The Year of Disquiet.

With ironic sadness, I watch a workers' demonstration, one whose leaders ooze mock sincerity (it always seems phony to me when sincerity is evinced by collective endeavors since it is only the individual, alone in their unique ego, that is capable of feeling. This makes any teeming and rowdy group come off as little more than a mob of animated idiots). Their antics are indulged in to break the outsiders' indifference since the rest of us, living our animal lives of varying complexity, cross the stage as walk-ons who play at existing without thinking about it, devoid, as we are, of any appreciation for the magic of mystery.

One of my own favorite mysteries I was reminded of today when I read that California was soon to become, if it hadn't already, the 4'th largest economy on the globe, supplanting Germany, and taking its place behind China, the USA and Japan.

The mystery had nothing to do with California, though, but with Japan. How does an economy that has been in what economists call a depression for the span of what is rapidly approaching two generations, still rank as the THIRD largest economy on the globe, whereas, Germany, which has been the growth champion of the EU for close to that same amount of time, drop down to the fifth because of one year of sub-par growth?

Meanwhile, one of those countries, the one rivalling the US for the size of its economy, China, was also counted as one of the BRIC's, along with Brazil, Russia, and India.

If we then pirouette to the current president reanimating the God-Offal Party's theme of "American Energy Independence", when that same America is draining its "Strategic" Petroleum Reserve to do nothing more than goose the sales of gas-powered SUV's while claiming he wants at least half of new vehicles to be EV's in the next dozen years or so, the disquiet felt at the prospect of a national disaster blossoms into an anxiety that can induce a panic attack in the more vulnerable in our society.

But we are not only draining the SPR, we are draining the Permian Basin as well ... simultaneously ... and exporting its content of irreplaceable energy resources to fuel growth in our much-maligned "enemy", that same China.

Although no one on Fox, and not a soul on MNBC will ever ask the question, why is it that the only one of the world's three Petro-States (that triumvirate of oil production that together produces more than a third of the world's oil supply), that must import as many barrels of oil to run its economy as it produces, so keen on keeping its rivals' oil in the ground while doing everything possible to extract and sell to competing economies the last of its own fossil fuels?

If we take a glimpse at the oil-producing states of Iraq and Iran, whose oil-producing capacity has been knee-capped by US foreign War policy, it becomes apparent that those countries' oil production has left them with far more oil in the ground than they would otherwise have had had the US  let them drain their own reserves instead of stealing market share so we could suck our own as dry as fast as ethanol from corn is drying the Oglala Aquifer.

What, you may wonder, is their endgame? 

While this question is never asked domestically, one can be sure that Russia and Saudi Arabia, with their battened down populations, kept docile by beheadings, religious indoctrination, and authoritarian rulers, are making calculations of their own as they watch America eat its own seed corn so that Billionaires can further tighten their grip on the political process, and removable assets. 

Neither the Russians nor the Arabs have any intention of sharing the prosperity that output of their oil fields produces, with any but a chosen clique, of their populations, needing it, as they do, to sell at high profits to economies that are in desperate need, of it, none more than those economies that had been built on their own surpluses, such as Egypt, Indochina, and Venezuela, none of which can now supply their own energy needs, and so have ensconced Strongman governments to keep "the right people" (as GHWBush referred to them) in clover.

Thus, they can wait.

 It is only a matter of time before the energy hog of the globe, the USA, squanders the last of its resources, while its billionaire class sells off to ROW the Republic's last fossil fuels (much the same as Britain sold off their oil legacy, leaving them the poorest nation in Europe, yet with the most expensive form of government. Not only must they support the Keptocracy of British peers and its Royal succubae, but also its Demockracy that keeps those persons in their positions of untouchable privilege).

Even Russian citizens know the  precarious position of the US, as one can glean from conversation with ex-pats fleeing the Putin purge of a generation of Russian males. Moscow is now reminiscent of post-WW1 France, whose manhood was sent for a similar drubbing on the Maginot Line as the one the untrained Russian forces are being subject to by the Kremlin's strategy of creating a Killing Field for their excess population. Like Tsar Nicholas, Putin knows full well that the one thing a religiously-addled people can always be relied on to do is produce more babies to be reared and steered in to the maw of the iron monster of modern Warfare. 

Like Kissinger's illegal "secret" bombing of Cambodia, the plundering of the US continent is only a secret to US. The Cambodians were certainly in on the secret, as the Russians and Arabs are onto the US billionaire classes plan of rapacity. There is no "Stop the Steal" of American fossil fuel supplies, as the squabbling populace is too busy fighting for their piece of the dwindling pie to notice that their legacy is being pulled right out from underneath them while one side screams Keep it in the Ground, even as they insist on their high-energy lifestyle, while the other kowtows to clerics who blandly reassure them that, "god will provide," while they tool around in their own over-sized luxury cars dispensing useless blessings to the masses.  

Perhaps as New York and New England start rationing heating oil before winter (The Daily Mail claims stockpiles have slumped by 70%) and fears rise that families will be left in the cold, the disquiet will spread. Perhaps people will begin to ponder the wisdom of using public monies to develop a technology that is then usurped to siphon off the last of a Nation 's energy supply so as to enrich a few billionaires, who insist they are having their Freedom impinged by being asked to pay their fair share of taxes ... taxes that paid for the selfsame technology without which they would NOT be billionaires.

But for that to happen we probably would need a press that actually paid journalists instead of  hacks. And that's just not going to happen.

 

Homeless in Seattle.

If You Prick me, Do I not Breed?

Like pensive cattle lying on a parched, dry California heap of brown, sun-dried earth, they turn their eyes towards the hard-hearted passersby; they watch their feet as they hold out a hand of despair, fighting off the sweet languor of desperation amid their bitter shivering. There are some who call out for your help while wracked with howling fevers, with naught but that ancient duller of physical pain, distilled brews that bruise them even further.

The churches, those Reagan-era bastions that declared anti-poverty programs should be destroyed so that they could do their rightful job of providing succor to the needy, are but tax-free havens that ply the late-night airwaves with calls for cash for which they promise that the god of consumption will reward worshipers of the Almighty, as in dollar, with a New Car! A Cache of Cash! While they bolt their doors against the wretched lest they scare off their well-heeled worshipers, never mind that all they worship is Baal, the god of gold, the Avatar of Greed.

Devils and monsters, they consider themselves great souls destined to rank among the chosen in their imagined hereafter, and thus are they contemptuous of reality; seekers of the infinite, they step gingerly over the filthy heap of rags; hold their noses against the rank odor of Capitalism's detritus, encased, as they are, in their carapace of moral righteousness. The idea that the god they pretend to worship would gladly don his crown of thorns yet again to show them the real nature of worship, and the place that compassion deserves in those who claim belief in his message, has never cracked the shell they have carefully built around their hearts. 

Meanwhile to the vaults of fathomless sadness, to which a nation besotted with Disneyland as though it weren't but a land of make-believe even 12-year-olds sneer at, is condemned, those whose destiny has already banished faith, crushed hope, and destroyed love are strewn across the dirty pavement as crushed underfoot as the cigarette butts their homeless encampments are stewn with. There there is no pink; no gay day replete with prismed light ever enters; there, alone with chill-bane-inducing Night that makes for a gloomy landlady, they huddle together on concrete as cold as Bill Gates' heart at night, while heating to rival Hell's kitchen during the day. Theirs is a bleak universe with leaden horizons in whose darkness floats horrors while blasphemies they refer to as "prayer" hover in the air as they issue from the mouths of the faithful as if to demonstrate the mockery their sham religiosity has become.

We now have, it is true, we corrupt nations, marvels unknown to the ancient world; but to counter them, we have created horrors unknown to them as well. Surrounded as we are by the failure of the Market as the Sole SuperPower, the only Force against to measure success, or to use to decide what we, as a nation, an individual, a world, pursues, continue to ignore how short it falls from its original promise of grandeur as we gingerly step over the ragged nakedness of a man whose eyes we avoid, filled as they are with a chilling darkness that envelops his soul as he lies in a squalid pile of filth whose reek nauseates us. While their women, whose twisted bodies, undernourished and skinny, pot-bellied or flabby, are pale as church candles, fed and gnawed away by debauchery, drag along the inheritance of their sex's vice: the low-hanging vestiges of fecundity.

Evening skies are now filled with choking air from wildfires thickening night like a wall so that every breath inhales air laced with poison gases. There are those among them who, by the light of purloined candles whose flickering shadows on their faces reveal hollows as deep as old pagan caves, call on your help in their raging fevers, if for nothing else than a drop, a shot, a Packie's nip, to ease the pain of their eternal remorse. But in this cold city, full of hopeless tears, its canyons echoing stifled sobs, great souls contemptuous of reality are too busy seeking the infinite to have capacity for pity. Your bleak sufferings, your unquenched thirsts, and the dried  springs of love with which your hearts were once full, are as remote to them as a needle in space.  

Separated @ Birth: Bride of Chucky and Liz Trussed

 

Awaiting her Knight of the Long Knives.

She thought she knew the Drill, baby, Drill.

 Truss'd Buster: Fracturing the Polity and the Ground.

                   Beauty is butt skin deep, whereas ugliness such as hers goes Right to the bone.

A Driver Guns Through It.

With bone-Saudi Arabia refusing to up their oil production (because, like Exxon and other American oil producers, especially in the Texan Permian basin, it isn't in their own best interests), the cry of "J'Accuse!" can be raised to blame yet another party for this winter's coming energy crisis.

As drainforests of pumpjacks pop up all over the USA, draining swamps of oil from underground pockets, their output is constrained by CEO's wishing to return dividends to their stockholders rather than invest those monies to increase oil production (Despite the fact that the price they can charge now is more than twice what it averaged in 2016). When even your own Nation's oil Companies refuse to invest in a commodity they know they can get twice as much for than what they could have gotten less than 6 years ago, just who do you think you are, President Biden, to ask another country to up their oil production just so that American drivers can continue to buy vehicles made to carry 9 people to transport exactly one? While at the same time declaring you wish to manufacture a fleet of EV's to put that same country out of business? And then passing legislation that will require the rest of the world to pay for them? Because when you pay people to buy products they neither want nor can afford, by picking up part of the tab (an unforgivably inflationary item embedded in a bill that's hailed as the "Inflation Reduction Act," a level of cynicism not seen since the Bush era) and you are the issuer of the globe's Reserve currency, that is precisely what you are doing. 

Yet I've heard not a single outcry against that. 

And because, since the Federal Government is passing a highly inflationary bill even as domestic inflation is roaring ahead, the Fed must react by hiking interest rates, which means everything outside the US, especially loans denominated in US currency, costs more; ergo, the US is EXporting not only the last of its energy supplies to the ROW, but it's inflation as well. Hence, them furriners we rail so much against are being coerced into paying for our EV's ... which makes for another generation of immigrants, now that they can't afford to live in their own country, fleeing to the heart of the beast, where they can ... or at least they hope they can ... feed the progeny they produce in such unsustainable numbers.

Meanwhile sanctions are kept on South America's largest oil producer, whose heavy crude Texas refineries have been equipped to process, yet the ocean of oil in Venezuela's Orinoco belt remains in the ground, stymied by US intransigence, as they demand a sovereign state return to "Democracy," as though its own stewardship has set an example for how desirous one should be to copy it.

The standard of living we enjoy in the States, it always seemed to me, once I learned about how Europeans such as the Pilgrims, who created Thanksgiving, thanks to Chief Massasoit, (the grand sachem (or intertribal chief) of the Wampanoag Indians, who were the inhabitants of  the coastal regions of present-day Massachusetts) that a country that simply steals the resources of a vast continent, and develops them for its own aggrandizement, using slave labor as an energy source, a fulcrum to enable its lever of rapine, would always, like England under Queen Elizabeth 1, whose strategies of aiding and abetting criminals our own most resembles, have a definite leg-up on the competition. Of course America was rich: it STOLE anything that wasn't tied, and then tied it down and worked it to death.

The very unCivil War being staged by the US press and billionaire elites on its blighted citizens demonstrates the intractable nature of the "something for nothing" meme on which the nation's notions of "Pursuit of Happiness" is built. The mythical Big Rock Candy mountain that is the apple pie in the sky of the American Dream is, like MacArthur's Park of song, melting in the acid rain while America bickers over how to best achieve the status of being something it never truly was.

While an enormous straw sucks out yet another 15 million barrels of the "strategic" oil reserve, for no other reason than to entice American consumers to buy ever-larger/heavier rolling gas chambers, the resultant decrease in pain at the pumps (Just get new pair of heels, Greta!)  is barely visible. But what is most acute is the knock-on effect the rise in prices of ALL forms of energy is having on economic output, and therefore, with the burning of ever larger quantities of King Coal, on the environment of every continent.

When we had the oil shocks of the 70's and the Bush-rigged manipulation of prices in the aughts to pay for the ginormous upfront costs of fracturing rock on a continental scale, the other forms of fossil fuel-derived energy were barely mentioned (if you can't put it in a gas tank, who cared?). But in our current (No pun intended) dilemma, since it is now the "News"' job to keep you entertained, rather than informed, the fact that Natural gas and coal are priced at stratospheric heights never seen before, is simply ignored, while all the fulminating of "high" oil prices is given free reign. This despite the fact that oil prices are not currently out of line with expectations; they are more likely to fall back to $80/bbl, instead of soaring to a good $20/bbl higher, and even if they did, they still wouldn't be as high as they were during Biden's stint as Obama's VP.

Only environmentally disastrous hydraulic fracturing's output kept the price of oil down during Obama/Biden's 2'nd term; oil pumping that dumped oil on the world market, bringing pain to bone-Saudi Arabia and other smaller oil-producers, causing them to do what the North Sea did before that, charge a price that is a poor reflection of the irreplaceable value of the commodity they deal in just so that Americans could drive around hauling more than three tons of plastic, metal, and glass as they opted for bigger and more polluting versions of the portable gas chambers they tool around in so thoughtlessly as soon as the price to propel them drops.

My contention that the environment, energy, and economics are all intricately entwined, is being borne out by all three of them becoming more volatile simultaneously: a volatility that is showing every sign of not only not abating, but of being instead exacerbated by the policies of not only the US, but its allies and enemies. Each of which is pulling the same trick as the Inflation Reduction Act, by putting on a façade of doing one thing while doing exactly the opposite in actual fact. The outré money-grubbing of ultra-rich, tax-dodging, Corponations for US federal dollars in order to cash in on the bonanza of cash the US Treasury  has opened up its doors to disburse, is a case in point of the Green-lighting of any scam that can be Greenwashed into acceptance. The current atmosphere of money-grubbing, hopium-infused desperation, where fortunes are made by proffering nonsensical schemes to prolong the West's idiotically-monikored, "Post-Industrial" society, is an echo of the nineties' Beany Babies  and Vaporware manias that caused stocks to soar by presenting schemes, without even a modicum of proof, using a scurrilous miasma of pseudo-science that evaporated as quickly as morning fog in a California sunrise, to entice those lacking even the basics of climbing skills, to scale the Big Rock Candy Mountain, and make themselves rich, when all along, the schemes were devised for no other reason than to make Goldman Sachs and its ilk fat on other people's sucker's bets.

Besides the obvious problem with this mindset, in that it has the opposite effect of that maintained, is that we get the Las Vegas effect. What I mean by that is the fact that Vegas, in the grips of an unending drought, decided that people shouldn't have lawns. So what they did is, they filmed crews as they went around the city ripping up the grass from people's yards. Now, I haven't got a lawn, but I do have grass. It grows when it pours out, but I pull off the tops when they go to seed to keep them from proliferating out of control. But, as I live on  a hillside, I never pull it up by the roots, as that's what keeps the soil in place. In other words, I control its growth, largely by having other plants crowd it out. What I don't do is rip it up by the roots.

The next storm that Vegas got hit with occurred after I saw that video on the evening news of them tearing up the lawns that should have been left and simply not watered so the the next time it rained, they could absorb the runoff and keep all that water from collapsing the drainage system. By doing the opposite of what any hydrologist would have recommended they do, they caused exactly what you would expect: flooded streets on the Vegas strip, despite there being less rain dropped than in previous storms when vegetation was in place to hold back both the soil and the excess water, keeping them from overwhelming the drainage system. 

Things similar to this are happening all over the country and the world, for the simple reason that many of the steps we need as citizens, municipalities, and neighborhoods, don't make a damn nickel for the corponations, and therefore for the federal, State, and City governments that live on their taxes. When you prioritize something, that is what is considered first, and everything else takes a backseat. Otherwise it wouldn't be called prioritization. So when you "Let the Market"  "solve" the climate crisis, they naturally will think up all kinds of tricks and ruses to put money in their pockets in the attempt (well, pretending to be attempting ... what motive do they have to derail the money train from chugging to bring them free federal dollars? Especially when the example of Bush's fuel-from-food scam has demonstrated to them that even after twenty years of environmental destruction, economic dislocation and wasted energy, the freeeee!!!! federal funds just keep on flowing, and in even greater quantities now than at the start of the program. Even as the product they use all your money to produce, reduces the mpg's of every one of the 250 million vehicles plying the nation's highways. So where's any incentive to actually meet green targets? ... especially when one considers that none have ever actually been established).

What we get instead is an echo of the not-so-Great Britain's response to their farmers' distress over the ongoing drought: A call to instigate a government-sponsored, nation-wide hydraulic fracturing of the island kingdom; earthquakes, poisoned water, methane production and environmental destruction be damned. Full speed ahead to energy-production dystopia and economic ruin for their own farmers and urbanites. So what do they piss and moan about? Nappies. Not enough of them. When I was a kid, I washed out the younger kids' diapers. It was disgusting, but ya know, that's life. Not anymore. Who cares if an environmentally destructive "solution" wreaks havoc with various eco-systems, as long as we need never soil our dainty little hands scrubbing our own offspring's waste from their diapers so that we can get on to doing more important things, like sitting for hours on end glued to the ever-larger, ever more energy-intensive TV screen ... until we too are in need of nappies for our ever-expanding rear ends that have become so vast our arms can't reach  around to wipe them.

Luckily though, now that we have all accepted the Corponational propaganda that peak oil is a mere phantasm, we will be able to unbury and set on fire every last hydrocarbon that currently lies buried and sequestered beneath fertile soil, destroying what we actually need to get what we merely want. Thus laying clear what will be mankind's epithet. The swan song of the ugly duckling.

"It was in our nature to destroy all of Nature ... preferring to deny that we were part of it to living with any constraints on humankind's rapaciousness."   

The Four Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse

 While we anxiously await the annual Clown roundup known as the COP27 (COP = Clowns Only Please), in which we are privy to the drooling ravings of Corporate-sponsored (In the modern economy mankind has devised, nothing happens unless it’s Corporate-sponsored … climate change being but one example) there are four obvious and usual suspects, each of which has been thus far, and, there is every sign, will continue to be, ignored. So, in keeping with the theme of this blog, I wish to document them, so that the “Who could have seen it coming?” question can be answered when they inevitably rhetorically pose it again. Because, if an idiot such as myself could’ve seen it coming, then it's fairly obvious that you could have done so, too.

All of these items that need  to be addressed are already known by every attendee jetting their CO2 path to the COPout conference, but none of them will have the effrontery to bring them up,  least of all, the first on the list, and the most intractable:

1) Corporate Law.

The rule of the Corporate sphere is so entrenched now that Corporate interests can actually brag about the fact that any climate solution that doesn’t make profits for the Corporate overlords running the economic and political systems and ruining the environment in the process, and hence humanity’s future, has been announced as DOA. With the destruction of the Soviet Union, the most powerful impediment to the primacy of private interests over the public’s was swept into the dustbin of history, while the consumer-takes-all Liberal Democracies, with their feckless inability to halt or even constrain the environmental wrecking ball that Corporate Rule wields, were handed free-rein. In this endeavor, they are aided and abetted by the laws they bribe congress to enact in their behalf, putting private interests, in full view of the polity that re-elects them again and again and again, above the public’s interest, as they know full well that corporate money, being in charge of the crushingly expensive Free Press, will buy their way to re-election, regardless. And the public flock will flock to the polls to reseat them. No Putin needed to stand with a gun and assure they vote the right way. The process is indeed rigged, just not in the way the resident of Mar-a-Berchtesgaden bellows it is.

The corporate ballet is nowhere more evident than in the Double Etendre being danced around the SPR (not-so-Strategic Petroleum Reserve). As one trainload of light-tight from the Permian roars in, another steams away towards the port full of energy products for struggling European industries. Like the food-for-fuel program, this boondoggle is a lobbied-for government support program for the fossil fuel industries. The SPR has never been lower than it is now since its inception in the eighties, and the reason? To reduce “pain at the pump”, exactly where it’s needed. Every time the price of petrol has the desired effect, and people start to purchase and drive more efficient flying car pets, the US federal government steps in and protects their “freedom” by instituting policies, such as draining the SPR, to lower the price. The effect on consumer behavior is both immediate and predictable: SUV sales increase, thus locking in, thanks to government interference, higher fuel consumption, for yet another decade.

Yet, thanks to corporate sponsorship … perfectly legal corporate sponsorship … of NGO’s, lawsuits that are frivolous and ridiculous, are brought to court to sue Exxon … for what? For providing government-mandated oil to fill up the SPR, which that government then drains so that it can be used to provide an extra layer of down to our suffocating blanket of CO2. Yet no lawsuit is being even considered by any of these NGO’s, since their corporate sponsors would retract their support … ie, their money, money made from the profits derived from the cheap fuel provided to them by the government’s sleight of hand on Corponationals' behalf. 

All done by the administration that is selling itself to a bewildered public as “Green.”

But, “The American Way of Life is NOT Negotiable”, is not now, nor can it ever be, a Green possibility. By maintaining such an obvious dictatorial stance, the current administration is dressing  up the “Climate Change is a Hoax” rostrum in a new set of Emperor’s clothes; but he’s just as grossly naked as before. 

2) The all-but-ignored ongoing energy crisis.

Other than a spike in the price of gas in early spring, Americans have been kept in the dark about the world’s energy conundrum and continue living in their usual fantasy land about their future prospects.

While the COP27 speakers drone on and on about nothing, try to remember that they have done so 27 times before. In all that time, as they bemoan the existential crisis that mankind has created for itself and every other creature on the globe, the lights in the Eiffel Tower were dutifully switched on night after night, year after year, one decade, and century, after the other. Only when the exigencies of War demanded it did the authorities see fit to even suggest that the cost to do so is cumulative … we not only pay the electric bill, but the CO2 bill never goes down, adding up over time. 

All over the world, displays of mankind’s venality are thoughtlessly lit up to ooh and aah a public that has seen electric lighting as a daily feature of their lives for more than a century, yet marvels like a Japanese tourist with a camera, as though it were a newly discovered toy, like a wristwatch a European explorer would use to impress the ignorant savages in both the “New” world, and Africa, modern man is as childishly beguiled as any primitive tribe member by displays of the "Miracle" of Science. The belief in magic is deeply ingrained, with no little thanks going to the despotism of the three  major religions that brow-beat known falsehoods into the brains of their helpless offspring as though it were sacred script.

Since the beginning of the century, oil consumption has remained remarkably stable. Meanwhile, however, the combustion of coal and natural gas has exploded, with the most dire of consequences. Coal combustion has doubled since the turn of the century, even as natural gas combustion has replaced it in most of the first world, a trajectory that Putin’s War has reversed. Yet thanks to LNG, America’s gas bonanza is being hyper-shipped to the rest of the world, raising the price of everything else, no matter how much the Fed thinks it can control “inflation” (note how all of a sudden, inflation is no  longer  “Always and everywhere a monetary phenomena” … as the cost of energy escalates, it not surprisingly, takes everything else with it, no matter what the momentary authorities do to tighten … unless it tightens so much that it causes, once again, extreme economic dislocation, otherwise known as a depression ... still the only method that has thus far demonstrated (in 2008) its ability to constrain the growth in oil-consumption). The world teetering on the brink of depression is coinciding with the most vicious constraint in energy resources since WW2, yet this direct connection is still denied by the entire economics "profession". But we all know in our barbarous little hearts that any restriction in energy production puts a stranglehold on growth and  it won't stop choking it off until energy production resumes ... which it cannot do.

3) The Green PR Machine.

Like the Green Revolution before it, the Green Machine was invented and promulgated as a boon to Corporate profits. You know the truth. You already know that EV's (electric Vehicles) are no more a green solution than natural gas is clean energy. You already know that biomass that includes the razing of forests to "manufacture" woodchips is nothing less than a PR scam pulled off right in front of your face because the powers that be know you'll swallow anything as long a it'll allow you to continue your non-negotiable lifestyle for even one more day.

Since none of the enumerated Horsemen can exist without the other three, they will be constantly intermingled, illustrative of which, the Corporate, perfectly  legal, labeling of both the food-to-fuel programs all over the world being called bio-fuels, despite their being grown specifically to power machines, so they are mechano-fuels, having been repurposed from the bio-fuels they really are (bio-fuel is what food crops in actuality ARE, fuel for biological units such as yourself) and the intense, Green-Revolution energy and machine-dependent mono-cropping methods that have increased the generation of CO2 venting into the atmosphere so egregiously, heavy as they are in the use of all three of the fossil fuels, coal, NatGas, and oil, as well as their complete dependence on artificial fertilizers, GMO'd crops, destructive pesticides and gene-altered herbicides, are now all deployed to grow energy-rich crops to power the very machines they are dependent upon for every stage of their production. So instead of poisoning the Gulf of Mexico to feed the world, US Corponations are given free rein to destroy and plunder whatsoever and wherever they wish, so they are now destroying entire livelihoods in the Gulf simply to make it cheaper (thanks to the outrageous size of the Federal Government's contribution to their bottom lines ... which they then distribute to their shareholders) for American suburbanites to "run" to the store (despite their not running a single step of the way) to pick up a quart of milk or a pint of Haagen Dazs.

But just as the ICE machine, in the form of the Car ... A FREE Car! ... can be used as the single largest contributor to the crisis we are twiddling our thumbs all the way through, precisely because we, as a nation, as a world, know deep in our hearts of darkness that there is no curtailment of energy usage that does not include a hit to the free-wheeling lifestyle we have come to both abhor and adore, likewise the biggest con must, of necessity, include the promise that you will be able to ride into the future as firmly ensconced on your own ever-expanding derriere as ever. Hence the largest amount of PR, involving the entire infrastructure of the Democratic party, entail duping Joe six-pack, (and I don't mean abs), into buying a machine that will bankrupt both him and the country while simultaneously increasing the output of CO2 from the nation's economic activities.

As perhaps you know, President Biden decided that the entire fleet of US automobiles are going to be EV's by 2030 ... in California, by 2035 (those two being mutually self-canceling never posing a problem), which means that in a mere 6 years (2022 is pretty much history, so since "BY" 2030, means that before we actually get to that milestone, means at the end of 2029) the number of EV's being purchased as of right now today, when ICE machines are at a premium in both cost and availability, should be a good harbinger of things to come. But it doesn't bode well. As we near the end of Biden's second year in office, the number of ICE machines sold SAAR, is in excess of 13 million units in the US; the number of EV's in that same time frame? Approximate 100,000. For the math-challenged, that is less than one percent of units sold. Hence, in six years, the US is pretending it's gonna be running an electric fleet to speed workers to their corporate jobs, with the expense to change the infrastructure to do so, being borne by the polity, while the Corponations that demand the workforce be mobile, will be figuratively manning the toll booths at the entrance to the highways to collect their tribute, buttressing their sagging bottom lines with the toil of the masses they despise, with the Libertarians who condemn the very governments they betray, while  challenging their very existence,  standing first in line, having elbowed the actual productive enterprises out of their way. This leads to the last horseman, riding up in his white hat in a tank bristling with hi-tech-enabled armamentaria.   

4) The Motley CRU: China, Russia, and the USA.

Of the three super powers of China, Russia and the US, only Russia braves the slings and arrows of a country that not only cares not a whit about slowing down the climate derangement, but with their TrumPutin logic, stare down the other powers with the braggadocio that they will benefit from climate derangement, so "Bring it ON".

But the two major contributors of CO2 to the atmosphere (except when calculated on a per capita basis, at which point Russia pulls far ahead), China and the USA, have made promises that are hollow, and which, should they enact the options they have said they would, will help us save the planet by guaranteeing mankind's extinction.

By using Biden's vision of an EV in every driveway, it is apparent that, should he be successful, the amount of CO2 alone, never mind the methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs not only currently in the atmosphere, but that would be added to realize his envisioned hyper-electrified future (Since Reagan, every president knows they can do whatever they want to goose the economy, no matter what the long term repercussions, as they won't bear the opprobrium for the damage they inflict, those inheriting the resultant disastrous economy thus created will) would insure a far more unstable weather regime ... one that could never in our lifetimes reach a stasis, since mankind insists on increasing the heat energy it adds to the system year after year, one decade after the other, such that no weather regime can never stabilize (one of the main reasons the TrumPutin claim that Russia will benefit (it's agriculture he's specifically referring to ... but for ag to work you need a predictable climate, which adding 40 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere an an annual basis dooms outright).

This year's above-notated 13 million gas-burning cars is the lowest number manufactured since 2015, the figure approaching 20 million in the years preceding the Pandemic (and of course, that  still wasn't enough ... the economy was demanding more). So by 2030 the US should have turned those numbers on their head if it wishes to even approach its goal, such that there should be 13 million EV's sold in 2030 to the 100,000 gas-guzzling vehicles parlayed that year.

You know as well as I that that's absolute nonsense. Yet even if it weren't, the infrastructure necessary to build out such a transformation of the entire transportation system would increase, as I have detailed in earlier posts, the already over-sized US CO2 footprint to a monstrous size, all the while flashing its "green" credentials at the annual COPout conferences.

China, not surprisingly, creativity not being a Chinese strongpoint, is proffering the same idea: untrammeled CO2 Paying it forward, while keeping its own nonsensical zero-emissions goal, a decade further, into 2050.

But what these so-called zero-emissions goals amount to, from the Corponationals' perspective, is  a Greenlight to Gaslight, as they fall over each other to push their own Green agenda, (despite it's being anything but), to the source of their success: government largess.

There are no milestones any manufacturer must meet on the way to our bright green future. There will be no diminution of the CO2 vented into the atmosphere before 2030 (or after that, if solar, wind, or hydro energy production are any guide). In other words, as the Germans dismount their windmills, there is no metric to meet before they install the next generation of generators that need be shown to demonstrate that wind has indeed curtailed the emissions of CO2, as the fossil fuels burned to manufacture, install, transport, and maintain, and then to do the reverse once their life-cycle has ended, are never included in their sanguine estimates of the Clean in their Machine.

Windmills were a strategic blunder, calculated to reduce Germany's dependence on politicized Russian energy resources. But renewables aren't renewable if the optimum temperature your solar panels work at are a thing of the past, or if the windmills become stranded assets because the new climate regime causes the wind to blow elsewhere, nor if the hydro you have counted on is MIA because, not only has rainfall not replenished the drying rivers, but the melting glaciers feeding thirsty hydroelectric dams will soon be bare rock.

Like EV's, windmills are a good idea, they are spiffier, cooler, and cleaner than their fossil-fueled counterparts. But cleaner doesn't mean life-cycle cleaner for windmills any more than for EV's, but they are at the source: a city full of EV's vis-a-vis gas-guzzlers is a far healthier place to live. But the outsize investment necessary to change the current gas-burning transportation system to one running all EV's in a mere six years will do so much damage, that there will be no coming back from it. Sam Carana spells it out for us on his Arctic News blog: 

"large amounts of methane are getting released from the Arctic Ocean, with even more to follow". 

The Arctic, largely thanks to Putin's Russia, has gone, in the course of merely two years, from warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, to warming 7 x's (!) the rate. And if you look at the activity in the Arctic, it is being done by completely unsupervised Russian conglomerations of oil companies, coal enterprises, and natural Gas facilities, all of which rival, in their contempt for any environmental restrictions being placed on their activities, the wildcat ferocity of the state of Texas. Yet this build-out of methane-producing industries is occurring in the littoral of the Arctic, while a fleet of no less than 30 ice-breakers plies the Arctic ocean breaking up its ice sheet into myriad ice chunks that melt far more easily in the warming waters, all so that China can then use the Northwest Passage to ship its goods more cheaply. Well, more cheaply for them. For the rest of the world, the cost is prohibitive. But just as US Corponations need worry not the least about the damage they inflict on the ecosystem of the prairies, such that the resulting dust storms are never attributed to their wrecking-ball activities, the Chinese Corponations haven't a qualm about the price others have to pay for their intransigent attitude, nor does Rosneft have to fret that the Russia government will halt their toxic plundering of Siberia's resources, even as the taiga burns down around them, destroying the livelihoods of millions of Russians.

The reason that the Russian despot is never called out on this while he is excoriated on a daily basis for his activities in Ukraine, have nothing to do with humanitarianism, which is a delusion, and everything to do with the Liberal Democracies' inability to rein in their own citizens outsized burning of fossil fuels. So they've concocted this War so as to blame our "adversary" for the rise in fuel prices, the inflation eating their workers' earnings, and the food prices curtailing the continued expansion of their overstuffed bellies.

But the crime Russia is in the midst of committing in the Arctic is of a far worse sort, with more far-reaching consequences, and with zero MainStream Media coverage, as it provides the energy resources necessary for the Corponations to continue their iron domination of every aspect of life on earth, of which the MSM is but a cog. They obey or they will go away. Like NPR, they will be corporatized until all they tell are lies (most of them lies of omission).

Now, what Mr. Carana argues, is that at the current 1950 ppb (parts per billion ... as opposed to CO2, measured in ppm's) of methane level translates into 396.2 ppm CO₂e (that's CO2 equivalent)  GWP (Global warming Potential). In other words, you'd add 396.2 to the CO2 current concentration of 416 ppm, to make the CO₂e of 812.2 ppm. (By 2030, a full generation before China plans to have its zero-emissions economy, that figure will be > 1000ppm CO₂e). But because those measurements are taken at Mauna Loa, they are far more concentrated where the activity is taking place, such as in the Four Corners' region and the Permian basin in the US, as well as the Russian activity in the Arctic, wreaking, each of them, havoc in their nearby regions. So we get mega droughts in America's West, amped hurricanes in Florida and the US Southeast, a months' long heat wave and drought in China, and an Arctic going from warming twice as fast to one warming 7 times as fast as the rest of the globe in the mere span of a couple of years.

None of these hyper-contributors to the tonnage of CO2 and methane being vented into the atmosphere (while each of the same motley CRU destroys their own and foreign forests that are the world's best hope for carbon sequestration) will be mentioned at the upcoming COPout27 convention that is supposed to hammer out an agreement among all the rest of the countries in the world, while raising not  a peep of protest about the outsized carbon Jackbootprint this motley CRU is kicking up into the world's face over and over and over again. 

But in this, our "Oh, Well"-ian world, what's the point of even mentioning it?