by Irina Slav
Green activists this week filed a lawsuit against TotalEnergies for criminal wrongdoing. The wrongdoing in question appears to be the company’s oil and gas production, which allegedly caused extreme weather, which, also allegedly, led to deaths.
Also this week, Democrats in the U.S. Congress called on the Department of Justice to investigate Big Oil for allegedly spending “decades deceiving the public about climate change.”
Dear Big Oil, the time has come to stop fighting. Governments and activists want you to stop sucking oil and gas out of the ground and they are not going to give up until one of two things happens: either they all die suddenly or you give in and stop sucking oil and gas out of the ground.
I urge you to do the latter. It would certainly take less time, effort and money than hunting down and disposing of all netzeroists, which would be pointless anyway because they’ll just acquire martyr status, which would sprout even more zeroists and we already have more than we can handle.
No. Murder is not the way. So turn off the pumps, switch off the compressor stations, if that’s the right verb, and suspend all crude oil and natural gas production. For a month.
In the interest of honesty, I was going to suggest a week initially, but I have doubts a week will be enough for the full range of effects this suspension would have to manifest. And also there’s oil in storage. Let’s try for a month. Because that’s all it would take to initiate a comprehensive economic and societal breakdown.
The idea of suspending oil and gas production to show the green activists what’s what is not a new one in the anti-transition community. But we don’t normally go into detail about the consequences such a move on the part of producers would have. And we should.
David Blackmon did a succinct summary of the most devastating of those recently, in response to a Just Stop Oil call to end oil and gas production. Others have sketched the consequences. Let me add my own sketch — and remember, we’re talking about a month of no oil and gas production — by only Western energy companies, at that. Let’s assume for humanity’s sake that OPEC+ and the rest of the world will keep producing (and enjoying oil price charts).
As David pointed out, electricity will be the first thing to go. You can’t store natural gas, so once the pumping stops, so does supply. Oh, but LNG is right there, nicely fluid and ready to regasify. By all means, power utilities will use whatever’s available — and sell it at a massive premium because the next delivery will be late.
Some coal plants will keep generating power — until the fuel that powers the trucks that bring the coal from the mine to the plant runs out. For those who are lucky to have their own mines. For importers, coal will be the new gold. And the price of that electricity will soar, too, with fuel prices, which will — what’s a stronger word than skyrocket? — in hours after oil and gas producers declare the temporary end of oil and gas production.
There is no government in the West that can afford to subsidise prices at the pump to keep them affordable when global oil supply has just dropped by over 10 million barrels daily. Sure, OPEC+’s 2.2-million-bpd cuts failed to push prices to $100 per barrel. The reasons for that failure have almost everything to do with speculator moods and automatic trading, both of which are heavily influenced by grim reports of peak oil demand and other propaganda. So, Big Oil, why not play along with the propaganda for a while? Test the hypothesis, as it were.
So, finally, we will be dependent on wind and solar. Which means we’ll have blackouts, a surge in the price of any electricity that still gets generated, an equal and graver surge in fuel prices, and, as a result, an inflation tsunami compared to which what’s been going on in Turkey for years is minor price trouble.
By the end of the month that Big Oil and its smaller friends take off from producing oil and gas, life in comfort will have become a luxury only accessible to millionaires. For the rest of us, including climate activists, it will have become a struggle to secure our basic needs — with the exception of survivalists who knew something like this was coming and have prepared accordingly.
Crime will spike, of course. Fuel theft, a practice that was very popular in the 90s former Eastern bloc — guess why — will no doubt return as people get desperate to transport themselves from one place to another without draining their savings accounts. Robberies, burglaries, and all other forms of taking other people’s property against their wishes will also multiply.
Those who can’t afford driving will start walking again — another vivid memory from my childhood when public transport drivers went on strike for a week and a friend had to walk from the one literal end of Sofia to almost literally the opposite end, where I lived, to attend my birthday party. Ah, sweet memories.
More violent crime will spike, too. This tends to happen in times of survival uncertainty and confusion because these breed fear and fear breeds violence — a lot of violence. The police, then, will be quite occupied for a month, at least, and they’ll be suffering fuel shortages for reasons of prices, just like emergency response services. People will die.
Then some more people will die as the fear and confusion spill into the streets and head to parliaments and government headquarters (The address of the European Commission is Rue du Luxembourg 46, 1000 Bruxelles, Belgium. The IEA sits at 9 rue de la Fédération, 75739 Paris Cedex 15, France. Just to save us all some time).
Of course, the corporate headquarters of oil companies will no doubt also become targets because survival fear does not exactly discriminate between deserving and undeserving targets. It is an all-welcome kind of punishment exacter, and a generous one. There will be property destruction at a massive scale.
Did I mention the supermarket raids already? There will be supermarket raids. Lots of them. When 90% of people suddenly can’t afford to buy their basic necessities, they will secure them by any means necessary, including, or rather heavily featuring, force.
Once the looting starts, it will spread. And once it spreads, it will be very difficult to contain, especially with fuel shortages. Governments will have to borrow massive amounts of money to avoid total collapse, at exorbitant rates because that’s what happens when the supply of something suddenly spikes way, way, way above demand.
Food will become scarce, with international transportation either impossible or mind-blowingly expensive, and fertiliser prices through the top-floor roof of price inflation along with the new prices for diesel fuel. No tractors, no food. Those who grow their own will become targets — or chieftains feeding their immediate-vicinity communities.
Now, before all this begins to unfold, governments will already be sternly asking the industry to restart production. The stern requests will quickly escalate to threats before those threatening realise — if we’re lucky — that threats won’t really accomplish much, assuming the industry, that is you, Big Oil, sticks to the plan for a month with no oil or gas. Then the pleading will start. I would suggest ignoring it. Some lessons are harder to learn than others but the ones that are hard to learn are learned better.
Once the true collapse begins the governments responsible for the situation will be duly disposed of, one way or another, and I must declare that I’m not giving anyone any criminal ideas but I wouldn’t really mind seeing a broken nose or two. Then production can be restarted and the survivors could breathe a sigh of hard-earned relief.
The surviving activists will no doubt celebrate the amount of carbon emissions not emitted and then accuse you of trying to end human civilisation, by doing exactly what they wanted. At this point I would suggest litigation against both activist networks and their government, and non-government, supporters.
The specific grounds for the lawsuits I’ll leave to the professionals but there’s abundant evidence that both governments and activists repeatedly called on the industry to do just that: stop oil and gas production. Loudly and publicly. So sue their pants off. They won’t have anything else left after the fossil fuel-free month.
By way of punishment, make them all write the following a hundred times on a plastic white board with a plastic marker:
Carbon is at the centre of it all. There is no life without carbon. Nowhere that we know of in the universe. Everything that lives, lived, will live, carbon.
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