Bury your carbon, bury yourself
Are you among the 85% of adults who, according to MasterCard, state that "they're willing to take personal action to combat environmental and sustainability issues in 2021"? MasterCard has partnered with a Swedish company called Docotomy to unveil the new Do Black MasterCard — the world's first credit card with a carbon limit! Do Black "not only helps users track and measure CO2 emissions associated with their purchases but also puts a limit to the climate impact of their spending."
So instead of a spending limit in dollars, the card is limited by the climate impact of your purchases. The possibilities for voluntary and not so voluntary compliance are endless; however, as not all carbon is created equal, allowances will have to be made for the frequent, though necessary, private jet travel of the elites, as well as adjustable carbon allowances for various regions of the planet.
On a less personal level, a company called Navigator CO2 Ventures LLC is working hard to capture and sequester carbon (CCS) from the farmland of five Midwestern states, through an endeavor they've christened Heartland Greenway. As if CO2 were not really plant food, as formerly taught in grade school, Heartland Greenway wants to "capture and store 15 million metric tons of CO2 every year" from some of the world's richest farmland by building huge interconnected contraptions to capture, dehydrate, compress, and liquefy CO2, which would be transported via a 1,300-mile steel pipeline, then pumped into its permanent resting place in the ground, more than a mile below the surface.
And as if it were not an irredeemably boneheaded policy to burn our food supply in the midst of increasing worldwide famine — only to pour it into our gas tanks, project Heartland Greenway boasts that it "will help expand the market potential for corn-based ethanol by reducing its GHG [greenhouse gas] profile." Referring to ethanol as a renewable resource, by the way, is a major fallacy. Neither our topsoil nor our freshwater aquifers are renewable in any practical sense. What is renewable, however, is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey, where "nutrient pollution, primarily from agriculture [e.g., nitrogen from fertilizers] and developed land runoff in the Mississippi River watershed" fosters rampant growth of oxygen-depleting algae, to the significant detriment of marine life. There are no free lunches.
So long as China continues to build, every year, more than three times the number of new coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world combined, are we not expending an inordinate amount of resources tilting at windmills, so to speak? More to the point, the lure of using technology to monitor and control the minutiae of everyday life for billions of people is impossible for many of those in power to resist. Couple that with the capacity to make untold gobs of money chasing elaborate, expensive schemes to save the planet, and it's easy to see why the histrionics over "climate change" are not only explainable but inevitable. It's up to us, the chattel, to resist.
Image: nadjadonauer via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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