Energy is at the heart of everything, and energy production should be exciting and dynamic and positive. It is not. Here, in large reason, is why. Consider the following passages, emphasis added.
“The West as America is the total geopolitical opponent of Russia…The positional geopolitical war with America has been and continues to be the essence of all Eurasian geopolitics, beginning in the middle of the 20th century, when the role of the United States became obvious. In this regard, the heartland’s [Russia’s] position is clear, it is necessary to counteract the US Atlantic geopolitics at all levels and in all regions of the earth, trying to weaken, demoralize, deceive and, ultimately, defeat the enemy. At the same time, it is especially important to bring geopolitical disorder into intra-American reality, encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements of extremist, racist, sectarian groups, destabilizing internal political processes in the United States.” – Highly influential Russian political philosopher and strategist Aleksandr Dugin in Foundations of Geopolitics
“When hostile forces want to bring disarray to a society and overthrow a political regime, they always start by opening a hole to creep through in the ideological field by confusing people’s thoughts.” – From a publication by the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 2006
“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures…he will refuse to believe it. That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.” – Yuri Bezmenov, Soviet journalist and ex-KGB operative who defected to Canada
Does any of that feel vaguely and sickeningly familiar?
In the old days, we’d hear from crazy people in two ways. One, we’d know them, and unless we were fond of engaging with their antics, we’d avoid them. Two, they would show up in Letters to the Editor sections of news publications, people venting their spleen in sometimes intelligent ways, sometimes not. The ‘sometimes not’ category often included repeat customers, cranky people with nothing better to do with their time than fire off endless barking missives. After a while you’d become familiar, and could discount or ignore at your leisure.
Now, with social media being so dominant, the crazies are infinite, like an endless chorus of dogs barking at anything that moves, with a truly saddening noise to signal ratio. There is no barrier to entry; one need not even post a letter to an editor, all that is required is to start typing and hit send. And that’s not even the half of it; participation in the conversation does not even require your name or identity, it is completely anonymous and that has consequences. Big ones.
Often anonymously. And…that’s where the opening quotes become so illuminating. The crazies are indeed infinite, because there is no longer a link between online psycho behaviour and a single person. A single person now can wield a virtual army. And they do.
People across all spectra – political, environmental, social, economic – you are being played.
Look at what’s happened all around us. Trust in the media has been diminished or destroyed. In its place is a cacophony of noise, a billion voices all jousting for attention.
Some are winning, or appear so by clicks, by popularity, by number of views. That’s how we tend to gauge relevance. Something’s been viewed 100 times? Who cares. A million? Let me see that. Must be right.
It is not a conspiracy theory to say that malicious actors have no purpose other than to diminish the value of public discourse. They literally state that as an objective. Once upon a time, the efforts might have been subversive and taken a bit of work, like buying off newspaper editors, or planting moles, or whatever other Cold War stuff happened that makes such great movies.
No more. The brazen rats are right out in the open. Open any political or politically-themed discussion in social media, which includes everything from the environment to gender to Israel to you name it, and you’ll see dozens or hundreds of commentators that show up to provide provocative, baseless attacks, constantly. Some accounts have few followers and hundreds of thousands of comments, anonymous entities who are there simply to stir up angst. You can get a feel for it by watching what they do, their patterns of comments, the fact that they seem to be busy 8 or more hours per day engaged in messaging guerilla warfare.
In one of the more disappointing but inevitable developments of the modern information age, the brazen rats don’t have to hide in the shadows anymore; businesses have sprung up that proudly describe how they can d the dirty work for you. For real.
Check out this company called Doublsespeed.ai. The very first message on their webpage, after a creepy logo and slogan (“Robots have your eyes”) is this statement: “Control is all you need. The doublespeed TERMINAL allows you to orchestrate actions on thousands of social media accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” On the next page: “Instrumented Human Action – Our deployment layer mimics natural user interaction on physical devices to get our content to appear human to the algorithms.”
Companies like Doublespeed publicly and proudly advertise their skills in destroying what was once valuable, and are paid to do so. Their existence is like someone making a business by telling Safeway’s vegetable suppliers that they can help their sales by spitting on every other supplier’s vegetables.
It’s like Jackass, but with consequences: the destruction of trust across the board.
World class smart ass Mike Solana put it best in an article on his excellent Pirate Wires site. Mr. Solana goes through some of the (comical) aftermath after X, ex-Twitter, started naming where accounts were located. Rats scattered vigorously, and Solana captured it well: “..the American commentariat erupted in Surprised Pikachu shock at the revelation much of our domestic online discourse is shaped by catfishing rage farmers from the third world, the ranks of which include many popular anonymous accounts…With so many frauds exposed, there is now a great seething chaos of unfurling dramas, all entangled. This includes not only the disgrace of countless lying influencers from, of note, almost every political pole, lying on behalf of almost every major side of every major issue in America, but the revelation of what seems a scandalous reliance on such fraudulent stories in mainstream reporting by outlets such as Britain’s Sunday Times.”
But it’s not just the commies and Russians and Nigerian princes’ beleaguered lawyer class that are up to this. We do it ourselves; we allow it, and it’s actually a well-known tactic. FUD, the strategy is called, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt – messaging aimed to spread these feelings in consumers. Wikipedia and other sites call FUD a “manipulative propaganda technique”, whereas a marketing website called Changing Minds describes it as “method used in sales and marketing” and “an opportunity for sales and marketing people who can use threats and uncertainties that lead to negative emotions…that leads to desired changing of minds.”
As an evident reader of an energy website, you will be aware that the hydrocarbon industry is often accused of such tactics through “climate change denial”. Advocates of that position highlight anyone who ‘disagrees with the science’ or they will quote some Exxon worker from 25 years ago. And yet at the same time they will refuse to contemplate the other side of the equation, the wonders that hydrocarbons have brought to humanity. As geopolitical analyst/writer Peter Zeihan correctly put it, without injection of any fear, uncertainty, or doubt, “Oil is civilization.” We rely on it every day for existence, and you may compare the two opposing positions as you will.
The energy field unfortunately has been one of the epicentres of these campaigns, which, in rational times, makes no sense. Why on earth should we be fighting about energy? It is obvious how we need it, use it, get it; it is obvious that converting to any other system is a challenge of indescribable proportions. It is not obvious how we will get it in 20 years; many things could happen technologically to alter the landscape, but as far as we know now, we are going to be using largely what we are using now, give or take some unknown but not massive percentage. Bashing one form of energy will not change this fact one iota. Anger and rage farming simply sets back progress because energy is diverted to pointless battles.
The energy discussion has been so successfully FUD’ed and manipulated and destabilized that it was becoming dangerous to us all, as we can see with increasing frightened cries from regulators about grid stability, and how it is being (or was being) rapidly diminished by the forced retirement of hydrocarbon based baseload power. Clarity is emerging. We are now breaking through the manufactured FUD to deal with that, and just in time, as AI sweeps in and upends everything that we thought we knew about energy consumption trajectories from just a few years ago.
But looking far beyond energy, to the world of ‘everything else’, be fully aware that very powerful actors, with a lot of financial and technical might, are working diligently to make us fight. It is not a hard task.
It is human nature to be triggered by perceived injustice or certain bad actors. A villain is, ironically, a good thing: it offers a focal point for frustrations and blame, and the presence of a villain in some ways alleviates the requirement that we think about things.
And by and large we really don’t like thinking about things, because at heart we can see many things – particularly policy issues – are nuanced, and not black and white (obvious crimes excluded), and can look very different depending on which seat you have at the great table of society. Where you were born and how you grew up means automatically that you will share no frame of reference with someone that grew up vastly differently, neither will appreciate the challenges of each other’s particular existence. It is insane to think we will all coalesce neatly around solutions to complex problems.
That is the challenge of the west, the Achilles heel of the west, because, unlike China or Russia, we are free to speak our minds here. Which also makes it the beauty of the west. We can analyze these things out in the open. That is vital in the long term to avoid dictatorship; sunlight is the best disinfectant. To bury it all under government control as in those two countries doesn’t mean discord ceases to exist, it simply becomes rot hidden under paint.
And that doesn’t mean you won’t encounter genuine accounts that are acidic and nasty and idiotic and yet genuine. Some people are just like that. They may be revolting, but their presence is just yet another of democracy’s demands, if it is to be true. Jerks are free to be jerks. But we don’t have to give them attention. Up to you.
There’s an interesting sidenote to dealing with jerks. Maybe they aren’t jerks at all. Maybe they’ve just been drawn into brawls and said something they regret. In a significant number of instances, simple interaction can blow away a lot of animosity. Most people have more in common than they think, but may lose sight of that when one person’s political opinion might cause you to think they are stupid beyond redemption. Maybe, maybe not. Actually talking to another human can work wonders.
Here’s an example about as extreme as you can imagine. A month ago, US President Trump apparently noticed an avowed socialist running for mayor of NYC. You can just imagine how that went.
On Nov 3, Trump posted an extended soliloquy, as only he can: “If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival! It can only get worse with a Communist at the helm, and I don’t want to send, as President, good money after bad. It is my obligation to run the Nation, and it is my strong conviction that New York City will be a Complete and Total Economic and Social Disaster should Mamdani win…” There’s more to the speech, but you get the picture. Not a fan. A day later, he had more considerations to offer. On Nov 4, Trump posted: “Any Jewish person that votes for Zohran Mamdani, a proven and self professed JEW HATER, is a stupid person!!!” (Yes 3 exclamation marks.)
But then, by some process of epically weird proportions, the two agreed to meet. Mamdani could have attacked Trump as a bad billionaire, as he has done in his campaign. Trump could have greeted him as a Communist JEW HATER as he did on social media. But neither went that route. Somehow, both chose the high road. They chose to discuss things that were of common interest in rectifying, namely, the cost of living crisis. The meeting left me dumbfounded, or at least the televised press conference anyway. They spoke positively and constructively, Trump slapping him affectionately on the arm, smiling at him, almost admiringly. It all culminated in Trump posting a comment to social media: “It was Great Honor meeting Zohran Mamdani, the new Mayor of New York City!” In the accompanying picture, Mamdani stands solemnly and Trump is grinning like he just found out communists are made of chocolate.
That’s a head-exploding example of what we can do, if we choose construction instead of destruction. The experiment started by the US nearly 250 years ago grinds on. It’s not easy, not when so much work is being done to drag it under, to cause citizens to turn on each other, to amplify any little disagreement and make it personal and nasty and destructive. At the end of the day, take heart in the fact that it takes two very different types of people to be party to this: One is seeking to create destabilized situations, which is about as low as a human can get; and the other type is seeking to know and grow its way past it. Here in the west, we get the choice. It’s not a hard one to make, even if it is hard to work on every day.
Ignore the BS artists, the obvious purposeful/useful idiots, the nameless automated drones inserting themselves into our world just to ruin it. Don’t give them attention or power.
Canada’s energy potential is almost unlimited, in all forms. We truly have what it takes to be an energy/minerals/materials/food superpower. We have everything and we can make anything, and we can send our surplus to the world. We start by finding common ground to push towards a unified goal of such excellence, and that starts by looking beyond the un-pretty hate machine.
Here it is, the ideal non-denominational present. At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative, facing into the storm. And now everyone is coming around to this realization as well. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)