BindleSnitch News Digest for August 16, 2022

Prosecutors Struggle to Catch Up to a Tidal Wave of Pandemic Fraud
The New York Times led off today with a huge fraud story. Between the Trump and Biden administrations, more than $5 TRILLION was injected into the economy from 2020 to 2021 to help soften the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on families, businesses, and the entire economy.

Billions, and perhaps trillions of those trillions were wasted on fraudulent claims. The Justice Department is investigating $7 billion worth of fraudulent relief payments but more than $163 billion may have been paid out to cover fraudulent unemployment claims. The Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program may have been bilked for an additional $58 billion. The Small Business Administration’s Inspector General, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, has 50 field agents to investigate 3.9 million grants and loans totaling $339 billion.

The alphabet soup of federal agencies investigating these charges is overmatched by the scope of the fraud to the extent that hundreds of thousands of grants for $10,000 in supplemental unemployment compensation will never be investigated because it costs more to investigate the cases than the value of the recovered assets would be worth. 

What the Times article doesn’t mention, however, is the possible impact of $5 trillion injected into a stumbling economy over a two-year period, impacts such as sudden rent increases, and accelerated prices at the grocery store and the gas station. The recent bump in the rate of inflation can almost certainly be attributed, in part, to the injection of free money into the economy.

Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste

In a New York Times Guest Essay by Dr. Charles Harvey, a professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Kurt House,  the chief executive officer of KoBold Metals, a metals exploration company, the authors convincingly argue that carbon sequestration – the recapture and storage of carbon dioxide – is a dead end that will actually increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by making carbon fuels more acceptable to the public, causing us to continue driving oil guzzling vehicles and undermining the electrification movement.

In the Times article, no differentiation was made between elemental carbon and gaseous carbon dioxide. Elemental carbon is solid and, while it may cause health problems if you inhale it, it is also used (in the form of charcoal) to treat accidental food poisonings. It is only the gaseous carbon dioxide that is causing such grievous harm to the environment. Storing carbon dioxide gas is, frankly, stupid because it takes a great deal of energy to compress the carbon dioxide, and an enormous expenditure to build the containers and bury them where they can do no harm…until the containers fail and the carbon dioxide leaks out again.

Carbon sequestration, a major winner in the Inflation Reduction Act now awaiting President Biden’s signature, has been around for decades. Bill Gates is a major investor in carbon sequestration schemes…but these schemes are actually quite ridiculous because (a) there is a highly efficient carbon sequestration method that has been around for centuries in the form of dry ice, (b) the plastic materials used to absorb the carbon dioxide are, in fact, petroleum products, and (c) there are numerous other materials that are known to absorb carbon dioxide, including soda lime, sodium hydroxide (lye), potassium hydroxide (used to make alkaline batteries), and lithium hydroxide, all of which require energy to produce them.

Of course, the single most efficient method for sequestering carbon is to plant more trees – lots and lots and lots of trees, more trees than we can reasonably expect to plant in the time we have left to effect material changes to the atmosphere.  It takes around 40 years for a tree to become an efficient storage device for carbon dioxide…until someone cuts that tree down.

One of the ventures that Bill Gates is invested in is working toward converting carbon dioxide into calcium carbonate and then using the calcium carbonate which will then be used to help extract more oil from existing oil fields, increasing the amount of oil available, lowering the price, and adversely affecting the energy-expense equation for renewables.

Drs. Harvey and House point out that, as of right now, 90% of the carbon sequestered by various mechanical and chemical methods is being used in this manner, to facilitate the extraction of more oil from seemingly depleted fields. They are also being used to promote the”clean coal” myth, the idea that we can burn more coal (thus enhancing Senator Manchin’s personal wealth) if only we sequester the carbon dioxide released by burning coal.

SHORT TAKES:

F.D.A. Clears Path for Hearing Aids to be Sold Over the Counter is a non-story because hearing aids have been sold over the counter for decades. Go to any Walgreens or CVS and you will find reasonable facsimiles. They’re cheap and they don’t work very well but they are out there. The problem with hearing aids is the prescription requirement: it’s the absurdly overpriced equipment.

Pigs to the Rescue: An Invasive Species Helped Save Australia’s Crocodiles explains how feral pigs that have escaped from captivity are providing square meals for alligators that were on the brink of extinction until they developed a taste for pork. By the way, the author of this story – I kid you not -is one Anthony HAM. (You can’t make this shit up.) 

Alligator Kills 88-Year-Old Woman in South Carolina Speaking of alligators,  a South Carolina gater killed an 88-year-old woman, the fifth alligator fatality this year. Solution: import more feral pigs? (I have a Bowie knife with alligator blood on it, given to me by a friend who used it to kill a gator in his backyard.)

Two important facts about alligators: They can outrun anyone, even Usain Bolt, and, while their jaws can crush your skull like a malted milk ball, you can easily hold their mouths closed until you can get a rope around their snouts if you happen to have a rope. Then, flip the gator over on his back and stab him through the throat, chest, and stomach. Remember: alligator hides are very valuable…and the tail tastes better than chicken when cooked properly.