What a Piece of Work is Man: How Ignoble ...

BBC's comment on COPout 27: "No fossil fuel progress":  

Nov. 21, 2022 418.47 ppm

Nov. 21, 2021 415.30 ppm

1 Year Change 3.17 ppm (0.76%)

The completely predictable and abject failure of the COPout 27 Annual Follies left me inexplicably bereft of hope. Perhaps that's because it displayed the real Nature of humanity as a horde of scrabbling, squabbling egotists strutting in their artifice of Globalization, yet whose ideas are more provincial than those of Medieval peasants who have never left their local hamlet:

What a piece of work is Man. How ignoble his treason, how limited in faculty; in form of moving how crippled by machine-dependence; In action how like a fallen angel; In apprehension how like a clod; The pariah of the world, The basest of animals. This quintessence of dust has proved to be no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of lepers. 

While contemplating how to write about the COPout Follies, I realized I've turned myself into a character in a book; a life one reads. Whatever I feel is as useless as spilled ink on a page. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, which are mixed with images that undo them, as so much revising has destroyed my original intent. From too much thinking, I have become my thoughts and not I. I've plumbed myself so entirely that the only thing remaining -  blackly vivid in my reflection at the bottom of a well - is my own face observing me observing it. 

Like a lost playing card from an old and discarded suit of an ancient deck, I have no meaning; my intelligence is pulp, and I have no worth. I merely state my beliefs ad nauseum; wringing out my soul to use as ink, I have made myself useless for anything else except this writing, which is meaningless for the simple reason that it is of no use to anyone. However, to this task I resign myself, being uniquely qualified for it; it is Who I am, which amounts to nothing. And yes, at times there is a hint of tears that aren't cried, so they make my tired eyes burn; while a touch of anguish clutches at my heart and makes my throat dry. Yet I don't even know what I'd cry over, if I cried, nor why it is that I don't just get over it. This contradiction follows me everywhere, like a dark shadow. A specter that leaves me in constant dread of sleep. This results in a terrible weariness that compounds the sadness I feel because of who I never was, a nostalgia for someone who never lived anywhere other than inside my feverish head, flashing intermittently with the awareness that we live inside an illusion conjured by others who have none of our best interests at heart, but that are instead driven by an animus of greed and self-aggrandizement at others' expense, an animus they then dub "Freedom", and thus avoid any real parsing of the deleterious effects they have on others.

How else explain the pawning off of responsibility to alleviate the sufferings of those nations badly impacted by climate change onto the shoulders of citizens, while the corporations and the billionaires sit on their golden thrones (literally ...the Saudi "princes" as well as hirsute financiers have their commodes fashioned from the barbarous relic) sneering at how easy it was to get the richest of the world's citizens to except the fetid "trickle-down" from the shriveled appendages of their betters. 

From the graphic, you can see almost the entire outline of the US bespeckled with CO2 emissions:

Cry the Beloved Continent.

Though the least polluting continent, African countries suffer more than any others from the deleterious effects of cascading climatic catastrophes, with droughts, blackouts, epic flooding and insect infestations, destructive wildfires and the despoliation of entire ecosystems, all to accommodate the marauding necessities of the asset stripping enterprises of those countries on other continents that are emitting the most CO2 and hence, those most responsible for the carnage wrought beyond their borders but for which they accept no blame.

So as the world teeters on the edge of recession, Central Banks, led by the Fed, hike interest rates, while the European powers, bolstered by the ubiquitous American Wehrmacht, slide into yet more senseless carnage, destroying yet another economy to ensure their own countries' pre-eminence. Meanwhile, the new generation's version of  "The Smartest Men in the Room" ignore the interconnected nature of the economy, such that those very raised rates become the biggest threat to Oil prices, which will likely fall because of the totally predictable financial problems brought on by those higher interest rates, (as evidenced by the result of Liz Truss's little experiment in demagoguery that came within a hair's breadth of collapsing her own county's bond market, which would have had a concatenating effect on the rest of the world's) and these lower oil prices will lead to even lower oil production, which will inflict yet another blow to economic growth, and hence lead to a recession the likes of which the world has yet to see in this century (or, considering the unprecedented size of the world's population, in any previous century as well). 

But putting a damper on the rest of the world's growth, while maintaining dollar hegemony, exactly parallels the hoarding of gold by the USA before WW2 that resulted in the financial crash of 1929, yet it is apparentlky only Gail Tverberg, who seems to have noticed that, after the purposely engineered financial crash of 2008, the price of crude oil quickly bounced back to over $120 per barrel in inflation-adjusted prices in the 2011-2013 time frame, yet the world economy continued to grow. Now, at the relatively cheap price of ~$90'bbl today, the US is emptying out its "strategic" reserves to make it more affordable for this most profligate of nations to combust petrol completely unencumbered by any remorse at fueling the combustion of a commodity the rest of the world desperately needs to increase production of goods. And for no other reason than to allow Americans to fuel their addiction to speed at any cost: in other words using a vital resource for recreation while the world goes hungry and naked for lack of that same resource. Consumption for consumption's sake, with nary a lick of work being accomplished in our mindless, puerile pursuit of Happiness.

That the period when we were paying the highest prices for oil in our entire history, was exactly the same period in which the production of oil (from hydraulic fracturing) was ramping up at an equally unprecedented rate has also gone uncommented on. But this time round, there is to be no comparable surge in production of US oil during this decade as there was in the last. Au contraire, the drop in production initiated by the Covid-caused collapse in demand shows every sign of continuing, never returning to its pre-Covid level; while the world-changing release of the most potent of GHG's that has not only been egregiously flared, but leaked, and seeped during the entire episode of pin-cushioning the earth's mantle will continue unabated. But, given that there is no repercussion to any of the marauders effecting this criminal pollution, methane will continue to build in the atmosphere long after every drop of oil has been fractureded out of the last slab of shale on the continent. This will have the known effect of bringing forward changes in the climate regime that should have taken place decades hence to happening "on the ground", "in Real Time", as in the space of but a few years; such that  every country's COPout27 "net Zero-emission" pledges, or "Clean energy commitments" by 2040, 2050, or China's cynical 2060, is totally moot.  The damage will have been irreparably done long before any of those dates, decades away, are reached.

Adding to this methane released from its sequestration in the bedrock of North America and Siberian Asia will be the immense amounts of trapped methane near the Arctic's permafrost surface. Together they will act as a far more powerful accelerant of global warming/climate change than CO2 has. Which means, at eighty times the warming capacity of CO2, we will continue to see climate disasters and habitat destruction happen within years, not decades; tipping points crossed in decades, not centuries.

Zdzislaw Beksinski
 

 Like climbing plants detached from their walls, cities around the globe will collapse, even as the Corponations responsible for the carnage, as they do currently in the Wars waged on their behalf, take their profits and smile. The vital irony that their own enrichment is at the behest of their creators whose grand design to build a "Green" infrastructure, while never bothering to "do the Math" to ascertain how much fossil fuel combustion it will take for them to do so, is not lost on them ... they rather enjoy it. But since their own tenure is temporary, and consumers are easily swayed to ignore the long-term repercussions of their actions, (so long as they are enabled to continue to live their "NON-Negotiable" American lifestyle), its deleterious effects, even on their own children, will first be denied, and when that becomes untenable, scoffed at.

The Journey, after all, has been redefined in Newspeak as the Destination; that's so that we can all just Zoom Zoom to our Doom Doom with nary the rise of a single eyebrow. 

Structurally Unsound: Tipping Points in the State of Denial.

 A mere two days after the state of Florida voted to re-elect their own little "Climate Change is a Hoax", aficionado, Marc-o-Lardo Rubio, the diminutive Presidential wanna-be and Trump lackey, a tropical storm that barely reached hurricane status raked the coast of Florida as though it were a Zen garden, demonstrating the Jenga-style condition of the entire Real Estate industry as McMcansions and condos that were built where even a beach house would  have been a gamble, revealed the shifting sand onto which Banks, realtors, and Appraisers conspired to put their seal of approval, but were exposed for money-grubbing charlatans; that is who our "Globalized" economy has left in charge of our most precious commodity: Our Homes.

Tipping Point

Here is the result of a conservative policy, rigidly maintained by Republicans that goes against every instinct and tradition, that used the awesome might of the federal purse to fling itself into a rapid career of Globalization (a term that was never more than a euphemism for Imperialism) for which we possessed neither the material nor moral equipment; sacrificing the principles and practices of liberty and equality by the establishment of militarism and the forcible subjugation of sovereign states for no other reason than to find a home for the speculative investments and the global lies of the Keptocracy. For it was their imperious demand for a place to put their speculative oversavings, with which they flooded the Communist State of China in the last century, that is responsible for the adoption of the Globalization policies that gave rise to such catastrophes as the wholesale building of profits, profits guaranteed by the federal government via various agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie MAC, to name but two, of which you never hear a word about since the crash in 2008, yet whose portfolios are replete with properties such as those you have been watching fall into the ocean. Property which, should those “investing” in the securities that their mortgages are bundled into, and then purchased by federal agencies, would never have been built on such precarious perches were they not guaranteed repayment should their speculation prove, as it has, as disastrous as every non- “Climate Change is a Hoax” businessman knew quite well it would.

 

The rush was on to have a safe place to pile their hoards into to get a return  of the same magnitude they'd gotten used to before the country hit Peak oil in the 70’s. For this and various other reasons the US economy wasn’t delivering to them the returns to which they had become accustomed. This had made future commitments hard to honor in the new environment, so they envisioned China, in which they saw a vast country to play the vast liabilities of the upper classes. But what honor is for a Monarchy, Virtue is for a Republic; so they made vice a virtue and declared untrammeled Greed as good; sneering at any nod to Virtue as Liberal hypocrisy. 

But, Globalization, you see, secures the use of the machinery of the federal government by private interests, mainly capitalists, to obtain for them economic gains  from outside their country, once they are no longer able to realize them within their own borders. This dominance in public policy had an effect upon both expenditure and taxation, the most salient feature of which is the diminishing proportion of the national revenue expended for what used to be regarded as the legitimate and productive purposes of government. Instead, vast sums are spent for naval and military, (always propagandistically referred to as “Defense”) spending, such that, during the Reagan era when unions were being destroyed and federal outlay for social programs cut to the bone, our direct military, naval and Air Force expenditures were increased at an unprecedented pace, all with "borrowed" money, while no war was being waged nor was one even on the horizon; and this feat was accomplished, also so as not to tax the public, making them question the necessity for such an outlandish outlay, but by the raising of vast sums via the sale of the future to the monied interests via the onerous assumption by the entire polity, of high-interest-paying, tax-free, Treasury Bills: a no-risk investment paying stellar returns unavailable to all but the most closely connected insider traders, the best connected of them sitting in the next office, the Vice President and  Ex-CIA director, George Bush, together with his cronies from previous Nixon administrations, including not only Ollie North and his cadre of crooks, but Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the list of Neo-cons who would eventually put their names to the PNAC, outlining the entire GW Bush putsch to imperialist expansion via the “Manifist Destiny” (sic) of the 21’st century, envisioned as the Full-Spectrum Domination by the Soulless Super Power over every other nation on the face of the earth. This is not Globalization, but Imperialism; this is no longer an economic system, but a War Machine; a

Weimar Wehrmacht Enterprises: WWE forever: 

“We are the World."

Although it is right there in front of our noses for all to see, we prefer to ignore the fact that it was under the Neo-Con sway of the major Corponations and the TBTF banking firms that fashioned the Imperious Imperialism whose yoke the poisonous Red Tide of Republicans and Their Blob and his attendant mob, were handed the broad discontent in the polity it needed, as it was they who needed Imperialist adventures, newly dubbed "Globalization" by a fawning press, led by that snarky sniper of sedentary sedition, Paula Krugman. No one was more seduced by Imperialist dreams of plunder more than the Krugmaniac, who knew quite well that the New Imperialism was not only a tool of particular capitalists, such as Enron's Ken Lay and his coterie of crooks, but was also a tool for the complete militarization of the economy that Reagan  had initiated by funneling the largest deficits in the history of the country into the militarization of every aspect of the US economy, while the NSA was deliberately reconfigured via DarpaNet to enable the unwarranted and unsuspected surveillance state that has been dubbed the Deep State by the very REDs who created it ("better Dead than Red" is an old GOP rallying cry before they started adopting every aspect of Soviet totalitarianism those other Reds were well-known for; even going so far in the fifties as to propose legislation to strip any native-born American of their citizenship should they have the temerity to join the Communist Party: that's what they consider Free Speech and "Freedom": their freedom to shut down every one else's opinion). 

Thus was imperialism, in the form of military aggrandizement, become the mode of capitalist expansion planned for and executed while all the while the addled electorate was easily convinced by the star power of the paid shill of the Keptocracy, to undertake such an enormous expenditure of money we did not have was necessary to "fight Communism," while the Red Party conspired to spy on every America household and citizen in a way that Stalin and Hitler could only have dreamt of, meanwhile "Opening China" to the deluge of US FDI dollars used to De-Industrialize the US economy. In other words to bring it back to the stone age. China, eg, was an LDC, low development country, and the stated goal was to make the USA a low developed country, as a mechanism for the billionaire class to dispose profitably of their economic windfall by using the power of the Federal Government to secure for their own particular use the undeveloped economy of foreign countries to use as a risk-free market for their own success, while building an enemy for their future growth via even more militarization, this time of the  entire globe, but more specifically, China. 

 Yesterday Mike Pence, in a CBS interview, stated the maxim that: 'It doesn't take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law;" basically calling out his former boss as the spineless coward he is. Standing with arms folded to block the mad rush of a mob incited to violence by a demagogic ruler takes backbone, something The Blob who would be King, by definition, simply doesn't have. To step aside and relish the destruction wrought by their perfidy when you are the Commander-in-Chief of the country's military is an act of cowardice so profound only that cacophonous crowd of conspiracy theory-addled collaborationist clowns could countenance it. 

Then, the authors of a report published by COPout27 attendees declared that "The (current) global energy crisis sparked by the Russian war in Ukraine clearly shows how dependent the world still is on fossil fuels.” 

If it weren't so pathetic, it would be comical that it takes a War that was begun during the year of the hundredth anniversary of the start of WW1, with nary a reference to the Imperialism that ruled the world then and the Imperialism, dubbed "Globalization," that rules it now, demonstrates the utter fecklesseness of the entire circus of the annual COPout conference roadshows. Yet it is this unquestioned imperialist expansion that has been glossed over by a scurrilous reference to it as a "Global Village," even as we hammer distant outposts of our "Village" with the most advanced weapons of our outsized, deficit-enabled, unaccountable armamentaria that is given their silent approbation by the same hypocrites that simply avert their gaze from the derelicts and homelessness such a policy creates.  

Now to use the word hypocrite in a world whose every government is now so corruption-riddled as to make real governance unrecognizable, I would normally consider too obvious a reality to bother stating; but when the murderous "King" of bone-Saudi Arabia  accuses Europe of hypocrisy on energy and climate policy, it is impossible to ignore. Saudi Arabia is the center of hypocrisy. The land of the "holy" sites of one of the major religions yet has as the only source of its "kingdom's" wealth a cadre of royal assholes who behead anyone not in their liking on trumped-up charges, holds sway over an impoverished population of religiously-addled sheep, (the religious flock ... in other words, not my characterization, but one that they themselves are proud to embrace) eager to be fleeced, half of whom aren't even allowed to pilot the very vehicle that is responsible for the mad accumulation of all that unearthed wealth, a simple ICE machine. Even as "The West" is being held responsible for Climate Change, it is Only Asia that has Trillionaires ... and only that section of it called the "Middle East" has a Keptocracy so entrenched it can concentrate into the hands of but a few potentates such undeserved, unshared Wealth.

A royal flush would not only be the best thing for the polity of Saudi Arabia, but for that of the whole world. Problem is, so much ill-gotten cash has been stuffed into the plumbing of the global economy, that the Plunger Protection Team would be on hand to suck the clog thus created right back out again to spread once again their miasma of privilege to which you will never be made privy. Meanwhile the Climate change is a Hoax, Rubio, who nixed funding for FEMA, will continue to demand more FEMA funds even while clamoring for the cessation of funding for the very  agency disbursing it. That method of piracy has worked so well when done clandestinely by those who have put him in power, that he has utterly forgotten the fact that even in Fox Fake News America, there is an opposition party that still has a smidgen of press coverage to publish such outré hypocrisy as the Cuban catastrophe of the Senate broadcasts; and for no other reason than that his lobbyists, who own him, wish to continue the mindless, but very profitable, expansion of Federally-funded mortgages to people who will continue to build multi-million dollar McMansions right on the beach. Only by continually assuring them that "Climate Change is a Hoax" can such hypocrisy continue. Even before the last remnant of the House of Cards of the construction, mortgage, and insurance industries is swallowed by the waves, the drive to "Return to Normal" is underway; the fact that it will soon enough be under waves providing not the least bit of hesitation, nor the slightest amount of retribution for those who made a killing building them and who now stand in line to make yet another killing as the way is paved for the tragedy to repeat itself, only this time in the form of farce.

The Year of Disquiet.

With ironic sadness, I watch a workers' demonstration, one whose leaders ooze mock sincerity (it always seems phony to me when sincerity is evinced by collective endeavors since it is only the individual, alone in their unique ego, that is capable of feeling. This makes any teeming and rowdy group come off as little more than a mob of animated idiots). Their antics are indulged in to break the outsiders' indifference since the rest of us, living our animal lives of varying complexity, cross the stage as walk-ons who play at existing without thinking about it, devoid, as we are, of any appreciation for the magic of mystery.

One of my own favorite mysteries I was reminded of today when I read that California was soon to become, if it hadn't already, the 4'th largest economy on the globe, supplanting Germany, and taking its place behind China, the USA and Japan.

The mystery had nothing to do with California, though, but with Japan. How does an economy that has been in what economists call a depression for the span of what is rapidly approaching two generations, still rank as the THIRD largest economy on the globe, whereas, Germany, which has been the growth champion of the EU for close to that same amount of time, drop down to the fifth because of one year of sub-par growth?

Meanwhile, one of those countries, the one rivalling the US for the size of its economy, China, was also counted as one of the BRIC's, along with Brazil, Russia, and India.

If we then pirouette to the current president reanimating the God-Offal Party's theme of "American Energy Independence", when that same America is draining its "Strategic" Petroleum Reserve to do nothing more than goose the sales of gas-powered SUV's while claiming he wants at least half of new vehicles to be EV's in the next dozen years or so, the disquiet felt at the prospect of a national disaster blossoms into an anxiety that can induce a panic attack in the more vulnerable in our society.

But we are not only draining the SPR, we are draining the Permian Basin as well ... simultaneously ... and exporting its content of irreplaceable energy resources to fuel growth in our much-maligned "enemy", that same China.

Although no one on Fox, and not a soul on MNBC will ever ask the question, why is it that the only one of the world's three Petro-States (that triumvirate of oil production that together produces more than a third of the world's oil supply), that must import as many barrels of oil to run its economy as it produces, so keen on keeping its rivals' oil in the ground while doing everything possible to extract and sell to competing economies the last of its own fossil fuels?

If we take a glimpse at the oil-producing states of Iraq and Iran, whose oil-producing capacity has been knee-capped by US foreign War policy, it becomes apparent that those countries' oil production has left them with far more oil in the ground than they would otherwise have had had the US  let them drain their own reserves instead of stealing market share so we could suck our own as dry as fast as ethanol from corn is drying the Oglala Aquifer.

What, you may wonder, is their endgame? 

While this question is never asked domestically, one can be sure that Russia and Saudi Arabia, with their battened down populations, kept docile by beheadings, religious indoctrination, and authoritarian rulers, are making calculations of their own as they watch America eat its own seed corn so that Billionaires can further tighten their grip on the political process, and removable assets. 

Neither the Russians nor the Arabs have any intention of sharing the prosperity that output of their oil fields produces, with any but a chosen clique, of their populations, needing it, as they do, to sell at high profits to economies that are in desperate need, of it, none more than those economies that had been built on their own surpluses, such as Egypt, Indochina, and Venezuela, none of which can now supply their own energy needs, and so have ensconced Strongman governments to keep "the right people" (as GHWBush referred to them) in clover.

Thus, they can wait.

 It is only a matter of time before the energy hog of the globe, the USA, squanders the last of its resources, while its billionaire class sells off to ROW the Republic's last fossil fuels (much the same as Britain sold off their oil legacy, leaving them the poorest nation in Europe, yet with the most expensive form of government. Not only must they support the Keptocracy of British peers and its Royal succubae, but also its Demockracy that keeps those persons in their positions of untouchable privilege).

Even Russian citizens know the  precarious position of the US, as one can glean from conversation with ex-pats fleeing the Putin purge of a generation of Russian males. Moscow is now reminiscent of post-WW1 France, whose manhood was sent for a similar drubbing on the Maginot Line as the one the untrained Russian forces are being subject to by the Kremlin's strategy of creating a Killing Field for their excess population. Like Tsar Nicholas, Putin knows full well that the one thing a religiously-addled people can always be relied on to do is produce more babies to be reared and steered in to the maw of the iron monster of modern Warfare. 

Like Kissinger's illegal "secret" bombing of Cambodia, the plundering of the US continent is only a secret to US. The Cambodians were certainly in on the secret, as the Russians and Arabs are onto the US billionaire classes plan of rapacity. There is no "Stop the Steal" of American fossil fuel supplies, as the squabbling populace is too busy fighting for their piece of the dwindling pie to notice that their legacy is being pulled right out from underneath them while one side screams Keep it in the Ground, even as they insist on their high-energy lifestyle, while the other kowtows to clerics who blandly reassure them that, "god will provide," while they tool around in their own over-sized luxury cars dispensing useless blessings to the masses.  

Perhaps as New York and New England start rationing heating oil before winter (The Daily Mail claims stockpiles have slumped by 70%) and fears rise that families will be left in the cold, the disquiet will spread. Perhaps people will begin to ponder the wisdom of using public monies to develop a technology that is then usurped to siphon off the last of a Nation 's energy supply so as to enrich a few billionaires, who insist they are having their Freedom impinged by being asked to pay their fair share of taxes ... taxes that paid for the selfsame technology without which they would NOT be billionaires.

But for that to happen we probably would need a press that actually paid journalists instead of  hacks. And that's just not going to happen.

 

Homeless in Seattle.

If You Prick me, Do I not Breed?

Like pensive cattle lying on a parched, dry California heap of brown, sun-dried earth, they turn their eyes towards the hard-hearted passersby; they watch their feet as they hold out a hand of despair, fighting off the sweet languor of desperation amid their bitter shivering. There are some who call out for your help while wracked with howling fevers, with naught but that ancient duller of physical pain, distilled brews that bruise them even further.

The churches, those Reagan-era bastions that declared anti-poverty programs should be destroyed so that they could do their rightful job of providing succor to the needy, are but tax-free havens that ply the late-night airwaves with calls for cash for which they promise that the god of consumption will reward worshipers of the Almighty, as in dollar, with a New Car! A Cache of Cash! While they bolt their doors against the wretched lest they scare off their well-heeled worshipers, never mind that all they worship is Baal, the god of gold, the Avatar of Greed.

Devils and monsters, they consider themselves great souls destined to rank among the chosen in their imagined hereafter, and thus are they contemptuous of reality; seekers of the infinite, they step gingerly over the filthy heap of rags; hold their noses against the rank odor of Capitalism's detritus, encased, as they are, in their carapace of moral righteousness. The idea that the god they pretend to worship would gladly don his crown of thorns yet again to show them the real nature of worship, and the place that compassion deserves in those who claim belief in his message, has never cracked the shell they have carefully built around their hearts. 

Meanwhile to the vaults of fathomless sadness, to which a nation besotted with Disneyland as though it weren't but a land of make-believe even 12-year-olds sneer at, is condemned, those whose destiny has already banished faith, crushed hope, and destroyed love are strewn across the dirty pavement as crushed underfoot as the cigarette butts their homeless encampments are stewn with. There there is no pink; no gay day replete with prismed light ever enters; there, alone with chill-bane-inducing Night that makes for a gloomy landlady, they huddle together on concrete as cold as Bill Gates' heart at night, while heating to rival Hell's kitchen during the day. Theirs is a bleak universe with leaden horizons in whose darkness floats horrors while blasphemies they refer to as "prayer" hover in the air as they issue from the mouths of the faithful as if to demonstrate the mockery their sham religiosity has become.

We now have, it is true, we corrupt nations, marvels unknown to the ancient world; but to counter them, we have created horrors unknown to them as well. Surrounded as we are by the failure of the Market as the Sole SuperPower, the only Force against to measure success, or to use to decide what we, as a nation, an individual, a world, pursues, continue to ignore how short it falls from its original promise of grandeur as we gingerly step over the ragged nakedness of a man whose eyes we avoid, filled as they are with a chilling darkness that envelops his soul as he lies in a squalid pile of filth whose reek nauseates us. While their women, whose twisted bodies, undernourished and skinny, pot-bellied or flabby, are pale as church candles, fed and gnawed away by debauchery, drag along the inheritance of their sex's vice: the low-hanging vestiges of fecundity.

Evening skies are now filled with choking air from wildfires thickening night like a wall so that every breath inhales air laced with poison gases. There are those among them who, by the light of purloined candles whose flickering shadows on their faces reveal hollows as deep as old pagan caves, call on your help in their raging fevers, if for nothing else than a drop, a shot, a Packie's nip, to ease the pain of their eternal remorse. But in this cold city, full of hopeless tears, its canyons echoing stifled sobs, great souls contemptuous of reality are too busy seeking the infinite to have capacity for pity. Your bleak sufferings, your unquenched thirsts, and the dried  springs of love with which your hearts were once full, are as remote to them as a needle in space.  

Separated @ Birth: Bride of Chucky and Liz Trussed

 

Awaiting her Knight of the Long Knives.

She thought she knew the Drill, baby, Drill.

 Truss'd Buster: Fracturing the Polity and the Ground.

                   Beauty is butt skin deep, whereas ugliness such as hers goes Right to the bone.

A Driver Guns Through It.

With bone-Saudi Arabia refusing to up their oil production (because, like Exxon and other American oil producers, especially in the Texan Permian basin, it isn't in their own best interests), the cry of "J'Accuse!" can be raised to blame yet another party for this winter's coming energy crisis.

As drainforests of pumpjacks pop up all over the USA, draining swamps of oil from underground pockets, their output is constrained by CEO's wishing to return dividends to their stockholders rather than invest those monies to increase oil production (Despite the fact that the price they can charge now is more than twice what it averaged in 2016). When even your own Nation's oil Companies refuse to invest in a commodity they know they can get twice as much for than what they could have gotten less than 6 years ago, just who do you think you are, President Biden, to ask another country to up their oil production just so that American drivers can continue to buy vehicles made to carry 9 people to transport exactly one? While at the same time declaring you wish to manufacture a fleet of EV's to put that same country out of business? And then passing legislation that will require the rest of the world to pay for them? Because when you pay people to buy products they neither want nor can afford, by picking up part of the tab (an unforgivably inflationary item embedded in a bill that's hailed as the "Inflation Reduction Act," a level of cynicism not seen since the Bush era) and you are the issuer of the globe's Reserve currency, that is precisely what you are doing. 

Yet I've heard not a single outcry against that. 

And because, since the Federal Government is passing a highly inflationary bill even as domestic inflation is roaring ahead, the Fed must react by hiking interest rates, which means everything outside the US, especially loans denominated in US currency, costs more; ergo, the US is EXporting not only the last of its energy supplies to the ROW, but it's inflation as well. Hence, them furriners we rail so much against are being coerced into paying for our EV's ... which makes for another generation of immigrants, now that they can't afford to live in their own country, fleeing to the heart of the beast, where they can ... or at least they hope they can ... feed the progeny they produce in such unsustainable numbers.

Meanwhile sanctions are kept on South America's largest oil producer, whose heavy crude Texas refineries have been equipped to process, yet the ocean of oil in Venezuela's Orinoco belt remains in the ground, stymied by US intransigence, as they demand a sovereign state return to "Democracy," as though its own stewardship has set an example for how desirous one should be to copy it.

The standard of living we enjoy in the States, it always seemed to me, once I learned about how Europeans such as the Pilgrims, who created Thanksgiving, thanks to Chief Massasoit, (the grand sachem (or intertribal chief) of the Wampanoag Indians, who were the inhabitants of  the coastal regions of present-day Massachusetts) that a country that simply steals the resources of a vast continent, and develops them for its own aggrandizement, using slave labor as an energy source, a fulcrum to enable its lever of rapine, would always, like England under Queen Elizabeth 1, whose strategies of aiding and abetting criminals our own most resembles, have a definite leg-up on the competition. Of course America was rich: it STOLE anything that wasn't tied, and then tied it down and worked it to death.

The very unCivil War being staged by the US press and billionaire elites on its blighted citizens demonstrates the intractable nature of the "something for nothing" meme on which the nation's notions of "Pursuit of Happiness" is built. The mythical Big Rock Candy mountain that is the apple pie in the sky of the American Dream is, like MacArthur's Park of song, melting in the acid rain while America bickers over how to best achieve the status of being something it never truly was.

While an enormous straw sucks out yet another 15 million barrels of the "strategic" oil reserve, for no other reason than to entice American consumers to buy ever-larger/heavier rolling gas chambers, the resultant decrease in pain at the pumps (Just get new pair of heels, Greta!)  is barely visible. But what is most acute is the knock-on effect the rise in prices of ALL forms of energy is having on economic output, and therefore, with the burning of ever larger quantities of King Coal, on the environment of every continent.

When we had the oil shocks of the 70's and the Bush-rigged manipulation of prices in the aughts to pay for the ginormous upfront costs of fracturing rock on a continental scale, the other forms of fossil fuel-derived energy were barely mentioned (if you can't put it in a gas tank, who cared?). But in our current (No pun intended) dilemma, since it is now the "News"' job to keep you entertained, rather than informed, the fact that Natural gas and coal are priced at stratospheric heights never seen before, is simply ignored, while all the fulminating of "high" oil prices is given free reign. This despite the fact that oil prices are not currently out of line with expectations; they are more likely to fall back to $80/bbl, instead of soaring to a good $20/bbl higher, and even if they did, they still wouldn't be as high as they were during Biden's stint as Obama's VP.

Only environmentally disastrous hydraulic fracturing's output kept the price of oil down during Obama/Biden's 2'nd term; oil pumping that dumped oil on the world market, bringing pain to bone-Saudi Arabia and other smaller oil-producers, causing them to do what the North Sea did before that, charge a price that is a poor reflection of the irreplaceable value of the commodity they deal in just so that Americans could drive around hauling more than three tons of plastic, metal, and glass as they opted for bigger and more polluting versions of the portable gas chambers they tool around in so thoughtlessly as soon as the price to propel them drops.

My contention that the environment, energy, and economics are all intricately entwined, is being borne out by all three of them becoming more volatile simultaneously: a volatility that is showing every sign of not only not abating, but of being instead exacerbated by the policies of not only the US, but its allies and enemies. Each of which is pulling the same trick as the Inflation Reduction Act, by putting on a façade of doing one thing while doing exactly the opposite in actual fact. The outré money-grubbing of ultra-rich, tax-dodging, Corponations for US federal dollars in order to cash in on the bonanza of cash the US Treasury  has opened up its doors to disburse, is a case in point of the Green-lighting of any scam that can be Greenwashed into acceptance. The current atmosphere of money-grubbing, hopium-infused desperation, where fortunes are made by proffering nonsensical schemes to prolong the West's idiotically-monikored, "Post-Industrial" society, is an echo of the nineties' Beany Babies  and Vaporware manias that caused stocks to soar by presenting schemes, without even a modicum of proof, using a scurrilous miasma of pseudo-science that evaporated as quickly as morning fog in a California sunrise, to entice those lacking even the basics of climbing skills, to scale the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and make themselves rich, when all along, the schemes were devised for no other reason than to make Goldman Sachs and its ilk fat on other people's sucker's bets.

Besides the obvious problem with this mindset, in that it has the opposite effect of that maintained, is that we get the Las Vegas effect. What I mean by that is the fact that Vegas, in the grips of an unending drought, decided that people shouldn't have lawns. So what they did is, they filmed crews as they went around the city ripping up the grass from people's yards. Now, I haven't got a lawn, but I do have grass. It grows when it pours out, but I pull off the tops when they go to seed to keep them from proliferating out of control. But, as I live on  a hillside, I never pull it up by the roots, as that's what keeps the soil in place. In other words, I control its growth, largely by having other plants crowd it out. What I don't do is rip it up by the roots.

The next storm that Vegas got hit with occurred after I saw that video on the evening news of them tearing up the lawns that should have been left and simply not watered so the the next time it rained, they could absorb the runoff and keep all that water from collapsing the drainage system. By doing the opposite of what any hydrologist would have recommended they do, they caused exactly what you would expect: flooded streets on the Vegas strip, despite there being less rain dropped than in previous storms when vegetation was in place to hold back both the soil and the excess water, keeping them from overwhelming the drainage system. 

Things similar to this are happening all over the country and the world, for the simple reason that many of the steps we need as citizens, municipalities, and neighborhoods, don't make a damn nickel for the corponations, and therefore for the federal, State, and City governments that live on their taxes. When you prioritize something, that is what is considered first, and everything else takes a backseat. Otherwise it wouldn't be called prioritization. So when you "Let the Market"  "solve" the climate crisis, they naturally will think up all kinds of tricks and ruses to put money in their pockets in the attempt (well, pretending to be attempting ... what motive do they have to derail the money train from chugging to bring them free federal dollars? Especially when the example of Bush's fuel-from-food scam has demonstrated to them that even after twenty years of environmental destruction, economic dislocation and wasted energy, the freeeee!!!! federal funds just keep on flowing, and in even greater quantities now than at the start of the program. Even as the product they use all your money to produce, reduces the mpg's of every one of the 250 million vehicles plying the nation's highways. So where's any incentive to actually meet green targets? ... especially when one considers that none have ever actually been established).

What we get instead is an echo of the not-so-Great Britain's response to their farmers' distress over the ongoing drought: A call to instigate a government-sponsored, nation-wide hydraulic fracturing of the island kingdom; earthquakes, poisoned water, methane production and environmental destruction be damned. Full speed ahead to energy-production dystopia and economic ruin for their own farmers and urbanites. So what do they piss and moan about? Nappies. Not enough of them. When I was a kid, I washed out the younger kids' diapers. It was disgusting, but ya know, that's life. Not anymore. Who cares if an environmentally destructive "solution" wreaks havoc with various eco-systems, as long as we need never soil our dainty little hands scrubbing our own offspring's waste from their diapers so that we can get on to doing more important things, like sitting for hours on end glued to the ever-larger, ever more energy-intensive TV screen ... until we too are in need of nappies for our ever-expanding rear ends that have become so vast our arms can't reach  around to wipe them.

Luckily though, now that we have all accepted the Corponational propaganda that peak oil is a mere phantasm, we will be able to unbury and set on fire every last hydrocarbon that currently lies buried and sequestered beneath fertile soil, destroying what we actually need to get what we merely want. Thus laying clear what will be mankind's epithet. The swan song of the ugly duckling.

"It was in our nature to destroy all of Nature ... preferring to deny that we were part of it to living with any constraints on humankind's rapaciousness."   

The Four Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse

 While we anxiously await the annual Clown roundup known as the COP27 (COP = Clowns Only Please), in which we are privy to the drooling ravings of Corporate-sponsored (In the modern economy mankind has devised, nothing happens unless it’s Corporate-sponsored … climate change being but one example) there are four obvious and usual suspects, each of which has been thus far, and, there is every sign, will continue to be, ignored. So, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I wish to document them, so that the “Who could have seen it coming?” question can be answered when they inevitably rhetorically pose it again. Because, if an idiot such as myself could’ve seen it coming, then it's fairly obvious that you could have done so, too.

All of these items that need  to be addressed are already known by every attendee jetting their CO2 path to the COPout conference, but none of them will have the effrontery to bring them up,  least of all, the first on the list, and the most intractable:

1) Corporate Law.

The rule of the Corporate sphere is so entrenched now that Corporate interests can actually brag about the fact that any climate solution that doesn’t make profits for the Corporate overlords running the economic and political systems and ruining the environment in the process, and hence humanity’s future, has been announced as DOA. With the destruction of the Soviet Union, the most powerful impediment to the primacy of private interests over the public’s was swept into the dustbin of history, while the consumer-takes-all Liberal Democracies, with their feckless inability to halt or even constrain the environmental wrecking ball that Corporate Rule wields, were handed free-rein. In this endeavor, they are aided and abetted by the laws they bribe congress to enact in their behalf, putting private interests, in full view of the polity that re-elects them again and again and again, above the public’s interest, as they know full well that corporate money, being in charge of the crushingly expensive Free Press, will buy their way to re-election, regardless. And the public flock will flock to the polls to reseat them. No Putin needed to stand with a gun and assure they vote the right way. The process is indeed rigged, just not in the way the resident of Mar-a-Berchtesgaden bellows it is.

The corporate ballet is nowhere more evident than in the Double Etendre being danced around the SPR (not-so-Strategic Petroleum Reserve). As one trainload of light-tight from the Permian roars in, another steams away towards the port full of energy products for struggling European industries. Like the food-for-fuel program, this boondoggle is a lobbied-for government support program for the fossil fuel industries. The SPR has never been lower than it is now since its inception in the eighties, and the reason? To reduce “pain at the pump”, exactly where it’s needed. Every time the price of petrol has the desired effect, and people start to purchase and drive more efficient flying car pets, the US federal government steps in and protects their “freedom” by instituting policies, such as draining the SPR, to lower the price. The effect on consumer behavior is both immediate and predictable: SUV sales increase, thus locking in, thanks to government interference, higher fuel consumption, for yet another decade.

Yet, thanks to corporate sponsorship … perfectly legal corporate sponsorship … of NGO’s, lawsuits that are frivolous and ridiculous, are brought to court to sue Exxon … for what? For providing government-mandated oil to fill up the SPR, which that government then drains so that it can be used to provide an extra layer of down to our suffocating blanket of CO2. Yet no lawsuit is being even considered by any of these NGO’s, since their corporate sponsors would retract their support … ie, their money, money made from the profits derived from the cheap fuel provided to them by the government’s sleight of hand on Corponationals' behalf. 

All done by the administration that is selling itself to a bewildered public as “Green.”

But, “The American Way of Life is NOT Negotiable”, is not now, nor can it ever be, a Green possibility. By maintaining such an obvious dictatorial stance, the current administration is dressing  up the “Climate Change is a Hoax” rostrum in a new set of Emperor’s clothes; but he’s just as grossly naked as before. 

2) The all-but-ignored ongoing energy crisis.

Other than a spike in the price of gas in early spring, Americans have been kept in the dark about the world’s energy conundrum and continue living in their usual fantasy land about their future prospects.

While the COP27 speakers drone on and on about nothing, try to remember that they have done so 27 times before. In all that time, as they bemoan the existential crisis that mankind has created for itself and every other creature on the globe, the lights in the Eiffel Tower were dutifully switched on night after night, year after year, one decade, and century, after the other. Only when the exigencies of War demanded it did the authorities see fit to even suggest that the cost to do so is cumulative … we not only pay the electric bill, but the CO2 bill never goes down, adding up over time. 

All over the world, displays of mankind’s venality are thoughtlessly lit up to ooh and aah a public that has seen electric lighting as a daily feature of their lives for more than a century, yet marvels like a Japanese tourist with a camera, as though it were a newly discovered toy, like a wristwatch a European explorer would use to impress the ignorant savages in both the “New” world, and Africa, modern man is as childishly beguiled as any primitive tribe member by displays of the "Miracle" of Science. The belief in magic is deeply ingrained, with no little thanks going to the despotism of the three  major religions that brow-beat known falsehoods into the brains of their helpless offspring as though it were sacred script.

Since the beginning of the century, oil consumption has remained remarkably stable. Meanwhile, however, the combustion of coal and natural gas has exploded, with the most dire of consequences. Coal combustion has doubled since the turn of the century, even as natural gas combustion has replaced it in most of the first world, a trajectory that Putin’s War has reversed. Yet thanks to LNG, America’s gas bonanza is being hyper-shipped to the rest of the world, raising the price of everything else, no matter how much the Fed thinks it can control “inflation” (note how all of a sudden, inflation is no  longer  “Always and everywhere a monetary phenomena” … as the cost of energy escalates, it not surprisingly, takes everything else with it, no matter what the momentary authorities do to tighten … unless it tightens so much that it causes, once again, extreme economic dislocation, otherwise known as a depression ... still the only method that has thus far demonstrated (in 2008) its ability to constrain the growth in oil-consumption). The world teetering on the brink of depression is coinciding with the most vicious constraint in energy resources since WW2, yet this direct connection is still denied by the entire economics "profession". But we all know in our barbarous little hearts that any restriction in energy production puts a stranglehold on growth and  it won't stop choking it off until energy production resumes ... which it cannot do.

3) The Green PR Machine.

Like the Green Revolution before it, the Green Machine was invented and promulgated as a boon to Corporate profits. You know the truth. You already know that EV's (electric Vehicles) are no more a green solution than natural gas is clean energy. You already know that biomass that includes the razing of forests to "manufacture" woodchips is nothing less than a PR scam pulled off right in front of your face because the powers that be know you'll swallow anything as long a it'll allow you to continue your non-negotiable lifestyle for even one more day.

Since none of the enumerated Horsemen can exist without the other three, they will be constantly intermingled, illustrative of which, the Corporate, perfectly  legal, labeling of both the food-to-fuel programs all over the world being called bio-fuels, despite their being grown specifically to power machines, so they are mechano-fuels, having been repurposed from the bio-fuels they really are (bio-fuel is what food crops in actuality ARE, fuel for biological units such as yourself) and the intense, Green-Revolution energy and machine-dependent mono-cropping methods that have increased the generation of CO2 venting into the atmosphere so egregiously, heavy as they are in the use of all three of the fossil fuels, coal, NatGas, and oil, as well as their complete dependence on artificial fertilizers, GMO'd crops, destructive pesticides and gene-altered herbicides, are now all deployed to grow energy-rich crops to power the very machines they are dependent upon for every stage of their production. So instead of poisoning the Gulf of Mexico to feed the world, US Corponations are given free rein to destroy and plunder whatsoever and wherever they wish, so they are now destroying entire livelihoods in the Gulf simply to make it cheaper (thanks to the outrageous size of the Federal Government's contribution to their bottom lines ... which they then distribute to their shareholders) for American suburbanites to "run" to the store (despite their not running a single step of the way) to pick up a quart of milk or a pint of Haagen Dazs.

But just as the ICE machine, in the form of the Car ... A FREE Car! ... can be used as the single largest contributor to the crisis we are twiddling our thumbs all the way through, precisely because we, as a nation, as a world, know deep in our hearts of darkness that there is no curtailment of energy usage that does not include a hit to the free-wheeling lifestyle we have come to both abhor and adore, likewise the biggest con must, of necessity, include the promise that you will be able to ride into the future as firmly ensconced on your own ever-expanding derriere as ever. Hence the largest amount of PR, involving the entire infrastructure of the Democratic party, entail duping Joe six-pack, (and I don't mean abs), into buying a machine that will bankrupt both him and the country while simultaneously increasing the output of CO2 from the nation's economic activities.

As perhaps you know, President Biden decided that the entire fleet of US automobiles are going to be EV's by 2030 ... in California, by 2035 (those two being mutually self-canceling never posing a problem), which means that in a mere 6 years (2022 is pretty much history, so since "BY" 2030, means that before we actually get to that milestone, means at the end of 2029) the number of EV's being purchased as of right now today, when ICE machines are at a premium in both cost and availability, should be a good harbinger of things to come. But it doesn't bode well. As we near the end of Biden's second year in office, the number of ICE machines sold SAAR, is in excess of 13 million units in the US; the number of EV's in that same time frame? Approximate 100,000. For the math-challenged, that is less than one percent of units sold. Hence, in six years, the US is pretending it's gonna be running an electric fleet to speed workers to their corporate jobs, with the expense to change the infrastructure to do so, being borne by the polity, while the Corponations that demand the workforce be mobile, will be figuratively manning the toll booths at the entrance to the highways to collect their tribute, buttressing their sagging bottom lines with the toil of the masses they despise, with the Libertarians who condemn the very governments they betray, while  challenging their very existence,  standing first in line, having elbowed the actual productive enterprises out of their way. This leads to the last horseman, riding up in his white hat in a tank bristling with hi-tech-enabled armamentaria.   

4) The Motley CRU: China, Russia, and the USA.

Of the three super powers of China, Russia and the US, only Russia braves the slings and arrows of a country that not only cares not a whit about slowing down the climate derangement, but with their TrumPutin logic, stare down the other powers with the braggadocio that they will benefit from climate derangement, so "Bring it ON".

But the two major contributors of CO2 to the atmosphere (except when calculated on a per capita basis, at which point Russia pulls far ahead), China and the USA, have made promises that are hollow, and which, should they enact the options they have said they would, will help us save the planet by guaranteeing mankind's extinction.

By using Biden's vision of an EV in every driveway, it is apparent that, should he be successful, the amount of CO2 alone, never mind the methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs not only currently in the atmosphere, but that would be added to realize his envisioned hyper-electrified future (Since Reagan, every president knows they can do whatever they want to goose the economy, no matter what the long term repercussions, as they won't bear the opprobrium for the damage they inflict, those inheriting the resultant disastrous economy thus created will) would insure a far more unstable weather regime ... one that could never in our lifetimes reach a stasis, since mankind insists on increasing the heat energy it adds to the system year after year, one decade after the other, such that no weather regime can never stabilize (one of the main reasons the TrumPutin claim that Russia will benefit (it's agriculture he's specifically referring to ... but for ag to work you need a predictable climate, which adding 40 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere an an annual basis dooms outright).

This year's above-notated 13 million gas-burning cars is the lowest number manufactured since 2015, the figure approaching 20 million in the years preceding the Pandemic (and of course, that  still wasn't enough ... the economy was demanding more). So by 2030 the US should have turned those numbers on their head if it wishes to even approach its goal, such that there should be 13 million EV's sold in 2030 to the 100,000 gas-guzzling vehicles parlayed that year.

You know as well as I that that's absolute nonsense. Yet even if it weren't, the infrastructure necessary to build out such a transformation of the entire transportation system would increase, as I have detailed in earlier posts, the already over-sized US CO2 footprint to a monstrous size, all the while flashing its "green" credentials at the annual COPout conferences.

China, not surprisingly, creativity not being a Chinese strongpoint, is proffering the same idea: untrammeled CO2 Paying it forward, while keeping its own nonsensical zero-emissions goal, a decade further, into 2050.

But what these so-called zero-emissions goals amount to, from the Corponationals' perspective, is  a Greenlight to Gaslight, as they fall over each other to push their own Green agenda, (despite it's being anything but), to the source of their success: government largess.

There are no milestones any manufacturer must meet on the way to our bright green future. There will be no diminution of the CO2 vented into the atmosphere before 2030 (or after that, if solar, wind, or hydro energy production are any guide). In other words, as the Germans dismount their windmills, there is no metric to meet before they install the next generation of generators that need be shown to demonstrate that wind has indeed curtailed the emissions of CO2, as the fossil fuels burned to manufacture, install, transport, and maintain, and then to do the reverse once their life-cycle has ended, are never included in their sanguine estimates of the Clean in their Machine.

Windmills were a strategic blunder, calculated to reduce Germany's dependence on politicized Russian energy resources. But renewables aren't renewable if the optimum temperature your solar panels work at are a thing of the past, or if the windmills become stranded assets because the new climate regime causes the wind to blow elsewhere, nor if the hydro you have counted on is MIA because, not only has rainfall not replenished the drying rivers, but the melting glaciers feeding thirsty hydroelectric dams will soon be bare rock.

Like EV's, windmills are a good idea, they are spiffier, cooler, and cleaner than their fossil-fueled counterparts. But cleaner doesn't mean life-cycle cleaner for windmills any more than for EV's, but they are at the source: a city full of EV's vis-a-vis gas-guzzlers is a far healthier place to live. But the outsize investment necessary to change the current gas-burning transportation system to one running all EV's in a mere six years will do so much damage, that there will be no coming back from it. Sam Carana spells it out for us on his Arctic News blog: 

"large amounts of methane are getting released from the Arctic Ocean, with even more to follow". 

The Arctic, largely thanks to Putin's Russia, has gone, in the course of merely two years, from warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, to warming 7 x's (!) the rate. And if you look at the activity in the Arctic, it is being done by completely unsupervised Russian conglomerations of oil companies, coal enterprises, and natural Gas facilities, all of which rival, in their contempt for any environmental restrictions being placed on their activities, the wildcat ferocity of the state of Texas. Yet this build-out of methane-producing industries is occurring in the littoral of the Arctic, while a fleet of no less than 30 ice-breakers plies the Arctic ocean breaking up its ice sheet into myriad ice chunks that melt far more easily in the warming waters, all so that China can then use the Northwest Passage to ship its goods more cheaply. Well, more cheaply for them. For the rest of the world, the cost is prohibitive. But just as US Corponations need worry not the least about the damage they inflict on the ecosystem of the prairies, such that the resulting dust storms are never attributed to their wrecking-ball activities, the Chinese Corponations haven't a qualm about the price others have to pay for their intransigent attitude, nor does Rosneft have to fret that the Russia government will halt their toxic plundering of Siberia's resources, even as the taiga burns down around them, destroying the livelihoods of millions of Russians.

The reason that the Russian despot is never called out on this while he is excoriated on a daily basis for his activities in Ukraine, have nothing to do with humanitarianism, which is a delusion, and everything to do with the Liberal Democracies' inability to rein in their own citizens outsized burning of fossil fuels. So they've concocted this War so as to blame our "adversary" for the rise in fuel prices, the inflation eating their workers' earnings, and the food prices curtailing the continued expansion of their overstuffed bellies.

But the crime Russia is in the midst of committing in the Arctic is of a far worse sort, with more far-reaching consequences, and with zero MainStream Media coverage, as it provides the energy resources necessary for the Corponations to continue their iron domination of every aspect of life on earth, of which the MSM is but a cog. They obey or they will go away. Like NPR, they will be corporatized until all they tell are lies (most of them lies of omission).

Now, what Mr. Carana argues, is that at the current 1950 ppb (parts per billion ... as opposed to CO2, measured in ppm's) of methane level translates into 396.2 ppm CO₂e (that's CO2 equivalent)  GWP (Global warming Potential). In other words, you'd add 396.2 to the CO2 current concentration of 416 ppm, to make the CO₂e of 812.2 ppm. (By 2030, a full generation before China plans to have its zero-emissions economy, that figure will be > 1000ppm CO₂e). But because those measurements are taken at Mauna Loa, they are far more concentrated where the activity is taking place, such as in the Four Corners' region and the Permian basin in the US, as well as the Russian activity in the Arctic, wreaking, each of them, havoc in their nearby regions. So we get mega droughts in America's West, amped hurricanes in Florida and the US Southeast, a months' long heat wave and drought in China, and an Arctic going from warming twice as fast to one warming 7 times as fast as the rest of the globe in the mere span of a couple of years.

None of these hyper-contributors to the tonnage of CO2 and methane being vented into the atmosphere (while each of the same motley CRU destroys their own and foreign forests that are the world's best hope for carbon sequestration) will be mentioned at the upcoming COPout27 convention that is supposed to hammer out an agreement among all the rest of the countries in the world, while raising not  a peep of protest about the outsized carbon Jackbootprint this motley CRU is kicking up into the world's face over and over and over again. 

But in this, our "Oh, Well"-ian world, what's the point of even mentioning it?

A Byte of the Apple Begets The Eve of Destruction.

 

Three Cheers for Bitten Fruit.

AS climatologists keep warning about tipping points in the climate crisis, the real tipping point, which must always be searched for in human behavior (otherwise it wouldn't be called an "anthropogenic" climate crisis), was reached long ago when mankind decided to trash its perfectly marvelous telephony infrastructure and replace it with the architecture necessary to support smart phones for stupid people ... you can see them as they drive around in their smart cars, dressed in smart clothes while guzzling smart water from bottles made from non-biodegradable plastic.  

Thirty years ago, when the Kyoto Protocols were introduced in 1992, there wasn't a smart phone anywhere on earth. Yet, fully knowing the environmental impact, they were used as a means to destroy the far more democratic Ma Bell network that could be accessed by anyone for a mere nickel. Now, the means to access the telephone network is restricted to those able to slap down a cool grand just for an access terminal, and then forced to sign a contract that will force them to keep paying whatever price the ISP demands to keep their smart phone from from turning into dead weight. 

 Thus, three decades after Kyoto made plain that the path down which humanity was so casually strolling led to the abyss, we  have reached what will be seen, in retrospect, as the tipping point for climate alteration via humankind's willful  geoengineering of the atmosphere. The Annus Horribilis of all mankind has ironically fallen during the same year that an aged British Monarch, who used the term to describe her own self-absorbed travails, has died, making its passing, as though it were just another year, that much easier to docket.

Sitting on my desk is a landline phone. 

It requires no power until I lift the receiver and start to push the buttons on its keypad.

The stupid smartphone you are using, however, sucks in power on a constant basis, and, unlike my phone, which can be use by anyone in the household without my risking them looking at my personal data, or erasing it, or stealing it and/or the phone, which is cheaper than a tee-shirt at Macy's, and which I've owned for 20 years, your phone, however, is subject to all of the above ... and should you find yourself on a street corner without it, you will be hard-pressed to find anyone who'll allow you to use theirs, for the above notated reasons. In other words, there is no mendacity necessary in the reluctant potential phone-lender, but a serious risk of them losing everything on the (for the most part) only computer terminal to the wired network in their possession, and risking the danger you will then have access to their data, data they would no longer have access to. To risk such a loss to benefit a stranger is unadvisable.

But the convenience cell phones offer is apparently worth geo-engineering the atmosphere for, so, together with the ubiquity of the automobile and the  pleasure derived therefrom, damn the consequences.

And the power usage?

As Europe goes through energy withdrawals, its industries in turmoil because of the cost of power, a new energy regime is being created on the back of the old one, a regime that will for the first time force industry to pay the true cost of power, and that will mean the end of the global economy as it has been known since the decade of greed, when a band of zealots calling themselves the Moral Majority, swept into power under Reagan in America, and Thatcher in anything-but-Great Britain.

And just as nobody saw fit to remonstrate about the gall of a religious organization claiming their superior morality to the rest of the population while it enshrines the deadliest of the deadly sins in a catafalque of Virtue, no one said a peep about the world imposing on its billions of citizens an entirely  unnecessary telephony infrastructure that would result in a rapid, ever-escalating expansion of the tonnage of CO2 annually added to the atmosphere; "Paying it (climate chaos) forward" by decades, delivering another Roaring Twenties: only this time marked by roaring wildfires and roaring torrents of floodwaters. Far in advance of the even the most pessimistic of "alarmist" climate prognosticators, all thanks to the ubiquity of remote control computer terminals with voice capabilities that we instead like to refer to as "phones." Siri-ously?

These terminals are in constant need of Upgrades, both in the hardware and the IOS, the one dependent on the other, such that a phone not upgraded soon loses its ability to accommodate the ever-expanding memory and cpu-cycle requirements of its bug-infested software.

By now we should all be aware that this is not a fluke, but a feature of the entire computer industry, of which the phone-capable terminals everyone carries are but an offshoot. Every component along the way, which is to say the network itself, is constructed using the exact same paradigm of rapid, built-in, energy-intensive, obsolescence. When AT&T bought the company I worked for in the nineties, there was still 60's-era communication equipment installed in the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco. There are no products that are manufactured by Cisco, Apple, or Microsoft-compatible PC's that come close to that longevity. Even now, while the world is experiencing its most intense energy crisis (one from which it hasn't the capacity to overcome), supply-chain problems, and computer chip shortage in our entire lifetimes (and I'm seventy, so that's quite a span of time), Microsoft has sent me a warning that my perfectly working HP PC, with which I have had no problems, must be entirely scrapped and replaced with "Windows 11-capable" hardware, because they will no longer support my functioning system. That entails millions of systems around the globe, pressuring supplies of microchips whose quantities are in such strained capacity that SUV's are sitting in manufacturers lots because the chip needed to move the sideview mirrors are unavailable. The push to replace older systems instead of offering to support them at least through the shortage demonstrates the real state, as opposed to the pseudo-concern for the turmoil, grief, and destruction that climate change is wreaking on an escalating basis, the corponations constantly pat themselves on the back for evincing. Maximizing profits trumps everything else. That is the Corporate mandate, not "doing something" to benefit mankind, or help alleviate a shortage their own strategy of planned obsolescence with a methamphetamine rush has helped to create.

And just as the hydraulic fracturing of the North American continent changed the paradigm of energy usage forever, in that the amount of energy consumed, and therefore the number of O2 molecules in the atmosphere replaced by CO2 molecules year-after-year increases, for every joule of electricity produced, the onus of the networks' energy requirements gets heavier and heavier with each passing year, as billions of remote terminals download TIK-Tok videos, and youtube seminars, full-length movies and fashion seminars, closing shops all around the globe that employed local help and hired your youngsters, who are now side-lined so that all the money that once stayed in the local economy is more and more efficiently vacuumed out of that local economy and sucked into the accounts of billionaires who have no accountability to anyone other than their "investors."

Although its mentioned time and again that the mining of crypto-currencies uses as much energy as that of a modern industrialized State, it is just as assiduously ignored that the entire internet and its vast array of wireless devices deployed around the globe in the hands of billions of citizens, does exactly the same thing, and for the same reason: to fill the pockets of Corponations like Google, that publicly preens itself for its "Zero-emissions" policies even while its vast  hordes of users unknowingly allow electronic hit-men to churn up their devices: hijacking CPU cycles, bandwidth, and memory (ie gobs of ENERGY), that the user must pay for despite it's being   unwanted and unwarranted intrusion. All these devices are enabled by Google to combust vast stores of fossil fuels, of every kind, all over the world, to provide Google exec's with their golden parachutes and its "investors" with dividends for delivering to customers exactly what they don't want: useless onerous advertising for products they neither want nor need and making them pay for the privilege.

And unlike broadcast TV, this advertising is downloaded first, so the data you go to a sight for is treated secondarily, by the time it gets loaded, an advertiser, or two, or three, or dozens, have been given the information Google has been paid to deliver, while your "free" content is held hostage. Some sites, such as Accuweather.com, have even had the temerity to switch their content to a small sidebar while all the ADS appear larger and bolder in the main viewing pane while (literally) hundreds of companies that have paid for your data are allowed into your device to access your hard drive, use your cpu cycles, and hijack your memory resources to collect it.

This is a paradigm shift of the same scale as that of our energy infrastructure, such that its energy requirements, far from taking into account the ever-increasing burden of CO2 we are asking the atmosphere and oceans to absorb, ignores them completely, as they have been for decades, and EXPANDS the number of electrons set in motion to do the simplest of tasks, even as we pay the price for such arrogance on an ever-expanding scale. And electrons are set in motion only by the input of more energy, while, like the telephone system, the less energy-intensive method of accomplishing the same task is gutted so completely there is no going back to it. 

Even as half the population of the most energy-intensive country in the world lap up the slime oozing from the lips of the avatar of the hoax that "Climate change is a hoax," rally 'round their fat, fatuous Furor, and the delegates of COPout27 pack their bags in readiness to burn vast quantities of jet fuel to junket to yet another in a series of failed conferences, the year 2022 is starting to look like the year when the paradigm in the world's weather regime is shifting in much the same way as that of our communication systems and our energy procurement. So much so as to make it an impossibility (for anyone but the addled followers of their Jim Jones Furor) to not realize that whatever they thought their future was going to be, and whatever all those advertisers on those "smart-alec phone"'s are trying to sell them as to our viability in that future, are all based on factors that have intractably changed. 

Just as landlines are gone forever, and crude oil has been replaced with light-tight oil costing exponentially more to explore for, excavate, and deliver, the weather regime that we have geo-engineered is no longer conducive to mono-cropping, while our shorelines will never again be secure from flooding, and our summers can no longer be looked forward to as a time to for recreation and vacation. Instead, crop failures and pest infestations will increasingly plague farmers; rolling blackouts, that have already become part of the necessary power arrangements in even two of the top five oil-producing states (Texas and California) in America, one of the three Petro States in the world, such that the country that produces more than ten percent of the world's oil supply can now no longer keep the lights on (yet no provision has been made to prepare Utilities' users for the changed future they are facing); and summers are already looked to with trepidation all over the world as people wonder who's next to have their lives destroyed, or their homes burnt to the ground while they watch their vehicles being swept away by yet another flash flood.

While Apple displays their logo proudly, no one in this Moral Majority-ruled nation, seems to have considered what the consequences of taking their own bytes from the Apple might be. Somehow the Loss of Paradise has figured nowhere in their estimation.

Paradise Lost, by John Milton Friedman.

 

The Zani Hoax that Remade Our World into a Death Factory.

                                                      Habitat Destruction always precedes  

The Distinction of Extinction.

While fires rage on every continent of the globe, and the US Congress holds its inquiry into the attack on its very existence, not a single "journalist", not on the radio, nor on any podcast, not on substack, nor, naturally enough, the mainstream press, cares to point out the banality of Evil represented by the trumpery that "Climate Change is a Hoax", espoused by the instigator of the mob's attack on the Capital.

Even while they hold the spotlight on themselves to investigate what everyone already knows to be true, national institutions resist mentioning the brutality inflicted by the megalomaniacal assertion that climate change is a hoax; nor the subsequent use of that phrase to use the State's apparatus and its instruments of violence for its own economic purposes. The GOP continues to stake everything on its continued use of the trumpery of the Big Lie that Climate Change is a Hoax, solely to incite the mob into taking politics into its own hands and liquidate the liberal elites along with all other classes and democratic institutions.

We can piece together the attributes that made the current leader of the Zani party the man of the moment: the attraction he evokes for both the mob, afflicted as it is by the toxic mixture of gullibility and cynicism, and the elites, driven by their thirst for expansion for expansion's sake of their mountainous hoards of capital. No wonder that they tell lies. The wonder is that even a mob should swallow them whole. They take advantage of the unthinkability that the policies supported by the Big Lie will lead to their own doom ("the very immensity of the claim that Climate Change is a Hoax guarantees that the murderers who proclaim their innocence with all manner of additional Lies will be more readily believed than the victims of those policies who tell the truth").

As the nation sizzles in the extreme heat while denying its own complicity in stoking it, the Bright Green Lies that Derrick Jensen wrote an entire book to expose, continue to help stoke the already deadly heat. The 10% mixture of corn-based ethanol that every driver in America is Forced to pay for at the pump, and that DEcreases the number of miles they are able to drive on any given volume of gas, emit VOC's from every tailpipe of those hundreds of millions of ICE machines and heats up the urban environment even more as those volatile organic compounds get transformed, via the intense summer sunlight (the ethanol is only mandated during the summer months, the worst months that could have been chosen) , into ground level ozone, which increases the intensity of urban heat islands even further.

 Although the frog boiling in water that has had its temperature slowly increased so that froggie doesn't notice it is being boiled alive, is at this point perhaps a trite trite, it reminds me of one of my early childhood experiences. Growing up on a street called Brookside, it never occurred to me until we left that there was no brook anywhere in sight, but what there was, was a small pond to which we would venture in the spring to watch the pollywogs swimming around. Soon enough, of course, they all disappeared. As we bewailed their demise to our parents, we learned that they hadn't in fact all been devoured, but had transmuted into toads (although we always referred to them as frogs) . They were so tiny and adorably cute that we caught a whole bucketful to watch them romp and play, leaping from one another's backs in their vain attempts to regain their freedom. We were called in for lunch at some point, and forgot all about our little terrarium for close to two hours while the sun continued along its prescribed path that gave the erstwhile shaded bucket its place in the sun, broiling its tiny inhabitants to a crisp by the time we returned to discover a gruesome scene of carnage. I was maybe 5/6 years old, but, as you can see, I never forgot the act of terror I had participated in, the unnecessary suffering I had caused playing with the living world as though it were simply a toy for my amusement.   

But as I grew and learned more about the how the world operated, the more I became aware of how wrong-headed my perspective was. The entire culture in which I was reared looked upon nature in exactly those terms, not with horror at their heartlessness toward what they referred to as god's creation, but with a sense of complete entitlement that that was what the lower forms of life were there for: they were at our disposal to use howsoever we saw fit, no matter how unfitting the extermination of entire species was to a mankind tasked by the same god we feign belief in with its husbandry.

It is only the peoples that Fake christians call heathens, so as to justify their liquidation of them, that  still practice sustainable agriculture, building mounds around corn stalks and planting squash and beans in them: raised fields as opposed to industrial's agriculture's "Green Revolution"'s adoption of the unsustainable practice of razed fields as far as the eye can see. The creative destruction that capitalism brags about inflicting on Nature, which, unlike the fantasy god of the supernaturalists, actually exists, and not paying tribute  to Her exacts real consequences that threaten our continued existence despite the continued insistence by "the smartest  people in the room", that it is there to be used and abused solely for our species' benefit. Like the subsistence farmers of Brazil that I can remember being scoffed at in our student textbooks for their use of crash-and-burn agricultural methods, using up the fertility of the soil and then moving on to the next tract, leaving a swath of scorched earth in their wake, the oh-so-clever modern heathens follow the exact same logic as they slash and burn their way through the entire globe, as though they too can simply move on to the next earth to continue their rampage anew.

What the most primitive of peoples know that the moderns have forced themselves to forget, is that fertile soil is Nature's most precious gift to mankind, and so they cherished and nurtured it, as did the peasant class that has been all but wiped off the face of the earth. Yet even as the main ingredient for manufacturing modern fertilizers, natural gas, is burned to power Air conditioners, stream bonehead videos through the air, and produce the main ingredient for fireworks and firearms, ordnance and smart bombs, or loaded onto a fleet of LNG tankers - non-existent a mere decade ago - the increasing insolation that is cooking the topsoil across the vast prairies of America continues to be ramped up.

So as you read about, or hear of, the Pyrrhic victory of the Democrats' big "Climate Bill," that imposes a larger bill on the price tag of climate derangement than a giant platypus', in order to "make clean energy (which is as much as an oxymoron as "Clean Coal") so cheap in all aspects of life that it’s nearly irresistible," is an ambition that suggests it should instead be named the Climate Kill Bill.  If you recall that a Pyrrhic victory is "a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it is tantamount to defeat," then it is obvious that the Democrats' legislative victory negates any true achievement and instead damages any long-term progress that might still be possible.

If the spineless Democrats had started the reversal in the process of processing corn into fuel so as to lower the costs of ownership for the very Ice Machines they are purportedly phasing out; if they had mandated Corporate cessation of all fracking operations until such time until the oil companies are tasked with reducing the hemorrhaging of methane resulting from their operations (instead of forcing the costs of following around the fracturing corporations with taxpayer-funded cleanup crews); or mandated that UPS and other "free" delivery services pick-up from their customers the deluge of cardboard boxes and packing materials, all practically virgin, but all of which, since the delivery is "free," are not even recycled, never mind re-used, which the empty UPS trucks could easily transport BACK to their points of origin without spending an extra nickel on getting this resource (it is a RESOURCE, not something to be discarded ... unlike Congress) into their  revenue stream; or had they passed a law that restrained the size of any new industry's carbon footprint, such that a scam with the carbon footprint the size of the crypto-capitalist Bit-coin "industry," (that created an entire industrialized nation's carbon footprint overnight, while providing absolutely no social benefit to anyone other than billionaires trying to increase their hoard by conning the horde); or had they offered incentives to any State or local government that came up with programs that demonstrably, reduced their citizens' carbon footprint, perhaps their efforts could at least be seen as well-intentioned.

But none of that is the case. 

Every aspect of the Climate Kill Bill legislation is rife with pork to be larded onto the very same Corporations that continue to pour unwarranted amounts of toxic gases into the troposphere, the Congress blithely hiding their defalcations behind much of the same crypto-capitalist rhetoric the Bush administration used to ram through the Legislature his ongoing Twin Towers of ecological disaster: horizontal fracturing and his cynical coal-powered, oil-burning, natural gas dependent, food-to-fuel programs sold to a science-challenged public as a means for the USA! USA! to achieve "Energy Independence."

 Naked Capitalism featured the photo below as their "antidote du jour" aujour d'hui. In addition to its its ineffable adorability, it illustrates the aspect of mutation that is most often neglected in our "survival of the fittest" myopic vision of Darwin's theory. Which is natural selection. The "Nature" in natural refers here to the environment in which the mutations take place, and how it is this conversation between environmental change and living organisms' mutations, which are what enable them to adapt to those changes, that has bequeathed to us the startling yet wondrously diverse world of wildlife we are in the process of extirpating. 

Bibi and her baby hippo (Lol ... What'd you expect her to have ... a baby giraffe?). 

It should come as no surprise to us that as any species becomes more "fit" for their environment, they become more vulnerable to changes in it, such that those that are the least fit for the environment in which they may nonetheless thrive, are also those most likely to survive sudden changes in that environment; while those most exquisitely fit to survive in it perish. Such a creature is a hippo; or a platypus. The more unique an animal becomes to more perfectly fit its environment, the more vulnerable it becomes to any alterations in those very aspects of their surroundings that their mutations have given them the attributes that have conferred to them their dominance in it.

That is why, or at least one of the reasons why, I reject the use of "race" as a  designation for cultural and physical differences among people: it has been deranged form its true meaning in order to more easily set us at each others' throats ... admittedly not a terribly difficult task to begin with. But there is in fact but one human race, and we homo sapiens are in fact the consummate racists, just not in the way the Fourth Estate means it. The racism the human race demonstrates toward the non-humans on what we constantly refer to as "our" planet, far exceed the worst aspects of how the word is used in politics to drive a wedge between people of different skin tones or facial features who nonetheless mostly share the same interests. And it is to this actual racism that, like dangling prepositions, we mostly turn a blind eye to. And it is this lack of vision that allows the drafting of this obscene Climate Kill Bill the House is poised to pass as though it is a transformative bill that will somehow fight climate change by lavishing the largest hoard of cash onto its Corporate sponsors than any other country; dwarfing even that of Germany's Energiewende:

 As millions of its solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice, and its vast fields of windmills stop turning for lack of wind, their hydropower output continues to shrink along with its rivers, whose waters are now so low and so warm it obviates even  the resuscitation of its nuclear industry, forcing even their transport system to fall back onto burning coal, oil, natural gas, diesel, and even woodchips to fuel their Energiewende that is, instead of transitioning, not only fueling the steepest rise in energy costs in Europe, but is necessitating energy rationing; our own transition to the moronically monikored "Clean Energy", a concept even children would question, is being ballyhooed as the current administration's greatest achievement; the ecological damage and habitat destruction our own nascent Energy Transition is already inflicting be damned.  

This piece of destructive legislation only hardens the firm conviction the thesis of this blog has maintained from its inception (and which even a cursory examination of the utter failure of Germany's Energiewende to not only not transition away from fossil fuel, but which has, because of the outsize expenditure it undertook to enable it, left it with a larger carbon footprint than when it started its non-transition away from fossil fuels): namely, that the more big governments shovel into the coffers of the ruling class of Corponational criminals that support them, the worse the derangement of the climate gets, and the faster disastrous events are wont to occur. This is true for a very obvious reason that no one cares to mention but which is written on the wall for anyone to read who cares to: 

The path to any so-called energy transition is as paved over with fossil fuels as the roads over which all those multi-ton E-SUV's must be driven, so that, when twenty years later, as is true in the case of both Germany's Energiewende and the criminal GW Bush's food-to-fuel-SUV's program, even though the CO2 forcing of the atmosphere, far from abating, is instead accelerating, the Corponations can still sit on their hoard of government-funded profits that are then lavished onto their shareholders, while the actual people burdened with shouldering not only all the risk, but the financial burden as well, are left shivering in a flooded house or staring at the charred remains of their fire-ravaged homes, completely unaware that it is the very policies of "transition" that have left them homeless, helpless, and ready to be counted among the world's dispossessed. Had the Climate Kill Bill done nothing more than address  this disconnect between risk and reward that is the hallmark of the Crypto-Capitalist economy, whereby taxpayers incur all the costs, and private "enterprise" pries all the rewards out of our cold dead hands, while disrupting every aspect of life on every continent of the globe, it would have actually had a chance to stop the Madness of continuing our self-inflicted extermination. But of that happening, there's neither the slightest glimmer of hope; nor the slimmest chance, as the only "people" Congress has congress with are the Corponations on whose bribes their future in politics is wholly dependent on.  

Aug. 10, 2022 417.45 ppm

Aug. 10, 2021 414.39 ppm:

1 Year Change 3.06 ppm (0.74%)

But since, "The American Way of Life is Non-Negotiable," you needn't worry ... nothing will actually change that will in any way slow down the derangement of the climate.  What you can depend on, is that any policies they do enact, will have the exact opposite effect than what they claim, by virtue of their initial, pay-it-forward, enormous addition to the already high burden of heat-trapping GHG's.