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