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.