King Wastes Euros, Elephants; CO2 Denier Blames Cows!


THOSE WHO TEACH WASTE OUGHT TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON.

Five millions Spaniards are unemployed (out of 40 million). And now the king broke his hip. How? He was in a safari. It turns out that the good king loves to assassinate elephants in Bostwana. Each time the king reaches ecstasy by killing one single elephant it costs 37,000 euros ($50,000) to European taxpayers (and even to the American ones: globalization, remember?) But there is no money for the 35% of Spanish youth who are unemployed. Each time the king presses the trigger, it’s more than two median family incomes in Spain, which go to pierce flesh. It’s highly symbolic: you earn it not, while the king penetrates a terrorized victim with it.

King Juan Carlos loves to pose with elephants he perforated with bullets. It makes him feel mighty, he has got to feel completely empty inside.

The truth is that this assassin of elephants was put in power by a fascist, the treacherous general, Franco, who killed more than a million Spaniards, while overthrowing the republic, and even more for years after that. With the crucial help of Texaco, and other American plutocrats, Mussolini and Hitler. Franco and his subalterns were even engaged in child trafficking (killing the parents to get the children; no wonder the Catholic church who has had an obsession with abusing children ever since Abraham, was all behind Franco: Opus Dei!)

The latter two, Mussolini and Hitler, were punished, but they were only the puppets of the former, a worldwide conspiracy of plutocrats, whose heirs are doing better than ever, thank you. We are moving in a new phase, where their role and tastes are becoming obvious, in part for an extremely sinister reason: they don’t feel they have to hide anymore.

Starve millions of Spaniards, kill the elephants. Hopefully they all suffer very much, pleasing Juan Carlos to no end.

After one more scandal too many, should one want to improve matters for the commons, Juan Carlos and his family ought to be removed from their influential position. We have seen enough of his kind. Juan Carlos, a Bourbon, that is a descendant of a family that made France suffer so much, is there because his ancestor, the sectarian criminal, Louis XIV of France, put him there. OK, first France had to win a war, the War of the Succession of Spain, an enormous world war that lasted more than 13 years, devastating all of Europe, and even America, but especially Spain, France and Germany.

The main reason why Spain could be democratized is that admiral Duke Carrero Blanco, Franco’s confidante and successor was thrown, still in his armored vehicle, into a ballistic trajectory by ETA. After overflying the church where he had attended mass, Prime Minister Blanco was in for a rude landing. He died later, after contemplating his crimes.

It’s high time for Spain to become a republic again, a generation after the fascists killed millions to make sure it was not. The fact that several members of Carlos’ family have been stealing Spain in full sight makes Spanish, hence European, recovery difficult.

We have seen that problem in Italy with Berlusconi. Now that Berlusconi is gone, a great cleaning has started. As much as 35% of Italy potential tax base is evaded, one now hears. Italians are poor, Italian political parties, are filthy rich. It turns out that some in one of the parties, the Ligua Norte, stole in excess of ten billion dollars. The son of the founder had never seen an expensive sport car the Ligua did not buy for him.

That reminds one of the Chinese Princelings who all go to Harvard, to live like princes. Plutocracy is a world phenomenon and Harvard is a crucial link of this somber conspiracy of unprecedented reach. Harvard profs wrote Saif Al Islam Qaddafi’s PhD thesis, passed in London at the urge of George Soros (another plutocrat multi billionaire). Bo, the son of Bo, famous for his extravagantly expensive lifestyle was in Harvard, but now that his mother has been accused of being an assassin, he has disappeared. Don’t worry: the daughter of the coming Chinese president is also in Harvard.

Some Harvard supporter told me that 60% of student there receive scholarships. Paid by American taxpayers? and does that mean we are left with 40% heirs of plutocrats, and 60% future sycophants? Plutocrats need servants. The latter can go to Harvard, and get acquainted to their masters, who are, conveniently enough, in the same locale.

Spain’s problems mostly arise from a conspiracy of the bankers with the politicians. Bankers, backed up by taxpayers, engaged, thanks to politicians into projects that could not bring a profit, but would just force the People of Spain (hence Europe) to pay them rent.

Time for the clean-up. It has to start with the symbols.

Just as there is a worldwide banking mafia feeding its pet politicians, academic and media, there is a worldwide fossil fuel mafia feeding the same sort of critters.    

Paul Handover from the excellent Learning From Dogs site has detected a new angle of the fossil fuel mafia. I thought that I saw I read everything from the CO2 deniers, but this reaches new heights of perversity! Thanks to Paul to bring this to light.

Arizona State University Professor Darnall claims that:

“Livestock generates more greenhouse gases than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet. In part, that’s because the methane from, well, the other end of cows, has 21 times the greenhouse gas warming effect as carbon dioxide.”

Whatever. Good trick to utter a lie, and then explain it with something true. Yet, Prof. Darnall does not even know her own propaganda well. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, CH4, over 20 years, is actually seventy-two times that of CO2, and twenty-five times over 100 years. However its global Global Warming effect may be as little as 25% that of CO2.

Methane from herding may have spared us a re-glaciation, 7,000 years ago, some scientists have suggested. The good professor rides on that notion all the way to hell.

There is crushing evidence that what the good professor says about cows is NOT just incorrect, it is outright absurd. And the absurdity is easy to demonstrate. Why? Because the CO2 went from 280 ppm (1800 CE) to 395 ppm, but only up to 460 ppm in CO2 equivalent (see Radiative Forcing, below).

As Paul Handover points out: Darnall’s solution? Meatless Mondays — to start curving that scary trend line.”

Just to visualize, that’s a lions’ diet. Once a week, lions at the zoo are NOT given meat, for better health. So prof. Darnall suggests that Americans, who, as Homo Sapiens, are omnivorous, should actually eat just like lions at the zoo, with “Meatless Mondays“.  

So even if all the supplementary CO2 like gases were all methane, CH4 (and they are not), one would get a methane contribution of only 30%, over the 1800 base.

The good prof. should have said that one could cut off all greenhouse gases of industrial origin. Some have 32,000 times the Greenhouse Warming Potential of CO2. One easy way to mitigate the greenhouse would be to outlaw them all. Their Radiative Forcing is about two-third that of methane, itself a third of CO2.

 So I would dare to say that the good professor’s discourse is corrupt. She looks cute like that, young and smiley, but she is out to seduce the big industrial interests of the fossil persuasion, or to seduce on their behalf. Obviously. It’s all about small people not doing enough, she says. They just eat too much of the bad stuff. Let them eat arugula instead.

This is typical: those who don’t want to change anything claim it’s enough to change a few little things: put the cardboard in the green container, eat grass, don’t shampoo, etc. In truth, the real problem is energy. Energy has to be made expensive. Why? Because it is. At this point, it is kept cheap by big armies, and an exploitative mentality. Even if there was no greenhouse and CO2 poisoning, fossil fuels will run out soon.

Whereas I say: rise energy taxes colossally, force professors, bankers and politicians to video-conference, instead of jetting around. I am myself jetting around right now, but it’s for (literally, vital family reasons). I have known professors who go around the world all the time, as if frequent flier miles were all they were really after, thanks to taxpayers’ ever more colossal generosity (does not beat Obama sending an army around his 13 year old to play solo student in Mexico, or Sarkozy recovering his bad belly adult son in Ukraine with one of the French republic’s fast jets).

I have not eaten much meat in my life (last time was a few months ago), so my defense of meat is altruistic. I know that in vast swathes of the planet, meat is the ONLY source of protein. Lack of proteins is a huge problem in Black African children, cattle and bush meat their salvation. We are far from arugula salad there. Cattle is also an important export and source of livelihood in the Third World.

There is probably more cattle in Africa than in the Americas. So not so good prof is saying millions of African children should go around with enormously distended bellies, and the poor there, getting poorer.

I am presently generating lots of CO2 myself, as I travel around the planet. But I am no hypocrite: I admit to it.

Plus, I have to do this for family reasons. I minimize air travel as much as possible. Out of dozens of flights, I remember just one for pure “tourism”. I may be somewhat hypocritical though, as my destiny was sprawled over three continents plus one archipelago. Thus I was condemned to conflate sightseeing and common decency. There are no free trips.

***

Patrice Ayme

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18 Responses to “King Wastes Euros, Elephants; CO2 Denier Blames Cows!”

  1. Old Geezer Says:

    “…In truth, the real problem is energy. Energy has to be made expensive. Why? Because it is. At this point, it is kept cheap by big armies, and an exploitative mentality…- PA

    Must agree and then disagree.

    Energy has to be made expensive. TRUE. Why? Because the banksters need global demand for all the US Dollars they have printed up. Remember, there is no gold standard – just an OIL STANDARD. All global oil exchanges denominate oil in US Dollars, and while the Chinese and Europeans cheat a little bit, the vast majority of trades (and hedge contracts) are denominated in USDs.

    And the big armies are NOT there to keep oil cheap. They are standing on the last reservoir of cheap oil in Iraq. And they intend to make sure it gets pumped out very slowly if at all.

    Gotta keep the price high so the world will not use USDs for toilet paper.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Being in the process of contemplating old Roman engineering, no time to think about this as it deserves… But I will. Rome got caught up in an ecological problem, though… World “got old“, as Romans used to say.
      PA

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    • Jens Says:

      Dear Old Geezer,

      Being Norwegian, I’m wondering if we could do good for the world by trading our oil in Euros rather than USD. It would at least lessen the incentive for Americans to keep the oil price high and doing it by creating conflict.

      However, the best thing Norway could do with its oil is to leave it in the ground. As much as I would like to see that happen, I don’t think it will and that the best thing I can hope for is that the oil money will be spend on R&D + infrastructure (basically dumping money on thorium reactors, smartgrids, hurrying up the off-shore wind generation projects, rail-buiding etc)…but that isn’t very likely either in the current political climate in Norway which is stuck in an entitlement rut and with non-visionary economists in the that simply have no idea of how to calculate cost-benefit on a larger scale in the long run.

      Jens

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      • Old Geezer Says:

        Wall $treet does NOT want the world trading oil for Euros. They have a monopoly on printing money, one that they do not want infringed upon.

        But keeping that $100 per barrel floor does make a lot of non-fossil ideas economically viable. Wind, Solar, Tidal, all look better. What we here in the USA need is a leader with some spine. Perhaps one day he will grow one.

        Slow travel is coming back. Even better would be virtual travel via fiber. Better still would be virtual office work from home with maybe one actual car trip to the office per week.

        All easy to do. They just take spine.

        Sigh.

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Dear Old Geezer. Agreed that the guiding lights in the USA do not want the world trading in euros. Krugman claimed it would make no difference, but he did not really have an argument, so it looks as if he was just saying what he knows his masters want him to say. As a further proof, he did not come up on that subject again, whereas he spends like forever attacking “republicans” one never heard of before…

          In truth, of course, if the world traded in euros, the USA would find itself quickly in the position Argentina used to enjoy NOT: with a collapsing currency. And I agree with you about pretty much keeping Iraqi oil in reserve. At this point I think they are prisonner of their private industry mythology… Except for banks, of course. But then there is propaganda that “monetary base” as Krugman makes a big deal of calling it, the money given by the Fed to banks, is, NOT, repeat, not, a gift by the state to banks… Private industry mythology say that all problems are best solved privately.

          But private is financed by banks, which have beeter things to do with their money…
          PA

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      • Patrice Ayme Says:

        Dear Jens: I read Norway has much more energetic reserves in Thorium, than in fossil fuels… Thorium tech should be developed on an emergency basis, as it is the only definitively feasible energy without ANY drawbacks long term. A Plutonium energy tech is readily feasible, but the pollution and military problems would be EXTREMELY difficult to surmount.

        Peopie do not understand we are in an energy catastrophe. A battle on two fronts, and we are not winning. Considering all the wind and hydro (storing) potential in Norway, and the low population, it’s understandable that Norwegian politicians have other worries… Probably creating new young Norwegians ought to be number one top priority… I wonder if that is how it’s perceived that way in Norway? (Apparently not, as my American born from a Norwegian born mother, sister in law was told she was not welcome as a citizen there?)
        PA

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      • Jens Says:

        Dear Old Geezer,

        Your sigh explains perfectly the politics of Norway. Patrice, using any type of nuclear power in Norway is unthinkable, regardless of the arguments, sigh. We have plenty of hydroelectric power, and since we are not a ember of the EU we are not interested in anything beyond our own navel. When it come to birth rates, Norway is doing pretty nicely compared to most of Europe, not entirely long term sustainable, but with immigration it should be ok compared to the rest of Europe.

        Norway has a sovereign wealth fund of about $500bn that recently has been renamed ‘the national pension fund’, yet there is now way it could ever pay for the pensions we have committed to pay. Due to all the extra unexpected oil money in Norway (we had previously calculated a long term oil price of about $50), the budgets are inflating and any kind of prioritisation is not going to happen. Norway is officially aiming to become a ‘knowledge economy’, yet we are not investing anywhere near the same amount as other Scandinavian countries in R&D as percentage of GDP.

        Norwegian oil money goes to bloating local government who are not responsible for raising their own tax and hence the most clever thing they can do is to fuck up so they get more money from the central government to help their suffering population. Also, the oil money goes into raising the wage for everyone…but what do they use it for? Either buying Chinese products + expensive marketing or air travel (biggest air travellers in Europe).

        Regardless of some good things in Norway, it is pretty much a fucked up resource diseased country like many African countries and Russia as well as some central Asian ones. In my mind if you want to look at the best countries, Sweden Finland and the Netherlands are good candidates. Canada is good apart from their awful oil extraction,but their immigration policy is beautiful, and they have a nicely European take on North American culture that to me, brings out a lot of good, together with their ethnic and cultural diversity that might be second to none in the world. Senegal sounds awesome but I know no more than what I have read here. Japan is stuck in limbo between so many god things and so many bad ones,but if you look at their net investment position they are really in good shape economically, even if their government might seem indebted. The best places I’ve seen culturally have been San Francisco and Berlin, but intellectually, the best place is the internet.

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Dear Jens: just back from the Pantheon (no kidding!). Amazing. Soaring concrete dome, no support inside, 150 feet tall. Took more than a millennium to be replicated….
          I saw a Norwegian expert report, a few years back that, subliminally said: Norway will become the Thorium nation… When all the fossil fuels are gone, the Thorium beckons.
          Clowns in California had said a High Speed Line HSL San Francisco to LA would cost more than $100 billions. They said that for ten years, before realizing that trains can go over conventional lines when entering urban areas. That’s the way it’s done in Europe, especially France. Anyway that brings the cost down to $60 billions… And it’s much faster to build, too…
          Maglev do not have that advantage, and that kills it.
          Also maglevs fly, so they have to very light. But magnets are very heavy. So maglevs are built of magnesium, etc. They catch fire easily. Plus they don’t have emergency breaking as steel wheels have. Finally Train Grande Vitesse tests when the top experimental-maglev speed was nearly reached, were limited by aerodynamics, not steel wheels, rail, or catenary problems. The latter are expected to arise above 600km/h…
          PA

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  2. Jens Says:

    Dear Patrce,
    Energy does need to be expensive. Pressurising organic material for 100 million years is indeed a ridiculously expensive process and simply ignoring that fact is not very clever. So activities like flying should cost a lot and only be used when they have to.

    But another aspect of ‘not-flying’ is that it will take more time to travel. Let’s say someone wants to travel from the west coast to the east coast of the us, from San Francisco to New York. The travel time will be about 3.5 days. The key issue here, for a lot of people, is time. People simply don’t have the ability to take 3.5*2 days of work to go to New York and back. In my mind one should have the ability to take time off work without pay if one wants to or need to and plan it far in advance, but it is (often) just not done. Also, if one works mostly through a computer, one could bring the computer on the train and work while travelling. Yet even this would be frowned upon by many bosses.

    In Norway it is getting increasingly common with an arrangement for workers called ‘flexitime’. The standard is a 40hr (37.5hr work + 5 30 min breaks) week, but one can work 8 hrs more one week, and take a day off next week. If the same flexibility is awarded to weekends, and the standard is that you work an average of 1800hrs per year (US average). Then ideally, although some planning needs to go into this, you can arrange it so that you have all the time in the world to travel more slowly, without using up so much carbon.

    When it comes to food production, I doubt the reliability of such figures. I have a sneaking suspicion that corn fed cows produce a lot more CO2 equivalents than ones eating grass. But there are many types of meat, and also fish. But indeed there is no doubt eating animals is healthy (you won’t get sick from eating a healthy animal, but animals from industrial farming are not healthy), and can provide vital nutrients for many. Additionally, simply switching to plant food does absolutely nothing with the devastating consequences of the monoculture/poison mix. This industrial growing of plants is outdated, and it destroys ecosystems on a large scale. Also we are no longer as reliant on it as we don’t really need as many people working in secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy (most services and industrial production can be automated), and can afford more people being involved in farming.

    Now if the real cost of energy had been paid, then all kinds of capital intensive farming would not be profitable, whereas just as productive and much more healthy methods could be used, but indeed more people would have to work in the primary sector.

    Jens

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Jens: Agreed for flextime, video conferences, etc. french Very High Speed lines have been built, for a decade or so for 400 km/h. (Although SNCF does not want to operate above 350 km/h, at this point.) Standard Siemens train on the standard VHS line Barcelona-Madrid have reached 400 km/h. The record of ground speed so far is around 575 km/h (French TGV and Xperimental Jap Maglev). The limit was mostly from aerodyanmics…
      In any case, at 400 km/h, crossing the USA downtown to downtown would take around 11 hours. This is just a tiny bit more than taking the taxi/shutle, checking in, passing security, sitting in plane, taxiing, etc… I just crossed the USA three days ago, and can bear witness…

      You are right that the question of how to feed humankind is vastly complicated. In particular, corn is a disaster, as it needs much water and fertilizers, whereas potatoes are excellent…
      PA

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      • Jens Says:

        Dear Patrice,

        If you want to build a new east coast to west coast line in the US the obvious choice is maglev though. It is proven to operate at at least 420kmh, but if you upgrade it a few years later with a vacuum tube you can make any speed you want. It has been suggested that 700kmh is possible and probably even faster than air planes travel could be achievable. At the moment though, the biggest obstacle to maglev is that people don’t see the immediate ridership within 10 years. If you look at the next 20-60 years though, the ridership becomes obvious. I think that a mix of maglev and conventional rail is the best way to develop so you can accommodate for shorter and less travelled distances as well as freight, could be covered with cheaper technology, whereas distances like SD-LA-SF is an obvious candidate for maglev. But it all depends on pricing energy correctly to achieve this.

        This link gives a few hints to how wrong transport subsidies have gone in the US: http://www.trainweb.org/moksrail/advocacy/resources/subsidies/transport.htm

        When it comes to food, I have no doubt that more labour intensive but much less ecosystem intensive permaculture is the way to go. But to an extent, I think way too few people are involved in agriculture. Because agriculture is not only producing food, but also tending the ecosystem on our planet, and hence in both ways perhaps the most important task we have. This should be more important than the 2% of GDP it is in the west!

        Jens

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  3. LuigiG Says:

    Buongiorno Patrice,
    Quando leggo i tuoi messaggi intitolati PLUTOCRAZIE ho sempre un soprassalto, questo perché il primo uomo politico a usare questo termine
    pubblicamente é stato MUSSOLINI.
    Ricordo con raccapriccio la dichiarazione di guerra di M. da piazza Venezia ” le PLUTOCRAZIE europee”

    Like

    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Luigi: OK, I am sure that Mussolini also said “buogiorno”. However… that does not mean he really meant it, nor that I should abstain from using it.
      The theory that plutocracy is nefarious, is not really new, in the sense that it was already exposed theoretically 22 centuries ago, in a book we still have. Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler all claimed to be socialist and anti-plutocratic. That’s how they got, and stayed in power: by claiming to be the opposite of what they were. In other news, Obama claimed to be for “change we can believe” (compatible with zero change, as that’s all we can believe).

      MY definition of plutocracy encompasses all and any tyranny. It’s not just about money. Plutocracy is all about believing that the basest instincts are we need to lead society for the best.
      PA

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  4. Geo Says:

    Your stuff on Juan Carlos was brilliantly illustrative. Remember Gogol’s immortal ‘Diary of a Madman’ — where the protagonist ends up imprisoned suffering from his delusion that he is the king of Spain? And here it turns out today that those plutocrats considered sane are madder than any of us! But it has always been so. Your stuff on ‘Trading with the enemy’ and other scandals of the WWII era, so suppressed here in the US was actually something I thought I knew something about. Your influence though has had me reread much of the available literature, and I must tell you, I don’t know if it is the effect of age and having more of a context within which to place every new thing one contemplates, but it is so depressing to think about I can barely go on.

    Little sense complaining personally given what others have suffered.

    How people live contemplating such injustice and inequality is beyond me. Television, I suppose.

    Another chilling and frightening essay by you, and fascinating as ever.

    Like

    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Geo: Thank you for all the compliments, they warm my heart. It also encourages me to keep on going, the way I went, daring to say what’s definitively not PC.

      I switched continents momentarily, for family reasons, and had to go through Rome for business reasons. I am using the occasion to visit the remnants of the civilizations which thrived here, in various guises. I takes lots of pics, of lots of details. So far this visit reinforces what I thought, before, but some time very mightily. It’s very obvious that the degeneracy and fall of antique Rome was a huge loss

      It’s also fascinating to read all what written in Saint Peter, and get penetrated by the “Christian RESPUBLICA” theme… “Constitution”, “science”, etc are explicitly mentionned… To see Muslims inside, as I did, was also interesting, considering the reciprocal in not true in lots of places of Islam… Also the violations of the bible’s
      commandments is a sight to behold…

      It’s true one can feel discouraged (that’s why comments from readers are precious, especially when positive!) However, discouragement is no positive outcome at this point.

      Yes, in WWII, the most important collaborators of Hitler were actually not within his reach, it was rather the other way around!
      PA

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      • Geo Says:

        Yes, the fall of antique Rome. And now we live, while we do, through this decade of facebook, and high frequency trading overlaying the usual multitudes caught in hunger, war, disease and every kind of frailty and talent. Quite a way we have come in 2000 years while nearly standing still oh so predominantly and until fairly recently. Fate of speciazation, colonization, exploitation, all life in the face of entropy. How adaptable will people turn out to be? And in the face of what exactly? The puzzle, one might think or hope, is shared, but each sees a nearly unique and changing facet. We’ve already lived and seen so many extremes, who would venture to guess?

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          dear Geo: I spent the whole day going around another part of Rome I did not go through before. What an amazing city! But the Romans of old did not live of empire alone. fantastic engineering was of their essence. Touching 2,000 year old Roman concrete is very enlightening… I knew the answer already, but still… I know it much more now. I am full of zillions of newish things to say…
          PA

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