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.