Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

I wrote this in 2020 and posted it in early ‘21. It was the first piece in the overall project I’m still working on. It sorely needed revision. I’d thought I could do the whole petrohistory of America in 2,000 words, but in fact I was just beginning a bigger project. Now that this revision is done, I consider this to be the starting place for anyone coming to my project for the first time. I'm very grateful to those of you who came to my work at various points and had to figure out what the f**k I was talking about with no or poor context. The following piece might be about as clear as mud, as they say, but at least it’s intended to be The Beginning, to be followed by the Apocalypse Confidential essay in the book that will someday maybe exist.

Speaking of the book that may someday exist, my goal with this substack is to generate a large enough list that a publisher will feel comfortable taking a risk on the book even though my work is…not for everyone. Since this is meant to be the beginning, this is the piece to share. If you like what I’m doing here, please help me grow my audience.

One of the mistakes in the original: I said that Fritz Haber went to Japan after he was finally unseated from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. I’m not sure where I got that idea. He literally and figuratively died on his way to Palestine, only finally embracing his Judaism via Zionism. Read Nitrogen for context on that.

Co-hosting on the audio version are my Hermes 3000, which typed the pages included as images, and my Outside Typewriter, the Rambo of Ultraportables, the very thocky Antares Parva.

"The Sixth Hyperstitional Entity of Oil: Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice: a post-apocalyptic entity composed of organic corpses flattened, piled up and liquidated in sedimentary basins (mega-graveyards); geologists suggest that if a high sedimentation rate preserves organic material, a catastrophic sedimentation rate (The Flood) would uproot, kill, and bury organic material so rapidly as to cut the porphyrin off from oxidizing agents which would destroy them in the ocean water. Oil as the post-mortem production of organisms is bound to death. Since its ethos — both origin and end — is purely teleological, whatever it inspires is founded on death and the logic of death and eventual conclusion. Oil as hydrocarbon corpse juice is itself a mortal entity which has been the source of ideology for petro-masonic orders and their policies — from OPEC to the agencies of the War on Terror to pomo-leftists.… It is extracted through teleological instrumentalization of the socio-political body of the Earth.” —Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

All energy on the planet is solar energy. This solar energy exists here on earth as movement, heat, and biochemical energy. It matters what machines we use to convert that solar and photosynthetic energy into survival, and, ultimately, wealth. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of those machines were animals, including most importantly, human animals, who could convert biochemical energy into muscle power and so labor power. Under this preindustrial regime, the most efficient way to gain power was to accumulate and control human bodies: slaves. Ultimately, slavery was the engine of colonialism — the energy that drove the domineering Europeans to invade, occupy, dominate and control so very many communities around the world. Slavery came to demand a total logic of white supremacy that infected everything. And then, our story begins:

In 1880, Pattillo Higgins, a White Supremacist in Beaumont, Texas, with a fourth grade education, threw a bomb into a Black church and started shooting into the windows. I don’t know whether he killed any of the churchgoers, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t recorded. However, Patillo got in a shootout with the cops who responded to the scene, and he killed one of them. Pattillo was acquitted of the murder, since after all, he was simply performing his duty as a young racist to terrorize Black people in their own church, and the cop was a race traitor for defending them, and this was Eastern Texas in 1880 (“self-defense”). He was seventeen.

Living free in Beaumont without fear of reprisal, Higgins became active in his Church, and somehow ended up teaching a girl’s Sunday School class. As you might expect from someone of his caliber, he “fell in love” with one of them, which to me must mean that he raped her. He did name his oil company after her. Anyway, one Sunday he took the girls up to a hill outside of town, called Spindletop, and thought he smelled oil. He bought the land and spent the next nine years trying to drill for oil there, and failing to do anything, wasting intolerable amounts of capital, and yet always getting bailed out (just like that jury did back in Beaumont). Then in January, 1901, oil erupted out of the hole, destroying the machinery and shooting 100 feet above the derrick. It flowed for 9 days at a rate of 100,000 barrels a day, as if it was eager to be free of its subterranean lair: not quite as a caged animal would escape into freedom, more like an ejaculation that doesn’t end. That 900,000 barrels of oil was the vanguard of oil’s entropic conquest of America, as Texans and other White southerners made themselves rich and Capital was mobilized to tap the flow of distilled photosynthesis spurting out of the ground, turning money into oil’s key instrument to get itself into combustion chambers to release its pent-up joules.

Suddenly we could tap hundreds of thousands of years of photosynthetic energy at once, millions of metric tons of oil just bursting out of the ground, flinging itself at us like a horny teenager. After Spindletop, new oil fountains kept leaping up around Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, each one creating a new capital stream, each one making rich first a few White men, then groups of them as the streams began to run together into rivers: Texaco, Chevron, Hunt Oil. This was the birth of a new global power with a center of gravity in the former Slave states, where, at the time, the Civil War was referred to as “The Lost Cause.”

(It is worth mentioning that coal, which was the tellurian entity that spawned the first phase of the industrial revolution, and which continues to be a major necrotic agent today, has its own personal history, different from but related to that of oil.)

So, modern American petrohistory is about 120 years old. Not a long time, just longer than the life of a real person, and indeed, many people still alive have lived through the great majority of it. On a timeline, the fossil fuel age looks like the flame on a long cigarette. And it’s creating an epochal extinction event that will be quite unpleasant to live through.

But apparently 120 years was long enough to seem like it’s always been here, and always will be. Apparently, it was long enough for capitalism to complete its domination around the globe, long enough for it to grow into maturity as colonialism’s replacement. Long enough to spread the false dogma of progress, of a natural human right to air conditioning, internet, and power tools (none of which I’m prepared to live without). Long enough to make it seem like anyone without a national regime of mass consumption has been left behind, and need to be doing everything they can to “develop.” Long enough to create a third world and intentionally, cruelly impoverish it, long enough to destroy the idea of a second world, the only alternative that gained enough power to pose a dialectic challenge to capitalism: Communism. Long enough to irrevocably change the climate of the world and trigger a mass extinction event that will be the defining feature of the 21st century. Long enough, in other words, to remake the world.

I believe that oil is a sentient entity, with its own intelligence and motivations. That it has manipulated humanity into its own self-demise. To make myself seem moderate and mainstream, I’ll start by citing Amitav Ghosh, who, building on the fact that today scientists accept that trees in a forest are able to communicate with one another, develops a very common sense vision of arboreal consciousness:

“In that humans lack the ability to communicate as trees do, could it not be said that for a tree it is the human who is mute? If trees possessed modes o...