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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.
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