Chapter 10: The Vanguard Party Is Not What You Think It Is: Part V

I'm still not done with why communism hopping in bed with the fossil fuel industry by proxy is a great idea masquerading as a terrible one. Advance yourself, in your mind's eye, to one hundred years after a successful worldwide socialist revolution. The Sahara Rainforest easily feeds Africa with more than enough room for more wildlife than the continent's seen in geological eras. The descendants of the millions who fled the coasts for Nevada's high desert agricultural collectives now live in redwood cloud forest, along a canal network pushing water from the Mississippi Basin to California and all points in between, and now world shipping even travels through this so-called "Midwest Passage." Australia's just recorded its one billionth person as a baby boom and immigration help populate the new Outback jungles. And along every coast everywhere, record seafood catches are being landed sustainably, the downstream effect of planting so many coral reefs and kelp forests after the revolution.

Everything is going wonderfully, except for the millions of people living and working in the Antarctic, where the glaciers have begun to uproot the experimental boreal forests planted in their path, and all the introduced wildlife that sustains. All the carbon those many new forests and jungles and coral reefs have sequestered was keeping the planet warm at night. Too warm, hence the planting of those things, but that problem has passed and now the Earth's ecosystems demand a much higher level of carbon output to sustain themselves. Global warming caused by humans has given way to global cooling caused by humans.

The socialist governments of Earth get together to try to decide what to do. Someone suggests, if the forests are gobbling up twice as much carbon as can be safely taken out of the air, why not rip out half the forests? That guy is laughed out of the room, because no country wants to give up the sustainable powerhouses of their new socialist economies. Finally, it falls to someone who's always been too honest for their own good to suggest bringing the old fossil fuel infrastructure out of mothballs, restarting limited mining and extractive activities for fossil fuels, and adding this now-inefficient fuel back into the energy mix, not so much because solar power satellites or cold fusion or whatever we're using by then can't power our economy, but because the Earth needs a thermostat and a fossil fuel industrial complex working in tandem with massive food forestry is the next best thing to that.

Liberals do not do any real work for a living, nothing more complicated than using Microsoft Office. This means that when they hear something is bad, they have no personal understanding of The Thing That Is Bad that may limit their hostility. The Thing That Is Bad is just bad, full stop, no matter what, and if you don't agree, well, you're an idiot who's part of the problem. This works in Antifa, although even there the liberals inevitably take it too far, as with the hipster that drop-kicked a pro-life woman. But it doesn't work anywhere else. Liberals turn their inchoate rage on guns, spouting off their little fixits without knowing the first thing about how a gun works or having shot one themselves. Their fixits sound hilarious to anyone who is familiar with guns or gun culture, because they are so removed from reality.

But nowhere has this liberal crusade against The Thing That Is Wrong reached levels of absolute bullheaded stupidity than the environmental movement. Michael Moore recently put out a movie, Planet of the Humans, where he points out that solar panels and wind turbines in and of themselves won't end climate change, because climate change is driven by capitalist economics. Michael Moore isn't a communist, but he is organically closer to the American working class than most people in the mainstream media. He also happens to be preaching the correct line in this movie, but you wouldn't know it by the number of "Marxists" screeching about how Michael Moore denies climate change now, or some dumb shit like that. What really happened is that Big Solar has lobbyists now, and all these class traitor Bernie voters haven't quite learned to spot liberal bullshit coming from an environmentalist direction yet.

So if they're going to do that to Michael Moore for holding fast to the correct line, I fully expect them to nail a sign saying "Kent Chamberlain, Rex Proletarius" above my head when they crucify me for saying what I'm about to say: we need to end climate change, but we still need a fossil fuels industry as we do it.

For starters, the entire infrastructure built to accommodate natural gas is entirely renewable if we decide to make it so. The sunk cost problem that faces society with all other fossil fuel infrastructure simply doesn't exist here. Natural gas is methane. Plants produce methane. Normally, it just goes into the atmosphere, where it's 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It should be technologically feasible for every greenhouse to have a filter to trap the methane produced by the plants, and from there it can be sold through our natural gas infrastructure as a climate-friendly fuel that reduces the greenhouse effect when burned. If we stop putting fracked gas in those pipes and start putting renewable methane sourced from plants, it becomes yet another way to turn solar energy into electricity. Given the vast extent of this infrastructure, and that especially in the homes of the working class it isn't always duplicated by electricity, we will need to preserve and possibly even build out further this infrastructure in a socialist America.

Furthermore, there is a chemical in coal that is a required ingredient of certain forms of solar panel. It is too early to say for certain which particular solar technology will come to dominate the market. But if it is the form dependent on this particular chemical, then there will always be a market for coal, albeit a smaller market than exists today.

Similarly, although we have other and better ways to derive dye, most colors can be derived from coal dyes. Immediately after the revolution, a socialist American government trying to put coal workers back to work without hastening climate change might temporarily step up society's use of coal dyes to provide a cleaner market for coal until better uses can be found.

That future socialist America will definitely want to find some bridge to the future to keep its coal industry alive, however, because its greatest days lie ahead of it yet. The settlement of space will create a market for coal (and other fossil fuels, but especially coal) that will dwarf the present market. Jeff Bezos, in a strange fit of being right about something, predicts that once society can do asteroid mining and metallurgical work on a massive scale in space, we will create space habitats to live in. He predicts, again rightly in my view, that the standard form these habitats will take are O'Neill cylinders. An O'Neill cylinder is like a big soda can, at least a fraction of a mile wide but could be up to 20 miles wide with current technology, and however long you care to make it. They spin to provide gravity inside, at whatever strength desired, and the bigger the O'Neill cylinder, the smaller the Coriolis effect that distinguishes it from true gravity.

A socialist American government will inevitably see the wisdom in mass-producing these O'Neill cylinders in order to create space farms, ecological habitats, and living areas. One thing all of these habitats will need is air; another is breathable air; and a third is plants to turn the former into the latter. But where do we get the carbon dioxide for these cylinders that the plants will turn into oxygen for us? The answer is simple: fossil fuels. Set up a coal plant in every O'Neill cylinder and have it provide the energy and the atmosphere both for further development once its shell is built. The fumes it belches and the energy it generates will sustain plant life in the habitat, and once the O'Neill cylinder has a self-contained carbon cycle (which it may never, if it exports its food crops elsewhere), it can dismantle the coal plant and send the machinery off to the next newly-built O'Neill cylinder shell to get it started.

Continue reading Part VI