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Page added on February 29, 2020
The Greatest Crime in History: How it is Being Perpetrated in Front of Your Eyes.
A few years ago, I was sitting in the audience of a conference on energy. There appeared a Japanese researcher who spoke for half an hour on how they were exploring the possibility of extracting methane hydrates from the Pacific Ocean. For a while, I thought it was a joke. Then it was clear that he was speaking seriously. His company had obtained grant money from the Japanese government to do exactly what they were doing: studying how to extract hydrates from undersea deposits.
When the time for questions came, I thought to rise up and tell him something like, “you are a criminal. You are worse than Hitler, Saddam, and Genghis Khan, all together. You should be arrested and shot.” But I didn’t do anything like that, after all, this guy had simply used some of his grant money to take a tourist trip to Europe. I think other people in the audience thought the same because he was asked just a couple of trivial questions. Then he left, not to be seen around again.
You may have heard about methane hydrates: they are an enormous reservoir of methane created long ago by bacterial activity and stored underground at low temperatures in the Northern permafrost and under the ocean floor. And you know that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, fortunately present in minute amounts in the atmosphere today. But the carbon in the stock of hydrates is probably at least twice as large as the amount of carbon in the whole atmosphere. And, obviously, if this methane were to be released into the atmosphere . . . If it were done for real, it would be the final crime against humankind. The past exterminations carried out by the great dictators of the past would be just jokes in comparison.
How can people be so disconnected from reality? It seems just one manifestation of a basic problem of the human mind: it can tackle only one problem at a time. When we are worried about something specific, all the rest fades in the fog. So, the city of Florence declared the climate emergency and then lobbied hard to build a larger airport nearby (they failed, at least some good news, but they are insisting). Not the only example, of course: when mad ideas such as extracting fuels from methane hydrates are proposed, nobody seems to be overly incensed.
Right now, there is a moment of frenzied activity of the mining industry in telling us what they are going to do to solve the problem of mineral depletion. How they are going to exploit marine resources to produce all sorts of minerals, how they are going to develop nuclear drills to go deeper in the search for oil, gas, and whatever. And the old idea of getting minerals from space continues to be proposed.
It all smacks of desperation and that’s good: but never underestimate the craftiness of the clever monkeys that populate this planet. They can still do a lot of damage.
9 Comments on "The Greatest Crime in History: How it is Being Perpetrated in Front of Your Eyes."
Sissyfuss on Sat, 29th Feb 2020 10:26 am
Methane hydrates exist at the bottom of the barrel waiting to be scraped. Efforts to harvest them are acts of desperation masquerading as progress.
Alice Friedemann on Sat, 29th Feb 2020 11:47 am
I’m not the least bit worried
Why we aren’t mining methane hydrates now — or perhaps ever
http://energyskeptic.com/2014/methane-hydrates/
Duncan Idaho on Sat, 29th Feb 2020 12:02 pm
“A thin layer of very rich, a thicker coating of the well off and middle class debt slaves with the bulk of the people living hand to mouth and many dying off.”
makati1 on Sat, 29th Feb 2020 6:21 pm
Or, a thin layer of future guillotine victims soon to be beheaded as the rest of the population decides they are expendable. I’ll buy the machines if someone will use them on the top 1%.
Abraham van Helsing on Sun, 1st Mar 2020 3:15 am
Perhaps a wind turbine? Solar panel?
Oh wait. This is Anglosphere where these devices are magically dependent on fossil fuel. The experts said so.
Davy on Sun, 1st Mar 2020 4:35 am
“The Countries Best And Worst Prepared For An Epidemic”
https://tinyurl.com/tfz6dfe statista
“The United States was named as the country with the strongest measures in place and it came first with 83.5 out of 100. The United Kingdom came second with 77.9 followed by the Netherlands with 75.6. China, which has initiated a series of lockdowns in response to the outbreak, comes 51st with a score of 48.2. This map shows levels of preparation across the world and Africa’s vulnerability is immediately noticeable. It has struggled with serious diseases in the past and in 2014 a major Ebola outbreak devastated parts of West Africa, killing over 10,000 people. So far, countries in Africa have only reported 3 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Nevertheless, the continent has some of the weakest countries when it comes to containing disease with Equatorial Guinea (16.2) and Somalia (16.6) the worst scoring countries in the Global Health Security Index.”
Davy on Sun, 1st Mar 2020 5:16 am
“Meanwhile At A Costco In Brooklyn, The Hoarding Begins”
https://tinyurl.com/w9br74k zero hedge
“The same long lines that we’ve seen in China, Japan, South Korea, and across the world as people panic buy food and health supplies have started in the US. On Saturday, the US Surgeon General urged people to “stop buying masks,” saying on Twitter that they’re not effective in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus. Despite the CDC telling everyone to calm down, alleged video of long lines pouring out of a Costco store in Brooklyn, New York, surfaced on YouTube Saturday afternoon. This comes days after we reported Hawaiians raced to Sam’s Club and Costco to panic buy food and health supplies as virus fears surge. And as we noted earlier today: “The great panic of 2020 is underway” as Americans are now stocking up on supplies as a pandemic could be imminent.”
Davy on Sun, 1st Mar 2020 6:11 am
Hi, juanPee, maybe you have noticed I decided not to play your games for a while. It get boring and you are just a mindless troll. I don’t think you will ever change either. Many people with mental illness never get better. You are likely one of them.
More Lunatic Davy Mindless Trolling on Sun, 1st Mar 2020 10:48 am
Davy on Sun, 1st Mar 2020 6:11 am