Thursday, January 28, 2016

Climate Denialism, Climate Fatalism and Porter Ranch: Confronting the Inevitability of the Carbon Crisis

Peak Oil happened 10 years ago according to the International Energy Agency. I no longer mention Peak Oil (that's a peak in global conventional crude production, to be precise) in my description of this site because the technological advancements in fracking have punted the full ramifications downfield by at least a decade or two. This in spite of President Obama's attempts to emphasize renewable energy use; proving that when you employ an "All-of-the-Above Energy Strategy" - dirty beats clean in the marketplace for liquid fuel consumption. This will continue to be the case even after the shale bubble pops, which looks like what's happening now, and after US shale oil production peaks, which may occur as soon as 2020, according to the US Energy Department. Look for coal to make a comeback (along with the Fischer-Tropsch coal-to-oil liquefaction process popularized by the Nazis) sometime in the 2030s or 40s at the latest. That's regardless of whether it's a Democratic administration insisting that the coal is "clean" or a Republican insisting coal production should skyrocket regardless of environmental ramifications because of China, the Middle East, or whatever "other" is timely for a reactionary to demonize.

Bottom line: this means a peak in total liquid fuel production probably won't occur until sometime close to the mid-21st century. This is not good news. Delaying the inevitable peak through an increased reliance on non-conventional fossil fuels only intensifies the overall consequences, both economically in terms of demand permanently outstripping an irreversibly declining supply, and environmentally in terms of carbon (oil, shale, coal) consumption increasing greenhouse gas emissions to the point global warming becomes severe enough to diminish food production, among other disasters. They are flip sides of the same coin that should be simultaneously referenced as the Carbon Crisis in referring to the predicament human civilization finds itself in. I've been saying that for over two years now; I even did an annual update in 2013 and 2014.

I decided to stop doing an annual update - partially because of my terrible history in maintaining any kind of annual update on this blog (like UNDER THE RUG or Krampus of the Year), but also because I think it's better to report news as it occurs, rather than compile it for reporting en masse near the end of the year. It's not as though there was a shortage of developments in the worsening of the Carbon Crisis in 2015. But at some point, the enormity of climatological abnormalities happening either necessitates a universal awakening within civilization or a universal shutdown of civilization. True existential threats trump denial every time.

So why am I writing this blog entry, since we clearly haven't reached that point yet? Because I want to explore the sociological phenomenon of climate denial through a prism I've grown extremely comfortable looking through: conspiracy theory. Interestingly, there are two diametrically opposed theories positing a cover-up of the truth about global warming:

1) The truth about global warming is being covered up because the United Nations, through the backing of such pro-eugenic wealthy elitists as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Bill Gates, is using this phony story, propagated by paid scientists and a compliant mainstream media, as an excuse to cull the world's population and institute totalitarian control by removing property rights via Agenda 21 and instituting a technocracy economy where carbon consumption is rationed through global policing.

2) The truth about global warming is being covered up because human industrial civilization has already burned enough greenhouse gasses to drive humanity to extinction, so to avoid spreading panic the mainstream media sells the worst effects as possibly happening, but in decades or hundreds of years, and mainstream scientists are soft-pedalling the immediacy of self-reinforcing feedback loops from clathrates and permafrost melt sending massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which could happen within the next decade or two.

more at link...

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2016/01/climate-denialism-climate-fatalism-and.html