The Omicron Olympics.

 While the hand-wringing over the disastrous consequences visited upon the entire globe by the unacknowledged goosing of Climate Change that has resulted from the hyper-pace of hydraulic fracturing of the earth's crust on a continental scale in both the US and Russia continues (with nary a comment on the obvious connection between the two), the connection between a zero-Covid infection rate in Pre-Olympics China, and the dramatic reversal in Post-Olympics China, is also being studiously ignored.

Holding a major international event at the height of the latest, and most virulent, iteration of the virus responsible for a worldwide pandemic surely can't have anything to do with its sudden appearance and spread in a country that's had no sign of it for two and half years, even while the rest of the globe suffered millions of deaths resulting from their citizens' contracting it, now can it? But just as the Trump campaign in 2020 was a super-spreader event that ravaged the country, yet resulted in nary a word from our oh-so-watchful media, neither is the state-controlled press in the communist regime of one-party rule in China making that oh-so-obvious connection lest the arrests begin and the tanks get rolled out to flatten the regime's critics into Chinese pancakes.

Similarly, as one country after the other loses its ability to provide its citizens with enough electricity to keep the lights on, the great USA plans to, somehow (there's no actual plan, that being what is called "Central Planning," and only private enterprises are allowed to plan for the future in a Democracy, not the government, since that would make it too "socialist"), "electrify" its transportation system ... without fossil fuel of course. Which is good, since , a fact we are being made privy to by the energy deprivation going on around the word by the curtailment of Russian supply, peak oil is in fact very real ... you can tell how real it is by the fact that the afore-mentioned amazing media, has assiduously avoided making any reference to it whatsoever, even as entire countries go dark from lack of fuel.

But thanks to Russia, and the West's feckless response to its unprovoked attack on its sovereign neighbor, we are being made privy to a foreshadowing of things to come. 

The bonanza of energy products released by hydraulic fracturing are, in the most optimistic of scenarios, not going to outlast the decade. Light Tight oil is so different than conventional crude, it can't even be processed by US refineries, which must import the thick tar sands goop from Canada, despite the ongoing environmental disaster, high costs, and civil protests involved, to keep its refineries running. Now why, if tight oil is to be the fuel powering us into the future, would those US refineries not be re-tooled to process its own output? Well ... Because the costs would never be recouped in time: there simply isn't enough product to justify the outlay. 

Both the lockdowns in China and the oil renaissance in the USA were surprisingly successful. But in both cases, because of the depth of ignorance of the public in both countries, each of which have spent more in the past generation to educate their citizens than the GDP of the majority of the world's countries, the steps necessary to leverage the breathing room afforded by their good fortune have not been taken, and a fortuitous opportunity has been thereby squandered.

The whole purpose of lockdowns is to  keep your population safe until you can get them vaccinated.

Then, when it come roaring back, as it alwaysdoes, there is a level of immunity in the population that didn't exist prior to vaccination, allowing for a less draconian response when the next wave crashes ashore. But that's not what China did. Half of the most vulnerable population of elderly Chinese have yet, a good two and a half years into a major worldwide pandemic that started in its own Communist Republic, China has yet to be vaccinated against the microbe for which their own country was responsible:  not only for its genesis, but its spread to the rest of the world ... again. (It's called SARS TWO for a reason).

Similarly, in the USA, the flood of energy products released by an energy-intensive, hyper-polluting procedure dubbed "fracking," is being squandered to power over-sized, military-style vehicles marketed to the deluded public so that the large profit margins thus obtained can goose the dividend checks of the insider traders known as shareholders, but who are in reality slave drivers (remember, the Supreme Court itself decided corporations were people. Yet these "people" are illegally bought and sold on the criminal NYSE on a daily basis, in total disregard of the US Constitution that has outlawed exactly that. Stock market indeed: human beings are considered so much animal stock. Like Gogol's Dead Souls, human beings are bought and sold along with the enterprises they're part of).  

One could liken the stripping of the last energy products from under the earth and the marketing of them to the lowest bidders around the globe to the current administration's draining of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, because that's what the dregs of our nation's oil bounty amounts to. Blessed with such an abundance of petroleum that its Seven Sisters were once able to set the price of oil worldwide, even going so far as to use it as a tool to bring down the Soviet Union, the US has squandered its El Dorado. A fact that is a secret to none of its competitors, but one that its own uneducated citizenry is in complete ignorance of. Which ignorance is essential to the Russians, as they are now in the process of doing what they did with Afghanistan: turning the tables, and using the exact same ruse to collapse the US empire that the US was so spectacularly successful at using on them. For it was the double whammy of the draining of resources to fight their own War in Afghanistan, and the US-contrived collapse of oil prices (their only source of foreign exchange, since the Soviets made nothing anyone actually wanted to buy) that resulted in the loss of the Soviet's empire, and, now, using its energy reserves to blackmail the EU into compliance. 

Which would be a problem if just one person would have the temerity to point out that that's what Russia's doing. But they don't so they won't, so what is obvious to the rest of the world is invisible to the US, which has become so deluded by the glitter of its own obscene stockpile of fiat currency, that it can't recognize the same dynamics are now at play as when it hoarded the world's gold reserves between the last centuries' two Whirled Wars.   

As the number of rigs drilling into the earth to extract its riches have doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled, from their lows after the price of their output plummeted to negative $35/bbl in March/April 2020, the barely rising output resulting from this prodigious effort are, for the most part, being exported:  US distillates exports are at a 45 month high, leaving domestic distillates supplies at an 8 year low (and prices at a 15 year high); natural gas drilling is at a 30 month high, yet supplies are at a 3 year low, 24% below what they were a year ago; and, less than 6 months after all the folderol of the COPout 26 imbroglio, every single one of the IEA countries have joined the US in an unprecedented release of "emergency" fossil fuel oil reserves. All the while silently thanking Russia under their breath for providing them the necessary cover.

What this demonstrates for us is that when one leg of the production trio of the world's Petro States of the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia is even partially constrained, the entire edifice of worldwide petroleum production and distribution is left teetering. More than 25 years after the Kyoto protocols were announced, entire countries are unable to provide juice to their citizens on a reliable basis, demonstrating that despite more than a generation of "effort", humanity is no closer to being able to function without enormous amounts of fossil-fueled energy inputs into their not-so-modern economies than they were before taking such "drastic" actions as making useless climate pledges.

That you can't even partially embargo Russian production without wreaking chaos across the planet points out the fact that when the US fracking booms inevitably goes bust, as it is in the process of doing, the world, despite the knowledge that the fracturing of the US would provide at most, a temporary buffer from the exigencies of peak oil, is in no better, if not far worse, shape to weather an energy crisis, than before wide scale fracturing of the continent ever began. Like China with its zero Covid policy, the US with its zero energy conservation policies (a grand understatement of the problem, as the US  has made itself increasingly reliant of what it knows to be a transient energy spike), has left itself wide open to be overwhelmed by its own excessive combustion of a fuel we know is not only killing us, but changing the planet so profoundly that one country after the other is seeing its crops either destroyed in floods, frozen by cold blasts, desiccated like autumn leaves in historic droughts, or swarmed by voracious insects and population explosions of rodents. 

Yet the overriding concern of the majority of American citizens is to get back to an ugly American maskless "normal". Meaning no masks, as the economy can't function otherwise (apparently), bigger and heavier vehicles, larger and impossibly expensive homes, built exactly where they are in the most danger from the exigencies of Climate Change, jet flights around the country and the world to attend their grandchildren's graduation from Kindergarden(!), and an increasingly "effortless" existence provided by electronic fossil-fueled slaves.

So while the policies of the Chinese government periodically releases one microbe after the other to ravage the globe, the US energy regime, powered by an increasingly expensive fuel, the obtaining of which is poisoning the atmosphere, resulting in an exponentially destructive heating, the Russian War on Ukraine is but a blip. Like the Iraq War, and the Syrian War and the War on Libya, or Yemen, it will end. But the human race's War on the World will go on until it has destroyed the planet's ability to sustain life; and it will intensify, with Russia in the vanguard, as its Ice Capades exploits the last of the world's fossil reserves in the Arctic, utterly destroying not only their own vast taiga, but the globe's capacity for weather stability and hence, mankind's ability to continue its mad experiment with monoculture: soil-destroying, pesticide and fossil-fuel-derived fertilizer-dependent, deadzone-creating, agriculture.

Laura DaLand:
If you want to live like the folks on the hill,
 You first have to learn how to smile while you Kill.

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Thus will the original "Green" Revolution be brought to its knees by the calamitous, energy-intensive, fossil-fueled, "Green" New Deal, same as the old Deal, dealt from the bottom of a fixed deck by a gang of three-card MonteBanks, suicidally monikored as "People" by the Law of the Land, giving the economic system priority over actual living persons. And seeing how watching Covid kill millions precisely because the economic system is purposely structured to serve but a handful of Corporate entities, did nothing so much as stoke the literally insane notion that "The American Way of Life is Non-Negotiable," there is nothing to prevent humanity from being destroyed by the very products of its own making. The best we can hope for now is that the life forms that evolve to replace the human species aren't so blinded by their own vanity that they can't see that the remaking of the entire globe for their own self-serving interests, regardless of the dire impacts on every other living organism we share this blue dot with, won't find the idea of sharing the world "Non-Negotiable."