Income inequality, the divide.


Professor Reich at UC Berkeley

* Robert is an endangered species.

Fossil Kapitalism - Ever onward to maximum profits and minimum happiness.  Increase the misery.

I add the K but it is a C in the title.  K is the answer to the problems C causes.

Father Karl looked at the relationship of labor and capital to produce the 'commodity'.  As Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.  A comparison I have not been fond of.  It is confusing, but the fact is.  Oil MULTIPLIES labor and can't be neglected from a proper analysis of economic conditions, Father Karl style.

As I have been saying like a broken record going round and round and round so much I am dizzy.  We let the money do our thinking and it is KILLING US.

FOSSIL CAPITAL is self expanding value (profit) generated by the metamorhphosis of fossil fuels into CO2 gas.  Profit generated through the service of fossil fuels.

Climate change human extinction and capitalism are joined at the hip.

The video mentions the book 'Losing Earth' by Nathaniel Rich.  Here is what Nathaniel says :

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world's tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming "a prescription for long-term disaster." Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world's leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?  <-- Capitalism has veto power on that decision (KD)

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world's major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we've come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

And Capitalism!  All hail the Musk .

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth's atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the "greenhouse effect" — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Why didn't we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that "most scientists believe global warming is occurring," and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president's Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, "There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself." The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the "American way of life" in order to drastically increase global carbon emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that "the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division." If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the '80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously that it was "urgently necessary" to act. Four months later, at the Group of 7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world's seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn't.

The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change's second chapter — call it The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist   who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.

100 Hansens would have changed the world.  We only had one.

Humanity is not smart enough to figure out that if money got us into this mess, perhaps money could get us out.  Let the obstacle become the way.


Carbon Fee and Dividend puts a tax on carbon AND DISTRIBUTES THE PROCEEDS TO THE PEOPLE.

Gas becomes expensive as FUCK but since YOU GET THE TAX you can still drive if you want to.

BUT YOU COULD CHOOSE TO DRIVE LESS AND GET RICH.

The dumfucks of the world can't understand this.  Too busy dreaming of being the Musk or Bezos to actually care about making their own life better.

I made the last video a couple of years ago.  I found it at the Museum Website.

James Explains How Fee and Dividend is different in the video about halfway through.  This link has more info.

What could have been.

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2023, 11:04 AMAs Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.

I didn't know the math that way.  According to Jason Heppenstall, Homo Saps on the planet are the equivalent of 22 Billion Energy Slaves.  Divide by 8 Billion people, 1 person= ~3 Energy Slaves.  How much is an energy slave worth?  1 gallon of gas?  1 Kw of electricity?  1 Joule?  1 BTU?  Dunno.

The point of this number of course is to demonstrate how much Work a Homo Sap can do versus how much Work a Barrel of Oil can do, but that number varies on the type of machine the oil is used to run and its efficiency at converting Heat to Work.  Muscles are actually very efficient converters of chemical energy to work without burning the same way you burn oil to get work done, which usually involves pistons or turbines.  Muscles take ATP and the energy released by breaking a phosphate bond to make the muscle contract, and the ATP is formed by running glucose through an electron transport chain that adds enough energy to ADP to allow it to hook on an extra phosphate group.  Basic biochemistry here.  The glucose is the energy fuel homo saps use, along with fat (oil) which we use to store energy on our bodies.  That tire around your waistline is actually your personal gas tank of stored energy.

FAT on your body is actually close to equal in energy to a similar quantity of oil, but you would have to be darn fat to carry around 55 gallons of body fat.  Say the typical person carries 10 gal of fat?  So you have to render down 5 people to fill one 55 gallon drum of oil! 

RE

Quote from: 18hammers on Nov 22, 2023, 02:24 PM

Quote from: RE on Nov 22, 2023, 01:11 PM

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 22, 2023, 11:04 AMAs Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.

I didn't know the math that way.  According to Jason Heppenstall, Homo Saps on the planet are the equivalent of 22 Billion Energy Slaves.  Divide by 8 Billion people, 1 person= ~3 Energy Slaves.  How much is an energy slave worth?  1 gallon of gas?  1 Kw of electricity?  1 Joule?  1 BTU?  Dunno.

It is a hard number to quantify, some assumptions need to be made but roughly if a young fit slave you should net 1kwh of work from him, less as they age.

How many kwh in a 55 gal drum of crude?  How much after it is refined down to gas?  Down to Diesel?  Down to jet fuel?

RE

I have an answer.

One approximation suggests that a barrel of oil contains roughly 4.5 to 6 years of human labor,

That tells us nothing.  I have to chew on this.

One gallon of diesel can take a fully loaded semi up a 10% grade over a mountain pass and the engine will cut out just as the truck reaches the summit.


Now using a series of posts sunk into the road on which hand winches can attach we find out how long it takes One Joe Six Pack to winch the truck up the same path.

Several weeks of cranking to produce the same result for sure.  The time to move between hitching posts does not count.  Diesel is obtained from a barrel of crude at an efficiency of slightly less than half.  So twenty gallons (a barrel is 42) times several weeks. 

Is in the ball park of 4.5 to 6 years considering a barrel gives more than diesel when it is refined.

* If the earth is 4.5 billion years old and Sisyphus had been rolling stone all that time he would have rolled up the equivalent of a third of Alaska's total oil endowment (as of 2021) in terms of energy used.  But Sisyphus is a good stone roller.  He would have put out the equivalent of all of Alaska's oil by now.



Twenty thousand slaves harnessed in front of a semi truck like the twenty mule teams of the old west could haul the semi no problem.  Only a few hundred would be needed.

A human being can sustainable produce 50-150 watts of mechanical energy. That number seems pretty consistent across most sources I've found researching various energy topics. A gallon of gasoline has roughly 34 kWhrs of energy in it. So at the high end assuming a 30 percent efficiency in a gas engine, and a fit human say 34 x 0.3 /0.15 or 68 hours of labour for the labour of 1 gallon of gasoline. I don't like when they use the full energy content of gas and substitute it for labour as it does not take into account the efficiency of use. I did just amend my original numbers as I was using numbers for younger more athletic types. I was fascinated with human powered machines for a while. There was even a thread I used to follow where a recombinant bicycle was hooked up to a hydraulic pump to run tractor accessories. There are efficiencies to be gained though to cut that number down. Take an excavator for example. Having hand dug many 4 ft deep 25 in wide footing holes I can tell you they are awesome. They can easily replace my 24 hours of digging with 1 hour of work. Then it gets messy though. They get freighted in by truck, must use roads that are built with fuel, often coated in asphalt, and have a staggering embedded energy number. So all those numbers should count against their efficiency but I never see that part written down.

Eco-socialism? Has the DD turned into a WEF outpost? You guys get that the eco-socialists are already in control of our institutions and pandemics are just one of the means of their depopulation plans?

Quote from: whd on Nov 23, 2023, 05:12 PMEco-socialism? Has the DD turned into a WEF outpost? You guys get that the eco-socialists are already in control of our institutions and pandemics are just one of the means of their depopulation plans?

Considering the WEF is 100% capitalist which has nothing to do with socialism I have to ask you to clarify what you mean.

Regarding socialism and this website much of it has to do with me.

In line with 'Save as many as you can.' as RE says, my position is that you can't expect people to comply with doing the right thing (whatever that is) unless there is a PAYBACK for them.

Guaranteed work and Universal Heath care are PAYBACKS which the upper class has convinced every right-wing nutter between the east and west coasts to think of as bad.  Are you one of them?  You put eco-socialism and the WEF in the same sentence so I am thinking you may be.

The best thing we could do is implement Carbon Dividends but that would mean 'they' the imaginary left wing hordes of SOCIALISTS would be taking over.

You can't say the eco-socialists are in control when you can't even name one.  I am calling you out on that.  Name an eco-socialist, or if you cannot name one, tell me what one is and I will let you know if you are right or not.

And the prevailing winds of Doom indicate NOBODY is in control.

The WEF is stakeholder fascist, making common cause with the eco-socialists undermining all our institutions. Basically, anyone who thinks climate justice is race and gender justice, aka woke. That is the basic message of the WEF, which is Capitalist like the CCP is capitalist. Green is the new red brigade. CBDC will be the key, all those woke/trans ideologues admining cancellation of anyone questioning the Narrative, like that boy toy leading Canada during Covid. Which means everybody here, likely. .

Quote from: whd on Nov 23, 2023, 07:39 PMBy everybody here I mean, CBDC will get everybody here cancelled.

What is the CBDC?

If you mean -- Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) do tell how changing how rich people define and keep money changes the plight of the poor?

There are many ways to be cancelled, worrying about digital currency being a primary cause is not one of them.  But you are free to disagree and explain why and how.

When I meet people who worry about digital currency the thought always goes through my mind to ask : "You do realize there are three letter government agencies that can already cancel your credit cards any time they want.  Don't you?", but the desire to ask is not strong.  Such people for the most part are talking to themselves and would not listen.  They do not know they already wear chains.

A primary point of a CBDC is to prevent the unwashed masses from buying gas, guns or meat. It will also be tied to AI: "At 3:07pm you stated on ----- website that ------ official is a 'kidfucker'; 150 Fedbits have been deleted from your account"..."Your Fedbit account has been cancelled because you have said three times in the the past thirty days that Fedbits are a conspiracy to cancel dissidents."

Of course Intelligence can cancel your accounts, but that is so 20th century. Once it is all digital and AI, they can all claim it isn't happening.

Yeah, and, line up for your monthly mRNA boosters or lose your Fedbit account....

WHD returns to the Diner packing WMDs for the WEF , mRNA & CBDCs.  WTF I am LMAO.    AFAIK I will BBL.

RE

I wonder why

Quote"You do realize there are three letter government agencies that can already cancel your credit cards any time they want.  Don't you?"

always gets ignored.  It mystifies me that the truly paranoid never consider that shit already happens.  It always is in a future and never right now to them.

Quote from: K-Dog on Nov 23, 2023, 09:12 PMI wonder why

Quote"You do realize there are three letter government agencies that can already cancel your credit cards any time they want.  Don't you?"

always gets ignored.  It mystifies me that the truly paranoid never consider that shit already happens.  It always is in a future and never right now to them.

Which is why many people who are at-risk of being targeted for investigation by the FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, NSA, CIA, INS, TSA or BHS keep a substantial amount of money in CASH in Safe Deposit Boxes or buried in one of the National Parks off the main trails and keep the lat/lon of the location in a file encrypted with GPG4USB on a MicroSD card in a waterproof capsule they store in their Prison Wallet.  Not only your Credit Cards can be stopped, but you bank accouunts and stock trading accounts all can be frozen in a matter of seconds leaving you only with the money you have on you if you need to skip town.

This of course is the reason for numbered Swiss Bank Accts, Cayman Islands Accts and why many held very high hopes for Crypto as a means for having stored money Da Goobermint can't touch if you run afoul of their approval of your activities.  Of course, folks whose activities include things like Drug Smuggling and Weapons Trafficking have a lot to worry about in this regard, so most people tend to believe if you are just a nice law abiding citizen you have nothing to worry about, but sadlly that is not necessarily true.  Mistaken Identity and Identity Theft can be a problem, and targeting for political purposes is most certainly possible also.  J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI was well known for making miserable the lives of anyone he disagreed with politically who had even limited notoriety.

Crypto has turned out to be not so great and Gold can be problematic due to the fact any transactions over I think $600 have to be reported to the IRS.  Offshore bank accounts can be hard to get the money from if you don't have a functioning bank acct here to transfer money to.  So, CASH remains King as the money safety valve in the world of plastic and digital currency that has evolved.

Cash itself can be a problem to work with except in small transactions of say <$10K, but once you wanna buy something bigger than that it can be difficult to pay cash.  If you walk into a Porsche dealership and wish to pay Cash for a 2023 Porsche 911 which retails around $300K, I'm pretty sure a call will be made to the local cops on the high probability you are a drug dealer. lol.  Same thing buying a house, I'm not sure walking into a closing with a briefcase with $500K in it to buy a McMansion if it is that easy to just hand over the briefcase and get the Title signed over by the seller without having bankers and lawyers all hovering around.

In any event, I have never had that much surplus money around to need to bury it or use a safe deposit box, but I have always recommended all Doomers keep a few grand in cash around for emergencies.  On occassions all the cash machines and store POS registers all suffer an outtage, having cash to buy your smokes is essential.

RE