This is not a newsletter. I’m trying to write a book about sentient oil and petrohistory. I’m posting that work here in an attempt to generate an audience before the book is finished.
I have a commitment to the craft of nonfiction writing. Everything I post was drafted on my typewriter, and then re-written multiple times. I’m interested in the past of things, and most of these essays are narrative histories. Writing is a wonderful way to feel like I’m doing something. Even when I’m not writing about global warming, I’m usually writing about global warming—but I do hate that phrase.
If you know you’ll want a copy of the book, preorder it now by buying a paid subscription, and I’ll send you a copy whenever it is ready.
I write a bout jinn and daemons and whatnot, but still, I Respect Science. You’ll never find me knowingly contradicting it. Indeed, you will find me trying to make scientific arguments—though I don’t recommend you use me as your main source on that front.
But we need to add layers to the science: political, social, traditional, and religious. We need to find ways of speaking about ecological collapse in less sterile terms. Now, I’m a materialist: our ‘ways of speaking’ don’t matter for shit compared to what we are doing. The top priority here should be the seizure of Power by People so that we can rapidly decarbonize. But I, as an individual, have no real power to do so, because the infrastructure of coordinated political effort on the real Left was destroyed in an organized campaign of violence from the fifties through the eighties that was cooked up only in order to maintain the War Machine in America. But I do seem to have time to sit and think. That’s what you’ll find here. Digestions, excretions; nothing about my personal life; perhaps it’s a mistake that I use my real name, but the damage is already done.
So there are a couple points I’m making germane to the effort of radicalizing climate discourse. First, we need to historicize fossil fuels so that we may imagine a society without them. We should be looking to understand how oil corporations attained sovereign power. Insodoing, I believe we can find petropower’s weaknesses, and then we can try to work at those weaknesses before again attempting head-on policy negotiations with it. I believe I’ve found such a vulnerability in oil’s deep ties to the War Machine. The fact that War was so instrumental to the ascendancy of oil over the earth to me means that if we weaken the war machine, we will weaken petropower. This may sound uncontroversial, but liberals are falling all over themselves supporting a derangement of the conflict in Ukraine. Anti-militarism should be the primary tactic of the climate movement, incentivizing us to make common cause with socialists and third-world nationalists. Yeah, I could have gone through that history without specifically arguing that oil is actually sentient, but that seemed like little fun.
Sentient oil is about realigning people’s relationship to their fuel. Right now, all sides seem to view fossil fuels as intrinsic to humanity, a part of human nature. Impossible to disentangle from our very selves. No, oil is an outsider, an alien, an inhuman parasite.
Standoffish FAQs
Why The Spouter?
“Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.” (Moby Dick)
Why Are You So Obsessed with Gravity’s Rainbow and Cyclonopedia?
Read them to find out.
Why Should I Read You, In Particular?
I’m not sure.
Does Using A Typewriter Make You A Better Writer? A Better Person?
Yes, definitely.
