What a Piece of Work is Man: How Ignoble ...

BBC's comment on COPout 27: "No fossil fuel progress":  

Nov. 21, 2022 418.47 ppm

Nov. 21, 2021 415.30 ppm

1 Year Change 3.17 ppm (0.76%)

The completely predictable and abject failure of the COPout 27 Annual Follies left me inexplicably bereft of hope. Perhaps that's because it displayed the real Nature of humanity as a horde of scrabbling, squabbling egotists strutting in their artifice of Globalization, yet whose ideas are more provincial than those of Medieval peasants who have never left their local hamlet:

What a piece of work is Man. How ignoble his treason, how limited in faculty; in form of moving how crippled by machine-dependence; In action how like a fallen angel; In apprehension how like a clod; The pariah of the world, The basest of animals. This quintessence of dust has proved to be no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of lepers. 

While contemplating how to write about the COPout Follies, I realized I've turned myself into a character in a book; a life one reads. Whatever I feel is as useless as spilled ink on a page. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, which are mixed with images that undo them, as so much revising has destroyed my original intent. From too much thinking, I have become my thoughts and not I. I've plumbed myself so entirely that the only thing remaining -  blackly vivid in my reflection at the bottom of a well - is my own face observing me observing it. 

Like a lost playing card from an old and discarded suit of an ancient deck, I have no meaning; my intelligence is pulp, and I have no worth. I merely state my beliefs ad nauseum; wringing out my soul to use as ink, I have made myself useless for anything else except this writing, which is meaningless for the simple reason that it is of no use to anyone. However, to this task I resign myself, being uniquely qualified for it; it is Who I am, which amounts to nothing. And yes, at times there is a hint of tears that aren't cried, so they make my tired eyes burn; while a touch of anguish clutches at my heart and makes my throat dry. Yet I don't even know what I'd cry over, if I cried, nor why it is that I don't just get over it. This contradiction follows me everywhere, like a dark shadow. A specter that leaves me in constant dread of sleep. This results in a terrible weariness that compounds the sadness I feel because of who I never was, a nostalgia for someone who never lived anywhere other than inside my feverish head, flashing intermittently with the awareness that we live inside an illusion conjured by others who have none of our best interests at heart, but that are instead driven by an animus of greed and self-aggrandizement at others' expense, an animus they then dub "Freedom", and thus avoid any real parsing of the deleterious effects they have on others.

How else explain the pawning off of responsibility to alleviate the sufferings of those nations badly impacted by climate change onto the shoulders of citizens, while the corporations and the billionaires sit on their golden thrones (literally ...the Saudi "princes" as well as hirsute financiers have their commodes fashioned from the barbarous relic) sneering at how easy it was to get the richest of the world's citizens to except the fetid "trickle-down" from the shriveled appendages of their betters. 

From the graphic, you can see almost the entire outline of the US bespeckled with CO2 emissions:

Cry the Beloved Continent.

Though the least polluting continent, African countries suffer more than any others from the deleterious effects of cascading climatic catastrophes, with droughts, blackouts, epic flooding and insect infestations, destructive wildfires and the despoliation of entire ecosystems, all to accommodate the marauding necessities of the asset stripping enterprises of those countries on other continents that are emitting the most CO2 and hence, those most responsible for the carnage wrought beyond their borders but for which they accept no blame.

So as the world teeters on the edge of recession, Central Banks, led by the Fed, hike interest rates, while the European powers, bolstered by the ubiquitous American Wehrmacht, slide into yet more senseless carnage, destroying yet another economy to ensure their own countries' pre-eminence. Meanwhile, the new generation's version of  "The Smartest Men in the Room" ignore the interconnected nature of the economy, such that those very raised rates become the biggest threat to Oil prices, which will likely fall because of the totally predictable financial problems brought on by those higher interest rates, (as evidenced by the result of Liz Truss's little experiment in demagoguery that came within a hair's breadth of collapsing her own county's bond market, which would have had a concatenating effect on the rest of the world's) and these lower oil prices will lead to even lower oil production, which will inflict yet another blow to economic growth, and hence lead to a recession the likes of which the world has yet to see in this century (or, considering the unprecedented size of the world's population, in any previous century as well). 

But putting a damper on the rest of the world's growth, while maintaining dollar hegemony, exactly parallels the hoarding of gold by the USA before WW2 that resulted in the financial crash of 1929, yet it is apparentlky only Gail Tverberg, who seems to have noticed that, after the purposely engineered financial crash of 2008, the price of crude oil quickly bounced back to over $120 per barrel in inflation-adjusted prices in the 2011-2013 time frame, yet the world economy continued to grow. Now, at the relatively cheap price of ~$90'bbl today, the US is emptying out its "strategic" reserves to make it more affordable for this most profligate of nations to combust petrol completely unencumbered by any remorse at fueling the combustion of a commodity the rest of the world desperately needs to increase production of goods. And for no other reason than to allow Americans to fuel their addiction to speed at any cost: in other words using a vital resource for recreation while the world goes hungry and naked for lack of that same resource. Consumption for consumption's sake, with nary a lick of work being accomplished in our mindless, puerile pursuit of Happiness.

That the period when we were paying the highest prices for oil in our entire history, was exactly the same period in which the production of oil (from hydraulic fracturing) was ramping up at an equally unprecedented rate has also gone uncommented on. But this time round, there is to be no comparable surge in production of US oil during this decade as there was in the last. Au contraire, the drop in production initiated by the Covid-caused collapse in demand shows every sign of continuing, never returning to its pre-Covid level; while the world-changing release of the most potent of GHG's that has not only been egregiously flared, but leaked, and seeped during the entire episode of pin-cushioning the earth's mantle will continue unabated. But, given that there is no repercussion to any of the marauders effecting this criminal pollution, methane will continue to build in the atmosphere long after every drop of oil has been fractureded out of the last slab of shale on the continent. This will have the known effect of bringing forward changes in the climate regime that should have taken place decades hence to happening "on the ground", "in Real Time", as in the space of but a few years; such that  every country's COPout27 "net Zero-emission" pledges, or "Clean energy commitments" by 2040, 2050, or China's cynical 2060, is totally moot.  The damage will have been irreparably done long before any of those dates, decades away, are reached.

Adding to this methane released from its sequestration in the bedrock of North America and Siberian Asia will be the immense amounts of trapped methane near the Arctic's permafrost surface. Together they will act as a far more powerful accelerant of global warming/climate change than CO2 has. Which means, at eighty times the warming capacity of CO2, we will continue to see climate disasters and habitat destruction happen within years, not decades; tipping points crossed in decades, not centuries.

Zdzislaw Beksinski
 

 Like climbing plants detached from their walls, cities around the globe will collapse, even as the Corponations responsible for the carnage, as they do currently in the Wars waged on their behalf, take their profits and smile. The vital irony that their own enrichment is at the behest of their creators whose grand design to build a "Green" infrastructure, while never bothering to "do the Math" to ascertain how much fossil fuel combustion it will take for them to do so, is not lost on them ... they rather enjoy it. But since their own tenure is temporary, and consumers are easily swayed to ignore the long-term repercussions of their actions, (so long as they are enabled to continue to live their "NON-Negotiable" American lifestyle), its deleterious effects, even on their own children, will first be denied, and when that becomes untenable, scoffed at.

The Journey, after all, has been redefined in Newspeak as the Destination; that's so that we can all just Zoom Zoom to our Doom Doom with nary the rise of a single eyebrow. 

Structurally Unsound: Tipping Points in the State of Denial.

 A mere two days after the state of Florida voted to re-elect their own little "Climate Change is a Hoax", aficionado, Marc-o-Lardo Rubio, the diminutive Presidential wanna-be and Trump lackey, a tropical storm that barely reached hurricane status raked the coast of Florida as though it were a Zen garden, demonstrating the Jenga-style condition of the entire Real Estate industry as McMcansions and condos that were built where even a beach house would  have been a gamble, revealed the shifting sand onto which Banks, realtors, and Appraisers conspired to put their seal of approval, but were exposed for money-grubbing charlatans; that is who our "Globalized" economy has left in charge of our most precious commodity: Our Homes.

Tipping Point

Here is the result of a conservative policy, rigidly maintained by Republicans that goes against every instinct and tradition, that used the awesome might of the federal purse to fling itself into a rapid career of Globalization (a term that was never more than a euphemism for Imperialism) for which we possessed neither the material nor moral equipment; sacrificing the principles and practices of liberty and equality by the establishment of militarism and the forcible subjugation of sovereign states for no other reason than to find a home for the speculative investments and the global lies of the Keptocracy. For it was their imperious demand for a place to put their speculative oversavings, with which they flooded the Communist State of China in the last century, that is responsible for the adoption of the Globalization policies that gave rise to such catastrophes as the wholesale building of profits, profits guaranteed by the federal government via various agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie MAC, to name but two, of which you never hear a word about since the crash in 2008, yet whose portfolios are replete with properties such as those you have been watching fall into the ocean. Property which, should those “investing” in the securities that their mortgages are bundled into, and then purchased by federal agencies, would never have been built on such precarious perches were they not guaranteed repayment should their speculation prove, as it has, as disastrous as every non- “Climate Change is a Hoax” businessman knew quite well it would.

 

The rush was on to have a safe place to pile their hoards into to get a return  of the same magnitude they'd gotten used to before the country hit Peak oil in the 70’s. For this and various other reasons the US economy wasn’t delivering to them the returns to which they had become accustomed. This had made future commitments hard to honor in the new environment, so they envisioned China, in which they saw a vast country to play the vast liabilities of the upper classes. But what honor is for a Monarchy, Virtue is for a Republic; so they made vice a virtue and declared untrammeled Greed as good; sneering at any nod to Virtue as Liberal hypocrisy. 

But, Globalization, you see, secures the use of the machinery of the federal government by private interests, mainly capitalists, to obtain for them economic gains  from outside their country, once they are no longer able to realize them within their own borders. This dominance in public policy had an effect upon both expenditure and taxation, the most salient feature of which is the diminishing proportion of the national revenue expended for what used to be regarded as the legitimate and productive purposes of government. Instead, vast sums are spent for naval and military, (always propagandistically referred to as “Defense”) spending, such that, during the Reagan era when unions were being destroyed and federal outlay for social programs cut to the bone, our direct military, naval and Air Force expenditures were increased at an unprecedented pace, all with "borrowed" money, while no war was being waged nor was one even on the horizon; and this feat was accomplished, also so as not to tax the public, making them question the necessity for such an outlandish outlay, but by the raising of vast sums via the sale of the future to the monied interests via the onerous assumption by the entire polity, of high-interest-paying, tax-free, Treasury Bills: a no-risk investment paying stellar returns unavailable to all but the most closely connected insider traders, the best connected of them sitting in the next office, the Vice President and  Ex-CIA director, George Bush, together with his cronies from previous Nixon administrations, including not only Ollie North and his cadre of crooks, but Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the list of Neo-cons who would eventually put their names to the PNAC, outlining the entire GW Bush putsch to imperialist expansion via the “Manifist Destiny” (sic) of the 21’st century, envisioned as the Full-Spectrum Domination by the Soulless Super Power over every other nation on the face of the earth. This is not Globalization, but Imperialism; this is no longer an economic system, but a War Machine; a

Weimar Wehrmacht Enterprises: WWE forever: 

“We are the World."

Although it is right there in front of our noses for all to see, we prefer to ignore the fact that it was under the Neo-Con sway of the major Corponations and the TBTF banking firms that fashioned the Imperious Imperialism whose yoke the poisonous Red Tide of Republicans and Their Blob and his attendant mob, were handed the broad discontent in the polity it needed, as it was they who needed Imperialist adventures, newly dubbed "Globalization" by a fawning press, led by that snarky sniper of sedentary sedition, Paula Krugman. No one was more seduced by Imperialist dreams of plunder more than the Krugmaniac, who knew quite well that the New Imperialism was not only a tool of particular capitalists, such as Enron's Ken Lay and his coterie of crooks, but was also a tool for the complete militarization of the economy that Reagan  had initiated by funneling the largest deficits in the history of the country into the militarization of every aspect of the US economy, while the NSA was deliberately reconfigured via DarpaNet to enable the unwarranted and unsuspected surveillance state that has been dubbed the Deep State by the very REDs who created it ("better Dead than Red" is an old GOP rallying cry before they started adopting every aspect of Soviet totalitarianism those other Reds were well-known for; even going so far in the fifties as to propose legislation to strip any native-born American of their citizenship should they have the temerity to join the Communist Party: that's what they consider Free Speech and "Freedom": their freedom to shut down every one else's opinion). 

Thus was imperialism, in the form of military aggrandizement, become the mode of capitalist expansion planned for and executed while all the while the addled electorate was easily convinced by the star power of the paid shill of the Keptocracy, to undertake such an enormous expenditure of money we did not have was necessary to "fight Communism," while the Red Party conspired to spy on every America household and citizen in a way that Stalin and Hitler could only have dreamt of, meanwhile "Opening China" to the deluge of US FDI dollars used to De-Industrialize the US economy. In other words to bring it back to the stone age. China, eg, was an LDC, low development country, and the stated goal was to make the USA a low developed country, as a mechanism for the billionaire class to dispose profitably of their economic windfall by using the power of the Federal Government to secure for their own particular use the undeveloped economy of foreign countries to use as a risk-free market for their own success, while building an enemy for their future growth via even more militarization, this time of the  entire globe, but more specifically, China. 

 Yesterday Mike Pence, in a CBS interview, stated the maxim that: 'It doesn't take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law;" basically calling out his former boss as the spineless coward he is. Standing with arms folded to block the mad rush of a mob incited to violence by a demagogic ruler takes backbone, something The Blob who would be King, by definition, simply doesn't have. To step aside and relish the destruction wrought by their perfidy when you are the Commander-in-Chief of the country's military is an act of cowardice so profound only that cacophonous crowd of conspiracy theory-addled collaborationist clowns could countenance it. 

Then, the authors of a report published by COPout27 attendees declared that "The (current) global energy crisis sparked by the Russian war in Ukraine clearly shows how dependent the world still is on fossil fuels.” 

If it weren't so pathetic, it would be comical that it takes a War that was begun during the year of the hundredth anniversary of the start of WW1, with nary a reference to the Imperialism that ruled the world then and the Imperialism, dubbed "Globalization," that rules it now, demonstrates the utter fecklesseness of the entire circus of the annual COPout conference roadshows. Yet it is this unquestioned imperialist expansion that has been glossed over by a scurrilous reference to it as a "Global Village," even as we hammer distant outposts of our "Village" with the most advanced weapons of our outsized, deficit-enabled, unaccountable armamentaria that is given their silent approbation by the same hypocrites that simply avert their gaze from the derelicts and homelessness such a policy creates.  

Now to use the word hypocrite in a world whose every government is now so corruption-riddled as to make real governance unrecognizable, I would normally consider too obvious a reality to bother stating; but when the murderous "King" of bone-Saudi Arabia  accuses Europe of hypocrisy on energy and climate policy, it is impossible to ignore. Saudi Arabia is the center of hypocrisy. The land of the "holy" sites of one of the major religions yet has as the only source of its "kingdom's" wealth a cadre of royal assholes who behead anyone not in their liking on trumped-up charges, holds sway over an impoverished population of religiously-addled sheep, (the religious flock ... in other words, not my characterization, but one that they themselves are proud to embrace) eager to be fleeced, half of whom aren't even allowed to pilot the very vehicle that is responsible for the mad accumulation of all that unearthed wealth, a simple ICE machine. Even as "The West" is being held responsible for Climate Change, it is Only Asia that has Trillionaires ... and only that section of it called the "Middle East" has a Keptocracy so entrenched it can concentrate into the hands of but a few potentates such undeserved, unshared Wealth.

A royal flush would not only be the best thing for the polity of Saudi Arabia, but for that of the whole world. Problem is, so much ill-gotten cash has been stuffed into the plumbing of the global economy, that the Plunger Protection Team would be on hand to suck the clog thus created right back out again to spread once again their miasma of privilege to which you will never be made privy. Meanwhile the Climate change is a Hoax, Rubio, who nixed funding for FEMA, will continue to demand more FEMA funds even while clamoring for the cessation of funding for the very  agency disbursing it. That method of piracy has worked so well when done clandestinely by those who have put him in power, that he has utterly forgotten the fact that even in Fox Fake News America, there is an opposition party that still has a smidgen of press coverage to publish such outré hypocrisy as the Cuban catastrophe of the Senate broadcasts; and for no other reason than that his lobbyists, who own him, wish to continue the mindless, but very profitable, expansion of Federally-funded mortgages to people who will continue to build multi-million dollar McMansions right on the beach. Only by continually assuring them that "Climate Change is a Hoax" can such hypocrisy continue. Even before the last remnant of the House of Cards of the construction, mortgage, and insurance industries is swallowed by the waves, the drive to "Return to Normal" is underway; the fact that it will soon enough be under waves providing not the least bit of hesitation, nor the slightest amount of retribution for those who made a killing building them and who now stand in line to make yet another killing as the way is paved for the tragedy to repeat itself, only this time in the form of farce.