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.