Carbon-Based Lifestyles

Existential Resignation in a Post-Peak World

“...wherever you set foot on this ravaged earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen glamour of a fair” - Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

The fragmentation of Extinction Rebellion – amusingly dubbed the “midlife crisis of activist causes” by Dustin Broadbery – has been entertaining to watch, in the same way that accelerated footage of a decaying carcass holds a certain ghoulish fascination. Julian 'Roger' Hallam, former organic farmer and PhD researcher in neocon astroturfing tactics, was officially ousted from XR UK in 2020, due to controversy surrounding comments he made regarding the Holocaust, and jokes about engaging in terrorist assassinations. Hallam always seemed to me like the unhinged Lenin-wannabe of the XR clique, whose experience of trying to make a living as a farmer had turned him into a power-hungry fanatic; in doing so, he sided with a green-technocratic agenda that is currently being used as a pretext to destroy the livelihoods of millions of other farmers worldwide, but I suspect the irony is lost on Hallam, who has taken the split with XR in his stride and moved on to other embarrassing campaigns. Insulate Britain went out of their way to alienate even more people by blocking motorways to demand that the government buy everyone rock-wool or something, while his Beyond Politics/Burning Pink political party put five candidates forward for the UK local government elections in May 2021, all of whom finished last. Undeterred, Hallam drummed up some financial support from his buddies in the Climate Emergency Fund, and founded Just Stop Oil.

On the 14th of October, two Just Stop Oil activists threw a tin of Heinz tomato soup across Van Gogh's Sunflowers at London's National Gallery (I wonder if they got anything from Heinz for the product placement?). The activists claimed to be simultaneously protesting the use of fossil fuels and increased energy prices, which is a bit like staging a protest against whaling and the increased price of whale meat. The choice of both target and weapon are interesting, however; they could have chosen some shoddy bit of 1990s conceptual nonsense that only the most tedious of pseuds would pretend to like, such as Damien Hirst's Some Animal I Killed Because I'm Clever or Tracey Emin's Fakin Ell Mate Look At Me Laundry Basket, and made a statement about art that the majority of the population could get behind, thereby generating more support for their campaign. Ecological destruction makes the world an ugly place in the same way that postmodern art makes the gallery an ugly place, so a campaign of green art-terrorism promoting traditionalist aesthetics would at the very least be a refreshing change of pace. Short of that, at least choosing to throw a tin of soup over Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can would be a more appropriate and wryly amusing action. But the painting they chose to vandalise was a classic of representational Western painting, depicting the beauty and harmony of natural form; the fact that the painter was a Straight White Cisgendered Male also probably helped to inform their decision. Can you imagine how these activists would feel if someone threw a tin of baked beans over a Frida Kahlo painting?

Of course, the fact that this new wave of climate-cultists seems to be getting a free ride from the powers that be has not gone unnoticed among the general public. A video shared by Paul Embery on the 18th of October shows protestors blocking traffic in London, while baffled members of the public try to persuade the assembled police officers to remove them. A few days later, two women were killed in a crash on the M20 as hundreds of motorists were diverted from the Dartford Bridge by Just Stop Oil campaigners lying across the bridge in hammocks; 55-year old Mark Heap (no relation to the actor), who suffered a broken back and leg while trying to help the women, said the protestors have “blood on their hands.” I would add that the absolutely insane policy of opening the hard shoulder up as a motorway lane during busy periods is probably also at fault here, but that policy may well be rooted in the same technocratic push for complete infrastructural overhaul as has spawned these “environmentalist” movements: by making the motorways increasingly unusable for conventional vehicles, the ground is being set to attempt to push everyone into the driverless electric cars that will apparently dominate the roads once they iron out all those little kinks in the programming, and figure out how to make them without completely depleting the earth's supply of precious metals. Holding one's breath for that scenario is probably inadvisable.

Many enquiring observers would like to know why the Climate Emergency Fund have received $1 million from one of the scions of the Getty family of oil barons, or how XR are able to pay Tamsin Omond (granddaughter of baronet Sir Thomas Lees) £800 a month to be a professional activist. My own suspicions as why there is so much elite support for the climate-agenda are as follows:

1. To provide an apocalyptic cover-story for the more prosaic realities of peak-oil and industrial decline caused by the limits to growth. The original Limits to Growth report, issued in 1972 by the Club of Rome, often comes in for some unfair criticism from those in the 'alternate-perception' community, who dismiss its findings on the basis of who funded it. This is understandable, but the report was authored by independent scientists, and I would suggest that their findings are worth considering. Every report the Club has commissioned since the LtG, however, has been a useless exercise in sycophantery, concluding that handing more power to wealthy bureaucrats will somehow solve the hard limits outlined in the original report.

2. Overlapping with this is the creation of an atmosphere of panic and despair. Those who are paralysed with fear are easy to manipulate, and those who are stricken with hopelessness lack the will to resist anything. The increasingly tasteless and histrionic tone of climate-activism is both a manifestation of this existential malaise, and an attempt to convince as many others to join in as possible.

Tl;dr: the age of cheap energy is over, and the elites want you to surrender your freedoms and stay in your home, shivering, desperate, and malnourished, while they carry on flying around in their private jets, dining on steak, and dictating the terms of your parole. If you get really frustrated, you'll just have to wait until the next “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter rally comes to town, in which case you'll get to discharge your rage by devaluing the property of working-class neighbourhoods so that your friends in BlackRock can buy up the real estate. Or you could just glue yourself to something, if your psychology favours a passive-aggressive approach.¹

Months before the Great Reset was officially announced in 2020, Jasun and Michelle Horsley wrote a piece entitled “Illuminations Never Come from the Crowned: Carbon Credit, New Reserve Currency, & the Oligarchic Green Lock-Step to a Post-Covid-19 World”. The Horsleys managed to connect several dots that very few had up to that point, and put together a hypothesis that the “New Normal” Covid-19 policies and the suspiciously well-publicised rise in histrionic climate-activism were aspects of the same agenda, summarised as follows:

The purpose of the current “pandemic lockdown” is to slow down global financial activity in order to facilitate an economic reset and re-appropriate power. Powerful individuals and organizations around the world are colluding to reconfigure the economy and create a new reserve currency uncoupled from oil and coupled to carbon. The aim is to consolidate their power; restrain or destroy competition; impose, in a seemingly benign way, limits to acquisition; and re-institute and reconfigure social order, all the while being able to claim to be “saving the environment. (emphasis original)

The notion of coupling the reserve currency to “carbon”, or an energy metric of value – effectively inverting the petrodollar – is not a new one, and dates back to the Technocracy movement of the 1930s. James Corbett's excellent two-part documentary How & Why Big Oil Conquered the World provides some background to understanding how 'oiligarch' families such as the Rockefellers and the British and Dutch royalties² became involved in the effort to gradually restructure the global economy in line with the Technocratic model:

Carbon rationing. Carbon trading. Carbon taxes. Cap and trade. Just as the technocrats of old envisioned a new economic order based on energy and governed by the dictates of scientists and engineers, so, too, does this modern form of technocracy envision an economic order in which energy is budgeted, priced and traded by intergovernmental panels of scientists and the political caste that grows up around these institutions.

These measures are sold to the public as a way of penalizing the big oil interests that have spent the last century monopolizing the world's key resources and plundering the earth in the pursuit of profit. What they do not understand, because it has been deliberately obscured, is that it is these very interests that have been instrumental in creating these schemes in the first place. (emphasis mine)

Corbett explains how John D. Rockefeller effectively created the modern pharmaceutical industry by starting 'medical colleges' which taught doctors that the only effective medicines were by-products of Rockefeller's companies, sidelining the naturopathic remedies that had been on a more equal footing with allopathic treatments. Ironically, considering how often the term “snake oil” is used by Reddit-types to dismiss alternative medicines, Rockefeller's father was a literal snake oil salesman, a good old-fashioned American conman called John Livingstone. In this context, it seems terribly fitting that industrially-manufactured glue has become the weapon-of-choice for Big Oil's unwitting lackeys.

Returning to the Horsleys' article, everything that has happened in the past two-and-a-half years has confirmed their general hypothesis. Within a few months, their predictions of an “economic reset” were echoed by the launch of the Great Reset. Their observation that “this new economy also corresponds with a cashless society in which all monies become digital (something that may also be fast-tracked due to Covid-19 crisis)” has also aged rather well. Central Bank Digital Currencies are looming closer and closer on the horizon, and the movements of PayPal to penalize its users for dissident activity are ominous harbingers of something that previously would have only been thinkable in bleak Third World dictatorships, like Canada. The Horsleys write:

What this looks like is aggressive geopolitical economic warfare that is making it increasingly expedient to uncouple the US dollar from oil production and hitch it to a new resource. Or, put differently, and to link it back to the current thesis, whichever nation state gets its currency hooked to carbon looks likely to become the new superpower.

Another home-run for the Horsleys, as NATO countries currently engage in cold war provocations with Russia and China, despite all of them being run according to WEF-approved policies. Western 'anti-globalists' enamoured with Vladimir Putin conveniently ignore the fact that his government has instituted some of the worst Covid policies this side of Shanghai, documented on Riley Waggaman's Substack, and is infiltrated to the highest level with Schwab's acolytes, from Putin himself to Herman Gref of Sberbank, still listed as a Trustee on the WEF's website despite their cursory display of disapproval over Russian military action in Ukraine. All of this looks awfully like a frenzied, desperate scramble among the nation-states of the world to get to first place in the post-Reset world, as they throw their own populations to the android wolves of the Green Technocracy. As I asked Waggaman during his appearance on the Dodcast, why would Putin want to mass-inject Russian people with dangerous experimental gene-treatments when the nation was already facing a serious demographic crisis? For all the jingoistic pomp and bluster that comes through the Russian propaganda machine, the nation seems to be run by the same sort of sycophantic Renfields that administrate the 'monstrous West.'

As I write this article, my country has gone through another parliamentary reshuffle, and the instantly forgettable Liz Truss has been replaced by the just-as-forgettable Rishi Sunak, another bug-munching Schwab-crony. Unconfirmed but far-too-plausible rumours are circulating that Truss texted US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken with the words “it's done” moments after the mystery bombing of the Nordstream pipeline. Death rates are going up while birth rates are going down, which may or may not be related to all the “safe and effective” gene-therapies delivered to the population by our beloved NHS. Sporadically armed fighting-age men are being ferried across the Channel by the tens of thousands, presumably to work the essential jobs that lazy Brits just won't do, such as “pitiless mercenary working for a globalist death-cult.” The overall picture is not a happy one, and while I disagree with their interpretations, I can certainly understand why the climate-emergency brigade are channeling a sense of existential malaise. What, then, is to be done?

Our work is considerable. First of all, we have the practicalities involved for preparing for an age of scarcity. Stockpile key resources while you can – food, medicines, torches, batteries, matches, candles. If you are able to, get your home insulated, and think about installing a wood-burner. Rocket stove mass heaters are worth investigating, but if you live in a rented flat in the city, they probably aren’t a viable option; you can, however, create a simple mini-heater with nothing more than a candle and a clay flower pot, which could make a serious difference during a power-outage.

We also have the inner work that is required. You can frame this as psychological or spiritual depending on your philosophical or religious temperament, but as 'psyche' originally meant 'soul' anyway, I think this is a case of 'six of one, half a dozen of the other'. The practical ramifications of this are that you are probably immersed in a psychic field of stress, anxiety, fear, confusion, and rage, whether or not you are subjectively conscious of those feelings within yourself, because there is a very good chance that a lot of the people around will be experiencing them. Relax your gaze, and become aware of your peripheral vision; this is a very potent method for calming your mood, and becoming more alert to your surroundings. Cultivate your relationships, including those with the non-human world; we depend on it for our survival, after all, so developing a rapport with the animal, vegetable, fungal, and elemental worlds can only be beneficial. Learn about edible and medicinal plants in your area, and start growing vegetables, if you have the space to do so.

Above all, develop your spiritual practice, whatever that might mean for you. The medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich lived through the Black Death, and the social upheavals that followed; it seems fitting, then, to conclude with her words: “and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

1. Of course, it is quite clear that the climate is changing. This might well be caused by fossil fuels, solar activity, geoengineering, or some other combination of factors. The causes don’t really make much of a difference to me, as I don’t think we can do much about it beyond adapting as necessary.

2. King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, officially launched the Great Reset as a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and his own Sustainable Markets Initiative. This ill-advised venture may come back to haunt him during his reign.