Although not the UN Secretary General at the time, Guterres' words are more appropriately positioned at the start of the eighties, with an attitude toward energy transition reflected by the solar panels already ensconced on the White House roof, a future for the species of the earth was still possible. A full two generations later, following a fossil fuel incineration on a geologic scale, surpassing the CO2 output every year of what was at the time, a spike caused by the insane amount of ordnance dropped and fuel put to the torch by the Warring Nations in WW2, this is no longer the case. Senor Guterres is whistling past the graveyard at this point.
Along with the rest of the world. As mankind, using the empty goal of self-determination to justify ratcheting up the pace of our headlong flight to self-extermination, fiddles while homes burn.
No one knows this more than the Ukrainians, who are being, or have been, used most shamelessly by the Petro Powers, who are both using "self-determination" as a pretext for their dual partnership in the destruction of yet another sovereign State. And for the same reason that the Bush/Reagan junta took those solar panels off the White house roof: to ensure the continuation of the fossil fuel regime until the last lump of coal is incinerated and the last sheet of thin-film plastic is melting in the rays of UV lightwaves that will reach the earth' surface, by then shorn of its ozone layer of protection.
It didn't have to end this way, of course, but when Bush, then head of the CIA decided that he was fit material to be President of the US, he knew, by virtue of his position at the Spook factory, that the US militarized capitalistic economy was on the path to destroying the world, he asked his cohorts in the Reagan administration, Rumsfeld and Cheney, if they thought the Presidency was worth the deaths of millions and the ultimate destruction of earth's ability to sustain complex life, they responded, much the same as Madeleine Albright did to the question of the whether the death of half a billion Iraqi children was worth it ... "Definitely!"
Thus was the turn onto the warpath, which the USA has blundered down ever since, taken.
The Putin parallel with the Bush regimes is unheralded, but unmistakable.
In both cases the "humiliation" of their defeat in the previous decade must be first used to obtain power, and then, once that power is obtained, the defeat glossed over or simply denied.
Then, the centralization of power, effected by Reagan/Bush by the deployment of the nascent internet developed under the auspices of the CIA by the DOD in the form of Darpanet, granting "Champion " status to the "right people" ("Corporations are people too, my friend" a quote from another RNC PE champion, Mitt Romney, following Bush's example (Carlyle Group) of using his position as chairman of a private equity firm (Bain Capital, the homophonic irony of such a name escaping them) to destroy companies and enrich himself and his cohorts).
Both Putin and Bush leveraged their position as head of their respective country's goon Squad, using it to further their own political ambitions. Just as Putin used Medvedev as a placeholder, Bush used Reagan. Unable to garnered the public support that a movie star could in the celebrity-addled US, Bush adopted the Voodoo economics of Reaganism to usurp power, setting the stage for Cheney, who would run his son's Presidency in much the same way Bush ran Reagan's. Bush by funneling vast sums of borrowed money, gleaned form the ultra-rich by offerings of 15-20% interest rates on what were basically risk-free investments in 30-year Treasury bills, the US VP destroyed the credit unions, while pouring money into the military to develop technology that he could turn over to his cohorts on the board of Carlyle to grift the fruits of taxpayer-funded research into the development of technology for civilian deployment, all empowered by the banks; he tore apart the phone companies, and put into place a financial scheme built on the back of the alliance of oil, the military, religious fund-a-mentalism and banking fraud.
Putin merely used the same template to create his Russian "Champions", whose success has made him even richer than the Criminal Bush family, boasting a net worth of at least $71 billion.
But the crown on this enterprise, the cherry on their sundae, was, and is, of course, hydraulic fracturing on a continental scale. A crime against humanity for which neither Bushes nor Putin will ever be held accountable. A crime against Mother Earth ... which , I'm pretty sure includes Mother Russia ... on a scale never before even contemplated, never mind being perpetrated right in front of the entire globe with never a murmur of dissent that's ever made the slightest difference (Sorry Greta).
The last crime of such dimensions, enacted on a global scale with the full cooperation and backing of a centralized government, was John Law's Mississippi scheme, described as “delirium,” sheer “madness,” "a veritable carnival of money and speculation". IE, the current US economy. Ever since the Reagan/Bush de-industrialization and S & L fiascos that gutted the backbone of the economy and transformed it into the interwoven skein of deceit, rehypothecation, and other crimes encouraged by the widespread epidemic of financial delirium and money madness their "Decade of Greed" ushered in, the game has been afoot to impose Full Spectrum Domination via military production on a gargantuan scale, using religious End-of Days sermons to justify the fiery conclusion endemic to the scheme of excavating and incinerating every vestige of fossil fuel the state-sponsored, but privately owned, fossil fueled companies could produce, all while holding the free press in the palm of their hand, whose news mantra has been reversed from using their podium to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed to their new mission to unabashedly comfort the comfortable and utterly destroy the disturbed.
Ukraine is simply the international expression of that philosophy: the latest disturbed country to be lined up for evisceration.
So while the world was applauding Bush père as he invaded Kuwait, the real story never made it to the front pages of the war-mongering press, whose concern for the heads of Iraqi children the US government would be soon-enough dropping ordnance onto was non-existent (the same press that is oh-so concerned over Russia's war crimes ... can you say "Fallujah"?), the plans of Bush and his cohorts, to regain US supremacy by using US-taxpayer-developed technology to extract the last dregs of the US oil supply by deploying more drilling rigs across the landscape of North America in a mere generation than had been used in the entire 150 years since the first rigs were drilled in Titusville, proceeded.
But unlike John Law, whose Mississippi Scheme depended on slave labor to produce tobacco in a part of the US where it had never been grown before, resulting in the failure of his monetary madness, the extent of the bonanza the Bushes used to back their schemes actually existed. And the benefits to the population of US citizens of low-priced energy products with which to fuel their FUN!, was so assured that today we see ATV's (well, even cars, for that matter, when one considers that SUV stand for "Sports" Utility Vehicle, despite its neither being used for sports, nor even closely resembling anything that could be considered "utilitarian") flying off the sales rooms floors, their sole raison d'être being to enable bored, spoiled adult children to romp mindlessly over pristine unpaved surfaces, crushing the life out of the rest of the environment, because apparently the paving over of millions of miles of the earth with a toxic black goop that kills everything it covers, not being quite enough to supply them with the necessary room to express their self-determination to rock and roll with their mechanical monsters over anything that moves.
Just as John Law used the introduction of paper currency, which, with the use of stock as collateral, created what Law called “a new type of money", the Reagan/Bush financialization used "moneyness" or leverage, as though it were a new phenomenon, even though its denouement in disaster was well-known. But in the politics of the US, such matters are of little concern, as those who devise such schemes know that they will be long gone from power, and the US citizens are far too financially illiterate, and power-hungry, to ever hold them accountable. The likes of George Bush can paint pictures in the comfort of their expensive homes without the least trepidation that they will ever be held accountable for their monstrous crimes.
Thus have we arrived at our current state of affairs wherein the war criminals Bush and Cheney are comfortably ensconced in their respective homes, their families assured a place in the firmament of the elites, and the planet getting seared like a white-ass dear fallen asleep under a sun lamp, or a burger abandoned to the coals at an Aussie barbie, while everyone wrings their hands despairing that, "Nobody could have seen it coming":
Oregon's state climatologist, the larry O'Neill, told Gardner, a journalist for the New Yorker, that, "What happened in June (an off-the-chart heatwave that killed hundreds from heat-related illnesses) was startling" (Seriously?! Poor fool. It was baked into the yellowcake all along for those who cared to notice what ingredients were being piled into it).
O'Neill continues, "We weren't expecting to see events on this scale for another 20-30 years".
Well, why not? What has happened over the last 20-30 years that wasn't in those calculations?
Not the amount of carbon ... that's actually far less than what was, as recently as 2005, estimated to be in the atmosphere, as the amount of oil the world would be burning in 2020, per the published estimates of the World Economic Forum, was projected to be 120 million bbl/day. It is instead not even burning 100 million bbl/day. 20 million bbl's/day of oil that are not being burned, two years after 2020.
Which means they are not burning the fossil fuels to transport, refine, and bring to market that additional 20 million bbl/day, and yet the damage escalates every year as the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere continues its inexorable climb:
https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2:
Apr. 24, 2022 420.51 ppm
Apr. 24, 2021 418.41 ppm
... with yet another month or so to go before it starts its annual decline (But not below 415 ppm).
So it is very apparent, made apparent by Russia's War on Ukraine as much as the pandemic made the real status of "essential workers" apparent, that, since the world economy can't function in its current configuration without Russian oil, that, the amount of oil Russia supplies to the world market being essentially the same amount as the US supplies, and that both of them are obtained by hydraulic fracturing, (a technology, btw, illegally transferred to the Russian oil companies by Exxon, whose CEO our last President made Secretary of State, just to rub our collective noses in the shite that goes on behind closed doors), the cessation of hydraulic fracturing would mean the cessation of the global economy as we know it.
Hence do we get the feigned incomprehension of the scientific community as to the genesis of the "pay it forward" climate change scenarios being played out right in front of our eyes:
While the number of oil rigs continues to climb across the US, the States with the largest increase of drill points in the USA, are all, every single one of them, ablaze:
Colorado
Utah
New Mexico
Texas
Arizona
Nebraska
Oklahoma
California
Alaska
All ablaze; all leaking unparalleled amounts of methane from wells badly capped, or abandoned, and flaring enough natural gas to power the domestic consumption of entire States: Texas alone flaring enough to power its own outsized consumption, on top of which, they leak methane to a larger degree than any other state, their "regulatory" mechanism being in the pockets of the industry they supposedly monitor. Enron as an entity went under, but the pride in its own criminality it projected is alive and well in the fossil fueled businesses and government of the Stone Tar State.
Meanwhile, Russia flares more natural gas than any other country on the globe, and leaks methane to an equally egregious degree while the same scientists that claim,
"We weren't expecting events on this scale for another 20-30 years",
also claim that "If we stop increasing the amount of methane in the troposphere, it will keep the earth's temperature close to a degree cooler in the next decade."
The obvious corollary being that HAD we not started fracturing the earths crust to an extent unappreciated by the vast majority of mankind, the temperature would right now be cooler by that one degree, and consequently, we wouldn't be seeing the events we are seeing now for another 20-30 years.
But because we can't run the economy, as illustrated by the effects of even the threat of the cessation of Russian supply, without hydraulic fracturing and the concomitant release of the unprecedented amounts of methane it engenders, no one will ever point out that correlation.
What we are being made privy to, yet are in total denial about, is the fact that the middle class must shrink dramatically, even as governments around the globe pretend to be enacting policies to expand the middle class. But the middle class would not exist even now, if it had to pay the true price for the fuels they are combusting in order to try and attain the Good Life of ease and unaccountability they have fostered as the be-all and end-all of modern life.
Rather than focus our collective imaginations and intelligence on using less power, we have done the exact opposite, requiring more and more energy to carry out the simplest of tasks, funneling ever-larger loads of cash to the military and the billionaires the military-produced technology spawns, while goosing their fortunes by John Law-style funny-money creation and asset appreciation via the Fed-enabled clamp on interest rates to keep the unaffordable seem affordable to the suckers buying poorly constructed domiciles with poorly understood financing in soon-to-be climate-ravaged locations. TBTF Banks such as Chase sell those loans and then shifts all the risk to the public for loans they know will never be repaid to federal agencies such as Fannie Mae that they sold them to, and then those selfsame banks rake in billions more in zero-interest federal dollars for Covid relief, and then turn around and charge their customers 17% for borrowing that same cash.
As India swelters under cruel heat waves that occur earlier in the season with each passing year, and South Africa loses more than 400 lives to flooding on one part of the country while Durban, its capital city, claims it has less than 22 days of water supply left, and Australia is flooded, its corals bleached yet again, and manatees die off in Florida, while Caribbean corals are infected with a killing fungus, and fires rage not only in the states listed above, but in Russia's Siberia and Yamal regions, Argentina, Chile, India, Portugal, Greece, Italy, even as snow blankets the northern tier of the US as the polar vortex continues to weaken, unleashing its brutal cold to the lower latitudes, while the Jet stream sways and meanders as lazily as a conga line, world scientists will continue scratching their heads in feigned puzzlement because that's the price they must pay if they wish to keep their jobs.
We need to continue to fracture oil rock to obtain rock oil, (the name it was called pre-Titusville ... whale oil predominated prior to that). The fact that it accelerates climate change by decades is rather inconvenient, it's true; but the only time anyone mentions climate change, they are holding their hand out, but not to solve the problem, but to exploit it; to have their palm greased by government pork barrel incentives, not to remove a single molecule of CO2 from the atmosphere; so in the atmosphere is where it will remain. We all know this, because we all know that the price we pay for fossil fuel is subsidized so egregiously that, sans government largesse toward the very entities that could care less (are not even allowed to care less, as profit and market domination are their only goals) about the damage they inflict, means that expecting the amount of harm caused by a climate stoked by ever-increasing amounts of additional heat to decrease, is akin to expecting a pandemic caused by a constantly mutating virus to disappear simply because we wish it so. So just as providing the virus with an ever-larger pool of infected people for it to gestate and mutate in makes its continuation and spread inevitable, the similar desire to continue to use more energy every year than the year before, means what energy generation in a closed system always means: more waste heat is created, and that waste heat is added to the additional heat resulting from mankind's geoengineering of the atmosphere to one that's now overloaded with not only CO2 and methane, but nitrous oxide, and other heat-trapping VOC's as well. ,
Which means that we are, blinded by our own vanity, causing the suffering and death of billions of sentient creatures who have done nothing to us, have done nothing to deserve the fate we have prepared for them. It's not just the cute Koalas, burnt to a cinder in the branches of Australia's eucalyptus trees, but wild horses dying of thirst in dried out river beds, cattle starving in plains that no longer can produce the grains they once fed on; whales, manatees, otters, starfish, corals, bird species by the dozens, bees and other pollinators, you can add to the list what you wish, but the length will increase with each passing year while American, German, French, Italian, manufacturing corponations continue to produce their ATV's, their firearms, their munitions by the hundreds of tons, nuclear missiles to be buried in the desert, where nothing else can live; producing fashions to induce customers to discard perfectly good clothing for the empty reward of being in "style", etc, etc. There is no indication on any level whatsoever that anyone on this dying planet has a care in the world about the effect their self-determination is having on anyone, nor anything, else.
PBS recently aired
Dirty Dancing. No one was killed; not a single firearm appeared in the film. Such a movie, despite its low cost, could never be made today. If nobody is being threatened or murdered, there is nothing to keep our attention. Say what we will, mankind, not you, mind you, and certainly not moi, but mankind, looked at dispassionately, deserves exactly what it has uncaringly inflicted on the rest of the living world, you know, the one on which we are entirely dependent upon for our very existence. EARTH. Perhaps, thanks to the indigenous peoples we care so little about, we will survive the mass extinction event we ourselves have created, but
there is no joy in Mudville in that thought, as there is no reason to believe the cycle will simply not start over again and create another round of despair and death for anything that moves simply so that mankind can engage in its endless pursuit of Happiness. Or what Erasmus more cogently called, In Praise of Folly.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment