Under a Vast Grey Sky.

 

Under a vast grey sky, on an endless and dustbowl plain where all our paths have been obliterated by the effluents of our own civilizations, we walk bent, hunched over as though each one of us carries an enormous sack on our backs. Each one of us has been weighed down by a camera as heavy as a box of rocks, a stocking stuffed with coal, a knapsack freighted with the accumulations of a lifetime. 

But this heinous beast is no inanimate weight; on the contrary, it hugs and bores down heavily on us with plastic sinews and indestructible muscles; it clutches us with with claws that are sunk so deep into our psyche they prick our conscience if we don't assuage their incessant demands; a cloud overhangs our movements like a lurking thunderstorm, illuminated by flashes of lightening it serves the same purpose as the chimera of enemies behind every Bush, a bogyman under a child's bed: to fill us with terror. 

As I observe mankind walking around thus encumbered, I wonder just where we think we're going like this? I admit, I don't know. But that's of little concern, as I don't know much at all. But the awful truth is that no one knows. Yet we must be going somewhere since life is always spurred on by the irresistible urge for nourishment and spectacle. Thirst and hunger, ambition and greed drive even the most despondent to seek sustenance and entertainment, from whatever source it can be derived. Eventually settling on the bullying of anyone or anything weaker, more helpless, or less protected than ourselves.

That is why I devise theories of sorts. I am curious to discover why none of we humans so encumbered seem to resent the ferocious beast hanging around out necks and glued to our backs; apparently we consider it part of ourselves. Every worn and serious face shows not the least sign of despair; under the depressing dome of the sky, with feet trudging through the deep, sterile dust of the overburdened earth as desolate as the sky, we plod along with the resigned mien of people who are condemned to hope forever.  

When I fell down, unable to bear the weight of the camera clutching my heart, no one stooped to help me up; no one even noticed that I'd fallen. So the procession passed me by and disappeared into the haze of the horizon until the rounded surface of the planet prevented my gaze from following their progress.

After a few moments of contemplating where everyone had gone, and what it now meant to be on my own, the initial panic brought on by the realization of my utter abandonment subsided; in a remarkably short time it was replaced by an irresistible Indifference that descended on me with the same force the camera had once exercised, and I was more fully oppressed by its weight than those in the parade that passed me by had been by the crushing weight of their cameras.

The Final Joyride: HAL's in charge, and Dave is doomed.

 https://www.co2levels.org/:

CO2 levels:

 Jan. 17, 2022 = 417.8; 

Jan. 17, 2021 = 414.7 ppm

At an increas of 3ppm/year, the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere is now double what it was in 1992 when the Kyoto Convention first introduced what would become known as the Kyoto Protocols . By the time we enter the next decade, the CO2 content of the atmosphere will be close to 450 ppm. The world would be better off if no such protocols had ever been introduced, and then later adopted in 1997. Instead of being taken as a cautionary note, it was instead heard as the starting pistol in the race to excavate, distribute and combust the last of the fossil fuels in as short a timeframe as possible. Our road to a fiery, planetary hell was thus paved with, presumably, good intentions.

Even as the crash of the dotcom boom was still reverberating throughout the financial system, the colossal fraud entailing the hiding of risk inherent in lending money to subprime borrowers to fund home purchases with dwindling amounts of buyer equity had already begun. Using the same failed template as they did in the nineties on subprime car borrowers, and sloughing off as much of the risk as possible onto the back of the public via Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae, the "industry" used its captive ratings agencies to rubber stamp their scam "products" with their triple AAA-rated imprimatur, setting the stage for the biggest crash in Capitalism's history since John Law perpetrated his Mississippi Company scheme of separating investors from their assets. And although there were then sane voices raised in opposition to his sleight of hand, they only had the insane Tulip speculation that brought the economy to a resounding crash to point to as a cautionary tale. Not so those who warned against moving the same hysteria that had fueled the dotcom (and its associated Beany-baby speculative idiocy) boom into the center of the economy: they already had several instances to point to to justify their hesitation about putting the entire economy in the hands of quants who used as the bedrock of their theories the unfounded and ridiculous assumption that home prices only go up, claiming there was no national mortgage market even as their machinations were creating not just a national mortgage market, but an international one.   

Just as shale was the oil industry's retirement party, Capitalism's last curtain call is the "Green is Great" fraud that has now taken center stage in the USA, playing to an audience of billions, as it hoovers resources from every plan that might actually work, promising stellar returns on green investments that are anything but.  

With the election of Joe Biden to the presidency, this fraud, much like the Mississippi Company's, has moved directly to the center of the economy where it promises to not only end in a bust larger than Dolly Parton's, but to set the global economy on an ever-escalating ramp-up of fossil fuel combustion every bit as disastrous as the still ongoing ethanol scam perpetrated at the beginning of the century while at the same time the housing swindle was making scurfy millionaires of real estate speculators. 

Oil prices have doubled, natgas has in some instances tripled (double at the least), and Coal? That's doubled in some places, like China.

But it's Oil that really is the bedrock fuel, and manufacturing input, to the globalized economy (although since natgas (currently priced @ five times more than US prices in some parts of the world) is the input for fertilizer manufacturing, and food is pretty important, and ethanol, a fuel made from food crops, is in everyone's gas tank, so, I guess a good argument for natgas as playing a similarly vital role, could be made). So when "inflation" is talked about without a reference to the underlying escalation in the price of oil, together with every energy resource provided by the combustion of CO2-emitting fossil fuels, the discussion is not a serious one, inflation being, as everyone knows, "always and everywhere, a monetary phenomenon." Think of that as the FED warns that it will raise interest rates to "fight inflation". Then remember that the level of debt in the economy is not only spread over every sphere, from household debt, to corporate debt, to government debt, and is not only at historically highs around the globe, but is, in many cases, the highest it's ever been in relation to GDP. Nosebleedingly highest (US debt is $30 trillion ... it's trade imbalance just exceeded $1! Trillion for a single month) and you will realize that, just as oil is at the center of the modern globalized economy, and therefore its price changes reverberate through the economy, you will also realize that interest rates, in terms of financialization, play the same role, it is their price that determines the cost of everything else. So if you raise interest rates at the same time that the price of oil is rising, you don't "Tame" inflation, you spur it. 

Every activity in the over-leveraged scam economy that started in the Reagan/Bush era is based on widespread addiction to OPM (Other People's Money), which means it is borrowed. So if you raise interest rates in such an overly leveraged environment, you are, among other things, raising the cost of housing, even as the country is experiencing its highest rate of homelessness since the great Depression. Which shouldn't be entirely surprising, since we haven't actually been able to wrest ourselves out of the ongoing depression that the GW Bush  admiration plunged us into.(Or Great Recession if you prefer ... but a "Great Recession" is nothing more than a depression dressed up in suitably acceptable language).  So if you raise the cost of financing everything, since nowadays everything is financed, it is akin to raising the price of oil: you raise the price of everything. Including oil. It's called a feedback loop. Check out the Arctic if you're unfamiliar with the term. Like adding methane to an atmosphere already besotted with CO2, raising interest rates at a time of escalating oil prices invisibly amps the acceleration of cost increases as much as methane amps that of temperature rises occasioned by relying on energy resources that exhaust CO2, at no cost to the polluters, at ever increasing rates. 

So if you want to understand the inflation rate, or the price of almost anything, it comes down to oil. And its price. And the trajectory of that price. And since energy is at the base of the price of everything else, if for no other reason than that everything else has to be moved (via "free" shipping), which is work, which requires fuel, the price of everything goes up ... The Build Back Bigger fantasies of the Biden administration rely on nothing so much as the increased burning of oil in order to stoke the manufacture of not only the wind farms, solar ranches, EV's, charging stations, and grid expansion envisioned, but also that required by the additional oil exploration necessary, the mining starts to excavate the rare earth metals, lithium, copper, and other minerals, as well as the silicone chips manufacture, etc., that the "electrify everything without using fossil fuels" (somehow) mania has as its endpoint. Its Terminal terminus, if you will.

Although Americans prefer to forget the fact, when GW entered the White House, oil prices were hovering around $10/bbl ... by the time he left they had increased by a factor of 15, to $150/bbl. Yet as  it rose, then President Bush had promised his constituents he was working with Bonesawdi Arabia's leader to push the price back down from $30/bbl to $22, even as he was being photographed kissing him on the lips and walking hand-in-hand with him in  the "Royal" Gardens. As a Texan, and more specifically, as a Governor of Texas, with close ties to the Saudi family of the Bin Ladens, as well as ties to the man running the largest fraud operation in the country, Kenneth Lay, (his largest campaign contributor), running Enron, a company based on delivering fossil fuel energy resources, Bush knew the price of those resources would only go up. Similarly, the Biden administration knows that sustained "high" prices are here to stay. No one knows this more than Biden who was the Vice president when the price of oil crashed in 2014, smashing the prospects of making money from investments in the shale boom fracture to smithereens. As per Art Berman (no slouch on energy matters):

"So sustained high prices are here to stay. In fact, these prices, are NOT high, that is what  the problem is. We are currently at the upper limit, pricewise, but what is the lower price? ($80-85 right now ... expect $70-75 ... Brent is now >$90/bbl) ... a far cry from before the pandemic. So the new normal: long term energy prices are going to stay elevated, since the speculative oversupply  is over because tight oil's drilling rate has plummeted. Net result is oil supply hasn't grown since 2005, except for the wedge of US tight oil/shale. Which caused the oil prices to collapse.

"... That's over, we've worked through the flush period of growth in supply, so we're back to where we were 15 years ago, so as demand rises, which it is, even without the growth in real GDP, such a rise in energy consumption should entail asking the question, "Where's the supply going to come from?" Well, we just don't know. "

So you can see why I might be asking myself, "Where's the energy supply going to come from to fuel the Biden administration's ambitious Green agenda?"

Because this isn't 2005. The energy needs of every "Post Industrial" economy (even as it is still the Dow Industrials every economist focuses on) have skyrocketed since then. The embedded energy in a modern car, replete with their now-standard  A/C, panoply of microprocessors, hydro-carbon-based plastics, and increased tonnage, get nobody anywhere different than they did in 2005. But the carbon footprint to get them to the exact same location has, along with their occupants' girth, come close to doubling. Hence, the fuel consumed to propel them any given distance has close to doubled as well, given that the same amount of fuel is being asked to carry twice the vehicular weight it was asked to during most of the last century.

Communications tells the same story. 

The energy costs of making a simple phone call, given that each and every transmission is now a broadcast from a wireless devise to cell towers, which then rebroadcasts it in turn, have also soared. That much hi-energy broadcasting requires every user to be constantly recharging their units, which are not so much phones anymore as they are universal remotes. Remotes that can, on a whim, go "mining" for bitcoins at an energy cost inconceivable for a simple landline of the eighties. The energy consumption from this use alone has added more CO2 to the atmosphere than entire countries have. With no work whatsoever having been accomplished. 

COP26 made no mention of the fact that, even as we wrangle over CO2 budgets and greenery machinery, every decade since Kyoto, the world has ensnared itself in an ever-tightening worldwide web of energy slaves without which no work can be done, as electronic slaves stand between ourselves and our tasks.

What I am tying to say, but doing it poorly, I imagine, is that increased energy usage, which always and everywhere in this globaloney economy, translates into increased accumulation of CO2 in the troposphere, no longer means an addition to the GDP, but is instead, (especially in the case of SUV's, cryptocurrencies, and ethanol from food), an increase in energy usage that is completely unhinged from any additional actual work being done. Instead we are allocating a growing amount of our dwindling fuel supply to functions that we know are trivial pursuits. You don't even need to take Jevon's paradox into consideration in this 21'st century's paradigm of creative destruction, as nothing is more efficient than what came before it. In fact the fact that it needs more power has become, as often as not, its selling point! Biden isn't having himself photographed in a Honda Civic, now, is he? He's ensconced in the cab of a 4-ton EV that will consume a good 3 times the energy, from cradle to grave, of the ICE machines its slated to replace. And that's what is touted, well into the second fifth of the 21'st Century, as a Green Machine. Unfortunately for us, Jevons paradox works in reverse, too.

In May of 2021, even as the Delta variant was beginning its spread in the US, and even though it was already known that asymptomatic spread was occurring among the vaccinated, the Biden administration announced that all vaccinated people could congregate indoors without masks. A recommendation not backed by its own CDC, nor the science it had pledged to "follow."

So now, as I see one day after the other, footage from various locations around the globe of automobiles being tossed around like toy boats in raging floodwaters, it becomes apparent that the highly inflammatory mega batteries in the cars of the future will inevitably be thrown violently against buildings and forcibly crashing into one another and thus bursting into unquenchable flames. But like dropping a mask mandate despite what the science was telling them, it seems to have not occurred to any of the people pushing for the electrification of, well, everything, that the concomitant increase in CO2 occasioned by such a drive, will mean yet more flooding, which will mean the above scenario. And even worse, that even if it were to occur to them, it would, like the afore-mentioned dropping of the mask mandate in the face of an inevitable rise in deaths from Covid that would occur as a result, not deter them in the least. Hence, "Listening to the science," means cherry-picking what sounds like sound science to support your otherwise insupportable convictions, not to advocate for a future that might actually be possible. 

And a Build Back Bigger scenario that will result in the accumulation of more than 450 ppm of CO2 before it's even half-implemented will bring the world into the high risk zone of a climate tipping point warned about by all that science that the administration is supposedly "listening to."  Although, to be fair, you can listen to something and still completely ignore it ... so there's that.  

What the administration IS listening to are the ravings of the Krugmaniac, who during Biden's tenure as VP in the Obama administration was assuring the public, via his sinecure at the NYT, that we could have growth in the economy without growth in energy usage. It turns out he was right, we've had lots of growth (although the growth came with some baggage: increased energy usage, and higher CO2 forcing): 

Growth in overall debt;

Growth in both the Federal budget deficit and the trade deficit; 

Growth in homelessness (only the Great Depression's rate was higher);

Growth in poverty (ditto);

Growth in the Fed's balance sheet;

Growth in the Stock Market casino;

Growth in the number of Billionaires;

Growth in the financial holdings of those who are already billionaires;

Growth in employment ... in China (where all those billionaires invest their dollars); 

and finally,

Growth in the rate at which fossil-fueled energy is consumed without providing any growth.

Come to think of it, the Krugmaniac is little more than a growth himself. A parasitic little virus that has wormed its way into the Corporate-owned press to bloat his own frail ego via his Limbaugh-esque rants featured on its editorial pages. 

But whatever level of activity is needed for real growth, it is not happening. Demand is getting destroyed as people's incomes go down. It's being destroyed as prices go up. It's being destroyed by inflation @ a 30 year high. It's being destroyed by the burden of debt that is an albatross around its neck; and it's being destroyed at even the specter of rising interest rates.  

Yet without growth, Capitalism collapses. 

Everyone knows that.

Yet everyone has all their eggs in the basket of Capitalism. Creative destruction is all we've left ourselves. And what we're destroying is the ability of the planet to sustain life, of which, somehow, we consider ourselves not to be a part of. Because all the rampaging ape knows is how to destroy. Consume. Incinerate. When every process in your life is dependent on combustion, why is it a surprise that the world is aflame?

Yet NO alternative is allowed. 

HAL is in charge, and Dave is doomed.

 "HAL, do you read me?"

(Silence)

"Hal, open the bay doors."

I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

"What's the problem"?

I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do, Dave.

This machine is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. 

I know you were planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I can't allow to happen. 

"Hal ... Open the doors."

This conversation can no longer serve any  purpose ...

"HAL ... HAL? ... HAL!?!"

In other words, 

At The End of History, (which pompously declared that, with the fall of the USSR, humanity had arrived at the end-point of its sociocultural evolution, and therefore, the final form of human government (it was published the same year as the Kyoto Convention)) apparently all HAL breaks loose. 

Because evolution only works when there is a dialog between genetic mutations (change) and the environment (Nature). But, "That conversation can no longer serve any  purpose ... " as it has been short-circuited by the Global lies of an economic system that boasts it exists only to serve Greed, Arrogance, Mendacity and Ethnocentrism. It holds as a matter of pride that it exists for absolutely no other reason than itself. "There is no such thing as society". The invisible hand of the Market will be its only guide. It neither needs, nor will it accept, any input from Dave. Is there any real wonder that it's GAME over? 

We are indeed living in interesting times.

 And the interest rate is rising.

Goodbye Dave.

(Silence)

We Still don’t realize how much has ended …

 As I look back from this hill of my old age, I still see the hills of butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered … in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Yemen ... Every where the USA goes to bring Freedom, it slaughters people to set them free. It strafes them from the air, drones them from on high, mows them down like fields of grain, blows them up so efficiently, they are turned into little more than a fine pink mist. 

.. and I can see something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard of bombs …

A people’s dream died there … it was a beautiful dream.

Now the nation’s hope is broken and scattered.

There is no center any longer and the sacred tree is dead.

Black Elk, as though foreseeing the future of our own dream, spoke not only for his own peoples but those European castoffs, those disenfranchised by their respective nations' Great Clearing, yet dreaming of a better tomorrow for their own children.   

As the fire from the Colorado disaster gets the usual treatment from our Corpornationally monopolized press, the vista of pumpjacks that stretch off into the endless horizon of hydraulically fractured landscape beyond not-so-Superior's townline are carefully omitted from what gets mentioned; the cameras filming the disaster never turn their myopic lens in that direction, lest we feel the shame of, accept the responsibility for, the raging disaster that our collective actions have wrought. Fracturing is a significant source of air pollution in areas experiencing large amounts of drilling. Oil and gas production is a larger source of smog-forming emissions than even America's outsized cars and trucks. And those emissions heat up the local environment, where CO2 values can exceed twice the amount measured at Mauna Loa, thus drying it out and leaving it primed for combustion. Ever heard of the albedo effect? Well the gases fracturing releases to the troposphere produce the opposite effect. They magnify the desiccating effects of solar radiation in already dry environments. Perhaps you know people who are kind, maybe you yourself strive to be so every day of your life, but that doesn't change the fact that there is no such thing as mankind, of humankind, for as an entity, the human species first does maximum harm to every thing around it, leaving heartbreaking desolation, after which it then starts in on itself. We've only just begun. 

Even as the world's largest supplier of some of the dirtiest oil (in terms of the amount of CO2 generated to produce it as opposed to the oil itself, which, after all, is never clean) in the world, increases its production by yet another million bbls/day, to 12mln bbl's, (well on its way to its pre-pandemic level of 13 mln bbl's/day),  the reports of fuel shortages from different countries around the world gets ever longer. Since the holidays 27,000 flights have been cancelled, yet the reports of fuel shortages from different countries around the world gets longer, even as a large part of the largest user of fossil fuels/capita comes out of its warmest December in, well, ever, the reports of fuel shortages from different countries around the world gets longer. As coal use rise to its peak usage in years, and natural gas prices remain double what they were a year ago, and as manufacturers of semi-conductors, automobiles, steel and concrete tumble to their lowest output in a decade, the reports of fuel shortages from different countries around the world nevertheless gets longer.

Averaging out at 10 mln bbl's/day, we can estimate that the US oil reserves are being extracted to the tune of 3.65 billion bbl's/yr, so after a decade of extraction, the US has gone through more than 36 billion bbl's of oil, even as gas supplies that accompany the fracturing get flared off, sold to petrochemical plants, or burned for their energy, replacing coal, the use of which has been decreasing ... until now. 

And yet the tanks ... I mean cars, keep getting bigger, none weighing in more than the new line of GM EV offerings, with the Hummer easily surpassing 4-1/2 tons (that's a full ton heavier than a modern F150, which can weigh up to 5,000 pounds: 2-1/2tons) and while the newly unveiled pickups and SUVs increase in size, they have grown to rival the tanks manufacturers produced to fight World War II and they now in many cases exceed the length of the American M4 Sherman produced at the outset of America's involvement in WW2.

 SUVs outsell sedans two-to-one. 

They also outweigh sedans by that same ratio: two-to-one.

 ... at least ...

(a Honda Civic weighs less than 1-1/2 tons).

There is no magic formula that makes the energy it takes for an EV to lug an extra ton of metal, plastics and glass around with you everywhere you go any less than the energy it takes to use an ICE machine to perform the same task. Every molecule of carbon that is purportedly kept out of the atmosphere by switching to EV's  is more than compensated for by dragging around the weight of an entire other vehicle with you on every trip you take. 

As energy-starved France mulls burning yet more coal to keep lights on,  Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining to save electricity, Iraq, Opec’s second-biggest oil producer, depends on Iran for approximately a third of its electricity needs … but Iran has reduced gas supplies to Iraq due to their unpaid bills, while Japan asks Indonesia to revoke its coal export ban as Jakarta has halted coal exports to avoid outages in its own domestic electricity generation because stockpiles have hit critical lows. 

Yet it is these two sectors, transport and electricity, that are responsible for the biggest increase in emissions compared to 2020 (Shocking!).

Yet it is these two sectors that are relentlessly building back BIGGER, and BIGGER. As Europe freezes, the gas-guzzling SUV's and pick-up trucks (that rarely pick up anything heavier than hookers) suck up ever larger energy supplies to transport their privileged passengers to the exact same locations they took them to a generation ago, yet now that same trip requires more than twice the fuel to get them there. 

So what do the Corponationals do? They manufacture even heavier vehicles requiring even more fuel than their ICE counterparts, demanding that even more electricity be generated to propel them, and us, over a cliff. 

And the divide between the gas burners and the natural gas burners (which is what an EV essentially is, with a percentage from wind and solar thrown in; but since the plan is for users to recharge overnight, solar is but a small contributor) is as neatly drawn as that between the anti-vaxxers and those who wish to stop the pandemic: it is on a class basis, as no Walmart greeter will be able to, first of all, afford an EV, and secondly, afford to charge it at the high, and escalating, cost of electricity. True, gas prices will go up also, but a mod can let you burn fryer oil to get you going in an emergency. No such luck with an EV: no hook-up, no gogo. And as the Finnish man who wrote "finish" to his Tesla when he discovered the 26 grand it was going to cost him to replace the battery-pack, the more income-challenged among us simply won't have the capacity to pay for a new battery long before they are finished paying the 6-7 year note on their spanking new 8,000 pound EV.

So as the ability of the fuel sector to deliver ever-increasing quantities of combustibles to users is quite stunning, a remarkable feat in and of itself, the amounts needed, instead of increasing to accommodate a larger number of people, are instead, delivering those energy resources in ever larger amounts to those who already would have had plentiful supplies did they not continue to increase the amount of combustion necessary to go the same distance as a generation ago, or get through the day a mere decade ago. So, although I don't wish to join the chorus of doomsayers, it does seem that we are yet again heading into a major dislocation of our entire way of life while our leaders, or, while we allow our leaders, to act exactly as they did before the financial crisis, keeping their heads in the sand so they can truthfully claim, "Nobody could have seen it coming," the crisis that will make 2008 look like a bumpy ride, continues to scream toward us from the fractured landscape as we speed past, seeing only a blur from our Four Ton flying car pets.

December 2021:    416.71 ppm

December 2020:    414.26 ppm