What do the Just Stop Oil protests, the recent LA fires, the decline of the British economy, current UK energy policy, the Covid lockdowns and sanctions on Russia (but not Brexit) have in common? Hubris, of course (although Brexit involved a great degree of hubris too) the ancient Greek belief that acting in a way that challenged the Gods might result in the Gods humbling you in response. And in the modern world, hubris might be equated with our belief in the religion of progress, in which we unconsciously assume that the marvels of industrial civilisation, made possible only because of the vast surplus energy available from our burning coal, oil and gas, will continue long after that surplus energy has gone away. As we will see, each of the examples I set out below might be answered with, “be careful what you wish for…”
One: Just Stop Oil
Just Stop Oil are a splinter group from the original Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement which caught the public mood for action on climate change in the 2010s. The somewhat cult-like (yes, I spelled that correctly) group favours a more radical collapse-based “solution” to carbon dioxide reduction than the original XR, all but one of whose demands (declare a “climate emergency,” introduce net zero legislation, and replace the government with citizen’s assemblies) were more than conceded by a UK government which would legislate (because that’s what neoliberal governments do) to any length (other, predictably, than abolishing itself) to the extremes on climate issues.
XR itself experienced internal difficulties when leading members experienced severe cognitive dissonance over the movement’s claim that a “just transition” away from fossil fuels was possible collided headlong with the laws of physics – most notably with spokesperson Zion Lights having a car crash interview with Andrew Neil during which she was unable to defend claims about the supposed transition to renewable energy… Lights herself going on to form a splinter group promoting nuclear as the only viable alternative to fossil fuels.
The breakaway Just Stop Oil group – widely mocked for their professional-managerial class backgrounds – on the other hand, are more focused on engaging in annoying stunts aimed at the wide open door of ending British oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. As I have written for more than a decade, and as Brett Christophers explains in his recent interview with Novara Media, the North Sea is done. And with the exception of legacy wells draining the last dregs of the large reservoirs, what remains is too small and too difficult to be recovered profitably. That is, in the UK (in practice if not in political announcements) Just Stop Oil had succeeded before they even began… and to anyone concerned about how we might feed 70 million people on an island that cannot support ten percent of that without fossil fuels, that is not a good thing.
Despite accusations of “climate denial” (whatever that is) much of the current backlash against western climate policy and environmental protest is due to the obvious failure of the proposed alternative to fossil fuel use. The economies of Europe – including the UK – are collapsing in the face of depletion of their own oil and gas fields and the self-inflicted disconnection from cheap oil and gas from Russia. Indeed, the only thing keeping GDP growth going is the hard work of official statisticians finding ever more elaborate ways of fiddling the figures. Meanwhile, people are dying of hypothermia across Europe as I write because home heating is no longer affordable.
Not that this would have bothered the political class, had it not been for the recent realisation across the tech industry (which accounts for almost all stock market growth since 2008) that the claims behind net zero policies are nonsense. There is no energy transition that results in anything other than a return to the way of life of sixth century Anglo Saxons… no self-driving cars, no network of AI datacentres, no rockets to Mars, no “singularity.” Indeed, the tech godzillionaires have woken up to the realisation that the more immediate threat comes from a rapid loss of energy as fossil fuels deplete before any viable alternative can be found. Which, no doubt, is why peak oil is finding its way back into establishment entertainment… and why Bill Gates wants to restart Three Mile Island.
In the (very likely) event that Just Stop Oil got their wish, I suspect that they, more than most given their class background, will be prominent among those demanding that western governments turn the lights back on and restock the empty supermarket shelves. But, of course, when the hydrocarbons deplete, turning the clock back will be impossible… hubris indeed.
Two: The LA fires
Inevitably, the establishment media went straight to Climate Change™ (not to be mistaken for climate change) as the reason for the fires which have wreaked havoc across some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. In this instance though, Climate Change™ is a “thought-stopper” – a device used to distract from the fact that all disasters are ultimately man-made. That is, there are plenty of wildfires, floods, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, etc. around the world which are not considered disasters because there was no affected human settlement. So that, human failure is a more proximate cause than climate or weather… particularly in places (like Southern California) where the risk is common and well understood.
Just as the establishment media – and apologists for the liberal elitist regime which has run California for decades – went straight to Climate Change™, political opponents went to second-order issues such as the state, county, and city’s prioritisation of diversity, equality and inclusion policies at the expense of the fire service (whose budget was slashed) water security (the reservoir above Pacific Palisades was empty, while much of the state’s water had been diverted north). Second-order, because even if better decisions had been made, it is far from clear that the disaster could have been averted… particularly when we consider population and climate. The population of L.A. County is bigger than the population of 41 (possibly 45) US states. The ability to cram millions of people into a relatively small area with a semi-arid grassland climate which has experienced regular wildfires for millions of years, was only made possible by the development of the massive industrial base of the USA from the mid-nineteenth century, and especially the power of oil in the period following World War Two (Las Vegas being the other go-to US city whose existence would be impossible without the enormous energy and resources of the industrial age).
These cities were only made possible at the current scale because of the vast surplus energy that America enjoyed in the years after the Second World War. And yet, as the surplus energy has dwindled, and a host of socio-economic consequences have come home to roost, those with the power of decision have chosen not to fund (i.e., allocate surplus energy to) maintaining the infrastructure and institutions which make the city possible… instead, actively cutting those things in the insane belief that the city will survive and thrive without them (in the longer term, of course, this will be the fate of many more energy-deprived cities around the world, and for much the same reason).
Certainly, the pursuit of what have been referred to as “luxury policies” (those whose costs fall on those least able to cope with them) including the widespread grift of a housing programme which somehow failed to house any of the homeless, while systematically failing to mitigate known risk, is hubris in and of itself. But is speaks to something far more profound in the human condition… a form of denial without which we probably couldn’t function.
Three: The British disease
The UK has made international news in the last few days because of a growing crisis in its bond market. Establishment media have again turned to a thought-stopper – a comparison between Rachel Reeves’ budget in October and the ill-fated Kwarteng budget in September 2023 (which – though insane in its own right – was used to remove Liz Truss from office). The reality though, is that the UK economy has been slowly slipping around the U-bend for the better part of a quarter century… with the foundations for the fall having been laid fifty years ago.
Today, the UK government is running a £127bn deficit on £1,276.2 billion annual public spending. In and of itself, this might not be a problem. A growing economy with a resilient manufacturing base could easily manage this deficit… particularly where much of the additional spending is infrastructure investment. The UK, of course, is not growing and, indeed, in per capita terms has barely grown since the crisis in 2008. Moreover, what “growth” there has been, is the result of borrowing (private and state) currency to spend into the economy and then counting that spending as if it were productive growth. There comes a point at which borrowing £10 to produce every £1 of real economic growth becomes impossible.
In one sense, the UK’s current predicament goes all the way back to it being the first place to industrialise. As early as the 1860s, the UK’s sunk costs in the earliest industrial processes paved the way for competitors, using more efficient technologies and processes – notably Germany and the USA – to begin to overtake. And even in the early twentieth century, when the UK was clearly falling behind, there was no clear path to abandoning the outdated practices in favour of a technological leapfrogging ahead of Germany and the USA. Two world wars – at least partially due to Germany pulling ahead – exhausted Britain’s stored wealth, paving the way for the UK’s vassalisation by the oil-rich USA in the 1940s.
More recently, the collapse of Britain’s (mostly publicly-owned) nineteenth century industrial base in the face of the oil shocks of the 1970s created a predicament from which the UK never really escaped. Instead, the UK political parties – beginning with Jim Callaghan’s 1976 Labour government – swallowed the monetarist kool-aid about the need for a Free Market™ (which pumped wealth up to the monopoly corporations which funded the Mont Pelerin Society through which the monetarists drew their incomes) and Limited Government™ (which somehow got bigger with each passing year). But while the establishment media and the political class promoted the idea that it was monetarist (neoliberal) policy which ushered in the period of (debt-based) prosperity in the 1990s and early-2000s, in reality the whole thing had been a profligate sleight of hand.
The outgoing Callaghan government had desperately hoped for North Sea oil to begin flowing in the late 1970s. It was not to be. Instead, Thatcher inherited the gift and curse of oil… and did what corrupt oil states around the world have always done. Rather than invest the oil revenues in revitalising the UK’s economic base, they were used to allow government to spend beyond its means in a wealth dump to the already wealthy, while allowing the City of London banking and finance sector to inflate the debt bubble which came to grief in 2008. At the same time, public assets were hawked to the highest bidder to plug the gaps in government spending, while jobs were offshored to drive down short-term prices at the cost of any hope of long-term prosperity.
By 2010, the insanity had run so deep that, presented with the last opportunity to revitalise the UK economy – the historically low global interest rates – instead of borrowing to invest, the Cameron government chose to cut public spending – including infrastructure spending – in a futile attempt to “balance the books.” The underlying decline was built-in from this point and paved the way for the Brexit vote and the ill-judged attempts by Kwarteng, and more recently Reeves, to desperately fumble for some means of kick-starting growth.
In the absence of growth, the UK’s borrowing costs are rising. Today, the interest on UK government debt stands at £105bn – more than is spent on social security (£88bn) education (£89bn) and defence (£38bn). And with each passing day, more and more investors are losing faith in the government’s ability to repay its borrowing… which threatens a vicious downward spiral – as fewer buyers turn up at bond auctions, interest rates rise while the price of bonds fall, giving government less immediate income for the price of even higher servicing costs. Worse still, there are few pathways out – raising taxes lowers growth (making debt even harder to repay) but so too does cutting public spending. Creating currency directly (rather than borrowing) might work in the short-term, but only at the cost of devaluing the pound – which would be fatal to the UK’s highly import-dependent economy.
It is for these – longer-term and more profound – reasons that I am just about able to raise a nano-drip of sympathy for both Truss and Reeves, since they were both over-promoted to a position which has already been checkmated by the ill-judged actions of predecessors who ought to – and could have – made better decisions. Nevertheless, both – along with so many predecessors – display that same form of psychological denial which we witness in the people who mismanaged wildfire mitigation in California.
In Reeves’ case, we see the entirely irrational belief that raising taxes beyond what the economy can withstand, will not – logic to the contrary – undermine the economy upon which government borrowing and spending ultimately rests. Which is also why, despite the glaringly obvious impact of austerity cuts on an already tapped-out economy, this is likely to be Reeves’ policy response to the bond market crisis.
Four: British energy
Policy analyst and journalist James McSweeney offers a morbidly comic vision of the early minutes of 2035 (if the government gets its way):
“Shaken from a vague recollection of Luke 4:12 by the sound of fireworks, the seasoned engineer takes a deep breath and orders his subordinates to disconnect the gas turbine — a ritual being repeated at power stations across the country. There is a moment’s peace, and then the lights go out. Miles away, the staff of the Electricity National Control Centre watch helplessly as the sudden drop in power collapses the entire national grid.
“Despair gives way to morbid laughter a few hours later, when the prayed-for wind arrives in force — frying dump load systems and cables. Across the country, heat wishes its final farewell to homes as electric pumps cease to function. Chargeless electric cars pointlessly litter the streets…
“Those who can afford the power for a television tune in the following evening for Prime Minister’s candlelit address, as he congratulates the nation on its progress towards Net Zero and heralds the ‘Green Industrial Revolution.’”
It isn’t going to happen – at least not in that way – because the net zero scam is already approaching the limit of political viability. Nevertheless, what McSweeney was blowing the whistle on (and why he is persona non grata in Versailles-on-Thames these days) is the broad double whammy created by government (lack of) energy policy. In short, the insistence upon scrapping fossil fuel electricity generation before viable alternatives exist is already leaving the UK dangerously reliant upon imported electricity from European states which have (absent cheap Russian gas) their own energy problems. But compounding the problem is the government’s insistence on switching to electric cars, electric heat pumps, and electric cooking, which leave the UK with a generating shortfall of 68.6GW – the equivalent of 27 Hinkley Point C nuclear plants (which take decades to build and more money than the government could hope to raise through bond sales).
A functioning state’s energy policy must meet three key concerns: security, cost, and environment. Of these, the UK government addresses just a fraction of one – environment. That is, the UK government has a carbon dioxide reduction policy masquerading as an energy policy. Meanwhile, energy security has been sacrificed. Not only is the UK increasingly dependent upon imported electricity which may not be available in future, but it remains dependent on high-cost LNG and diesel fuel, without which the economy would disintegrate. Cost too, while it might sound mean, matters simply because without energy nothing gets done. And while energy security is concerned with absolute shortages, in practice excessively expensive electricity amounts to a hidden shortage which is already endangering what remains of UK domestic industry.
The same psychological denial – which amounts to sawing through the branch we are sitting on – is in operation. That is, government decision makers simply assume that a top-down revolution can be imposed without altering the pre-existing fundamentals. In this case, assuming we can switch off the electricity grid but still enjoy the benefits of 24/7 electricity.
Five: Lockdown
When the Covid-19 virus was officially detected in the UK in February 2020, the British state was completely unprepared. Initially – and correctly – the government assumed that the spread of viruses, once established, would be unstoppable. The best approach, then, was akin to the Great Barrington Declaration… to protect the vulnerable while allowing the virus to spread through the younger and healthier population (given that the average age of those dying with/of Covid-19 is 83, this was undoubtedly the correct approach). However, some very suspect modelling together with an organised media campaign in favour of The Science™ (not to be confused with science) bounced the UK government into an attempt at lockdown for which it was ill-equipped to succeed.
The direct issues concerning lack of protective equipment, testing failures, and inappropriate prescribing are well enough known at this stage. However, for the purposes of this article, it is the absence of any economic planning which is of most concern. I am one of very few writers who warned about the long-term impacts on supply chains, only to be accused of “putting greed ahead of people’s lives” and of “wanting to let the virus rip and kill granny.” What I could not foresee was where, exactly, supply chains would break, or just how long and difficult the ensuing supply shock (which is still ongoing) was going to be.
Clearly the “money printing” designed to keep businesses and workers solvent was going to have an inflationary impact later on. This much, then Chancellor Sunak acknowledged at the time. But nobody within government (nor, for the most part, in the wider economics discipline) seems to have understood what would happen when excess currency ran headlong into global supply shortages. The establishment media called it “inflation,” but it was only partially so. The problem wasn’t that everyone from gas suppliers to tomato growers had chosen to jack up prices… it was that those things were no longer available. And so, the western economies (with import-dependent Britain particularly hard-hit) were faced with rapidly rising prices, as those supplies which could be found were snapped up by the highest bidder.
The answer to high prices, as they say, is high prices. That is, as businesses and households see their costs rise, they are forced to alter their spending… focusing on essentials while cutting discretionaries. This is what has caused the growing slowdown of the past couple of years (although it has been exacerbated by central banks randomly throwing interest rate wrenches into the machinery). Fiddled figures being the main thing keeping the UK out of a deep recession at this point. And it is hard to think that we would have been as badly off had the world chosen not to lockdown in 2020.
Six: Sanctions
It is nearly three years since the Ukrainian military, bristling with ultra-hi-tech NATO ordnance, drove back Putin’s ill-judged invasion, rapidly liberating Crimea and pushing Russian-backed militia out of the Donbas region before marching victorious into Russia itself. Just a month later, the full impacts of punitive western economic sanctions brought about the collapse of the Russian economy, causing Putin’s pro-western opponents to rise up and overthrow the Putin regime (Putin himself seeking asylum in North Korea) … except, despite the establishment media narrative, none of that actually happened. And, as China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned at the time, economic warfare turned out not to be a game for children.
The use of embargoes and sanctions has a long history. Although most of the embargoes of the pre-industrial world involved luxury goods traded among the wealthy (since most people consumed only those things available locally). With industrialisation, and especially with the development of predictable international shipping, economic sanctions became more visceral. Those of us who remember the October 1973 oil embargo have an inkling of just how dangerous oil shortages will be – one which is apparently lost on younger generations.
The British plans at the outbreak of both world wars, were essentially economic. In August 1914, the Germans fielded as many armies as Britain had divisions. Militarily then, the British plan was merely to aid the French army in holding the Germans in Belgium (by which time the imagined “Russian Steamroller” would be well on its way to Berlin). The main thrust of the British plan though, involved deliberately engineering a collapse of global supply chains and of international currency and stock exchanges (The growth of the German navy having obviated the earlier plan of a close blockade).
It was the USA, which was as threatened as Germany, which – via threats of counter-sanctions and military intervention – forced the British to back down from this version of economic warfare in favour of a distant blockade in the English Channel and the North Sea (which the Germans famously countered using submarines in the Atlantic shipping lanes). With its plans in tatters though, the British were also obliged to face the harsh truth of a long and bloody stalemate on the western front which would require the mobilisation of the entire British Empire (and, crucially, the spending of its accumulated wealth).
If economic warfare failed in 1914, this was as nothing to the failure in August 1939. In both world wars, the primary aim of the British government had been to bring its two rivals, Germany and Russia, into conflict with one another – Germany because its economy was pulling ahead of Britain’s, and Russia because its expansion threatened key imperial resources in Persia, India, and China… Russia also enjoying a geographical position which made it immune to British naval blockades and marine invasions. In the inter-war years, successive governments stoked hostility between Germany and the Soviet Union, believing it inconceivable that the two could become allies – something thought all the more unlikely following the supposedly far-right Nazi seisure of power in 1933.
The big failure came in March 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland. This was the only point in the various crises prior to September 1939, when French and British troops were in direct contact with the Germans. For all of the diplomatic froth which followed, if the Anglo-French armies were not prepared to fight the Germans on their own border, they were never going to fight for Austria or Czechoslovakia.
Poland though, was different. Although for all of the fancy words about national sovereignty (notably absent in the earlier annexations) the British “guarantee” to Poland was extremely lopsided… offering support only against a German invasion (which is why there was no ultimatum or declaration of war following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland). Poland had become something of a line in the sand in the face of an unchecked German expansion which might well have overrun much of eastern Europe, and which might ultimately have threatened Western Europe too. Furthermore, while it is true that the British army was ill-prepared for war in 1939 (and, indeed, until late-1942) the Chamberlain government had bolstered the Royal Airforce and the Royal Navy, making the British Isles (except the Channel Islands) immune to invasion.
Nevertheless, these were merely plans for defence. Clearly, key officials within the Foreign Office (and very likely Chamberlain himself) intended a repeat of autumn 1918, via a close blockade of a Germany at least economically disconnected from the Soviet Union, and hopefully with both at war. An isolated Germany, disconnected from key resources which it couldn’t produce at home, would be doomed to failure… probably collapsing within a few months of the onset of the blockade.
But then the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. The alliance (in all but name) which involved each party turning a blind eye while the other overran another small eastern European country (the Soviets took seven against the German’s six) but was most effective in its economic impact. Without the resources of the Soviet Union, including especially supplies of oil from the Caucasus, the German military could not have overrun Western Europe (Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France) in the spring of 1940. And while Britain itself was immune to invasion, the acquisition of air and submarine bases in northwestern France provided the means to counter the British blockade and to bomb (although not particularly successfully) British cities and British industry.
Economic warfare, then, has a track record of backfiring… as the post-1945 history of American sanctions demonstrates. From Cuba to China, and back to Iran, American sanctions seldom bring about the desired regime change, and most often simply mobilise the affected populations behind governments that they might otherwise be more predisposed to overthrow. And it is in light of this experience that western governments ought to have considered the wisdom of attempting to sanction Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
On the one side of the economic equation, Europe and the UK were heavily dependent upon Russian gas and oil. Russia had also been a key supplier of timber, virgin steel, nickel, and several other metals, and – despite net zero virtue signalling – Russia continued to supply 40 percent of Europe’s coal. In other words, Europe and the UK were setting out to cut their own supplies (in the middle of the post-lockdown supply shock) with no plan for where replacements would come from.
On the other side of the equation, Russia had been insolating itself from the Western economies since the Maidan coup in 2014. So that, by the spring of 2022, while western sanctions might hurt, they were never going to force Russia’s hand. Worse still (for western governments) the development of the BRICS economic block provided Russia with alternative trade partners which would gladly purchase resources and goods no longer desired by the Europeans. India, notably, became a world-leading exporter (wink) of oil despite having little in the way of domestic oil production. In terms of the conflict though, it is China’s economic (and diplomatic) support for Russia which (rather like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939) has made Russia invulnerable to western sanctions.
There is an old saying that if you sit on a bandsaw, you won’t be able to tell which tooth slashed your arse. In the UK’s case, it is impossible to separate out the impacts of lockdowns, global supply chain disruption, sanctions, and the incompetent political oversight of the domestic economy. Nevertheless, as with Europe more broadly, it is clear that the higher prices demanded for resources previously imported from Russia are responsible for the ongoing economic stagnation from which there is now no obvious escape.
Seven: But (mostly) not Brexit
Remarkably, despite the raft of negative events and ill-judged political decisions of the past five years, there is still a deranged section of the professional-managerial class which blames everything on Britian’s decision to leave the European Union. So why does Brexit not entirely fit with the other crises outlined in this article?
Certainly, Brexit had a negative impact on trade and had added costs to those UK businesses which trade with Europe (although the shriller claims of “remainiacs” about not being allowed to go on holiday or for their children to go to European universities, are nonsense – all that has changed is the addition of a visa requirement). It is also clear that handing the Brexit negotiations to an incompetent Tory Party whose instinct was to renege on the referendum result, set Britain up for the worst of all possible deals.
However, the theme running through all of these, largely self-inflicted, crises is that those with the power of decision made fatal choices in the expectation that the status quo would remain afterwards. So that, while some among the Brexit leadership probably did assume that UK trade and the UK economy would be the same after Brexit, most actively sought change from what they saw as the dead hand of EU bureaucracy. And this was certainly true of the 17.5 million voters to whom “call me Dave” Cameron had foolishly handed the power of decision by calling the referendum in the first place. As the Geordie car worker replied when Dave said Brexit would damage the economy, “aye, your economy!”
Hubris as denial
In the ancient Greek, hubris was seen more as a personal character flaw, closely associated with another ancient Greek entreaty, “know thy self” – that is, learn your limits. But what we witness in the examples set out above is clearly a collective phenomenon. Just Stop Oil are actively campaigning for their own destruction. The residents of Pacific Palisades went out and voted to undermine their own safety. Successive British governments have pursued economic and energy policies which have patently undermined the economy to the point that life support is now threatened. Lockdowns and sanctions were unthinkingly implemented without even considering what the long-term impact might be… in the latter case, nobody seems to have considered the possibility that Russia might actually win.
One explanation for the apparent failure to understand risk in these cases might be that those involved live in the abstraction. People who work in manual occupations, and those living in close proximity to real-world risk, tend to have a less optimistic view of the likely consequences of contemporary public policy than, for example, the upper-middle class supporters of Just Stop Oil or the Hollywood Luvvies who voted for their houses to be burned down. And in the western states, politics is the theatre of abstraction, where nobody dare allow the real life of millions of ordinary people to intrude.
This ability to operate in the abstract though, may have an evolutionary root, due to an innate human ability to deny mortality. That is; to exist in every moment knowing it might be one’s last would be so depressing and debilitating that one could not get anything done. And so, natural selection will have favoured those who, while occasionally aware of death in the abstract, could act as if they were immortal. This would explain the in-built optimism bias which allows us to simply assume that things will turn out fine even when the evidence points to the contrary. It would also explain why only a tiny fraction of us – mostly those of the Myers Briggs INTJ personality type, which makes up just 3 percent of the population – seem able to understand risk, but like Cassandra, are destined to be ignored when they raise it.
It is notable that in all of the cases set out above, those who chose to deny risk quickly established “thought-stoppers” to be deployed against anyone raising concerns about the risk. Those who point out the risks of ending oil use before a viable alternative has been found, are labelled Climate Deniers™. Those who point out the need for fire risk management are derided as Doom-mongers™. Those supporting alternative economic and energy policies are either (depending on the alternative) Communists™ or Far Right™. Those questioning lockdowns were Granny Killers™. While those concerned about sanctions were Putin Apologists™. Labels that quickly silenced the messenger, even if the risk persisted… it is a dangerous game to play as the stakes are raised by the combination of declining surplus energy, unsustainable economic circumstances, and growing environmental damage.
It is said that as the Titanic was going down, the survivors could hear the sound of the band playing. At the time, this was taken to be evidence of bravery in the face of adversity. But I have often wondered if the band was experiencing a form of denial – believing, despite the gathering evidence around them – that the Titanic really was unsinkable. Or at least that it was only a matter of time before rescue arrived. Maybe humans are just wired that way. So that nobody can tell them otherwise.
And Cassandra was right… there was something funny about that horse.
As you made it to the end…
you might consider supporting The Consciousness of Sheep. There are seven ways in which you could help me continue my work. First – and easiest by far – please share and like this article on social media. Second follow my page on Facebook. Third follow my channel on YouTube. Fourth, sign up for my monthly e-mail digest to ensure you do not miss my posts, and to stay up to date with news about Energy, Environment and Economy more broadly. Fifth, if you enjoy reading my work and feel able, please leave a tip. Sixth, buy one or more of my publications. Seventh, support me on Patreon.