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CO2 levels:
Jan. 17, 2022 = 417.8;
Jan. 17, 2021 = 414.7 ppm
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)
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