, with the Blob safely out of office, that the profiteers start pointing their cowardly fingers at the industry their own perfidy enabled. 

So somehow, the only legislative body in the world in the only country in the world that not only denies the very existence of Climate Change, but insists that there is a CONSPIRACY afoot to fool you into believing that climate change is happening, is the same one that is conducting a witch hunt to flush out the perpetrators of "Climate Lies".  Because that is what a hoax is folks: a prank pulled off by a cadre of co-conspirators to make a fool of someone for their own sadistic amusement. Watch an episode of Punk'd, and you will see the nature of the hoax that Climate Change is a hoax, for like the other lies of the Blob, once the idiocy of his stance gets in the way of his political ambitions, it is simply discarded with a, "Well I never really believed that" (See the history of the completely bogus "Birther" movement that sustained The Blob's political ambitions throughout the Obama Presidency and its complete disappearance despite the fervid, virulent hatred it bellowed to a red hot heat in its adherents, which was the only reason the hoax that Obama was Kenyan was conjured up in the first place).

Even as we were subjected for four long years to the clown show and media circus of All Trump All the Time, because it suited the MSM's bottom line as they watched their ratings skyrocket while they rode a gravy train of ad revenue that Silver Streaked into their home depots, barely a word of protest was heard, let alone a congressional investigation. Yet even as MSNBC, and none more than Rachel Madcow, spent millions of dollars and wasted years investigating the Russian "ATTACK" on our elections that gave us the Blob's presidency, never once did they in all that time point out the similar propaganda used by the Russian President Putin and the Russian's own oil extraction machine, even though the man the Blob picked for his Secretary of State ran the Company that was supplying Rosneft not only with the technical expertise to enable the horizontal drilling in the Siberian Arctic, but the economic backing as well, thus making the connection obvious. Russia needn't propagate any lies of its own, it had the President of the United States doing that for them. Whether that was intentional or not, the fact remained that the Fake News the President was spreading with all the fervor of an evangelical preacher, helped the Russians' oil industry far more than its alliance with Exxon, so it consequently  ended it. But this wasn't deemed newsworthy by the "Russia is Evil" contingent of the news media ... not entertaining enough, apparently. Right. Nor did they ever bother to illuminate the connection between the full-throttled extraction of the rest of the USA's energy reserves (and its sale to none other than Communist China at rock bottom prices), that was the underlying promise embedded in the lie that Climate change is a hoax. 

So when you read the News' assertion that "Facebook Is Making Millions Off Lies About the Climate Crisis", remember that lying about the Climate Crisis has been making billions for American Politicians from both parties for decades now, and that lying is not about to stop simply because Facebook's now accused of it too. Every train, even a gravy train, has a terminal, but not until every last cent of profit has been wrung from the last sequestered hydrocarbon will this one chug into the station, pulling the last lumps of thermal coal behind it.

Highlights have never been so Low Level.

"Limiting methane emissions, preserving forests and helping South Africa reduce its reliance on coal were among key initiatives announced by several countries Tuesday as more than 100 world leaders, including President Gee, I Joe, met for a second day at the COPout26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland."

That's the best they could come up with? This is what tens of thousands of junketers jetted in to achieve? And exactly what is so earth-shattering about these proposals that they couldn't have been arrived at via a simple Zoom conference? Why are these pathetically meager results been presented as if something substantial has been achieved?

The limiting of methane emissions, for example, is a farce. The shrinking output from the US fracturing of the earth and new demands from the investors in the sector that it actually show a profit have everything to do with the reduced methane emissions promised by the US. Instead of the pell-mell "drill, baby drill", that drove US output toward the 13 million bpd of production and the bounty of natural gas it produced, hydraulic fracturing operations in the US have been pretty much capped at 10-11bpd, so the peak of methane production, which, without a cap on flaring, only means that instead of simply letting it seep into the atmosphere, the US will simply do as the Russians and increase its flaring, which results in the addition of more CO2 and water vapor to the atmosphere, so there's a kind of highlight in that in that the high lights of the flares can be seen from space. Have been seen from space for more than 20 years now, from No. Dakota's Bakken to the Marcellus shale, from the Texas Permian to California's Monterey shale, so much methane has been flared that it is as though an entire country's emissions have been left unaccounted for by the Glasgow conference. Yet this low level of achievement goes even lower. 

"US Vows to ... " The promised reduction is only as good as the longevity of the Biden administration, which several pundits have already decided is a one-term presidency. Whether that's true or not, the fact remains that the trumpery of such promises has already been demonstrated to the entire globe by the previous administration to be worth less than the paper it's printed on. With no input from Congress, no vote by the America public, a new chief executive can still walk in and unilaterally, with no justification nor the need to provide the least bit of scientific evidence to buttress the claim, declare climate change to be just a hoax, and abrogate any and all commitments to, well, anything, even signed and ratified treaties with other sovereign nations. So of what good are vague promises of "limiting methane emissions" from a country as feckless and internationally unaccountable as the USA? It's like trumpeting a promised reduction of coal combustion from one country while another two, home to almost half of the entire global human population, have already penned contracts with Russia to increase their own importation of coal to keep their citizens warm/cool, and maintain their growth rates? 

And as Joan Rivers would've said, "Oh grow up!" If the US is going to "donate" wads of cash to South Africa to wean it from coal, that cash will be earmarked for the construction of a LNG terminals to receive Permian gas. You know, the "transition" fuel, that bridge to the green future. 

But it's not just the USA. Every country in the world will jettison any climate pledges they have made as soon as they start to impact the ruling clique's hold on power, which, since there is no known technology that can deliver the same level of ease as the sine qua non of an automobilized society, every country in the world faces their own Gilets Jaunes' explosion of popular discontent as soon as they impose the only really effective method of energy use curtailment: substantially higher energy prices. What they called "Pain at the Pump" in the seventies. Sign whatever you need to to make us look like good global citizens, but don't you dare ask us to spend a nickel more to fuel our "Let them eat yellowcake" jet-set lifestyle. 

The United Nations has held the "Conference of the Parties' Poops," or COPout, every year for close to three decades, with this year's being the 26th meeting. During that time, despite the urgent need evidenced to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, those emissions have skyrocketed by over 62%, one of the major emitters going to such ludicrous lengths as to bald-facedly claim that "climate change is just a hoax" for the specific reason of cloaking its own acceleration of emissions in order to funnel the proceeds from its fracking rampage across a continent into the pockets of less than a dozen high-flying executives, while one of the other CO2 Champs builds castles in the air and apartment complexes on the ground that are so shoddily constructed they are simply dynamited to dust, while yet another, one we hear little about, Japan, builds an airport in the middle of rising seas that was proven useless even before it was completed. 

Okay I made that last part up, it's fully operational after a slight cost overrun that ballooned its price from $4bil to $20bil, but the point is that  it was built in another part of the world that is dependent more or less exclusively on imported oil as arbitrage for the products of their labor force. Energy in, used to massage other resources into tradable products, merchandise out. Only what's happened in the last two generations is that the global economy's most profitable products have become somewhat ethereal, and those producing them are no longer serfs; so the working class has been severely downgraded in their skill set, becoming the serving class to the deserving class's cyber workaholism. Their only way to burrow into the fount of fortune is to sell their labor, not to industry, who bars their way at every step, but to the New Economy's successful individuals, doing their nails, inking their skin, stretching their muscles, scrubbing their toilets and weeding their lawns.

Kai Tak Airport (Getty Images)

So the fossil-fueled regime of industrial production  and mindless consumption isn't a paradigm one can take the coward's way out of by pointing at Exxon, or whatever other boogieman you may conjure. Japan is an entirely different political entity that has, despite being just across the strait from where the Kyoto Protocols were drawn up, embarked on this mega-project after the turn of the century that not only had a carbon footprint exponentially larger than that of any other airport in the world, its continued existence would, by design, have to depend on its continuing in that vein, imprinting a larger carbon footprint than any of its counterparts by sheer virtue of the ever-more-desperate extents it must go to to fight off what was already known to be a relentlessly rising ocean. One that constructing airports in the middle of only makes rise that much faster.

And that's just one of myriad examples of societies around the globe living by the maxim that "Building Bigger's Best" while simultaneously promising to reduce, reduce reduce. 

If you look at the photo above, what's most striking is the location pile-up, in the midst of open land, of the humans. It's as though "But where are the peasants, I  mean people, going to live?", came as an afterthought. Whereas the machines are afforded vast swaths of empty space, the human population has been silo'd on top of one another in highrises that leave many of them unable to get in or out during power outages. All that land has been usurped from the peasants by the elites as infrastructure necessary to fly themselves and their eye candy from country to country. Like that small triangle of trees between the highways in the pic, the humans have been bull-dozed over to the periphery, sequestered out of the way of the machines whose relentless appropriation of not only the land, but the very air we breathe, reduces humankind to slaves laboring for a Wehrmacht whose fumes are poisoning everything it holds dear.

And then there's India.

Modi: "These choices, made by billions of people, can take the fight against climate change one step further."  

Well you see, problem is, that's exactly wrong. There are billions of people on this planet. Of Earth's 7 billion, only 1 billion, mostly those populations in the OECD nations of the world, create close to 80% of the GNG's in the atmosphere. As inequality rises, as it has been for decades but has now been accelerated by the pandemic, the gulf separating us promises to grow ever larger, enabling a shrinking proportion of the world's humans to blow an ever-expanding cloud of exhaust gas into the rest of humanity's collective face. Modi's assertion completely ignores this. But looking at how the pandemic has been handled by the world community, how it has made the rich FAR richer, further concentrated economic power, and left 5 million dead in the wake of an economic Boom that has, far from "Lifting all ships in a rising tide",  instead left millions choking in the swell of its noxious wake, the wealth of the insanely wealthy has grown beyond the beyonds.  In the blink of an eye we have gone from a world where suddenly "We are all in this together", to one where you can already hear them chortle among one another sipping their dirty martini's at a Margo Largo cocktail party and ponder how to further game the virus to increase their Bloat:

"What do you call five millions dead from Covid?"

"A good start."

It's called Capitalism. And we (none more than Modi's millions of minions) LOVE it.

Even unto death.

"Let them eat Haggis": COPout 26's MT Greene House Gases.

 

Jesse Ventura of the Blond Whig Party.

Taylor-maid Greene-horn; from the femme in men Miss Teak to e-Mask-you-Lation Nation.

While the masculine anti-Maskuline trans-gendered, conspiracy-theory-addled Marjorie Taylors her remarks to appeal to her "Climate Change is a Hoax" constituency, the other Greenes, gathering like a flock of lost migra-Tory birds, have roosted across what they have come to refer to as "the Pond", which appellation reveals the Showboating nature of this boondoggle of a conference that has flown tens of thousands of people who "really care" about CO2 pollution, dumping, in the process, unnecessary additional tons of CO2 pollution into the atmosphere. CO2 that will still be in the atmosphere, added to that still hovering there from the previous less-than useless COPout conferences, long after all these participants are dead and cremated (adding more mega-tons of CO2 to the already over-burdened load mankind has dumped into its most vital commons). It's strikingly ironic that a vast ocean can be dwindled down in the mummified brains of the druling elites to a scummy pond, yet the very air we breathe is considered so immeasurable we can afford to dump 40 billion tons/year of CO2 into it, treating as a disposable wasteland the only delicate balance of life-sustaining gases in the known universe.  

Oh, but not to worry, our stalwart leaders are using their featherbrains to hammer out a road to the future, one paved with concrete and tar, of course. But don't blame me, it's not my assfault. And who's building that road? Why Brazil. Russia. The USA. All three of these leaders in emissions for no reason whatsoever, except "The Economy", are here to show the rest of the world how to curtail their emissions, so that these big three can continue to flare with a flair, or make a great nation from rampant deforestation, while each one jokes that "Climate Change is a Hoax". Yet it's somehow Exxon, or BP, that needs to be sued for "Climate Denial" (whatever that means).

Biden called on the world to increase its production of hydrocarbons right before jetting to the COPout conference where he urged that same world to decrease its combustion of hydrocarbons. Meanwhile Putin was busy tootin' how the world needs to take climate change seriously, even as his government opens mega-tons of fossil-fuel production facilities on the doorstep of the most rapidly warming area on the globe. These facilities, financed, as all such endeavors are, almost exclusively with borrowed funds leveraged to the hilt via funny-money and junk-bond cash, such that, should they not produce the abundance of hydrocarbons promised, they force a repeat of 1998, as Russian bonds are worthless without Arctic hydrocarbons to pay the interest on them, while the collateral on which they are based have not even the slightest ability to make good on the investments they have buoyed up. This sector, on which the entire economy of Russia hinges, has already, although not even out of their construction phase, released such prodigious amounts of GHG's that, although it has gone unheralded in what we still laughingly refer to as "the news", scientists have, since the beginning of the year, started referring to the heating up of the Arctic as accelerating from the "twice as fast as the rest of the world" to THREE times as fast (with some scientists referring to the warming in Alaska as occurring at a rate FOUR times that of the rest of the globe). A scant few years ago Putin boasted that Russia was the country best situated to profit from global warming, with its vast plains becoming the breadbasket of the world. Now he has seen the effect that an erratically warming globe has on food production: sure, you can plant more, produce more, but how to get it to market before a tornado roils through it or hail the size of baseballs shreds it to bits, or a relentless sun, its intensity magnified by the tons of seeping methane released from Russia's extensive fracturing and its endless vistas of thawing permafrost, fries the delicate germ on its stalk; that is if it doesn't burn it up in a raging wildfire or turn it into a reeking mass of rotting pulp following a deluge of torrential rain.

Then there's the clownish Bolsonaro's Brazil. Brazil has fielded one of the biggest delegations at the UN climate talks in Glasgow, funding a lavish promotional pavilion to propagate the meme that Brazil is “a longtime champion of the environmental agenda and an agrifood powerhouse”, two completely contradictory assertions: when you become an agrifood powerhouse by transforming the world's largest carbon sink into a defacto carbon pump, your claim to environmental championship might become somewhat besmirched. But trumpery has been adopted as the new language by dictators the world over. So nothing one says need be consistent with anything else you claim. Bloviate until you're blue in the face, you need never fear contradiction being voiced by the Corporate-owned and throttled, completely bought-and-paid for (which is the complete opposite of "Free"), press.

All three of these countries speaking out so forcefully on climate change are the same three countries that have paraded their utter buffoonery across the world stage, ham-handling for the entertainment and windfall profits of the elites, the pandemic caused by a Corona virus. Wherein Russia, thanks to its Greene-hued cohort of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, is currently in the throes of its worst viral outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, while Brazil's president is facing mass murder charges for deliberately spreading the virus among his poorest and most vulnerable populations, telling them a la MTG, that the vaccine will give them AIDS, and the US stands out as the host of a grand ole Party, nursing a hangover of 3/4 of a million deceased out of a worldwide death count of 5 million, the highest mortality rate in the world in the wealthiest country in the world. But don't take away that Punch bowl, Jewdy.

Yeah. Let's listen to those guys.

Which means we  have to ignore him. Who him? He who him:

The UN Secretary General  António Guterres:

"Our war with nature" includes a food system that generates one third of all greenhouse gas emissions and is also responsible for up to 80 percent of biodiversity loss."

What Guterres prefers not to mention is that the food system he refers to is the result of what was called the Green Revolution:

the one at the heart of all three of the above-referenced countries' "agribusiness", by which is meant the world's extensive, Corporate-owned, mono-cropped, artificially-fertilized, via the use of tons of fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers and pesticides, solar power plants. Plants that, as you can see from the photo above, require enormous inputs of hydrocarbons to sow, fertilize, harvest, and market. And the so-called Green New Deal promises to deliver even more CO2 pollution that the Green Revolution did. And that's it. That's the agenda tens of thousands of people junketed to Scotland to be assailed with. Perhaps that's what they mean by Climate Denial. So long as you call it Greene, you can build any machine. But as Guterres remark makes clear, just because it's green doesn't mean it's clean. In fact it  ends up that it generates enormous quantities of greenhouse gas emissions while wreaking havoc on biodiversity. All before one bite is consumed. Or one tank of gas is adulterated with solar-powered fuel produced by the Green Revolution, which has morphed from a "revolution" in food production to a platform for extending the life of the fossil-fueled era of the ICE machine (which now, being powered by fuel produced by solar power under the auspices of the Green Revolution, are defacto part of the Green New Deal solution ... Voila! Trumpery rules). 

Yet none of these countries have the least intention of dismantling their Agribusiness Powerhouse, even as they rail at other countries to follow the "environmental agenda" the GlassCow conference is tabling. One that each of them not only ignores, but, since all of them have inextricably straight-jacketed their futures into dependence on carbon-intensive economies, flips the bird at. Because what "leveraging" depends on are loan packages built using other loan packages as "collateral," a fair number of which are unpayable already, with many more teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, kept viable only by the low-to-no interest regime of the world's Central Banks. Thus they have no flexibility. Like jit inventory, there is no room left to maneuver for change or to fund innovation, as there is no time left when everything has to be "just-in-time" to the nano-second. And, time being money, as it is, there is no money, either. It has all been spent upfront, leaving not a red cent for alternate planning or building back bigger: and that too must depend, not so much on borrowed money per se, as on conjured money.

On the heels of the Green Revolution came the Reagan Revolution, and it declared that anything that can't be monetized is not only worth less, it's worthless. And on this maxim of monetization, wherein the value of everything is subject to the price a fickle market imposes on it, has the globalized economy been built. No conference on that isle where resides the remnants of an Empire built all-but-exclusively on Slavery and Piracy in the Caribbean, (funded by a religiously enshrined monarchy of murderers, castle intriguers and despoilers), where sugar plantations thrive to this day on the labor of indentured servants living in squalor where slave-like restrictions still hamper their every move, has the least possibility of altering that. If for no other reason than that all three of the most powerful, resource-rich countries in the world have not the slightest intention of altering in the least their respective carbon-spewing economies. Like three volcanos, joined by yet another three, India, China, and the EU, they discharge CO2 into the atmosphere in an unending exhaust of noxious gases, inviting cataclysm, while positioning their Corporations to enjoy windfall profits from the ensuing chaos their enshrined Disaster Capitalism delivers in spades, all the while bemoaning the intransigence of the rest of the world to halt their fuelish ways.

 Build back bigger arsenals, the real rallying cry of American, Russian, British, and Chinese "Defense" Departments, suddenly almost makes sense.