The Normalization of Madness

Climate change reveals the depths of evil and ignorance

Slim Pickens rides the bomb down as only a cowboy can in Dr. Strangelove, 1964. Yeah, it’s old, but a brilliant satire of human insanity directed by Stanley Kubrick with an outstanding cast. The message remains sadly relevant. Trailer here.

Certainly, as humanity faces extinction or near extinction in the most brutal manner imaginable, we will come to our senses. Certainly, as we create Hell on Earth in the form of biblical scale flood, fire and famine, we will unite in common cause. Certainly, we will finally recognize the differences of our skins are just skin deep, and unite to save our Garden of Eden. Certainly, we can now see we are part of nature, not above it, and work to tear the system down we have created, before it tears us down.

When the system you live in is killing you, that is madness. When virtually every act of every minute of every day decimates the world you depend on for life, that is madness. When every breath of air, every morsel of food, every gulp of water is made toxic by your own forced industriousness, that is madness. It’s a normalized madness, created by organized evil that views you as a unit of profit, nothing more, not worthy of support or investment, because that diminishes the god of the bottom line. If you die in this absurd machine, that’s of no concern, because there are a hundred desperate replacements willing to do the work of death. That’s what poverty is for.

When your body is filled with toxins and plastic, even that of your unborn child, yet to see sunlight on her face, that is evidence. When you have to stay indoors because the air is not safe, that is evidence. Every person dying in Phoenix, Mexico City, or New Delhi from heat is evidence. Every animal wild or domestic killed in flood or fire is evidence. Last fall when Mediterranean storm Daniel devastated Libya resulting in 6,000 dead and over 10,000 missing, that was evidence. Last summer, when 16.5 hectares (41 million acres) of Canada burned in one season, an area larger than the entire country of Greece, that was evidence.

Greece burned, too, which is why a gallon of olive oil is now north of $50, one of the first symptoms of an increasing world food crisis and endemic inflation to come. A short way across the Mediterranean Sea, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria broiled as well, but that was little reported because it’s Africa, not Europe a continent we colonial powers steal from. I had to dig hard for that information in The Economy is Going to Break. We don’t talk about Africa. Shh.

These events are not anomalies, they’re the earliest returns of our unsustainable madness, undeniable physical evidence of what’s to come, but with growing intensity and larger losses with every molecule of CO2 burned and methane released. Those releases are growing in spite of strides in renewables in the power sector, don’t be fooled. Also, beware those strides come with their own devastating consequences traditional to mining, including leaching toxic waste sites, groundwater contamination, human rights abuses, and competition for drinking and agricultural water as those supplies are over pumped on our ever hotter, evaporating planet.

Greenhouse gases continue to rise

Global average abundances of the major, long-lived greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, CFC-12 and CFC-11 - from the NOAA global air sampling network since the beginning of 1979. These five gases account for 96% of long-lived greenhouse gases since 1750. Carbon dioxide and methane are the biggest problems, followed by nitrous oxide. The only area dropping, CFCs are by far the smallest contributor to global warming. Source NOAA here.

We refuse to acknowledge the way of life achieved by fossil fuels is not sustainable. Never was, a blip in reality, a short mirage of 250 years compared to hundreds of thousands of Homo sapiens existence that is tapping out. They won’t tell you that, but I will, because somebody needs to speak the truth. Soon oil will be economically unviable to extract, costing more money and energy than can be gained to prop up this mindless, soul sucking consumerism we were born into and falsely taught is happiness. Most weren’t born into it and are impoverished by this system that provides ever more mindless inventions that destroy us both as communities and individuals. The world has been made poor, heartbreakingly so, by this heinous system called capitalism. Shh. We don’t talk about that. We’ve been brainwashed to equate unfettered consumption with freedom.

We don’t talk about reigning energy use in, which is absolutely part of the plan, whether we do it voluntarily or not. As a kid, I remember the 1973 Arab oil embargo. We were asked to drive 55, cars got smaller briefly, and we turned down our thermostats. Why are we not being appealed to again? Why are we not being told the truth, that our lives must and will change one way or another? Oh, I’ve got answers.

The following three graphics are from Goehring & Rozencwajg Associates LLC, who bill themselves as Global Natural Resources Investors. The Permian shale oil boom is drying up. Fast. An article on their website, The Permian Basin Is Depleting Faster Than We Thought, is compelling evidence from the enemy.

This energy boom which has unimaginably and foolishly made the US the number one oil producer in the world is about to go bust. Not joking. Fracking in the Permian Basin, an anchor to our GDP, is coming to an end. Read about it in The Vanished but Inevitable Return of Reality. Sure, we’ll use our military machine to get whatever oil we can, wherever we can, for as long as we can, but that vehicle is running out of gas, and there is no real plan, just greenwashing lies, an abused charade called carbon offsets (Chris Lang at REDD monitor does excellent work on this subject), and pretending EVs and so-called renewables mean our lives can continue as they have, unchanged forever. The same people who brought us climate change and employ child labor in the Congo to mine cobalt so we can enjoy TikTok on our “smart” phones are reassuring us of this. I’m certain they're not lying this time, considering the gravity of our situation. Surely oil companies will exhibit human values, since they were given the same rights intended for human beings by the wisdom of our noble highest court in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010.

Even as oil dwindles and our foolishly late turn to solar and wind are promoted, the true drivers of climate change, billionaires, plunge ahead, insisting oil is good to the last extractable drop, and bring us AI which uninhibited demands an exponential increase in energy consumption and massive water use in a world where both of those resources are diminishing, not increasing. I detailed this in Artificial Intelligence is Hot. Do we want vast new complexes of server farms and another layer of reality removed from our lives built on stolen intellectual property and western thinking bias, or cooling centers to save people? Do we want to deal with reality and move human beings away from coastlines and areas where heat will kill you if your power grid, not designed for these extremes, fails?

The lunatic billionaire vision, clearly the superior humans on Earth, as evidenced by their wealth, are doubling down to destroy it. They are so inhuman as to believe, after emerging from their bunkers (link from ultra conservative Forbes, I could give you twenty more) and having eliminated most of us, they will have solved the problem of diminishing resources and improved the human gene pool.

There were twenty-eight separate billion dollar climate disasters in the US alone last year. From 2017 to 2023 there were 137 separate billion-dollar disasters costing more than $1 trillion. This article from NOAA goes into great detail, the price we’re paying. In the meantime, $883.7 billion has been allocated to the 2025 military budget. Could we not be moving people out of harms way, strengthening our infrastructure, and protecting rather than killing people with much of that money?

The history of billion-dollar disasters in the United States each year from 1980 to 2023, showing event type (colors), frequency (left-hand vertical axis), and cost (right-hand vertical axis.) The number and cost of weather and climate disasters is rising due to a combination of population growth and development, along with the influence of human-caused climate change on some type of extreme events that lead to billion-dollar disasters. NOAA / NCEI.

Basically, the last man standing in a hardened shelter with his finger still on the smoking hot button wins. Or, as in Dr. Strangelove, everyone dies. Did you know, our military is looking at extracting resources from the Arctic as it melts in competition with China and Russia? It’s all here, backed up by military reports I found in my research. Seems like an excellent plan. The few left alive will need that energy to get to Mars to terraform a new world. Yes, we all know that’s the plan of Elon Musk and his billionaire competitors. I wonder if they will eat each other when they’re stunned to discover, that plan won’t work out?

Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop? Let’s consider what busy hands have created.

Dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, isn’t working out so well. Creeps are destroying our mental health and physical future. Heaven or Hell are on this planet, nowhere else. I don’t want those who believe in The Rapture in charge. Their beliefs will unnecessarily destroy us a billion years before the sun expands and burns up the planet. We are meant to be caretakers, not destroyers, that’s where wisdom, beauty and peace lie if we are to have a future.

However we were created, everything we need is here. We were unbelievably gifted. We have to earn our future. Fight for it.