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Not complicated

Complexity abounds. Our current politics, however, are dumbed down for their intended audience of us. Even then, we don’t seem to get the clarity staring us in the face: the country is being spoken for and to by a demented lunatic. There is no plan, only impulse, neediness, and corruption. We don’t want to reckon with this, but the sooner we realize that we must, that we don’t know how it ends, the sooner begins the work – and work it will surely be.

All signs point in the same direction. Despite all of the conversational satire to which we have grown accustomed, the hubris of a powerful society has done its work.

But here’s your bedtime story: the amount of lost oil supply is already equal to the reduction in oil consumption during the covid pandemic.

The world has lost over $50 billion ​worth of crude oil that has not been produced since the Iran war began nearly 50 days ago and ‌the . aftershock of the crisis will be felt for months and even years to come, according to analysts and Reuters calculations.

Since the crisis began at the end of February, more than 500 million ​barrels of crude and condensate have been knocked out of the global market, according to Kpler data – the ⁠largest energy supply disruption in modern history.
Put differently, 500 million barrels of oil lost to the market is equivalent to:
  • Curtailing aviation demand ​globally for 10 weeks; no road travel by any vehicle globally for 11 days; or no oil for the global economy for five days, ​said Iain Mowat, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie.
  • Nearly a month of oil demand in the United States, or more than a month of oil for all of Europe, according to Reuters estimates.
  • Roughly six years of fuel consumption for the U.S. military, based on annual usage of about 80 million barrels from fiscal ​year 2021.

The Reuters piece concludes with a short section under the subhead FULL RESTORATION COULD TAKE YEARS.

About this restoration… what if we don’t go back – and choose to move forward instead? It’s an outrageous proposition but, knowing now full well what do, having destroyed what we have – facilities, lives, and relationships, alliances – the accidental test case for moving beyond oil is no longer a test.

The seemingly scariest part of this (scary to the world’s most frightened populace of rich and coddled) is already underway for seemingly unrelated reasons [not at all unrelated]. Auditions are over. Thank you all for coming. We’ve found our man.

Image: Nemesis by Albrecht Dürer (1501-1502); Albrecht Dürer, via Wikimedia Commons

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Fearing the wrong storm

Panicky news media and political opposition frets and pre-surrenders to the prospects of what the next US president will do to climate goals and renewable energy projects. If you’re not accustomed to pushing back, prepare to be pushed around.

A few facts:

The U.S. currently produces more crude oil than any country, ever. What more fracking and drill babying will do to the price oil is an unsolvable mystery.

A powerful bomb cyclone is ripping the Pacific Northwest with hurricane-strength winds as the season’s first atmospheric river comes ashore in Northern California, promising torrential rains, floods and mudslides across the region.

Advanced energy capacity is concentrated in renewables, just ask the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, farmers continue to take massive financial hits from the effects of destructive storms.

What to do with this information (yes, after you stop ignoring it)? Use it to make decisions, including voting, but not just that. But speaking of voting, leaders have to be led to the safe place to do the right thing. Who’s going to do that? Who’s going to create the safe place and lead them there?

It’s almost flattering to think global warming is complicated and difficult to solve.

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Oldspapers

Critical piece by David Cay Johnston on why reporting is so bad, getting worse and going away, all at the same time.

This problem is not with the breakdown in the centuries-old economic model, a simple model that many journalists do not really understand. Connecting buyers and sellers who are in search of one another pays the bills. What draws them is a desire to find out that which is important but that they did not know. We call this information the news.

Far too much of what we produce today is already widely known. We fill so many pages with rehashed or known information that on many days these publications could properly be called oldspapers. It’s not like there isn’t important and revealing news all around us. There is. It’s just that we seem swept up in a herd mentality with too narrow a focus and too much eagerness to rely on what sources tell us rather than asking these same people to address important facts that lie in plain sight in the public record.

Lazy, incurious, often-times just plain dumb… know anybody like that? Relying on them for your world view?