CryptoCapitalism's Global War on Terra.

Screaming Trees.

 CO2 on May 16, 2022:  421.72 ppm

In an article on CO2 removal from the atmosphere, posted on Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism site, one of the commenters posted that, "We are in trouble… "

 Seriously!? WE!? WE caused the trouble, yes. But it is life as we know it on this planet, of which we are the most disruptive form, that is in trouble. Deep trouble. And it is in trouble specifically because of ongoing human activity which, despite all the grand designs envisioned by the pseudo-science of carbon removal, carbon sequestration, energy transition, zero emission folderol, etc. etc., have, as a species, formulated not a single  plan to actually decrease the combustion of carbon-spewing technologies, nor our dependence on the energy such incineration produces.

And all for one glaring reason: We insist on increasing the minimum amount of energy we need to get through each and every day. Day by day, year after year, one decade after the other, while we continuously bemoan the fact that , "We are in trouble… ", we just as continuously increase the energy needs of the human population while increasing the destruction such energy usage inflicts on our fellow creatures and the climate they have adapted to thrive in: fracturing is by far the most destructive widespread industrial activity in mankind's entire history.

Since we have of late decided that China and Russia are our greatest enemies, and since I can honestly say that in my entire lifetime, that has never actually changed (The Pentagon was making their battle plans for Full Spectrum Domination, which had China's growing militarism as its #1 priority (per Time),  at the very same time that US corporations were transferring US DOD-funded technologies hand-over-fist to both Russian and Chinese businesses ... which in autocratic states, means to the Russian and Chinese governments), it is fairly easy to see the attitude of the Corponationals vis-à-vis the specter of Climate Change: How can we make profits from it?

What I am trying to illustrate by that fact is that just as the DOD, specifically because of the economic system it operates under that pours trillions of dollars into it on a non-contingency basis, such that the fact that it has made living far more perilous for all of mankind, which, I'm pretty sure includes Americans, has absolutely no impact on the amount of capital that is extorted from the public and poured into the coffers of our Wehrmacht Republic's Luftwaffe and other offensive weapons systems, the trillions of dollars going into the construction of the zero carbon economy is having a parallel dynamic on the Global Warming front: the more we pour into creating our Frankenstein economy, stitched together with legacy parts from the industrial economy it totally relies on to not only spread its propaganda, but to power the ersatz transformation, the more energy-intensive, and therefore, carbon-intensive it becomes, and the faster the CO2 content of the troposphere, and therefore the earth's temperature, increases.

 In an article published in Undark magazine, they describe the steps necessary to produce "Green" Steel, idiotic as that concept is:

By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, Boston Metal claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions  (since steelmaking accounts for 7 to 11 percent of global GHG emissions,  it's one of the largest industrial sources of atmospheric pollution). 

The latter part of that sentence is completely erroneous, as it doesn't even mean what it says; what it really means is that Boston Metal is one of the world’s most prolific producers of greenhouse gas emissions (They are in an industry that, per the statement above, is "one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions", ergo, Boston Metals, as they are NOT currently using the method of steel production described, are ipso facto, one of the world’s worst companies for greenhouse gas emissions).  And that is what the process described would change. 

 Boston Metals would do exactly what any other corponation does when faced with business practices that reflect them in a bad light to the public: they outsource it. 

And that is all the elaborately detailed process describing how "Green" steel is made, outlines. Instead of coke, the process uses electricity, expensively produced off-site without Boston Metals involvement, to do all their hi-energy, GHG-producing steps before the BM gets involved.  

“It’s certainly not an easy fix to decarbonize an industry like this", ... in fact, it's not a fix at all. Following the success of off-shoring: moving the heavy pollution off-company, at great expense to the public (not to shareholders, to the public, the modus operandi of CryptoCapitalism), they simply move the onus of CO2 to the utilities that then have to install a massive expansion in "renewable energy infrastructure" (remember that includes biomass, which is anything but renewable, as it burns through forests faster than a California wildfire) that an industry-wide shift to these new methods would entail.

But as we saw in Texas, it is the ratepayers of electricity that are billed for the improvements to the grid, not the stock holders of Boston Metal, whose dividend check will go up to reward them for the risk they have foisted onto the publicm (another feature of CryptoCapitalism no one cares to mention).

Each of the steps described in the Undark article requires more energy than the fossil-fueled method, but because that increase in energy use will be generated off-site by utilities, the fact that it uses substantially more energy, that it produces more CO2, is no longer their black eye, but the utility's:

"The world would need up to three times the currently installed solar and wind energy sources just to electrify the existing primary steel production." 

 “What we are doing is basically swapping (OUR) carbon ) Footprint) and putting it on the backs of electricity-generating utilities." (CryptoCapitalism). 

And that's why despite decades of COPout meetings and corponational pledges, the CO2 burden the atmosphere is asked to take on is continually increasing, because neither governments nor corponationals have any incentive to decrease those emissions; their only incentive is to decrease their own emission, and the only way they have thus far found to do so is to offshore them, making it look as though they are reducing their carbon footprint when in fact they are INcreasing the overall carbon footprint ... by design ... as it burns fossil fuels to make the necessary changes:

Just ask Boston Metal:

"Switching to electricity or hydrogen would require vast amounts of capital spending to erect new plants and retrofit old ones." Vast amounts of capital comes from vast amounts of profits, which comes from burning vast amounts of fossil fuels since the industry that needs to generate that capital is "one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions."

 Now you might argue that that 's fine, but one industry after the other is doing this, and that's all they're doing They're not decreasing carbon pollution at all, and certainly not the never-talked-about waste heat the entire process generates (waste heat that can no more escape through the blanket of CO2 blocking its escape than the sun's UV radiation can ... so INcreases global warming ... but that doesn't matter. Just like California bragging about its green credentials, even as it imports electricity from thousands of miles away, but the Earth doesn't CARE:

Every ton that is made, every auto manufactured, every spark plug fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from wildlife that's hungry but can find no food, that's cold and homeless from having their habitat demolished.

This world, awash in ICE machines and weighted down in armamentaria so vast and integral to the manufacturing profits of industry that War must be CONSTANTLY WAGED, is not wasting money alone:

It is spending the sweat of its laborers to enrich the already obscenely wealthy, squandering the genius of its scientists to develop quants and apps to further funnel the nation's output in to the hands of despotic billionaires, and all the while, it is crushing the hopes of its children for a life not ruled by increasingly destructive weather.

The price paid for our modern life (in which riding in a vehicle that is already doing everything for us except piloting itself to our desired destination, has suddenly become too onerous for our poor, over-burdened selves, such that we are spending hundreds of billions in  "research" to enable an automobile, that is already being highly subsidized by the government, to pilot us around like so much cargo), is humanity turning every thriving wilderness area in the world into a lifeless wasteland.

Hence is it made clear the real reason the two war criminals, The United Petrol States and the Russian Conflagration, are environmental criminals who are using Ukraine in the same way the Bushes used Iraq:

To distract the world from the dire straits it has steered into. The economy, Ever Driven to giantism and centralization to cut costs, and thereby dominate every competitor to the point of extinction, has morphed into the CrytpoCapitalism model of obfuscation and rehypothecation, even going so far as to create cryptoCurrency exchanges to facilitate the hiding of the breathtaking scale of piracy, piracy without which the globaloney economy collapses. Like Queen Elizabeth (the first one ... you know, the one the Pope hired an assassin to do away with) turning a blind eye to English piracy on the  high Seas, because its unlawful activity filled the coffers of the Royal Treasury, the modern state doesn't simply ignore financial defalcations, it actively abets them.

As a brown cloud of pollution, caused  by the nearby oil and gas operations, stretches along the Rocky Mountains, the increase in insolation, and the resulting desiccation such pollution engenders, fires rage in Colorado, in New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, the cause of which is never stated but is readily known. But unlike the Great London Smog that killed thousands and that marked one of Queen Elizabeth's (this time the QE2) first public catastrophes, as per Netflix' The Crown, and resulted in the cessation of burning coal for heat in London, the deaths, firestorms, derechos, hailstorms, earthquakes, amped-up  hurricanes, relentless heatwaves, and historically destructive floods, never get associated with the rapidity with the the North America continent has become populated with pumpjacks and fracking wells, bespeckled with cesspools of noxious chemicals, veiled, thanks to its unmitigated release, with methane and nitrous oxide, while flaring unprecedented amounts of natural gas, amid the ongoing rampant destruction of the prairies, by the installation of a pipleline network so extensive, that it makes Enron's look like a paragon of industrial planning.

Instead of cessation, only expansion is envisioned:

So, even though Colorado has been hit by wildfires and floods linked to global heating, while the decline in snowpack fuels drought and water shortages across the west, although it has some of the worst air quality in the country, with emissions from oil and gas operations accounting for as much as 40% of locally produced ozone along the Front Range where most of the state’s 52,000 active wells (three-quarters are fracking sites) are located, production is about to escalate. Specifically driven by War propaganda that delivers to Biden the capacity to increase oil production to an extent that his predecessor could only have dreamed about.

It seems that cutting off oil supply and super-charging price increases is unpopular. War or No. So the Global War On Terra, far from curtailing its arc of destruction in response to Pakistan's unprecedented 50 degreeC heatwave, or India's 114 degree 2 week-old blistering oven-like temperatures, or its own out-of-control wildfires, never mind Russia's more than 7000 wildfires, its production is about to escalate dramatically.

 In the first-ever expose of the fracking industry's crimes, the Guardian recently claimed that "140bn metric tons of planet-heating gases could be unleashed if fossil fuel extraction plans get green light". After more than a decade of fracturing the rock across the North American craton, I should think that it is simply the gilding on the lily:

"The fate of the vast quantities of oil and gas lodged under the shale, mud and sandstone of American drilling fields will in large part determine whether the world retains a liveable climate. And the US, the world’s largest extractor of oil, is poised to unleash these fossil fuels in spectacular volumes."

Please note, that the above was written as a future scenario; as though it hasn't already happened. Somehow more than a decade of drilling and extracting, in a largely unregulated environment, hasn't resulted in the destruction of the liveable climate once enjoyed by Texans, New Mexicans, Coloradas, Californians, well, you get it, the entire western USA, that has been turned into firezone and pincushioned with fracturing machines pulverizing the plains year after year, yet nary a word has been published to protest the liability that this puts on American citizens. But as the words of the former President ring in our ears, as he blames China for the Virus that originated in, well, China, threatening the Sheeple's Republic with lawsuits to extract damages from the Chinese State for the havoc it wreaked on economies worldwide, not one reporter wondered out loud about the liability that releasing mega-tons of climate-changing gasses would impose on the US for deliberately loosing onto the world, (with a Texan cynically calling them "Freedom Molecules"), the billions of tons of gases it has already negligently allowed to either seep into the atmosphere, or that it has flared directly into the troposphere, solely to increase their own profits, as it would cost more money to bring the climate-changing gas to a customer than to simply burn it in situ.

The carbon bomb that fracturing represents is not, "poised to unleash fossil fuels in spectacular volumes."  It is already doing that; has been doing that for more than 15 years. It has been doing it in increasingly large increments ever since the first fracturing wells were installed in North Dakota's Bakken, following Halliburton's field test in the oilfields of Kuwait where, using horizontal drilling to steal oil from Iraq's fields, they did for America's pre-emptive strike what the Donbas did for Russia's: gave the US an excuse to shutdown Iraqi production and use the high oil prices such a shutdown would engender to build the enormously expensive and energy-intensive infrastructure across the vast plains of the US to create its last oil Boom. 

Ukraine is, by the purest of coincidences, doing the same for the two Petrol States, giving them both cover to continue to ignite what Faith Birol refers to as Carbon Bombs, across the planet, while enabling them to take the most effective step possible to curtail continued use of carbon-intensive energy: dramatically raising its price so that only the "Right People", as Bush père defined them, are able to afford them, while simultaneously, via sanctions, creating a 2-tier oil market, whereby India, buying Russian oil that is embargoed, pays half the price for a "fungible" product that the Europeans pay a premium for.

As Globalization's War on Terra intensifies, the amount of energy use keeps escalating, while those using the lion' share of that energy keeps dwindling. Thus, while India's billion swelters in 114 degree heat, a mere 29 million Texans, in heat north of 100 degrees, bring one electric plant after the other to its knees to cool their McMansions to a chilly 66degrees (True ... I've been there, in January, in Houston, where I was happy to be able to go out in just a t-shirt, only to make the mistake of going into a mall, shivering through the entire complex in the icebox temperature. So even in the middle of winter, when energy use in Texas should be less, it is goosed to allow obscenely obese white Texans to sport sweaters and their REI-branded outerwear  INdoors ... replacement culture indeed). Meanwhile, by the insistence that climate change is a hoax by hordes of replacement culture warriors, in the very country that is releasing more GHG's than any other country on earth, humanity's unparalleled industrial output has been severed from the increasingly chaotic state of the weather. And not only by The Blob's Trumpettes, but by that so-called conscience of a Liberal, Paula Krugman, who, despite all evidence to the contrary, has declared, while providing no data whatsoever to back his moronic claim, that economic growth is unrelated to fossil fuel usage. Meanwhile, as herds are culled, the production of food worldwide is kneecapped by floods and drought on every continent, bird flu results in the destruction of tens of millions of birds in the US alone; while bee colonies collapse, an insect apocalypse goes uncommented on, and the largest source of "green" energy, hydropower in the western US, (as well as India and other countries), turns into so many stranded assets,  the carbon investment in those projects goes unrealized thanks to droughts that never end.

Cryptocapitalism's War on Terra is a war against life itself... yet somehow, rational, science-minded individuals fail to recognize that human beings are living creatures, hence we have empowered non-entities we call "people" to write our laws, despoil our lands, poison our earth, air and water, and yet somehow believe that the war they wage is not against us. Why? Because it promises to make our lives "effortless". 

That remind me of what month it is, makes me think the May tricks (In The Matrix, their lives were so effortless, they weren't even awake) are being pulled on us while we somnambulantly go about the daily business of daily destruction because the cryptocorporate sphere pays us to. And the self-reverential dominant culture whines that they are being replaced? If only, like the theory itself, it were that simple.