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Christopher Owens 🎵 with the 56th in his Predominance series.

“There's a sad sort of clanking from the clock in the hall/And the bells in the steeple, too. And up in the nursery an absurd little bird/is popping out to say ‘cuckoo’” -   Rodgers/Hammerstein 

Horns up 

New Horizons



Public Enemy – Black Skies Over the Projects: Apartment 2025

Five years on from the excellent, if somewhat self-celebratory, ‘What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down?’, Chuck D and Flava Flav are back with another fine record to their name. While they’re never going to be as incendiary sounding as they were in 1987, it’s heartening that they’re still putting out LP’s with humour, anger and groove.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.

Cathedral – Society’s Pact with Satan

Apparently recorded at the same time as the underwhelming ‘The Last Spire’ and recently rediscovered, one would have to question how this was allowed to be forgotten as it is an utter belter. A 30-minute track that encompasses what made Cathedral such a legendary band, the blend of psych, folk, stoner and doom is revitalising.

The album can be streamed and purchased here.

ShitNoise – Charades

I thoroughly enjoyed last year’s ‘I Cocked My Gun and Shot My Best Friend’ from this Monte Carlo collective so this was always going to be interesting to me. Touted as their most eclectic to date, it blends bro-step, alt-rock, noise, metal, pop and electronica in such a cohesive manner that it is genuinely breath taking. More of this sort of thing please.

The album can be streamed and purchased here

Golden Oldies


Laibach – The Sound of Music

Released not long after their trip to North Korea, this reinterpretation of the world-renowned musical manages to be pretty, melancholic, sinister and political all at once. Don’t believe me? Check out ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ which now sounds like totalitarian propaganda. Or ‘So Long, Farewell’ set in the context of the Goebbels murder/suicide pact (see the video as proof).



D.A.F – Alles Ist Gut

Once dubbed the grandfathers of techno by John Peel, this release from 1981 remains a seminal industrial/techno record. Aside from it having ‘Der Mussolini’ (an iconic dancefloor number that still feels subversive despite saying nothing of substance), the whole album just oozes dirt, decadence and subversion. Highly recommended.



ESG – Come Away with ESG

I don’t care what your tastes are re. music, everyone needs to hear this record at least once. An astonishing mesh of funk, post-punk and minimalism that is rich in atmosphere and heavy on the groove, this debut LP from the South Bronx trio of the Scroggins family is a stone-cold classic that proves that less is indeed more.



Dead Can Dance – Into the Labyrinth

Released in 1993, this masterpiece was the first DCD album recorded by themselves, yet it has the same epic grandeur of a Hollywood movie. Although something of a goth staple these days, Lisa Gerrard’s version of ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ still has the ability to stop time and closer ‘How Fortunate the Man With None’ is Brendan Perry at his most haunting.



⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.

Predominance 56

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Seventy Two

 

Pastords @ 5

 

A Morning Thought @ 2954

Gearóid Ó Loinsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 27-October-2025.

Photo: GOL, protest in support of Petro in Bogotá.

Colombia is going through an unprecedented crisis in its relationship with the US. It is partly because the Empire is in the hands of a nutcase who is using the drugs issue to pressure the Colombian government. He is not by any stretch the first north American president to do so. The inclusion of Petro in the so-called Clinton List clearly points to what is happening being part of US anti-drugs policy going back a long time.

Trump decertified the country in the war on drugs, specifically the president, Gustavo Petro. His clarification that he was not criticising the police and military forces of the Colombian state but rather the president indicated that other things were in the pipeline and he sought to calm his Uribista allies in the country. Then came the inclusion of Petro, his family and the minister Armando Benedetti in the so-called Clinton List. The irony that Petro, the personal chauffeur of Clinton when he visited Colombia, ended up in that list is hilarious, though it is a serious matter.

First of all, we should be clear as to what that list is. Its official name is not the Clinton List but rather the Office of Foreign Assets Control and it has existed since the 1950s. The name says it all: CONTROL. Clinton lent his name to the programme to pursue drug traffickers. Its mission is:

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (”OFAC”) of the US Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.[1]

Whether a leader enters the list or not is not support for or a criticism of his or her moral fibre. It is simply an acknowledgement that their policies are not viewed favourably. They are perceived to be against the policies and interests of the US. Petro, his wife, son and the minister Armando Benedetti were put on the list under the pretext of being related to the drugs business, specifically in the case of Petro of not having prevented or having facilitated the production of cocaine. 

A lot can be said of Petro’s erratic drugs policy, except that he is a drugs trafficker. His policy on drugs is the same failed proposals of all the previous governments, although in his discourse he did speak of changing the prohibitionist paradigm without actually doing anything about it. He has already defended himself regarding the statistics on coca crop expansion, seizures etc. in which he has performed better than the previous government. I do not intend to support his defence, as I do not agree with what it represents in terms of social policy and a real change in paradigm. But in bourgeois terms, between one state and another, Petro is right. He complied with all that was demanded of him by UN treaties and above all the demands of the US government. He is not the first president to be attacked for his supposed or real links to the drugs trade. They did it with Turbay and Samper. Later without accusing him of being a drugs trafficker they got Pastrana to do everything they wanted with the excuse of a war on drugs. Strangely, the one president that they didn’t try to publicly tarnish was Álvaro Uribe Vélez, perhaps the one who is most questioned by Colombian society in the matter.

Drugs policy is now what it always has been, US interference in the internal policies of whatever country they choose and an excuse to invade it, if necessary. Petro is put on a list and the Colombian banks shut down his accounts under orders from a foreign government. The Clinton List places no legal obligations on anyone in the country according to the Constitutional Court,[2] but there is a problem. If the US designates Petro as someone linked to the drugs trade and his bank does not close down his account, that bank could lose its correspondent banking powers in the US and thus lose its right to trade in dollars i.e. the economic death of the bank. It is a question of imperialism. It is not a legal matter. As Petro’s lawyer, Dan Kovalik, explains, Petro has no criminal cases in the US and he intends to defend him as well as taking legal cases against the murder of Colombians on the seas by US state forces.[3] Kovalik has a long record in defending human rights in Colombia. As a lawyer he attempted to bring to trial the directors of various multinationals with a presence in Colombia for the murder of trade unionists, amongst them, Coca-Cola and Drummond.

There is deep seated problem though and it is that in the three years of Petro’s government, other than nice speeches about the prohibitionist paradigm he has not challenged it in practice. In fact, he adopted the discourse on drugs to mainly attack the ELN. He has publicly disagreed with the existence of the so-called Cartel de los Soles, but only to say that he has the revealed truth and it is not that Cartel but rather the International Narcotics Board. Utter stupidity.

Now, as on other occasions, the USA uses the anti-drugs discourse to try and break Latin America. They have been accusing Maduro in Venezuela of being the main drugs pusher in the world, an idea that has penetrated Colombian society and obviously the Nobel Prize Committee that gave the peace prize to the rotten right winger María Corina Machado. Now they move on to Petro. The results may be similar. Trump recently decided to send the USS Gerald Ford, the most modern aircraft carrier the US has to the Caribbean. It is all part of a strategy to justify the invasion of Venezuela and as the right-wing newspaper of the Colombian oligarchy, El Tiempo, points out or desires, Trump is considering the possibility of land attacks in Colombia and Venezuela.[4]

His migratory policy, drugs and trade policies are not that different to other presidents of the country. But as the spoilt brat he is and being a little bit of an idiot, suffering from cognitive impairment he says out loud what has always been said in the corridors of Congress, the club or the board of directors of the multinationals. Petro claims that the problem is not with the US but rather with Trump. Obviously in the current context Trump acts in a very particular manner. But the problem is with the US. The laws Trump uses against Petro have existed for a long time, even before Clinton hired him as his chauffeur, and they will continue to exist under the next government. The USA uses any excuse to justify its foreign policy, be it weapons of mass destruction, chemical attacks, supposed massacres or drugs etc.

The USA has to be fought, not just Trump, its imperialist militarism that we have lived through under all presidents, including the photogenic democrats like Clinton and Obama. The banking system that launders billions each year but closes the accounts of those who have nothing to do with the issue has to be fought.

The entire prohibitionist set up on drugs has also to be fought. If Iván Cepeda becomes the next president, he should take note. Pretty speeches on drugs are of no use. What is of use is an international fight and a break with the war on drugs in order to design new policies on drugs, regardless of what the Whitehouse tenant says.

References

[1] See.

[2] El Heraldo (24/10/2025) Cuentas bancarias del president Petro, su familia y del ministro Benedetti serán congeladas por decision de EE.UU. 

[3] El Heraldo (27/10/2025) “No hay ningún proceso judicial en Estados Unidos contra Petro”: abogado Daniel Kovalik. 

[4] El Tiempo (26/10/2025) Trump estaría evaluando posibles ataques por tierra en Venezuela y Colombia, según senador republicano Lindsey Graham. 

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Crisis Between Colombia And The USA 🪶 Narcotic Imperialism

The Journal ★ The claim that Muslims outnumber the Gaeltacht population has circulated online in recent days.

False Claims Have been widely shared online which suggest that Ireland now has a larger population of Muslims than people who live in Gaeltacht areas.

These claims have circulated since 14 October, when a number of accounts on X shared a graphic showing a map of Ireland with its Gaeltacht regions highlighted in green.

The graphic also featured two statistics: one which said “Gaeltacht population 106,000″ and another which said “Muslim population: 112,000″.

This image with incorrect data has been shared dozens of times on social media

However, the figure about Ireland’s Muslim population is incorrect.

According to the Central Statistics Office (CSO), there were 81,930 Muslims in Ireland when the 2022 Census was taken.

The same Census results show there were 106,220 people living in Gaeltacht areas in Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, Cork, Waterford and Meath.

It also recorded 1,873,997 people saying that they could speak Irish across the entire country, equivalent to around 40% of Ireland’s entire population over the age of three.

There are no statistics available on how many Muslims in Ireland are living in Gaeltacht areas . . . 

Continue @ The Journal.

Debunked 🪶 There Are Not More Muslims In Ireland Than People Living In Gaeltacht Areas

Brandon Sullivan 🔖 As everyone who’s read Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi knows, Charles Manson was a hippy cult leader who wanted to start a race war by murdering a number rich white people and blaming it on the Black Panthers.


His theory for this race war, known as Helter Skelter, was informed in part by The Beatles White Album, released in 1968. Again, this is known, accepted fact, detailed in the 7 million selling book, Helter Skelter. The author, Vincent Butliosi, was in a position to know this, as he was the prosecutor in the case against Manson, and a number of his followers. I myself read Helter Skelter some years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The problem is, sadly, that Bugliosi, to put it mildly, lied, lied, and lied again. The Helter Skelter idea, and it did exist, was just that: an idea. One of many discussed by Manson as he preached to his followers at ranches in the Los Angeles desert. As Tom O’Neill, the author of this magnificent and majestic book, said in an Error Morris (of Fog of War and Thin Blue Line fame) documentary: “we don’t know what happened. But we definitely know that what we were told happen isn’t what happened.”

O’Neill’s journalism is epic in its scale. The cast of characters in this book is astounding. I was familiar with the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, and how it targeted the civil rights movement. But the CIA’s domestic operations, Chaos, and MKUltra, I hadn’t heard about. In forensic detail, O’Neill illustrates how the FBI committed extrajudicial killings of Black Panthers, which I was aware of previously but not in such depth, but also how the CIA conducted experiments on “unwitting, let alone consenting” American citizens, which led to at least two deaths. CIA scientists wanted to create individuals who would kill on command without remorse, and experimented with hypnosis and LSD to create such “Manchurian candidates” – of course, infamously, Charles Manson did just that. The coincidences don’t stop there. The major CIA scientist involved in these experiments, Dr “Jolly” West, had an office in the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Center. Which is also where Charles Manson’s parole officer had an office and would meet him. And it’s also where Manson would bring his female followers for treatment for STIs and unwanted pregnancies. O’Neill is open about not being able to prove a link between the CIA’s operations and Manson, but the coincidences are absolutely incredible. Or incredulous. The reader is left to decide.

So, why did Manson charge his followers with murdering the occupants of 10050 Cielo Drive, and a middle class couple the next day? Well, a number of theories are explored. Vincent Bugliosi, in his prosecution and in his best-selling book, stated that the Cielo house was targeted to murder the record producer Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day) who, who had angered Manson by rejecting him for a recording contract. Except, as O’Neill diligently pointed out, Manson knew he had moved out of that property (because Melcher was scared of his housekeeper, he claimed) and Melcher also met Manson several times after the murders were committed. As O’Neill pointed out, his discoveries revealed that Melcher perjured himself, as did Bugliosi. This anomalies are among literally hundreds that O’Neill uncovers. The story of his O’Neill first got into this subject, and stayed the course over 20 years is a story worthy of a book itself.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If anyone is interested in true crime, the Manson murders, the counter culture, the FBI/CIA, Hollywood in the late 1960s, or just plain ol’ forensic journalism, then this book is essential reading.

I hope someone else on the blog reads it and does a better review than me.

Check out the documentary on Netflix, or the interview on Joe Rogan. I actually listened to the audiobook, then bought a hard copy to access the notes at the end, which are meticulously kept.

★10/10.★

Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring, 2019. Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties.William Heinemann Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1785152078

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

Chaos 📚 Charles Manson, The CIA, And The Secret History Of The Sixties

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Seventy One

 

Pastords @ 4

 

A Morning Thought @ 2953

People And Nature 🔖Review by Simon Pirani of More, More and More: an all-consuming history of energy, by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Allen Lane, 2024)

We really are in climate trouble now. The intergovernmental climate agreements, for whatever they were worth, are in peril. The target of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees is effectively lost. A more chaotic global order beckons, as Trump lashes out furiously at the international institutions the declining USA so long dominated.

A coal miner in Xingtai, China, which now burns coal at 15 times the rate that Britain did in the 19th century
Photo: Wikimedia commons

New rounds of fossil-fuelled capital expansion threaten. AI and other technologies, far from helping, turn the screw of rising energy consumption. And pathetic, shameful politicians assure us that capital will meet the challenge with its “energy transition”.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s wonderful book shows how the whole idea of “energy transition” is deceitful and dangerous – “bad history”, on which we can not base our visions of the future. If we are to find real answers to the climate crisis, we will need better understandings of energy and material dynamics than that.

There are two main parts to Fressoz’s argument. First, he shows how clunky, stagist simplifications, such as “transitions”, have distorted historians’ understanding of changes in technologies and fuel uses. False assumptions about past “energy transitions” are used to support comforting but illusory narratives about how we might move away from fossil fuels.

Second, he explains how, in the 1970s and 80s, a future “energy transition” – a shift of technologies, firstly to nuclear power – became the dominant, false “solution” to global heating, largely at the bidding of the US ruling elite. He interrogates the ideological prejudices that influenced the economists, energy analysts and other scholars who fed this narrative, and shows how it took hold – albeit not unchallenged – in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 1990s.

Energy history

The first part of the argument concerns tonnes of wood, coal, oil and other energy carriers. In the popular imagination, and the work of some careless historians, wood was displaced by coal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and coal by oil in the twentieth. But that’s not what happened.

Far from wood being left behind by coal and oil, in the twentieth century more was consumed than ever, in buildings, railways, crates, barrels, cardboard, paper – and pit props in coal mines. Far from coal being left behind in the “age of oil”, global production and consumption has risen in the twenty-first century to unprecedented heights.

“After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood”, Fressoz writes (page 2). China now burns coal at about 15 times the rate that Britain did at the height of its “age of coal”.

That’s the “More, more and more” of the book’s title. But this is not just about quantity; it is also about the complexity of energy systems in which wood, coal, oil and other materials are used in increasingly interdependent ways.

To underline the point about wood and coal, Fressoz describes the heavy dependence of twentieth-century coal mines on the availability of wood for pit props. “Without abundant wood, Europe would simply have had no coal, and hence little or no steam, little or no steel and few or no railways”, he writes (page 55).” Things have changed, but this is not a transition, he insists: “rather, we should be talking about a symbiotic relationship that intensified during the nineteenth century, followed by a gradual disengagement that really began in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Even now, hundreds of millions of people rely on woody biomass for basic fuel needs; in Africa’s big cities, charcoal is a fuel of choice – two or three times more energy-dense than wood, and transported by oil-fuelled vehicles. “This new energy system is based on a combination of wood, muscle power and oil”, Fressoz writes (page 124).

Women workers loading timber for pit props in the UK in 1943.
Photo: Imperial War Museum

Neither does it mean much to talk about a “transition” from coal to oil, Fressoz insists. While the wood-coal symbiosis weakened in the late twentieth century, the coal-oil symbiosis became stronger. More steel from coal-fired furnaces was needed to extract and transport oil, and to build hundreds of millions of oil-consuming cars and other oil-driven machinery. Conversely, mining coal from huge open-cast operations, and transporting it ever-greater distances, needed oil.

If the coal-to-oil “transition” did not happen, then the fashionable idea that it reshaped the relationship between labour movements and political power makes no sense. Fressoz offers an iconoclastic take-down of this false logic.

His bluntest questions are for Timothy Mitchell, who argues in Carbon Democracy: political power in the age of oil (2011) that the workers’ movement’s advance in Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was closely linked to coal miners’ economic power, while oil, extracted with significant capital and minimal labour, largely undermined labour.

Carbon Democracy’s “enthusiastic reception in the academic world testifies to an appetite for materialist explanations of politics and a paradoxical lack of interest in the history of production”, Fressoz writes (page 86).

“Energy transition” as politics

The second part of Fressoz’s argument concerns “energy transition” as a political discourse centred on technological innovation, an ideological cable that binds together governments’ “climate policies” and corporations’ PR fables.

He starts in the USA in the 1920s, when the apparently eccentric technocratic movement urged “transition” from capitalism to a society based on the most efficient use of energy and labour, through the rational deployment of technology.

In the 1940s came the atom bomb, which helped the US achieve unparalleled geopolitical and economic dominance. Its nuclear scientists found themselves in an unusually privileged position. In this milieu, long-term energy forecasting was all the rage – firstly, to convince politicians of the benefits of generous state investment in nuclear power, and, specifically, in breeder reactors that promised to produce new nuclear fuel more rapidly than they burned it.

Fressoz shows how nuclear lobbying sat comfortably with neo-Malthusian ideas about resources, including fossil fuel resources, running out due to population growth. Into this mix of ruling-class ideology, and the science influenced by it, came the issue of climate change:

Because the nuclear lobby was defending a very long-term technological option – the fast-breeder reactor – it produced a dystopian and innovative futurology, focusing not only on the end of fossil fuels, but also, as early as 1953, on global warming (page 154).

In the 1960s and 70s, “energy transition” was brought into wider public discourse, together with a new discursive battering-ram: “energy crisis”. That was a misnomer for the 1973 oil price shock, when social and political ferment in the Middle East and Latin America, culminating in oil company nationalisations and a partial boycott of sales to the USA, forced a shift in the terms of trade in the oil-producing nations’ favour. Fressoz argues that the “energy crisis” had already been invented by the nuclear lobby in the late 1960s: the battles over oil made it taken-for-granted common sense.

Energy system forecasting, too, went mainstream in the 1970s, thanks to the oil price shock and advances in computing. Fressoz shows that the computer models often focused on one technology superceding another, e.g. nuclear over oil, rather than the cumulative expansion of energy supply in the context of capitalist economic growth. He critiques the work of the Italian nuclear physicist Cesare Marchetti, who pointed to energy systems’ inertia, and argued that we could learn more about the future from historical statistics than from models that sketched a transition to nuclear dominance.

Fressoz concludes that, for half a century, energy research has focused too much on technological innovation and too little on the persistence of old technologies:

Even today, the many studies of technological diffusion hinder our understanding of the climate challenge. On the one hand, […] they say nothing about the disappearance of the old, making the assumption – implicit or explicit and in any case unjustified – that this would be symmetrical with the diffusion of the new. On the other hand, […] since energies and materials are in symbiosis as much as in competition, we simply cannot use a technological substitution model to understand their dynamics. Nonetheless, the experts are still comforted by the upturn in the diffusion curve for wind and solar power, as if it were equivalent to the disappearance of fossil fuels. (pages 178-9).

Who cares about the history of research, now we are confronted by climate crisis? We all should, because – as Fressoz shows in a fiercely polemical chapter on the IPCC – the technology-focused futurology summoned up by the “atomic Malthusians” of the 1950s, and written in computer code by the energy forecasters of the 1970s, now walks tall across the pages of the scientific reports on which the international climate talks rely.

By the 1990s, “a neo-Malthusian technological futurology for rich countries had suddenly become a safeguard plan for the entire planet … How was this scientific and political scandal possible?” Fressoz asks (page 180).

In the 1980s, as the climate scientists’ understanding of global heating improved, and fossil fuel burning confirmed as indubitably the main cause, it became clear that energy policy goals had to shift. The move away from fossil fuels had to be faster, not because of a Malthusian exhaustion of resources, but because of the damage done by the global economy’s constant expansion.

A meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the 1980s.
Photo from the Geneva Environment Network

Corporate technological “solutions” to the 1970s “energy crisis” were now repurposed for this real climate crisis, Fressoz argues. The Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus, who sketched out the economic-growth-plus-innovation strategies that heavily influenced the IPCC, has much to answer for.

Fressoz quotes the minutes of the 1979 World Climate Conference in Geneva, at which oil company representatives talked of a long transition away from fossil fuels (to 2100), mainly by way of technological innovation, and many prominent scientists agreed – until the nuclear physicist David Rose warned that Nordhaus’s approach, of postponing the transition until new technologies and new capital made it less painful, was “the perfect recipe for climate disaster” (page 190).

Fressoz describes how scientists, engineers, and social and political researchers sometimes resisted, cut across, worked alongside, or capitulated to the ideological pressure of capital. Or complicated combinations. I hope this account will be read, and thought about, by activists who in Extinction Rebellion’s heyday coined the slogan “listen to the science”, as though “the science” is a deity existing above and independently of the societies we live in and the rapacious capital that dominates them. It is not.

By 1988, when the IPCC’s Working Group III was set up, with a brief to advise governments on mitigating climate change, the aim of those governments, the US’s in particular, “was to regain control over international climate experts, who were quick to brandish emission-reduction targets without weighing up their economic effects” (page 199).

Did they bring the scientists to heel? Yes and no. In the run-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015, scenarios mapping slow progress were superceded by those envisaging rapid decarbonisation, in line with the 1.5 degree target adopted. But, as Fressoz shows, the most powerful governments had meanwhile proceeded in practice with the slowest decarbonisation trajectories.

As the gap between these pathways and reality widened, it was filled with a new technofix – “negative emissions” technologies such as carbon removal, that would help achieve “net zero”.

Without saying so, without discussing it, in the 1980s and 1990s, the industrial countries chose – if that word has any meaning – growth and global warming, and gave in to adaptation. […] Populations were not consulted, especially those who will be and already are the victims (page 211).

Fressoz concludes that the concept of “transition”, which lives on in the current obsession with carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and other false “solutions”, is “the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century. It turns evil into cure, polluting industries into the green industries of the future and innovation into our lifeline.” (page 220).

Past, present and future

To make the change that Fressoz suggests is needed – that is, to move away from fossil fuels by a deep restructuring of the economy – would require “a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense”, the economic historian Adam Tooze argues in an earlier review of More, More and More. But, he adds, “formulated this way, it can’t help but seem hopelessly out of reach”.

Maybe stabilising the temperature at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is out of reach, Tooze continues, but to assess the possibilities of the present moment, we need to look at the progress of decarbonisation so far: “it is change on a scale that would have been thought impossible until quite recently”.

Fressoz, by contrast, stresses that what looks like decarbonisation may not be. Historically, symbiosis between fuels took precedence over substitution. “The problem is that such symbiotic relationships still exist between ‘green’ technologies and fossil fuels”, he responded to Tooze in a letter (go via that link and scroll down to the end to see it).

In my view, that symbiosis is reinforced by the narrative of technological transition. And Fressoz further considers that narrative in an article just published in the academic journal Energy Research & Social Science.

He starts with Working Group III’s latest (2022) report, which mentions “technology” 2111 times, “innovation” 1667 times and “hydrogen” 1096 times – as against 232 mentions of “sufficiency”, 29 of “degrowth” (mostly in the references), and three of “prohibition”.

Fressoz proposes that this “technocentric focus” is caused first, because universities and research institutes “almost by design” prioritise novelty (e.g., focusing on hydrogen when sufficiency is more likely to matter for decarbonisation); second, research funding structures and intellectual property frameworks push scientists to work with industry researchers who are constrained by their corporate funders; and third, the way the IPCC itself operates.

He suggests that a milestone for mitigation expertise “will be the recognition that global carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2070 is not simply challenging but technologically impossible”. Accepting the impossibility of net-zero targets is “essential to freeing climate expertise from misplaced optimism and technological illusions”.

To my mind, the problem runs even deeper than this: we need to consider the ways in which the international climate talks, and the IPCC’s work, are not only part of the solution but also part of the problem. This involves questions about political power and its relation to capital.

Fressoz’s work, and his exchange with Tooze, make me think of four crucial research questions. First, we need a real assessment of current decarbonisation progress, as Tooze suggests – but conducted with an approach alert to the danger that e.g. expanding renewable electricity generation, desirable as that is, in the context of headlong economic expansion and capital accumulation may not result in any decarbonisation at all.

Second, we need to ask what a movement to forestall and obstruct that form of expansion could look like, given the global social and political conditions. Third, how can the fight against “technophilia” and technofixes be conducted most effectively? And fourth, what is our assessment of the international climate talks, and the relationship between science and political power around the IPCC?

This in turn begs another question raised in More, More and More: the position of researchers – whether historians and humanities scholars or scientists and engineers – in relation to power and capital. We are not neutral either.

📚 The Earth and us: ways of seeing (a review of The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz)

☭ People & Nature is now on mastodon, as well as twitter, whatsapp and telegram. Please follow! Or email peoplenature@protonmail.com, and we’ll add you to our circulation list (2-4 messages per month)

Technological Transition 📚 The Ideology Of Capital

Independent Dublin Republicans    New York Republican John McDonagh and other Independent Republicans will hold an event to honour Matilda Tone, wife of Theobold Wolfe Tone.
 
The event will be held on Saturday the 1st of November 2025 at 12.45pm at her graveside and final resting place in Greenwood Cemetery.
 
John McDonagh will place soil gathered from Theobald Wolfe Tones grave upon that of Matilda's.


John McDonagh done the very same in reverse when invited to attend the Independent Republicans Bodenstown 2025 National Wolfe Tone Commemoration.
 
Pat Williams will be reading the 1916 Proclamation at the event.

Wreaths will be laid, with O'Donovan Rossa’s Astoria GAA already committing to do so.

A recital of "The Man from God Knows Where" will be provided by Irish-American folk musician and writer Melanie Curran.
 
Matilda Tone was Dublin born (Martha Witherington) and like so many Irish women of the revolution married to prominent Irish Republicans, she was much more than a mere wife.
 
Indeed Matilda was a close confident of Theobold, and for being such, she had to flee in the aftermath of the United Irishmen revolution in 1798 and Theobalds death ahead of imminent execution.

Matilda left Ireland for France, where she held influence with Napolean Bonaparte and other prominent French political and military leaders.

Matilda and Theobolds son William entered millitary training as a cadet eventually qualifying and participating in historic battles against the British until suffering defeat at Waterloo.
 
Following the defeat at Waterloo, Matilda and William departed for America with Thomas Wilson, a former associate of Tones whom she had married.

Shortly after arriving in America both she and William set about locating and collating Theobald's writings and after many years of ardous searching they managed to manifest their labour with a biography.
 
Sadly William died in 1828, the last of the four children that Martha shared with Theobald, leaving her all alone as Thomas Wilson had passed away suddenly four years previous in 1824.
 
Martha Tone survived her four children, her remarkable revolutionary husband and confidant, yet continued her fight to return to her native country, Ireland, a plight that was repeatedly denied by the British political establishment.
 
Martha Tone died in America on the 18th of March 1849 and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
 
 Location: Greenwood Cemetery, Main Entrance at 25th Street & 5th Avenue, Brooklyn

 Meet at 12:30pm | Ceremony begins at 1:00pm

Any group or individual wishing to participate should DM John McDonagh.

Independent Republicans New York City To Honour Matilda Tone

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Eight Hundred And Seventy

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