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?