Heavenly

Attn Mark Steyn

I admire your wit and clever use of language. Always great fun to listen when you guest host for Rush Limbaugh. That said, you're a complete ass regarding energy. There is no crude oil in Pennsylvania. Horizontal fracturing of the Marcellus Shale to produce natural gas is profitable because New York, Philadelphia, and Boston shut all coal-fired electric power production, a particularly stupid political decision. There is not enough shale gas in Pennsylvania to supply the Northeast forever. We export highly volatile natural gas condensate from Pennsylvania to Alberta to dilute bitumen for shipment to specialized U.S. upgrading refineries that spew tons of toxic ash. The Fort McMurray tar sand operation is an environmental catastrophy that is unprofitable at less than $60 a barrel, without remediating mountains of sulphur waste.

The same is true of horizontal shale oil production in North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma, uneconomic at less than $60 a barrel. Several shale oil frackers are upside down financially, and the United States continues to import oil from Arabia. Please note that oil and natural gas are not equivalent or interchangeable. Gas is a cost-effective and efficient cooking fuel for commercial and household kitchens, an input for fertilizer production, and grossly misused for electric power generation, all of it supplied by pipelines. There are no natural gas aircraft, locomotives, farm tractors, big rigs, or bulldozers. Aside from subsidized buses, propane converted cars, and delivery vans in urban settings, liquid fuel refined from oil powers 95% of transport in the United States. Without oil, everything grinds to a halt.



It is important to grasp why Middle East oil is vital. Japan and South Korea have no oil, totally dependent on imports of Persian Gulf crude and LNG shipped via supertankers protected by the U.S. 6th and 7th Fleets. Germany has no oil. China, India, and most of the EU-28 are heavy importers of oil and gas from the Middle East, Africa, and Russia. The U.S. military pays $100 a gallon ($4200 a barrel) to transport jet fuel and diesel via armored tank truck convoys through hostile Pakistan and Afghanistan, every drop of it produced in Arabia.

There is no alternative to liquid fuel to power aviation, ground transport, farming, and heavy equipment for construction. Wind and solar produce a puny 2% of energy consumption. If we mandate electric passenger vehicles, it will rapidly outstrip U.S. electric generation and toxic waste disposal of depleted lithium batteries. The entire "green tech" movement is a fraud. It works pragmatically in China, because China is the world's worst polluter, poisoning its land, air, water, and millions of seriously ill, rightless Chinese industrial slaves. Wind power is an egregious fraud that eats mountains of maintenance and capital subsidy. The one and only dependable, efficient electric power fuel is coal, augmented by hydro turbines in those few natural situations where dams and reasonably short transmission lines make sense.

The greatest tragedy of all is Peak Oil, a geological certainty. The world endowment of oil is approximately 3 trillion barrels, of which we have already produced and consumed 1 trillion barrels. The next increment will be more expensive to produce. Much of it is in Siberia. The final trillion barrels are trapped in thin shales, the Arctic, incompetent and corrupt nations, war zones, and ultradeep offshore reservoirs that will never be easy or cheap to exploit.

If we lose Arabian production to seemingly inevitable Middle East war, oil will go to $150 a barrel, instantly crippling Europe, India, and the Far East. It is important to reflect that World War II was a genocidal military struggle to capture oilfields in Romania, Persia, and the Dutch East Indies, none of which are important today. The world consumes 85 million barrels a day and is becoming progressively dependent on Russia for oil and natural gas supplies. U.S. gas production is in long term decline. U.S. horizontal shale gas plays in Texas and Louisiana are already depleted, drilling rigs withdrawn, tens of billions of high yield debt written off, and shareholders screwed. The future of natural gas production inevitably belongs to Russia.



The threat is not global warming. It is economic collapse, freezing to death, starvation, and global conflict for control of oil and natural gas. If you think that's an exaggeration, consider what happened during the Obama-led Arab Spring and creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. High oil prices forced Americans to cut consumption, and domestic U.S. gasoline sales crashed an incredible 66 percent, forcing major East Coast refiners into bankruptcy.



In answer to public hand wringing and bureaucratic lies about climate change, it's simple to make as much sea ice as needed to cool the oceans, using offshore oil platforms that "flare" (burn off) associated methane gas that can't be profitably piped to shore. This is especially true of frontier plays, such as offshore Newfoundland, Greenland, Barents, and Brazil. The system deploys scaled-up standard technology used by commercial fishing vessels to make sea ice to chill their catches and a small turbojet engine powered by methane. I'd be glad to see it mandated on all offshore platforms, because I patented it.



It's not necessary to shoot ourselves in the head and abolish internal combustion transport. Industrial innovation has cut U.S. carbon emissions every year for two consecutive decades and offers the potential of ameliorating ocean warming, until the next natural cycle of solar variation tosses Planet Earth into another scary phase of global cooling like the 1970s, during peak gas-guzzling muscle car production and coal-fired electric power generation. It's truly hilarious that East Anglia Climate Centre was founded to study the threat of global cooling, and a prominent Stanford economist predicted mass starvation from over-population. U.S. chemists and farmers implemented the Green Revolution and world population doubled.

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Revised bucket list

Video frame grabs from 18 months ago, when I recorded the Vimeo lectures and did a comic reading of Rock and Roll Rest Home. Glad I did both.

There are a trio of new titles I want to proof and distribute on Amazon, books that old friends rubbished. Old friends no longer matter. Chiseltown is 128 pages, Heaven a short 54, and Four Strange Stories 170 pp., a total of 120,000 words written before I became weak and mentally vacant. Sleep is elusive. Shakes and sudden jolts. Flaky, itchy lesions head to toe, hands and feet incurably scarred. Parts of my face are numb with creeping paralysis.

I saw my daughter. Wonderfully pretty. Deeply intelligent.

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Loneliness

Self inflicted and -- fixable?

I could join a church, read the Bible.
I could memorize who's who in sports.
I could triangulate a market, use another pen name.
I could worry about global warming.
I could plead for forgiveness.
In short, learn to lie.

click to enlarge

I look at this stuff with a combination of pride and boredom. My experience of working for others was uniformly grim. Nothing was right except wandering  alone, however myopic, stupid, immoral, and penalized. The worst penalty of all is boredom, unable to savor a story written yesterday or 20 years ago that exploded in a volatile cloud of creative fuel. That's why I pushed forward, seeking another horizon to be attacked. Like all military conquests, it was necessary to kill people and break things. I killed my life, invested every dime that crossed my palm, burned credit cards, ignored flak from friends and family, subsisted on cold coffee, cigarettes and terrible food I despised, like a renegade, a filthy revolutionary in rags.

I bitched about it, far too often. I lost faith routinely, empty and beaten. The big wide world of prosperity and comfort mocked me. Decades stole my youth. Poverty is a badge of shame. No book sales. No movie sales. Crushing isolation.

I did, however, tell the truth. This is me.

"A third rate Romanticist has nothing." -- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
Go the hell away and bother somebody else. You're dead!

Actually, less lonely than I was a month ago. Neighbors stopped by often. They been extremely kind to me, took time to talk, helped me through a rough patch. Nice people.

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Kaput

Tom was bored by Chiseltown. Theresa likewise rubbished Chiseltown, said it was beneath me. This is what happens when I write comedy. No one laughs. If I write about the drama of rough sex, I get pelted with curses and condemnation. Total silence from Alaska about The Executive Branch. Zero support from Objectivists. No books sold. That's the bottom line.

Hmph. So old and stupid that I tell the same anecdotes over and over, can't remember user names or phone numbers or passwords. When my laptop dies, I won't be able to open email or log on to Amazon, Audible, Lulu, or PayPal. Maybe it doesn't matter any more.

I can't find Clare or her pal Linda. For all I know, they're both dead. Di locked me out of the house and refuses to speak to me. My hands and feet are covered in painful scaly scar tissue, an incurable auto-immune disorder, I'm told. The power utility sent an email, didn't receive the check I sent and threatened to shut off my electricity in a cold tin barn. That's a lifetaker in winter. No light, no heat, no power to operate a laptop with a bad battery and twin screen cancer blobs, top and bottom. With or without electricity, I don't think I can write a 300-page novel, the next logical thing to do, months of focused concentration. All it seems I can do is listen to the radio and play solitaire, AM skip after nightfall, Des Moines, Chicago, Cincinnati. Saturday afternoons it's The Neon Beat and Seems Like Old Times on FM from Arkansas.

Nowhere to go, no money to go anywhere. I can't even feed myself. No car. No phone. I look like hell, missing teeth, itchy flaky forehead, scalp, and eyebrows. I've been trimming my hair with a scissors, looking in a mylar panel. My bathroom is a bucket in an unheated woodshed, my bed a plywood pallet that I share with a dog. Nice enough dog, elderly and affectionate. Needs eye surgery, heartworm pills, flea pills, and a rabies shot, none of which is going to happen. An evil growth on my forearm has to be excised soon, might involve chemo.

I lost count. Twenty something books, not including the anthologies. A million words. I have the distinct impression that it's over and out with sauerkraut. That's a gag line I gave God in my last book, Heaven, unpublished. I can't quite bring myself to upload it to Lulu or Kindle, fording two deep, fast running creeks in leaky rubber boots, walk a mile and a half to a nice neighbor who lets me use her wifi in exchange for stacking wood on her porch, a three mile round trip, 6000 footsteps in cold wet socks, to reach no readers. I don't want to do it.

If someone could have shown me the future ten or twenty years ago, I don't think it would have deterred me from writing fiction, good bad or ugly. My nonfiction doesn't matter. No one cares what I think. But I lived all the fictional stories I wrote, every page, every moment of life and love and cruelty and comedy, signature work that no one else could have done.

The future is dark and cold, powerless. I sleep about three hours a night. One last project, to format a book for publication, probably a bestseller, written by a sensitive and warmhearted ally. Easy job. A few keystrokes and a cover layout. Be gratifying to see him succeed.

Film rights for sale

With my back to the wall financially and an 18 year old to send to college, I need to sell the film & TV rights for a series of private eye novels called The Case Files of Cable & Blount, a modern Nick and Nora Charles, equals in life, a tough ex-Marine paired with a brainy Silicon Valley heiress. Four novels cover multiple adventures, fighting mobsters and serial killers, covert ops overseas, and a global chase to find each other when separated in unexplained circumstances, 640 pages total, suitable for episodic TV or a feature film project.

Five star Amazon reviews: "The combination of courage, tenderness, integrity, and brains is way out of the ordinary. Alternately growls, whimpers, and seduces." (Erik Svehaug) "A master of sly observations, of the truths hidden in words. A big dose of literary fun, that even if played out in today's world, echoes to the time when men were men and writers weren't afraid to tell a story." (L.B. Johnson) "One part grit, a dash of over the top machismo, a pinch of womanly intuition, add heartfelt devotion, murder, and heat over a flame of erotic pleasure." (Librarian)

The text is frankly adult. It could be adapted for a general audience. The high concept is an update of 77 Sunset Strip, a pair of wealthy L.A. detectives with high tech communications, luxury cars, aircraft, a black female ex-cop sidekick, and family NSC and CIA contacts.

There have been numerous genre retreads with a husband and wife team, but Chris Cable and Mary Blount are action adventure wildcats, drawn into tense life and death operations that sidestep stern FBI bombast and LAPD's mulish, molasses slow cops.

A multi-year option is offered, email wolfdevoon@gmail.com

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Apparently unable