You likely have not heard about Chad Haag, he’s not a fashionable fellow. His main presence in the world is through his youtube channel, and if one may say he is to ever be famous it may well be because he is one of a few in a growing trend of academics working outside academia. A PHD dropout who was forced to flee the US to a remote village in India in order escape the crippling and enslaving student debt he could not repay (a modest ~20k debt which skyrocketed in interest), Chad has been an outspoken critic of the modern university financial scheme and the incoming student debt crisis that many are waiting to see burst. He is, however, generally not interested in moralizing or on following the typical trends of thought on what the important issues are. Attempting to comprehend modern society as a whole he has taken the comprehension of peak oil and its most raw meaning for our society as an integral part of a new starting point for rethinking metaphysics.

The abstract meaning of peak oil is this: modern technical industrialism is itself unsustainable, not just because of an incoming ecological disaster, but because oil, the cheap and plentiful resource that undergirds most of our modern way of life along with other fossil fuels, is running out and we have no alternatives to keep the cheap energy gravy train going. This is where Chad’s book, Being and Oil Vol.1: Peak Oil Philosophy and the Ontology of Limitation, comes to intervene as a philosophical systematic investigation of the logic of our oil based society as a specific object where he deploys his new philosophy of substance to elucidate the nature of the issue beyond the simplicity of the falling number of barrels of oil. With the end of oil comes not jtust the end of mass industry, but of the very way people comprehend and know the world as new categories take place over old ones. A new theory of Being through substance as limit is set to explain why and how this is so.

It is by virtue of oil that capitalism can continue to expand, it is by virtue of oil that financiers (usurers as Chad indicts them) make their unearned wealth, it is by virtue of oil that office “workers” (Chad doesn’t believe they genuinely work) can sit in a cozy office doing little all day and being paid more than those who do the real physical labor, it is by virtue of oil that teenage boys and twenty to thirty year old manchildren such as Destiny can make a living doing nothing but sitting at a computer all day playing video games to entertain jobless children. It is by virtue of oil that the most materially prosperous states in history have produced a populace who have essentially so little to do that they have fallen into depression, nihilism, and a life of pure appearance qua social media spectacle.

Being is oil, says Chad, because modern industrial society as a whole from technology to ideology exist on the back of fossil fuels in a social logic of explosion, a logic of expansion where much is made by doing little through exploiting a finite resource to attempt to extract infinity. We burn fossil fuels so that we may burn fossil fuels. The economy grows so that it may grow more, the consumer consumes so that they may consume more. But regardless of ideology and desire, Nature has a real limit, the limit of its substance, a substance that is not a figment of our imagination nor a product of our will. Being is insofar as its limit exists, and when that limit disappears so does what is built upon it. Technological developments cannot save us from peak oil, he claims, because such activities are premised on oil. Machines to develop more machines only burns more oil to develop more oil burning machines. As Chad writes: “Everything we do is just a euphemism for burning fossil fuels.”



But what is philosophical as such is not that Being is Oil, but why. Underlying this conceptualization is a rethinking of the categories of substance and the way subjects encounter and know substance. What follows is only a general outline of the first half of the work which itself is a meandering outline mixing Chad’s summary of the significance of peak oil thought and of a highly condensed preview of the strictly philosophical content of the second half of the work which takes up the remaining ~300 pages.

Return to Substance Metaphysics

It is a most shocking thing to hear from serious and sober lips that we must return to substance metaphysics. If one is aware of the regular milieu of Analytic and even Continental philosophy, and better, the average person themselves, it seems on the one hand undeniable that we generally never left substance metaphysics. Process philosophies have for the most part found little to no purchase outside of a dedicated small following of professors and eccentric autodidacts as well as artists in general, and even less specifically in the general disciplines both in material and social sciences. Those who are ahead of the curve see the world as lagging behind by an unfortunate couple of centuries at this point. How, then, can Chad claim we must return to substance if it seemingly never left? It all hinges on what we mean by ‘substance.’

Substance as Limit

‘Limit’ means . . . the substance of each thing, and the essence of each; for this is the limit of knowledge; and if of knowledge, of the object also.—Aristotle, Metaphysics V

Substance or limit, says Chad, is not a thing, but an intelligible a priori structure justified on purely rational grounds in order to avoid the paradox of infinite recursion. Substance, then, is an ontological and at once epistemological limit. Some examples are given as to why we must posit substance as limit if we are not to fall into paradoxes of recursion: an accident of an accident, change of change, becoming of becoming, foundation of foundation, and the meaning of meaning. Each example shows the unintelligibility of that which never has a definite ground of Being, that which we could never grasp insofar as it has no limit of intelligibility. Substance is, against Kant’s concept of it as noumena behind phenomena, therefore, the intelligible limit on recursion which remains as the foundation for all else.

The return to substance as such here is then the return to a wider view of substance freed from being seen only through one of its determinations and instead being seen through all of its fundamental determinations in social cognition. One may say, and I here do say, that Chad has here reached the level of the Notion qua Essence, but given his expressed differences to Hegelianism it shall be interesting to see how he manages to navigate this realm of cognition and whether he can mount to the full Concept.

Being that I have yet to read much of Aristotle, this is a new conception for me, yet it is a clear, intelligible, and even quite acceptable formulation even for the common person. I will offer here only a short counter remark: the issue of reflexivity which comes up here concerning intelligibility is indeed an issue for Chad’s Aristotelian standpoint, however, it is not a standpoint which is at all a problem for someone like Hegel precisely on its intelligibility. Hegel is the philosopher of reflexivity par excellence, his entire philosophy is nothing but the change of change and the fall of substance and subject into each other by the very nature of limitation. As Hegel notes, limit itself must be limited so that it may be limit.

Degrees of Being

In that something depends on another, that which is dependent/accidental/contingent necessarily has less reality than that on which it depends. In that substance is what is foundational, essential, and necessary it is the being of beings which exist through borrowing their being from it. Beings, therefore, have being only to the extent that they are in proximity to their substantial limit. The further down the layers of determination, the more mediated an existent being is in relation to its substance, the less being it has, the less real it is.

Oil As Substance

Modernity, Chad claims, is contingent on oil, and insofar as this is so oil is the substance and limit of modernity. All of the technical marvels of machines as well as intellectual ingenuity to deal with capitalism are premised on the real substance of fossil fuels, and if they vanish so does modern society as a whole. We are surrounded by fossil fuels to such an extent that they have become not just background for our living, but a transcendental lens for our cognition of the world, and so oil is also the limit of our cognition: we think all as oil without referring to oil whenever we engage the world with the logic of explosive growth and surplus. Oil itself, the material thing, is not oil as we know it without falling under such a framework of intelligibility of transcendental oil; thus, Chad claims that transcendental oil is the limit of empirical oil, what remains even after all empirical oil is gone—this a Marxist might call its ideology, though Chad would strongly dispute this and with good reasons with his concept of substance.

What is oil for us? An energy resource for the sake of explosive growth, an energy resource for our surplus production and appropriation, it is a fuel for progress. The myth of endless progress, particularly material economic progress, too is oil. Echoing Zizek’s “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” Chad changes it to “It is literally easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of technological progress.“ To us moderns the idea of technology progressing to save us from the evils of technology is an unquestioned given, but history’s trajectory of rising and falling civilizations, as well as the ‘myths’ of ancient peoples speak of an opposite vision, a vision of a fall and decline from a once great golden age with wonders long lost and forgotten.

Oil is, therefore, substance and essential form. It is substance in that all of modern industrialism is but an appearance of oil. It is essential form in that transcendental oil (henceforth Oil) is comprehended without reference to empirical oil itself as well as the fact that Oil is the formal determinant of modern society, the very ways it exists and operates. Chad will focus on Oil as Aristotelian formal cause and substance precisely because it transcends empirical oil, the chemical compound that powers the world, and becomes a higher order reality determining the cognitive and lived landscape of humanity.

Transcendental Oil & the Society of Waste

In that Oil is a logic of surplus and growth for the sake of surplus and growth, it logically manifests in a society of endless growth and consumption with no view to sustainability. In that technology takes over for human labor, people are freed from the toil of ages in having to labor for their own sustenance in a community of people who must deal face to face. The generation of a leisure population in a society designed not for living, but for growing and consuming, has at the same time through the parasite of capital produced a population physically and psychically sick, choking on their own pollution and alienated from their species being as laborers and social animals. Industrial society and the logic of oil has produced generations of people who no longer know how to function in the capacity of people, glued to social media and mediating their social lives through a spectacle of public images, videos, and short blurbs fishing for likes on an Internet system that exists only because of the oil being burned to maintain the entire infrastructure of vapid and evanescent sociality which is forgotten mere hours after it was posted and uploaded, never to be seen again in the mountain of meaningless information flooding in and through the digital entertainment world. Only in a society of Oil does it make sense that people who do not labor can survive and live better than those who do by endlessly producing pointless and vapid information which is here today and forgotten tomorrow, stored within warehouses of hard drives being kept online by burning oil.

Chad, rightly, questions the myth of progress that says that all of human history has inexorably brought us to our current day and way of life by power of an inner human drive to seek realization, with this realization of human essence being more and more clear and complete the closer we get to society. It is clear who his main targets are: capitalist liberals and socialist Leftists. I will not pretend here to defend these targets, particularly Leftists, from this attack insofar as Chad is right that the typical Leftist (Marxists in particular) is a hypocrite in many ways, of most importance to Chad being the hypocrisy of “green energy” which is based on the ignorance of what it truly costs to produce and maintain such proposed schemes of alternative Oil.

I will, however, defend the Left, particularly Marx, from this attack in that Chad is simply wrong about the ignorance of Marx towards the transcendental dimension of materiality. Anyone at all who has truly read Marx and given him his philosophical due knows that Marx is one of the earliest proponents of a necessity to come to terms with the “metabolism of Nature” which humanity must engage in order to materially exist. Marx certainly had a naïve faith in technology and progress, but it was based in a time and a world where our hindsight was not available. Nonetheless, Marx’s philosophical method and even doctrine left ample room for considering this problem. Along with Marx, Chad is unquestionably, and in other ways, indicting Hegel for this and further problems specific to him such as “system” thinking. That, however, shall have its own part. Nonetheless, Chad is right about one thing, and in this he is a good Marxist in privileging the material condition: as oil is burned and runs out, it is inevitable that Oil too will lose ground with no ‘fuel’ to stoke its fire—as such, the material conditions will force a higher order restructuring of our social cognition to accommodate to a post-oil collapsed environment.

Five Transcendental

Registers of Meaning

To link the material reality of oil with the transcendental reality of Oil, Chad has developed five layers of meaning: modes of practical being, social being, and intelligibility in relation to substance.

The first and most abstract layer in thought, but most concrete for sensuous perception, is the somatic (Greek for existent body) which is merely present to consciousness. In this layer of meaning, there is no determinate object that is present like a barrel of oil is present, yet something is present in a vague intuition of its being there in everything. The example given is that even though most of us have never personally seen a barrel of oil we have a vague awareness that oil has a powerful presence in our lived world.—On a rather interesting and amusing tangent, Chad goes on to attempt to distinguish ‘real presence’ from hallucination or fictions, referring to Husserl’s conception of a genuine experiences presence being confirmable within the context of the experience itself, i.e. experience in accord with itself. This reminds me strongly of Plato’s Idea and its function of being reason’s self-correspondence. Whatever we may call Truth, it is interesting that the greatest minds inevitably realize that Truth must come to be correspondence-to-self if the concept is to be minimally saved. As such, Chad anticipates questions on the truth of soma and offers a preview of his solution: soma shall not be verified empirically, it is a transcendental form of experience. The example given is that when oil comes to end, no one shall need to be shown that there is no more oil to know this, only that the world of oil has stopped.

The second layer is the memological, a view of substance as a simple transcendental geometrical image or shape. For hunter gatherers, it is the flat line or plane of natural and spiritual equality; for agrarians, it is the circle of the farming season cycles; for oil, it is the infinite upward diagonal vector of endless progress and growth, and Chad predicts the future deep meme of the bell curve for a salvaging society in that it represents the view of rise and decline which is told to us by history of societies. Of all of Chad’s elucidations, this strikes me as the most inessential, but perhaps it is a philosophical abstract bias which primes me for this in that images are most imperfect vehicles for conveying philosophical truths. I myself, along with Hegel and other great philosophers, make use of images both as simple geometric ones like circles and infinite circuits as well as more determinate images like a biological cell. While memes of this sort are quite useful and meaningful, I question if this should really be part of the discussion. In argument against myself, I realize that society in general has severely reverted from a literate abstract capacity to comprehend back to the primacy of the imagistic and simplistic. If memes have become the major way to communicate deep ideas in our society, and we see that this is true every day when people think that simplistic image macros are valid and sufficient educational material on social media, then I must commend Chad on taking this quite seriously. Nonetheless, I find no personal interest in such simplifications of thought in themselves.

The third layer is the sense objective layer which presents the somatic substance and its transcendental logic as a determinate sense object. For the fossil fuel era, this is “the machine”; today, specifically, it is the computer. This manifests not only the most determinate being of oil as a force of labor, but also of Oil as a logic of self-generation and overcoming through reflex of the same. The machine is made by oil, powered by oil, and presented as the answer to the loss of oil its own operation makes a reality. Chad calls many of the sense objects of modern society ‘counter-sense objects’ in that unlike past social formations, where the finitude and reality of resources was fully present in the objects, modern industrial sense objects hide the finite material and temporal reality of resources through the mediation of distances and economic mediations. Such objects are simple things like faucets which only show us the appearance of water and seemingly endless flow at our whim. Despite his distaste for Marx, Chad here seems to repeat Marx’s insights into ‘real abstraction’.

Fourth is the systematic or gnostic layer which is formed by the sprawling systematic knowledge which dives into ever increasing dense minutia.. Chad claims that no system in its endless articulation of minutia could communicate so clearly and concisely what a sense object or a deep meme could. The fundamental unit of systematic knowledge is an abstract value related to innumerably other abstract values. The exemplary paradigm is the Google search and results algorithm which regardless of its millions of webpage results cannot communicate to us anything so clear as what an actual present machine could about the reality of Oil. However, it seems that for Chad the real example of systematicity is axiomatic mathematics and its limitless formalism.

Here I must agree and disagree. I must agree in that for the common person, the beginner and initiate, what is required and demanded is not a sprawling system of details, but a single concise concept or Idea which will communicate the simple abstract truth. I must disagree, however, on the claim that this makes the sense object or meme superior to systematic articulation insofar as systematic articulation is not fundamentally to be comprehended as the pseudo-system of artificial constructs like Google or axiomatic mathematics. This disagreement is, therefore, a semantic one: I simply disagree that Chad really articulates a fully valid concept of systematicity. Indeed, in the Hegelian sense, the systematic articulation is the articulation of the essential form which sense objects and memes only present in simplistic one-sidedness. If Oil is the reality, then Oil must be articulatable and articulated in its reflexive self-development into the insane society in which we live, and this is precisely what Chad is doing by less clear and perhaps less systematic means with his five layers. Less clear in that deep memes and sense objects do not in and of themselves immediately communicate to us in conceptual articulate cognition, and less systematic insofar as he does not achieve a true construction of the layers from substance itself. However, in counterargument to myself, I must admit that the memological and the sense objective do provide a presentation of the intelligible which is more immediately grasped and can be used to scale towards the purely intelligible from the abstractly concrete to the concretely abstract.

Fifth and final is the layer of myth, the most experientially concrete mode of cognition about the world. The fundamental unit of myth is a singular event as a primordial unity only later analyzed into parts. The myth of progress and growth is the myth of fossil fuels. As Chad writes:

Human dwelling is primarily mythological and similarly unfolds according to the smooth logic of disclosing coherent events which can only be decomposed into smaller pieces through some act of abstraction. One can only deviate into systematic, sense objective, memological, and somatic frames of intuition through a conscious act which suspends the mythological horizon which would otherwise remain undisturbed. The primary challenge of Peak Oil Philosophy is that the Mythology of Progress is disclosed so unproblematically to virtually all citizens of Fossil Fuel Modernity that the other layers (above all, the Soma) are effectively invisible

to them.

Onto-Epistemic Confusions

In a short criticism of Kant’s diremption of subject and world, and thus making knowledge of the object in itself impossible, Chad claims that Kant’s mistake was sticking mediation in the wrong place and going about the derivation of these cognitive mediations in a wrong manner. Rather than an unobservable process we must infer about the synthetic constitution of the object through a backward derivation from a finished object of experience, Chad claims, the five layers of meaning (described in a section further below) are completely open and observable in that they are each individual transcendental structures of phenomenological disclosure or experience. This is certainly brought up to stave off the inevitable skeptical attack, “How do you know?” but I wonder how effective Chad’s response really will be. However, judgment must be suspended until he gives his full account in later portions of the book.

In part Chad sees the coming attack against his claim to Truth as well as claiming the categories of cognition as eternal yet historically relative. Much like the mystery that perplexes those who read Hegel, Chad offers here an absolute and relative stance which will also suffer the question of its necessity. By claiming these five levels of meaning, or rather of epistemic-ontological articulation of a whole social world, he provides for the historical contingency of knowledge and objects. One already sees a major problem: he must show the immanent necessity of his scheme as well as provide for how his stance itself does not suffer the fall into itself being a historically relative consideration. While I believe Chad can and will provide a better account later on in his work considering his grasp of philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, and even Hegel I am nonetheless skeptical about whether he could mount a proper defense against a skeptic if his Aristotelian stance on foundation does not develop further than a primordial groundless ground. The theory of Truth to be developed, however, awaits in the second portion of the book, yet it does promise to answer much of what is here only anticipatory question.

With the five layered model Chad claims to overcome the one-sided deficiency of prior philosophers who failed to grasp the truth of Oil as substance, a confusion of privileging one transcendental layer as the explication of substance’s operation and its manifestations. In here he lumps the Marxists who privilege the layer of sense objectivity in privileging machines qua means of production (a charge which is in general fair to Marxists, but unfair to Marx himself). In this layer is also Ted Kaczynsky (the Unabomber) who overemphasized the sense object layer but acknowledge myth and system as distinct layers of cognition, yet who according to Chad makes the significant contribution in unveiling the ecological crisis to be in an essential part about technology itself. The Analytic and Continental philosophers are indicted for privileging the systematic layer, overlooking everything as a mere formal argument over interpretations rather than one about real objects and limits.

Metaphysical Mythology

Chad, following Nietzsche, John Michael Greer, and Jordan Peterson (the influence of whom seems to be not much other than instrumental for exposure and rather unnecessary) claims:

The phrase “thinking with myths” is, as he [Greer] is fond of repeating, as redundant as the phrase “walking with feet.” If you are thinking, in other words, you are already by default using mythology to do so.

Myths are not just aesthetic narratives with spiritual meanings, but also epistemes which give intelligible meaning to the world. The myth of progress not only tells us that in engaging in the modern social process we are engaging in the generation of progress, but we are also making the world intelligible to ourselves on the basis of this myth of progress: things are valid and justified insofar as they are “progressive.” Empirical science is supported by the public on the belief that science provides technical progress which leads to rising living standards; however, Chad makes the claim that it is not the theoretical minutia that have led to our higher living standards, but oil which is burned to power the machines. I find this a rather flat and inane charge, for it ignores that it is not simply oil, but the relation and manipulation of oil through much more complex Ideal comprehensions than merely its burning. It involves the how and the why of burning these fuels. Reduction aside, however, Chad is right: the great bulk of our improved quality of life is in the burning of fossil fuels insofar as these mediating advances were done only through fossil fuels, e.g. the “discovery” of the Higgs Boson or the computation needed for gene sequencing, the generation of finer machines through more crude ones, etc.

Energy for powering the massive movement of goods, the energy to power the massive movement of human bodies in and out of suburbs to and from workplaces, the energy to provide mass produced food and housing to keep perishable goods from perishing so soon, energy for moving trash, and energy for powering the logistical computation necessary for the modern Internet marketplace. In the sense that technical progress is highly reliant on oil, Chad is right that modern science and its minutia have come to such ridiculous extremes of energy expenditure such as with the Large Hadron Collider, expenses which have so far shown themselves fruitless despite producing Nobel Prize winning discoveries for things like the Higgs boson (which has led nowhere in practical terms). With the end of fossil fuels this science will not just be unjustified, but impossible.

He goes on to discuss the plurality of myths that premodern peoples used while it is most curious that we moderns prefer one absolute simple myth. I strongly question the claim of the plurality of myths, since even going to antiquity one finds a metamyth which is meant to explain all others. Perhaps Chad is not aware of just how unified the worldview of ancient peoples was, or perhaps he is focusing on the sub-myths as particularities meant to explain certain things in their immediacy. According to him, myths deal with singular events which are only decomposed and analyzed into parts by the understanding which is systematic. The claim that we only think in myths, however, is directly pointed against claims that reason is supreme, i.e. a direct attack on the systematic rationalists of the Enlightenment who were the first to posit the myth of progress from barbaric savagery to civilized technical science, economics, and statecraft—all because man was inherently rational and rationalizing. Chad himself clearly does not believe this, claiming his systematic structure of the five layers of meaning to be transhistorically valid for all social formations.

If empirical science is a handmaiden to myth, a claim that is not unique to Greer or Chad (Marx himself says something quite like this), then we can expect that as material life changes, so will myth and so will empirical science. The obsession with minutia and such projects which we are obsessed with today won’t be the kind which future science will take for granted; in fact, it is likely that future scientists will see our obsession with minutia as deranged.

Oil Economics: Usury Writ Large

One may say, rightly, that Chad has a bone to pick being that he is himself victim to the predatory lending that is the student loan racket in the United States. Nonetheless, it takes nothing but this concrete asymmetry between the privilege of the lender over the borrower taken to absolute form that reveals the irrationality and injustice of the finance industry which makes money from the fact that it owns and lends money. Calling upon Aristotle as well as medieval and early Protestant Christianity, he condemns the institution of finance for what it was known but 300 years ago: the sin of extortion and usury. This parasitic vampire of labor, as Marx called it, is the pure form of capital which Chad targets as the most concrete economic realization of Oil. Not only is a life of finance in banking, but also in investing such as stocks, and capital investments in production not possible without the ground of oil, but they also are manifestations of the logic of Oil in the pursuit of explosive profits and endless surplus growth.

Here I must say that as much as I like the arguments of Aristotle against finance capital both as unintelligible and irrational, but also as immoral, I cannot accept these arguments on their own since finance capital as such is not any more of a culprit here than anything else in the whole capitalist enterprise. That money may be owned as a commodity itself and disposed as one too, following the same kind of general rules of any property one may exchange, itself does not lead to the unbelievable privilege finance capital is given in our modern world. A stronger argument is simply the irrationality of absolutizing the claims of lenders over borrowers, such that one as a borrower is held to account so that lenders never must face the consequences of their lending to those who cannot pay. “Loan forgiveness,” says Chad, is a slap in the face putting moral blame on borrowers who are taken advantage of by lenders—he should know because he is one of many students who took loans without being made aware of the consequences.

On a more fundamental note, which Chad does not go into in his first section of the book, but which he is unquestionably aware of, is the far broader significance of oil and Oil in the logic of capitalism as such. It is here where I can say that Chad and Marx converge and diverge strongly. In discovering the logic of Oil, Chad may very well be accused of merely rediscovering the logic of capital, self-expanding value. Of this attack Chad cannot make much argument against, he himself has provided that the mythical is the concrete beginning point in the process of abstraction. If this is so, however, Oil is indistinguishable from capital as a logic of explosion and self-expansion. In fact, I would say it is here that capital becomes the higher principle in that it is one simple concept which manifests both the explosive principle and self-reflexivity of burning oil in the myth of progress. Oil only through mediation of technology and the myth of progress explodes atop its own explosion, but capital immediately as a social reality expands itself and manifests without doubt in the entire social determination of self-expansion of everything. This is a vital link of orders of determination which Chad lacks in his outlined account. It is one thing to see a principle present in many things; it is another to show that principle necessarily developing itself into its appearances. Here the Hegelian logic, and in fact the German Idealist logics in general, are superior to Chad’s Aristotelianism.

Overall, however, I think the historical moment has come to indeed return to consider a metaphysics of substance as limit—the time is ripe for our society. In that peak oil is a real threat, and even now manifests as an already present reality in the wars for resources such as Oil as equivalent to capital, it is of vital importance for the entire world to come to grips with the reality of limits if it isn’t to find itself in disoriented shock the day the oil pipes run empty, the cars sit stopped on the lot, the electricity no longer runs 24/7, and the distance of travel and commerce is generally reduced to our local towns. The vast majority do not take seriously that the world of cheap and plentiful energy will end. They think and believe in “green” and “renewable” energy—solar, wind, hydro, bio fuels, etc.— but if one is critical enough to look into these it reveals the horror of truth: it isn’t really green, it isn’t even a generator of energy (solar panels), it isn’t environmentally friendly (much space is necessary which displaces animals or the machines kill them), and so all green energy is a myth and a scam which has been sold to us as a fix to our coming energy problems despite not being so. Green energy cannot replace the gluttony which Oil has accustomed us to. As Chad says: “green energy” is just another euphemism for Oil.