For example, here’s what
long-time friend and mentor Alabama Senator Hank Sanders had to say this last
week in his “Senate Sketches” newspaper article:
I
desperately called on my dear mother.
Across the chasm of her death nearly 20 years ago, she reminded me of
what she said to me and to her many children nearly sixty years ago. I felt her spirit moving within me. I was strengthened. Now, I can go on.
I
will share with you why I called upon my mother on this occasion. However, before I share the why, I want to
share with you what she said so many years ago.
At the time, we were nine children, a mother and a father living in a
three-room house. Mind you, not a
three-bedroom house, but a three-room house – a kitchen, a middle room and a
front room.
When
things got real bad, our mother would call us together in the front room. We had only one chair in the whole
house. She would sit in the chair and
make us children sit on the floor in front of her. She would go quiet until she had our full
attention. Then she would say: “Children, things are always kind of bad with
this big po’ family and all. But they
are real bad now.” She would go quiet
for a long moment, causing us to focus even more intently. Then she would continue: “But don’t y’all
worry. I am at my best when things get
bad.” It was powerful. It forged our strength. It prepared us to engage struggle. It lifted our spirits. It gave us hope. Even today, this memory brings tears to my
eyes, trembling to my being, and hope to my heart.
I
called upon my mother on Wednesday morning when I heard that Businessman Donald
Trump was now President-Elect Trump. I
went really deep inside myself. I could
sense the hard times coming. I had to
call on my dear deceased mother to help me through the moment.
Hank goes on to enumerate. But
we get the picture, eh? The Bad seen from the perspective of millions of
Americans on the far Left-Out side of the political spectrum.
Of course, many (yes, too many)
other millions who could also be fairly described as left-out actually voted
for Businessman Trump. It’s like another
whole level of Bad.
But understandable, since the
alternative would have been a vote for Business-As-Usual Empire-building,
including risk of nuclear war with Russia, at the expense of 99% of our
millions on whatever side and to whom whatever promises were made.
Deplorable, eh? However, one
piece of bad news I’ve come across in the last week or so, supposedly having
nothing to do with politics, puts all that electoral badness in deep shade.
Folks, here is the really Bad News:
The U.S. Geological Survey says
it has found the largest continuous oil and gas deposit ever discovered in the
United States.
On Tuesday, the USGS announced that a swath of West Texas known as
the Wolfcamp shale contains 20 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic
feet of natural gas. . . . As NPR's Jeff Brady reported, the amount of oil in
the Wolfcamp shale formation is nearly three times the amount of petroleum
products used by the entire country in a year.
Why is this bad news? The answer
comes only in the last paragraph of the article:
Producing and using the newly discovered oil and gas will also
contribute to climate change, since both oil and gas emit greenhouse gases when
they are extracted and burned using current technology. The U.S. has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions economywide 26 to 28 percent
by 2025 under the Paris climate agreement, which went into effect earlier this
month.
That this part of the news is
tacked on at the very end of the article is another level of bad news. By that
placement the writer (or editor) is telling us this is the least important aspect of the news.
So we have very bad news
presented as mostly good news. That bias is obvious in the opening paragraph
saying the newly discovered oil & gas resources are “nearly three times the
amount of petroleum products used by the entire country in a year.” A more realistic wording might be something
like “despite being the largest petroleum discovery ever, the Wolfcamp shale
would provide only about three years of total U.S. petroleum consumption.”
But the saddest and baddest part
is an apparent total lack of awareness of the realities of our Energy
Situation: Our entire civilization was built on incredibly cheap, easy-to-get
oil (and natural gas). In the mid-20th
century it took burning as little as one barrel of oil to get 80-100 more
barrels out of the ground. And for most of the 20th century we could
count on always getting more next year than we had this year, driving
ever-increasing economic growth.
But all that’s over now.
Shale oil requires fracking,
which causes serious environmental damage (a cost not included in corporate
accounting), and has an Energy Returned on Energy Invested ratio not of 80:1
but maybe 8:1 – and often costs way more to get out of the ground, recently averaging
around $60-$70 a barrel, than the market will bear. Right now West Texas
Intermediate crude is selling for $45. 58. And the sidebar articles on that NPR
story are about Bust arriving at the shale-oil Boom towns of North Dakota and
Montana.
Further, world crude production
has basically plateau’d since 2005. The economic “growth” reported since then
being mainly produced by cutting interest rates to near zero, creating an
enormous tower of unpayable debt.
I like to put The Situation this
way: The beginning is near.
That is, the beginning of a
return to a realistic outlook on How Things Work, no longer imagining that
never-ending “growth” on a finite planet could be possible, and realizing that
the fossil fuels were a one-time gift we have basically squandered by treating
that magical gift as though it was just another “resource” subject to market
supply & demand etc.
What am I talking about?
Consider that the energy contained in a barrel of oil enables us to get
physical work done today that would take a typically fit adult human at least
ten full-time work years to accomplish. At minimum wage, we would have to pay
that human at least $150,000. But we allow that barrel of oil to be sold on a
commodity market for $45.58. It is insane.
Gail Tverberg just day before
yesterday put up a convincing piece titled, “The Energy Problem Behind Trump’s
Election.” Check it out at: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/11/17/the-energy-problem-behind-trumps-election/
Other sources:
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