Subsidiarity Economics. The times more or less locally, Part XVI. And then the day arrived.
Our lifestyle, our wildlife, our land and our water remain critical to our definition of Wyoming and to our economic future.
Dave Freudenthal, former Governor of Wyoming/
December 3, 2023
Oil field, Grass Creek, Wyo, April 9, 1916
Snippets of news articles from this morning:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Fifty oil companies representing nearly half of global production pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in their operations by 2030, the president of this year’s United Nations climate talks said Saturday, a move environmental groups called a “smokescreen.”
Smokescreen it doesn't seem to be. That's a major commitment. But not as big as this one:
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- The United States committed Saturday to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that's a huge factor in global warming.U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035.
None of this should be a surprise. This is where we've been heading for some time, and it's inevitable. Indeed, I touched on this back in 2017 here:
Coal: Understanding the time line of an industry
And I cautiously dipped my toe in the water, wondering if Wyoming should ponder a fossil fuel free future here:
Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (a). The Economy again. . . the extractive industries
And here:
Well, now it's coming.
Not that we'll accept it. We'll do anything but. Our senior Senator in Washington will claim its part of Joe Biden's "radical green agenda", a radical agenda now sought after by the majority of people in the United States, and in the World. He doesn't believe that, but it sells back home. With a Republican Party in the state that was ready to boil Governor Gordon in WD40 for daring to say that Wyoming needed to look at a carbon-neutral future, he doesn't dare say anything else as it would imperil his position. Our junior Senator will likely say nothing at all.
Well, the voices are getting too loud to ignore, and they include people in the oil industry and now even entire nations that depend on petroleum. From the President, to the Pope, to the Governor of the state, the message is getting pretty clear. We're going to have to figure out a post fossil fuel economy here.
Quickly.
But, we'll choose not to. We'll pretend that somehow we can force others to consume the product that we wish to produce, as we've produced it for over a century and a half, and it's our economy.
That, however, isn't the way economies work.
Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.
Kurt Vonnegut
On another topic, the current owners of Remington are closing the doors this week to its Ilion, New York factor. The company had been headquartered there since 1816.
It'd gone through hard times in the past. It nearly went bankrupt after World War One when the United States Government cancelled contracts for M1917 Enfield rifles overnight, leaving them with a large stock of unfinished and partially finished rifles. The Wilson Administration proved to be quite bad at demobilizing.
Remington, while profitable, had the very bad fortune to be bought by the aptly named Cerebus which focused on AR15 production and drove the company under. Our prior thread on it is here:
Cerebus is virtually a symbol of all that is wrong with corporate capitalism. Named for the three-headed dog that mythologically guards the gates of Hades to contain the dead therein, it might well be recalled, at least since Dante included it, that the creature is in Hell and of it.
Remington's history was mostly associated, over its long existence, with hunting rifles. That's what the company was founded on in 1816. It did manufacture military arms on occasion, however. For example, it was a large scale supplier of contract rifles for the Union during the Civil War. It's widely admired by riflemen rolling block rifle had a military variant that was purchased by some states in preference to the Trapdoor Springfield series of rifles, and it was in fact better than the Trapdoor. The rolling block was widely sold overseas as a military rifle.
By and large, however, it never invested heavily in military sales until the Great War, when the British first contracted with it to produce the rifle that had been intended to replace the SMLE, but adapted to .303 British. The P14 was a major British rifle of the war, but its production ceased in 1917 when the US entered the war, and the same rifle was adopted to the .30-06 and used by the U.S. as the M1917 Enfield. Remington's production capacity was so vast that somewhat over half of all U.S. troops in World War One carried that rifle, rather than the M1903, and it continued to be used into World War Two. But the experienced badly burned Remington and nearly left it bankrupt. After that it was extremely reluctant to make military arms, and it only reluctantly took to producing, ironically, M1903s during the Second World War when the government again needed help. No original Remington arms were invented for the war as Remington didn't try to undertake that as a project, although it did make a continual series of changes in the M1903 which resulted in the M1903A3, nearly a new rifle in some ways.
After the war and into the Cold War, Remington didn't bother with military arms. It wasn't a contractor to the M14 like H&R was. It didn't try to enter a rifle into light rifle contests, like Colt did with the AR15 and Winchester did with its M1 Carbine derived competitor. That all changed when Cerebus bought the company in 2007.
Cerebus also bought the AR15 manufacturer Bushmaster, which was highly regarded in that field. By 2012 Remington was making M4 Carbines for the Army. It leaped wholesale into the "America's Rifle" baloney with a hunting variant of the AR15. It reentered the pistol market, which it had not been in since a brief foray after the Civil War, with a version of the M1911 pistol. Cerebus didn't seem to understand what it was that Remington actually made.
Indeed, it was telling that a brilliant move by Remington to introduce a fairly cheap 98 Mauser hunting rifle, the 798, came in 2006, the year before Cerebus bought the company, and it quit offering it in 2008, the year after.
In name, it still exists, but now it's headquartered in Madison, NC. It was the oldest manufacturer in the United States at the time of its bankruptcy, and it died a victim of American capitalism.
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