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."