Green Energy Mantra: "Don't Look Up" ... anything. Just Believe Corponationals' Propaganda.

Don't look up: How much coal is burned to produce the biofuel ethanol from corn

Don't look up: How much water is drained from the Ogallala aquifer (non-renewable) to produce                                         renewable fuel. (At no cost to the Corponationals that simply leave once the water is                                gone).

Don't look up: How much of the corn crop is used to produce renewable ethanol (40%: more than goes                           to animals (36%) or actual food).

Don't look up: How much federal money went to develop the technology to use plant residue and                                     switch grass to manufacture ethanol to a State (let's say Kansas) that still claims that                                 you should run the other way when someone claims, "I'm from the government and I'm                           here to help."

Don't look up: The stark evidence documenting failed ex-President Trump's continuing struggle with                               Long-Covid-induced dementia, even as the Republican Party continues to cater to his                               every whim.

Don't look up: The ecological disaster being wrought by making biofuels from woodchips, nor the                                  increase in the CO2 vented by burning wood to produce electricity instead of coal, nor                            the immediate addition of all the CO2 stored in not only the wood, but the leaves,                                    branches and soil. The devastation to the landscape caused by production of what is                                referred to as a biofuel is so total, it makes blowing off mountaintops, and burning the                              resultant biofuel of coal, look ecologically sound.        

Don't look up: How the Corponationals are exporting America's future energy supply hand over fist for                           quick profit, claiming renewables, all of which depend on non-renewable inputs,                                     (which is what we (they) are exporting) will power America into the future.

Don't look up: How US Corponationals, such as Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil, have transferred to                                                      Russian "Champions", such as Rosneft, the US government-developed                                                      hydraulic fracturing technologies necessary to power Russia's energy                                                                                         renaissance.                              

Don't look up: How, because of that renaissance, this year the scientific community has, with no comment, as though nobody would notice, quietly started referring to the speed at which the Arctic is warming as being THREE times the rate of that of the rest of the world; whereas, at the beginning of the pandemic, during which we saw the world reduce its energy consumption, it was always stated as being twice the rate of the rest of the world (which was quite alarming enough). Were it to increase to four times the rate, the Russians would curtail their climate-deranging activities not a single bit ... or byte.

Then be sure not to look up how the USA's victory over Germany's Nazi regime was fueled by what were at the time its "inexhaustible" supplies of oil. By draining not only the rest of US oil, and selling the vast reserves of Natural Gas thus created to the rest of the world via LNG, the Corponationals will leave the US in much the same position they are leaving US agriculture in respect to the rapidly depleting Ogallala aquifer: farmers will be unable to grow food (never mind produce "renewable" ethanol), while the USA will be left unable to grow its economy or military. What they will be able to grow is the trade deficit. With no more oil to procure foreign exchange, it will balloon from its already outsize figure, while its National budget deficit, since the military (which you may have noticed is continuing to receive an outsize portion of the federal budget, even though it is no longer in the midst of any pre-emptive wars, nor facing any threat that it hasn't itself produced ... it has become the country's largest, and most intractable, Welfare Program) keeps siphoning off an ever larger percentage of federal spending. The USA will soon enough, following its current trajectory (ie it is completely predictable, so whereas the vast majority of US citizens will be totally blind-sided, the Russians and Chinese are well aware of the strip-mining and exportation of US resources taking place by US federally-subsidized Corponationals) will be in the same position, vis-à-vis the by-then oil-dominant Russia that the EU and not-so-Great Britain are in now: complete dependency (as in over an oil barrel wondering whre all that gas flue) on energy imports from places, such as Venezuela, whose government we have, for no rational reason whatsoever, continuously antagonized and tried to destroy. 

So in case you were wondering where Russia's new-found aggressiveness is coming from, it is because they know what you don't: while the US hydraulic fracturing output is sputtering into its inevitable decline, Russia's is just beginning; and Russia, unlike the US, needn't worry one iota about citizens like me taking umbrage at its wanton destruction of the Arctic: that's what Soviet, oops, I mean Russian, prisons, such as the Lubyanka, are there for. It is Russia's real Memorial International, it doesn't need another one.

So don't look up anything, and you just may have a Happy New Year.

Distraction in Action.

As life expectancy continues its decline in the west and Omicron dominates the news, there is little room for reporting on the energy crisis that is impacting not only the USA's closets allies, Not-so-great Britain and the EU, but also Lebanon, several countries in Africa, Bulgaria, Kosovo and other nations. While Lynn Cheney pursues the investigation into the man who proclaimed that climate change was a hoax in order to goose the oil production of the country that was already one of the top three providers of petroleum to the world, so as to decrease "pain at the pump" for his beleaguered constituents, no one has deemed it fit to remember that Lynn's father, lick-the-Dick Cheney, in order to make the US once again a major player in oil politics, warned that, "There will be an average of 2% annual growth in oil demand over the years ahead", claiming, "That means by 2010 we will need an additional 50 million bbl's/day." 

At the time the world was burning through more than 80 million bbls/day, which means of course, that by 2010, that figure would be 130 million bbl/day. It is now well past 2020, yet that world (one that has seen a sizeable increase in the daily use of energy by the most resource-hungry country to have ever existed)  still consumes less than 100 million bbls/day. That means that the man who was intimately involved in the oil sector for his entire career, misjudged oil demand by the entire output of the three largest oil producers on the planet, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the USSA, which together produce 30 million bbl's/day. 

Not long after that, in 2003, Cheney's fellow Republican Texan, Matt Simmons, author of "Twilight in the Desert" was warning that there was an impending natural gas crisis, the only solution to which was, "To pray", insisting that should those prayers be answered, "There will be no crisis for maybe two years. After that it's a certainty."

Now, a generation later, anyone suggesting that the world has an energy crisis looming on the horizon, never mind in the midst of one, is derided as a "libtard eco-fascist", and the memory of the fact that it was the Republican vanguard, in order to attract investment into the ecologically disastrous hydraulic fracturing of the  continent, that deliberately stoked the panic that energy resources were running out. At the time, lest you be unaware, the Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company most invested in and standing to gain (and in fact DID gain) the most from, the fracturing of the continent and the unleashing of the methane monster that is silently stalking the country today.

So now, the reigning political power is using this fact, that energy usage = global warming, as distraction from the more immediate crisis of energy supply contraction, knowing that the polity has no stomach for any talk about peak oil nonsense. The fact that a world designed to run on ever-increasing flows of petroleum is now producing no more oil that it was a generation ago (suggestions on the now-defunct theoildrum.com that 2005 was the peak in conventional oil production were pooh-poohed then as much as they are today), is credited to the fact that technology has made our use of energy that much more efficient, even as the one technology that is currently being pushed to an insane degree, EV's, proves them wrong. On that particular score: Every improvement in battery technology that brings the EV revolution closer to realization is swallowed up by the increase in size of the vehicles the manufacturers produce and the public thoughtlessly purchases. 

What has thus occurred, is that, by concentrating on the effluents produced by our energy-intensive civilization, the USA is now replaying the same game that the Dick Cheney began those many decades ago: using alarmist predictions of a possible future so as to institute a realignment of current policies so as to make their own constituents happy, while doing nothing whatsoever to actually solve the dilemma they pretend their policies are designed to resolve.

Nothing Cheney said or did found anywhere close to that additional 50 million bbl's of oil/day. Likewise nothing the current administration has suggested has any more likelihood of bringing about its proclaimed intention of reducing CO2 pollution. Instead they bake them in. Just as the Bush/Cheney junta baked in fracturing, such that any attempt by the Obama administration to back away from it would have resulted in continuing the economic collapse brought about by the previous "gang of have-more", should the flow of funds into the EV imbroglio be curtailed by a future gang in Washington taking over the reins of power, the economic ramifications will ripple through the entire economy (and not in a good way). It will, however, do for the Build Back Bigger stalwarts what that similar legerdemain did for Cheney when he deliberately lied in order to induce panic, for-his-profit, in his constituents: distract them from the self-destruction inherent in an economic system that needs continuously increasing energy production to remain viable, yet which restricts the benefits derived from that production to an ever-dwindling, though now more globally-dispersed, percentage of the world's population. 

Paradise Lost.

You would think that a worldwide pandemic targeting those over the age of 65, a pandemic that started in the totalitarian country with the largest such population yet without the least provision to provide for them, and coming, as it did, on successive generations of Republican administrations that have attempted to destroy our own social security as well as any other safety net they can shred, making it clear that you have no future once the corponationals have no further use for you, would have made it clear that saving for your old age is no longer of any use, as you will never attain one, and should you do so, it will be cut short anyway, would have given  us a clue to the fact that life expectancy is set for a brutal reset. And that at the heart of that reset is that it is our very pursuit of more energy at any cost is what has burned Paradise to the ground. It has instead ignited a family feud, fueled by an increasingly desperate maniacal mass media intent on keeping the Big Top full  of cheering churls even as outside the tent the climate becomes ever more chaotic.

You would think.

But there's no space to.

There's too much distraction in action.

Babies Miraculously Saved from Tornado in Bathtub.

The BVM Stirs things up.

Ripped from today's headline:

"Babies Miraculously Saved from Tornado in Bathtub"; one can only assume it was one in which the BVM was ensconced. Being so close to Christmas, one can't help but wonder if one of the bairns wasn't the Christ himself ... or themselves, clumsily using the plural to ensure gender neutrality (If you take CIS from "Christ", it leaves, HRT, which means, His/Her Royal Trannie). How else explain the miracle of a tornado in a bathtub?

From the Desmog blog:

"And amidst all this turmoil, the push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels drives onward." That's just one of the many disconnects that the one-eye-blind approach to the intensification of Climate Derangement leaves the world's energy consumers blind-sided by, as the steady increase of CO2 and the concomitant explosive increase in methane is occurring simultaneously with that so-called, much-ballyhooed, "energy transition." 

Since that sentence should more accurately read, "The push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels is what drives Climate Change onward," because there has never been, nor will there ever be, an "energy transition." The energy powering the PC I'm using to write this post has changed not one iota since I started using PC's in the nineties. The fuel used to produce that energy may have changed, but that doesn't mean there's been an energy transition. The electricity produced by a nuclear reactor is electric energy, and that produced by a windfarm is in that same form: electric energy. So the only "transition" one can really talk about is the transition from using natural gas to produce heat to using electricity produced by natural gas to produce heat. So NatGas use, far from being mitigated, increases. But that doesn't make it an energy transition.

But in the home, mixed sources of energy inputs has now been, more and more often, transitioned into all-electric, as opposed to the mix of electric and NG. But that is far from a good thing. It is in fact, in terms of total energy and total CO2 produced, a big negative. Not to mention the benefit of having two sources of energy instead of a single source, the loss of which leaves the household powerless. As the weather regime becomes increasing volatile, having energy delivered by an underground infrastructure has distinct advantages, so what do they do? Deprive every citizen of the ability to have it delivered via an existing underground pipeline network, the largest in the world, and leaving it increasingly vulnerable to electric outages caused by tornados and hurricanes, which are increasingly popping up in places where they have never occurred before, ripping up power poles. Plus, using natural gas to produce heat at the location where it is needed is far more efficient than  producing electricity with that same fuel thousands of miles away and shipping it over transmission lines to the site where it must use ramped-up resistance to its flow, which is how heat from electricity is produced, but reduces the efficiency of heat production from ~ 65% for NG ( the remaining 35 percent is wasted through combustion and ventilation) to the efficiency of the power plant (between 30-60% before it's shipped across transmission lines). In Germany, for example, resistive heating is almost non-existent in new houses. Electricity is far too expensive for that (which it would be here, were it not for government subsidies to solar and wind farms and cheap NG from fracking, which NG is rapidly being shipped out of the country at a record pace via the US LNG industry which, a mere five years after its inception, is the largest in the world. That is not energy transition but energy transiting: from the US to US competitors). Heat pumps are used regularly in Germany, but not as often as e.g. natural gas. Producing heat via the clamping of electron flow means, since V=IR, that current flow decreases to a miniscule amount as resistance to its flow increases, so more voltage is required to produce a given current ... it is that resistance that creates heat in certain materials, so a large increase in Voltage is necessary, and that voltage is produced by burning more natural gas in the power plant to heat homes thousands of miles away, delivering across wires where it loses @ least 10% of its current to the same phenomenon: resistance to its flow over copper wires, which again, creates heat, this time right into the environment where it is not needed. So when you create an all-electric environment, and you have in that environment hot water heaters, clothes dryers, oven ranges and space heaters, for hundreds of millions of people, the energy requirements to produce the electricity necessary to be used for nothing more than to create heat, skyrockets.

Which brings us back to the term energy transition: it is thus not so much an energy transition that is occurring, but an energy EXPANSION disguised as an energy transition.  

Mankind blithely increasing its energy dependency since the introduction of the Kyoto protocols in 1992, ie, in the teeth of its recognition of the fact that the planet has been warning us that it has a limited capacity to maintain a livable environment when one of the species living on it is determined to continue its outsize energy production and utilization, even as the costs of said production spirals, together with its effluents, into the stratosphere, is but one of the many facts that are producing climate chaos: it is the push for an energy transition away from fossil fuels, while simultaneously continuing to increase the amount of energy required to run our societies, that is CAUSING the turmoil. 

Far from decreasing our energy usage back to pre-millennium amounts, we are using 100 million bbl's of oil today, just as we were in 2000. Only now, added to that burden of oil is that from the expansion in the combustion of natural gas and a doubling in the burning of US coal. The coal use by US power plants has been somewhat mitigated, but this year it increased by 22%. So when people using the term energy transition claim that we now generate 17% of our energy from wind/solar, what they omit from that little datapoint is that the world is still burning through 100million bbl's of oil/day, so mankind's use of energy hasn't "transitioned"  it has exPANded, and now includes renewable sources, even as we combust the same amount of fossil fuel in the form of oil, while burning up far more coal and natural gas than we did at the turn of the century.

 Interesting term, fossil fuels. Because fossils only come from living creatures, and what that means is that fossil fuels are a subset of biofuels: although not all biofuel is fossil fuel, ALL fossil fuel is biofuel, as it is derived from once-living organisms; like ethanol from corn, it's base ingredient is derived indirectly from solar energy. Only, in the case of ancient biofuel, time and geological processes have furnished the requisite energy needed to process the biological inputs into energy-dense fuels. But modern biofuels have no such helping hand in their production; that must be provided by ancient sunlight in the form of fossil biofuels. What that means of course, is that what they call biofuels are impossible without the combustion of those anciently-derived biofuels of coal, natural gas and oil, all of which  are, by the definition of the same people who insist we are in an "energy transition", non-renewable. From that it should be obvious that we are using ancient, eons-old, stored solar power to produce current current. In fact, other than geo-thermal, all our energy is solar-derived, as wind is a product of temperature gradients from the sun warming one part of the earth to a different temperature than the rest, and wind is nature's way of balancing that gradient. 

From this it can be seen that every term the Eco crowd uses to propagandize the switch to renewables and biofuels and green energy, are all bogus: 

Without fossil fuels, there are no more biofuels;

Without fossil fuels, no renewables are possible;

There has been no energy transition, but there has been a dramatic energy expansion; because just like burning down forests and calling that biofuel and net-zero, since the forests will grow back in the next century, gives us the picture of the entire Green Energy paradigm: burning additional fossil fuels now and venting their CO2 into the atmosphere in the unproven assumption that we will therefore burn less at some distant point in the future: the logic is the same, and it is just as (deliberately and maliciously) flawed.

Worldwide energy use has never been greater than it is today. And all the plans made by the corponationals assume that to be true every day going forward: every year we will use more energy than the year before, so it should come as no surprise that every year the planet gets warmer, and not just because of the greenhouse effect: mankind itself produces prodigious amounts of energy, and every conversion of energy from one from into another creates waste in the form of heat. Heat that cannot radiate into space any more than the sun's can. The more energy we produce, and it takes massive amounts of energy to produce an entire infrastructure for energy production from scratch, as well as massive amounts of energy to produce the fuel to provide the electricity meant to transit that new infrastructure, so the more carbon we vent, that much less of that waste heat can be dissipated. Which all means that every so-called solution to the Climate Derangement is in fact adding to the burden of CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore contributing to, not ameliorating, global warming, even as the legacy industries of coal, gas, and oil continue to produce record quantities of methane and CO2 of their own; only now the damage they do has been goosed, by the fuel transition, into hyperdrive. In other words, looked at with sober eyes, we are literally throwing more fuel on the fire yet expecting that to somehow put the fire out. Should it therefore be any surprise that, far from being mitigated, the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere is instead accelerating?

 In other words, it is the relentless push to pretend that we are actuating an energy transition away from fossil fuels, when instead we are burning through those stores of fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate in order to create an ill-conceived fuel transition, that is increasingly driving the weather turmoil we're witnessing all around the globe.

Loving More on Christmas.

 

A grog, a nog, a X'mas fog.

December's sky is cold and bleak

When here on earth it's Christmas week;

Where words of hope are everywhere,

Glibly spoken in frosty air.

It's said one night, long centuries ago

One of those stars began to glow

With such intensity wisemen followed its arc

Once the sun had set and it became dark.

Amateur astronomer though I think I am

I've never seen stars that gave a damn.

Nor seen one shining so ominously bright

That I'd leave home to follow it through perilous night; 

And least of all would I expect to see, 

A deity swaddled in its infancy.

This sweet toddler, it's said, really did burn

With a passion for mankind it could not return;

So he cursed it with Christianity

That taught let the loving one be me.

And though indifference is all we've ever returned,

Through the millennia, on Christmas, our hearts still burn

With a longing to love that's sweet and sublime.

But that's so antithetical to everything we do

By the very next dawn, it's gone

 with the dew.

Merry Christmas.

Kaputalism: Covid, Climate Change, and Corporatism Claiming it's Capitalism Spell Carnage across the Seven C's..

 In the aftermath of the Super typhoon that devastated the Philippines, Yan, an environmentalist and advocate (of what, he neglects to specify), said, "If we stop the emissions as soon as possible, or at least replace them with emissions from renewable sources, then the world will be a safer place for everyone.” 

WHA?! That is probably the most idiotic statement about Climate Change I've yet read: Emissions are emissions. If the source of those emissions is renewable, then emissions will ALWAYS go up, as there is no end to the source creating those emissions. For example if the new products director of Coca (Comércio Indústria Canaã Açúcar e Álcool Ltda), André Alves da Silva, were right when he stated that "Sugarcane is the green oil,” then even if the emissions caused by creating that green oil were to be half of those created using fossil fuel, since fossil fuels will run out at some point before the end of the century, but supposedly the "green oil's" emissions will carry on unabated, and will in fact increase until they first equal, then exceed, those created by the combustion of all the current non-renewable fuels combined, so inevitably at some point in time, renewables will produce more CO2 emissions than fossil fuels do today. But hey! They're Renewable! (and even that's a lie, since, sans fossil fuel inputs, there is no sugarcane industry).  

Palm oil is a green oil, by da Silva's definition, and Malaysia, like Brazil and Indonesia, has the smoldering destroyed rain forests to prove its "green" credentials. Somehow tearing out by the roots everything that actually IS green on every square foot of land in sight leads to green electricity; like the Drax, a British company fashioned after Dr. Who's daleks, razing American woodlands to the ground  to manufacture wood pellets, is laying bare hillsides and forested land throughout the US Southeast to feed the insatiable maw of wood-burning power plants in Europe in order for Euroland to boast of their "renewable" energy production as the definition of "renewable" is stretched so thin it includes everything under the sun.

Kill everything now!

 Military daleks, euphemistically referred to as drones, have already been deployed by the US military as a  weapon of massive destruction, yet we have barely scratched the surface of their full potential. The daleks in Brazil razing the rainforest, those in Canada chewing up the geography to boil kerogen, the daleks all across the American hinterland shattering it to rubble and flaring off the resultant gas, the daleks, numbering in the hundreds of millions coursing across the highways specifically designed for dalek mobility, and the mega-daleks burning the most polluting of all fuels as they cross vast oceans to deliver garbage to store shelves in such quantities that they squeeze out the less-profitable necessities, such as N-95 masks needed to slow the spread of what we now consider an endemic virus are all gifts from the corponationals. So much so that, despite its transmission rate and lethality far exceeding the original virus, we, as in the CDC, openly scoff at the idea of sending Covid test kits to any household in America that requests one ... I mean, after all, whadyathink this is, Communist China, fer Chrissakes? 

Kamel-toes Harris says the Biden administration ‘didn’t see omicron coming.’ 

Really? Maybe that lame excuse worked for those smug know-it-alls Bernanke and Krugman in 2008, but nowadays, when everyone is talking about the omicron variant and it is in headlines weeks before the VP of the Sole Superpower expresses her ignorance of the hyper-spread of yet another variant of the virus that has caused a worldwide pandemic, like an anti-vaxxer with dirty hands, it won't wash.

The current lazy-fare form of totalitarianism (Remember, Mussolini, who knew something about totalitarianism, created the words “fascism” and "totalitarianism" which he defined as “the merging of the state and the corporation.” He also said a more accurate word would be “corporatism.” ... this was the definition in Webster’s up until 1987 when a corporation bought Webster’s and changed it to exclude any mention of corporations) the world is currently in the grips of, has no mechanism with which to do anything but churn out profits. Should one of the Corponations fail to do so it fails, profits being the only metric by which any corporate balance sheet can be measured. So automatically, when the state hands over billions, trillions, to the coffers of the Corponations to come up with new technologies, their only "solutions", unsurprisingly, will be those that will, after spending the people's money to pay dividends to only their own shareholders, and make their bottom lines attractive to "investors", boost their own profits. And if those solutions are renewable, truly renewable (no such thing exists, of course, but here in Malice in Wonderland, there is no lie too outrageous that someone with a podcast and an evil intent won't propagate nor that millions with faith-based brains won't believe) all the better, as they can, presumably, go on forever. Because, even if you don't believe in peak oil or resource depletion, the CEO's at the vanguard of the Globalization (a catchy Newspeak noun for Corporatism)  phenomenon, know otherwise.

When a corporate CEO, a certain fElon Musk, can siphon government subsidies paid to make green technology to fund the fossil-fuel-swilling and self-serving Space X boondoggle, and by such defalcations earn the sobriquet of Man of the Year, when he has proven himself more worthy of the title Dick of the Century, one wonders if there is in fact any hope left for the poor creatures who are rapidly succumbing to the fastest mass extinction event in mankind's history. But hey, the Musk ox is richer than rich, so why worry? 

When I suggested to a friend a coupla weeks ago that every single step, every one, initiated to supposedly mitigate the disaster called Climate Derangement, has instead made it worse, she shook her head and rejected the concept as too frightening to contemplate. But how could it be otherwise? Is there a metric they have to meet? A rigorous protocol they must follow? Any restraint on the amount of carbon they vent into the atmosphere in order to bring their green genes to market? Nope. Not a one. All they need do is say whatever whiz-bang pseudo-solution they need enormous government input, in the form of cash, in order to actuate, and Bam! they're off to the races, and their first order of business, every single time, is to radically increase the amount of CO2 their corponation is spewing into the troposphere, with no actual need to, any time in the future either, demonstrate that their mega-project, that now has government backing as well as myriad ancillary companies doing the corponation's bidding, to even bother to try, since, should it turn out that they actually have INcreased their CO2 creation, it will be hidden away, and/or just simply denied. And any journalist that dare question them will be soon enough disappeared.

And we are complicit every step along the way, because everyone knows the two largest inputs to CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere are automobiles (and the complete transformation of the living environment into a dead one needed to support them), and the production and distribution of electricity.

Without these, there is no modernity, and without modernity, there is no need for Corporate behemoths bestriding the globe and transforming it into a desert. Hello!? They're suggesting you move to MARS if you don't like what they're doing to this planet. THAT's the solution of the so-called Man of the Year, so perhaps he is a suitable choice in the post-giving-a-shit about Covid world we are in now.

A world held fast in the iron grip of an intermeshed, internetted matrix of Corporate rule has no means by which to free itself from its gilded cage. Like Covid, Climate Change to a corponation is a business opportunity, a chance to use tax money to create a lucrative profit center. And every business opportunity requires huge upfront investments be made, and enormous piles of cash change hands before the first person is hired or the first product is mechanofactured. Right now both GM and Ford are constructing, following the Musk-ox's example, ginormous factories to roll out the transportation of the future, transportation that will look pretty much the same as the transportation of the present, and will wreak every bit as much havoc to the natural environment and the living planet as the current one: only it will happen ON TOP of the already-existing carbon-spewing technology that will be rolling, in far greater numbers, along the same tarmac, and those EV's will require, thanks to their tonnage, even more energy be created to mobilize them. But that's not a concern, because, of course, they'll be powered with "green" renewable energy, so what's the worry? Just clear-cut, burn down, and dig up everything on the planet to deliver it.

Darkness at Noon.

In the totalitarianism of the late-20'th and early 21'st century there is no room for dissension, no hope that a suggestion that might actually slow down our 40-billion-ton/yr habit of adulterating the air we breath with gigatonnes of the same gas our lungs are specifically designed to exhale. Because it's poison. The irony of CO2 accumulating in the lungs of Covid patients and proving deadly to them even as the world demonstrates the exact same phenomenon happening on a planetary scale has been completely lost on humanity a full two years into a deadly pandemic. There is just no way that a humanity so blinded to their own hand in their own extermination will ever see fit to do anything that will actually help ... humans that have been turned into corporate robots haven't that capacity. Their native intelligence has already been too badly compromised and replaced with corporate-sponsored Artificial Intelligence. And AI has no capacity for original thought or creative action. Just ask a Tesla driver who has trusted their auto-pilot. Oh, that's right, you can't; 'Cause they're dead ... or up on manslaughter charges.

 

The Moronic March to Omicron.

 UK faces new surge of COVID-19 infections due to Omicron variant ... well, not quite. 

That statement reads like one of the headlines this morning in ZME science: 

"The Salton Sea is the single greatest ecological disaster to have ever happened in the state."

Both of these items reflect the corpo-speak of the entirely-owned-by-corponationals' news machine, one designed specifically to cater to AS - Artificial Stupidity.

Just as the greatest ecological disaster in the State of California didn't just "happen", but was instead created by human beings, neither is the surge of infections in the UK "due to the Omicron variation," which would only be rampaging in South Africa if it were not for the airline industry. The same industry that spread the initial viral outbreak and every one of those that followed. 

The surge in Covid cases in the UK is due to the pretense prevailing throughout the western world  that the pandemic is over; so any variant will spread far faster, even if it were less infectious than the original Covid-19 virus, if for no other reason than that the species Homo Sapiens is intent on letting it run amok now; not only taking no precautions, but actually physically assaulting those who insist that they do take them ... but I have seen no "News" outlets mention that glaring difference. Being comfortable at the prospect of wiping out everyone over the age of sixty-five in order to return to "normal" is now normal; so as I said at the beginning of this plague: there is no returning to normal. And the fact that people accept mass infections over curtailing their vacation plans screams that fact, even as we put on our earmuffs to keep the moans of the dying from reaching our ears.  

This is important. As South Sudan floods, and Euroland burns down American forests to produce electricity from "renewable" wood pellets (nevermind that it takes a century to "renew" what is torched in the blink of an eye) to keep the coddled comfy, it is imperative that every call to reduce one's carbon footprint fall on deaf ears, and the pandemic has pre-purposed the ears of the entire globe to a comfortable numbness.

The much-ballyhooed Glasgow Copout26 has yet to see its one month anniversary, yet every continent other than Antarctica has made clear its intentions to not only keep burning record amounts of fossil fuels for their own citizens, but, those that have the capacity, are exporting those fuels at a record pace even as supply chains for every other commodity are beset with clogged arteries, stuffed with goods robofactured for a global population whose incomes have been funneled to a billionaire class that has unconscionably amassed a glut of savings so massive it deprives their so-called essential workers the wherewithal to buy even the necessities of life.

Less than a month ago, Boris Johnson proclaimed it was "Time for humanity to grow up on climate change" (an entire generation  already has, btw) forgetting about the party held in his own home in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, leading to the query, "How is humanity to 'grow up on climate change' when it can't bring itself to do so in the face of a pandemic?" ... where the casualties are directly attributable to a known virus? The news media, even after rampaging tornadoes ripped through a half dozens states, still must proclaim them as not being attributable to climate change lest they be excoriated for spreading "Fake News." How does that indicate that humanity has grown up the least little bit when it comes to Climate Change?

The stage has been set and the third act is already playing out. The poor of the world will be decimated while the rich nations, those most responsible for the havoc, will absorb more and more power, even as the atmosphere absorbs more and more heat. While Enron Musk absorbs the savings of the public to subsidize the "green machines" he calls Teslas, he uses the profits from the much-subsidized green EV's, a joke in and of itself, to start a company in Texas to build rockets that produce more carbon in one takeoff than entire counties produce in a year, that use machines that are impossible to build without the combustion of more fossil fuel for their specialized alloys and tons of metal than an entire fleet of his own robofactured scam-mobiles, all in order to make Gameboys work better in rural areas. Like crypto currencies, the entire network of satellites fElon is using taxpayer subsidies to hurl into space, are completely non-essential. Like much of the economies of every OECD country, it is considered a good idea because it creates jobs, and because the federal government, most governments, only tax income, the government supports ANY job creation, no matter how deleterious to either the local environment or to the global blanket of CO2 they inevitably thicken, so as to have a revenue stream from labor, even while capital has been given a free pass to fly out of the country and out of the reach of the taxing authorities. 

                                                                      Get my Grift?

Build Back Bigger: A "Green Machine" that weighs in at 10,000 pounds.

None of the what are laughingly called "provisions" of the Green New Deal even attempt to change this dynamic. The growth economy is in fact at the heart of the Green New Deal and exposes it for the fraud it is. If governments can't control capital, and they have capitulated all control over it to the all-knowing Free-for-all Market, then they can't control Capitalism. That should be obvious on the face of it. All they have left themselves as leverage against the mega-corporations that have no one but themselves and their shareholders to consider, is to funnel tax receipts straight from labor right into the coffers of Capitalistic Corporations that then use those funds to pretend they are building back better, but which are instead used to ensure their own future profits, not to bring about the Green Utopia promised. What they do deliver are the mayhem of F5 tornados as a regular feature of our everyday lives ... even in places where tornadoes never were a threat before. There is no stopping insanity such as this. Every disaster leaves the Mega Corporations further insulated, their executives further isolated from the workers they abhor, their profits distributed to an ever-shrinking coterie of what they still like to call investors, but are little more than insider traders, their dividends, as we learned, or should have learned, in 2008, all but government-guaranteed.

Which means that a climate regime that includes temperatures well above the 2 degrees Celsius are also all-but government-guaranteed. And in an investment environment that has already spent borrowed money that uses as collateral assets that are, even in the present, valued well above what they are actually worth, the funds we will need in the future to actually provision ourselves against the Mad Mad Mad Max World the Mega-Corporations and their compliant accessories after the fact, the world's governments, have planned for our future (I used to say, "Well, for your future, I'll be chum by then, buddy" (My own preference is burial at sea), but disastrous climatological events are ramping up so quickly, a direct result of our 40 billion ton annual contribution to them, that my own demise before things get completely out of hand can no longer be assumed) means that nothing will be left to borrow against that can actually support life once the fossil fueled regime has collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions. 

It seems Joni had it right yet again:

I Wish I had a River.

It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

Exterminating reindeer

While singing songs of joy and peace

Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on

But its waters have been diverted

To fill the Salton Sea

Then dammed up and converted

To make Green electricity

Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so long

I would teach my feet to fly

I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Its enough to make one cry

Science says it will help me

You know, that put me at ease

But their claims are so haughty

They're only made to please

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on

You can't hold a candle

To a mankind gone mad

One that's gone and condemned every baby

That it ever had

It sold them down the river so it could just skate on

As though nothing at all has happened

People still continue to fly

Still drive 'round in flivvers

Whose tons of weight betray how

We have made our planet fry

It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're exterminating reindeer

While singing songs of joy and peace

I wish I had a river I could skate away on

Fishing in a Bathtub.

You know the story of the man who was fishing in a bathtub. His psychiatrist asked him how they were biting, to which he responded, "You fool! This is a bathtub." That story somewhat illustrates our absurd notion that the way to mitigate the effects on our climate of the ever-growing load of CO2 we are asking the atmosphere to bear, is to add even more copious quantities to it by a manufacturing renaissance, this one powered by using "renewables", all of which are created using non-renewable inputs. But this world is a closed system, so renewables created via the combustion of fossil fuels means that they complement each other, the fossil fueled economy fueling the green economy, which in turn enables the continuation of the fossil fuel economy, their symbiosis thus providing the barely perceptible progression from one to the other, which represents our tremendous conquest in the realm of evasion. One group of scientists diagnoses the problem while another group, funded by corponations, imagines a solution that will earn their companies profits. A profitable solution. A solution that uses the creative destruction enshrined in capitalism to reap profits for a handful of insider "investors" while the deleterious effects of their industries promise an ever-escalating level of destruction for them to concoct ever-greater, government-funded, creative solutions to; not solve the problem, which the economic system has no incentive to do, but to wring profits from the "solutions" they provide, so as to ensure the ongoing rampages against nature, that is the key to Capitolism's (sic) ongoing destructive viability.

The pandemic being but a time-capsuled instance of the same dynamic. It's far more profitable to establish its endemicity than to eradicate it, which is anathema to Corporate bottom lines, yet that's the only measurement that matters in an economic system built to profit the few at the expense, and the toil of, the many. It helps them that we just accept it. In a certain sense, it makes people cherish it. The Long Covid patient cannot imagine another anxiety than the one tormenting them. So the people around them become attached to that void and that nameless pain, as if suffering assumes in this case a privileged aspect. This subtle remedy, whether that of vaccines or green machines, makes us love what crushes us and makes hope spring eternal in a world devoid of any  reasonable cause for celebration. Trapped in the global village, it is impossible to communicate with those in the primeval Keep we call government. While millions of essential workers persist in seeking a way forward, pharmaceutical Corponations use trickery and expediency to convince us their effort is driven by goodwill as they assume the duties entrusted to them. But only after receiving billions in government money and assurances from government officials of their right to keep private both the profits and the technology funded by the panicked public. Hence those duties are not what the public pretends them to be. They are monolithic and never-changing: Creative Destruction their constant dynamic, using their vaulted position to wring profits from disaster, to bring dividends to their insiders, and therefore to ensure the bulldozer of destruction is kept fueled to crush any resistance, obfuscate every true path to a brighter future. Perfectly paralleling the rise in the ubiquitous, all-descriptive, "A-maze-ing", with heavy emphasis on the maze they have created. Every path is a new frustration. It is not logical, it's just consistent, method. After all, fast financial gain is called making a killing for a reason. 

Calls to the government go unheeded, or are mocked, their insistence constitutes our ongoing tragedy, as all we hear are a confused Babel of voices, vague laughter, and fleeting whispers, or empty Glasgow promises. That is enough to feed our hope, like those few hopeful clouds scudding through drought-stricken Western skies, whose appearance on a summer evening make up our reason for living. Here we find the melancholy peculiar to Covid and climate derangement, the nostalgia for a lost paradise, by which is meant a return to a normalcy of guiltless extravagance only the well-situated ever knew. And so nothing ever avails, since the quest for solutions is meticulously contrived such that Glasgow was always probably a futile trip, its duration probably a wasted week, the naïve faith in it a wasted hope. On this probably we gambled our entire future. And lost. The uninspired automata we call government officials providing us with a precise roadmap to the land of distractions, where we are utterly consigned to the humiliations of bearing the onus of their upkeep while they provide the powers that be the necessary press releases to becalm the muddled masses.  Yet the word "hope" here is not ridiculous. On the contrary, the more tragic our situation becomes, the more aggressive that hope bursts forth. The more truly absurd it is, the more moving, while the passionless urge to save the economy that brings disaster to us, again and again, and promises to do so ad infinitum, we insist is necessary, having neither the imagination nor the creativity to conceive of any other. Which provides fodder for the maxim that it is easier for the tunnel-visioned to conceive of a future with a ravaged ecosphere than a future with no capitalism. After all, we've all seen the ravaged ecosphere all around us, yet have never experienced life without capitalism. Thus does the denouement of our misplaced hope inevitably lead to grief, and grief, being a form of destruction, enshrines Capitalism even firmer on its throne, even as the world smolders in the fires of interminable conflict fed by the same dynamic of destruction for the sake of creation, even though what is created is not what anyone but a powerful few ever wanted, and certainly never needed.

As the phantoms of regret haunt us during our descent into the maelstrom, will we wonder what could have been, what steps we may have taken, which path easily obscured by the stronger desire, the stoked greed to obtain something for nothing, the promise of effortless existence that nonetheless, once attained, leaves entire populations so desperate for stimulation it opens its veins to addictive poisons and Game of Thrones' simulated mayhem simply to break the monotony of this purposeless reality that offers everything and confers nothing? Share the rod and spoil the wild. We are all executioners. Hooded and armed we strike out against nature, as if we were not part of the world wide web of life; which belief has made us instead the proverbial Sisyphus, struggling to obtain the peak of domination with our illusions intact, only to have them crush us beneath their weighted past, whose gossamer strands we think will protect us from the worst consequences of our heartless destruction of our only home in this otherwise cold, comfortless universe.