Lecture 3. From Convoys to Commons

When Snow Refuses to Melt

One might come away from my discussion of Bill Gates and his meta-entrepreneurial comrades with the impression that they are figures who are universally loved. And why wouldn’t they be? They seem able to do things. While governments hold back on making important decisions, about the environment and other matters too, entrepreneurs make things happen. With their space programs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have managed to do what once only governments could. And the small modular reactors (SMUs) championed by Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy stand in sharp contrast to the slow retrofits and even slower build of new nuclear facilities by public utilities—that is, if the latter are even willing to take up the task. That SMUs don’t yet truly exist doesn’t matter; it’s the perception of action by meta-entrepreneurs in contrast to governments that renders the latter less (and less) important to shaping the direction the future will take—not entirely unimportant, just less so than in the past.

The love for Gates only runs so deep. His apparent power and his comfort (and self-satisfaction) in using this power to shape the direction of energy transition and climate change have been criticized as antidemocratic and environmentally dangerous. For example, his strong faith in the use of industrial fertilizers and monoculture crops to feed the world has been challenged by advocates of regenerative agriculture, including Vandana Shiva. Bill McKibben, has described Gates’s proposals for energy transition as “surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and . . . worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma.”1 But these are not even the most severe or significant criticisms that have been made of Gates. In some communities, he is openly despised. The use of his name is commonplace in widely circulated right-wing conspiracy theories proposing to identify the cabal of figures in control of the direction in which we’re all heading.

It’s difficult to identify precisely when Gates first became a synecdoche in conspiracy theories for misguided, dangerous, and (supposedly) left-wing, technocratic power in general. A search of the phrase “Bill Gates conspiracy” on Google Trends shows that the connection between these terms extends back to at least 2004, with discrete spikes in the subsequent two decades. The highest spike occurred in April 2020, during the initial months of the Covid-19 crisis, when Gates became looped into conspiracy narratives about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. His presumed role in the creation of the virus, and the development of a vaccine to deal with it, has for some elements of the right offered the clearest evidence yet that there is a nefarious scheme by meta-entrepreneurs to rule the world.

In a 2015 TED talk available on YouTube, Gates spoke of the need to prepare a response to a virus that might imperil life around the world, just as the Ebola virus had threatened to do in 2014, when the WHO declared an outbreak in West Africa to be an international health emergency.2 This video, at time of writing having been viewed by more than thirty-seven million people, was stumbled upon by anti-vaxxers, QAnon, and other right-wing pundits, including Alex Jones, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and transformed into a powerful political meme. Gates’s video made it possible to reimagine his sharp, public criticism of the failure of the Trump administration to mount an adequate response to Covid-19 as clear evidence of a complex plot. Descriptions varied as to just what the plot was: Gates had created SARS-CoV-2 to profit from vaccines created to address Covid-19; he was using the illness to kill off segments of the population; or he had implanted a chip into the vaccine that would allow him to control the planet’s population—a proposition that beautifully conjoined his work with Microsoft and the activities of the Gates Foundation. In its report on the conspiracy theory, the New York Times wrote that Gates had quickly “assumed the role occupied by George Soros, the billionaire financier and Democratic donor who has been a villain for the right.”3 The ill-timed decision in July 2021 by a consortium led by Gates and Soros to purchase Covid-19 test manufacturer Mologic further hinted at something afoot behind the curtains of power and pushed the Gates conspiracy theory in a new direction.4 In January 2022, Michael Flynn, former three-star general and a leading figure in the QAnon movement, claimed that SARS-CoV-2 had been created by Gates, Soros, and others—Klaus Schwab, chairperson of the World Economic Council among them—to steal the 2020 U.S. election.5 It’s a claim that has to be admired for its elegance: Flynn managed to pack all the current complaints of the U.S. right into a single conspiratorial assertion.

It doesn’t really need to be said that these claims are inaccurate—or, let’s be frank, unhinged. Covid-19 vaccines do not contain microchips for the purposes of surveillance. Cell phones, CCTV cameras, and social media companies do this work well enough; a meta-entrepreneur who lives and breathes the air of cost–benefit analyses would never waste time and money on something so costly and complex as a vaccine chip. What these narratives confirm, however, is a belief in the enormous power of individuals like Gates to determine the shape of reality and to do so without the need for either government input or approval from members of the general public. In his account of the Gates–Soros conspiracy, Flynn reminds his listeners on Twitter that the duo has “placed themselves above some . . . world institutions and they drive them, they really do drive them.”6 It would be a mistake to see these conspiracies as simply antibusiness or as opposed to the power of all meta-entrepreneurs. Peter Thiel, former board member of Meta and one of the largest donors to the U.S. Republican Party, hasn’t been the subject of conspiracy theories, nor has (for complicated reasons) Elon Musk, despite his sketchy proposals to end the war in Ukraine and single-handedly resolve the conflict over Taiwan—world-historical acts that only a meta-entrepreneur would imagine himself being able to carry out.7 What differentiates Gates from ultrarich figures like Thiel or Musk is not only the political party he supports but also that Gates has made it his explicit task to change the world for the better, even if—as I argued in my last lecture—this turns out to be a change that pretty much keeps everything the same as it is now.

The Gates conspiracy theory isn’t limited to his supposed role in Covid-19. Winter Storm Uri, which in 2021 caused millions of homes in Texas to lose power, generated theories about the role Gates may have played in making it happen. Instead of recognizing the storm as a climate change–induced weather event, some saw it as a geoengineering experiment—an attempt to block the sun to cool down the earth, even at the price of leaving millions in the cold. A series of TikTok videos attempted to confirm this by showing users trying to melt snow left by Uri with matches or hair dryers, only to find that the ice refused to turn to water.8 Drawing a link between Gates and geoengineering isn’t purely science fiction: a research project at Harvard University called SCoPEx (for Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment) has received funding from Gates, and although Gates points to some problems with geoengineering in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, he doesn’t rule it out as a potential solution to end climate change. Indeed, he writes, “geoengineering is the only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or even decades without crippling the economy. There may come a day when we don’t have a choice. Best to prepare for that day now.”9 It may seem perverse to suggest that the conspiracy minded are correct in their view of Gates. But the feeling of many that others are making decisions about their lives is real enough, no matter if attempts to make sense of this can be confusing, hypocritical, contradictory, delusional, or even dangerous.

Recent right-wing challenges to the legitimacy of the government and science making decisions on the public’s behalf have both unnerved institutions and limited their capacity to address climate change and other social issues. For this reason alone, an all-too-common response to the kinds of conspiracies I’ve been describing, and to the right-wing attempts to animate and amplify them, has been to quickly reaffirm the status quo role of government and business in political life. After all, who else can be counted on to show publics that there might be reasons why it might snow in Texas that don’t require secretive lever pulling? But the production of such a counterposition, which seems so obvious and essential, contains ideological dangers of its own. The political threat of the zany Struwwelpeter narratives that make up right-wing conspiracy theories doesn’t lie only in the distractions and confusions it imposes on some segments of the populace; such narratives can’t help but make it seem that the better—or, indeed, the only—option might be Gates or what I have described in my first lecture as “good nationalism,” each of which is animated by its own fantasy of its unique capacity to take on climate change in the most efficacious way possible. Conspiracies can quickly transform meta-entrepreneurial power and fictions of good liberal nationalism from propositions into a common sense about which the rest of us can agree, the illegitimacy of the former making the latter two narratives all the more convincing.

As I suggested at the outset of these lectures, there is an ongoing struggle by several actors to shape a common sense around energy transition and action on climate change—a common sense that can be relied upon (its proponents assert) always to take appropriate and reasonable climate action, if and when any is deemed necessary. The globalist eco-pretensions of the contemporary liberal capitalist state constitute one claim on common sense; another can be found in the “ethical” neoliberal entrepreneurialism that Gates embodies so well. A third is to be found, perhaps counterintuitively, in practices—real and virtual—of an ideology and movement opposed to energy transition and climate action: the mess and muddle of contemporary right-wing reactions to all matters concerning the environment across the globe. This opposition takes many forms, from contemporary eco-fascism, which conjoins present-day environmental discourses about protecting the earth and violent, Blut und Boden nationalisms, to the views held by some members of the religious right who see no contradiction between God’s assignation to man of dominion over the earth and species loss and strip-mining.10 In the other two cases I have examined, the radical action required to address climate change is tempered by the desire to keep political and economic systems much the same as they are at present. The mess of right-wing anti-eco positions works to the same end, by affirming the necessity of contemporary extractive practices in the name of tradition, thus shaping a reactionary environmental conservatism to match the sociopolitical ones it advocates. For understandable reasons, much discussion of contemporary right-wing politics has focused on the United States. But what I now want to examine is the right-wing extractive politics of its neighbor Canada, where the right to use fossil fuels has been sutured together with libertarian freedoms via conspiracy theories, ideological projects launched by governments committed to Big Oil, and nationalist narratives circulated by the fossil fuel industry itself. What better way to examine how this third common sense is being constituted than by looking closely at a country in which so many elements of society seem to believe that fossil fuels matter more now that they are beginning to matter less?

“Pierre Elliot Trudeau Rips Off CANADA”

References to Bill Gates as master conspirator now have a useful analytic function: the appearance of his name in articles and documents, on websites, and in other forms of social media can be easily used to pinpoint the ideological leanings of their authors. For this reason alone, it was not entirely surprising to find Gates noted in Dr. T. L. Nemeth’s April 2020 report A New Global Paradigm: Understanding the Transnational Progressive Movement, the Energy Transition and the Great Transformation Strangling Alberta’s Petroleum.11 This report was one of a number commissioned by the Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns, launched by the Government of Alberta to investigate the role foreign funding played in campaigns waged by NGOs, research institutes, and other organizations intent on ending extraction in the oil sands. The first few sentences of Nemeth’s report provide an immediate sense of her understanding of the situation. She writes, “There is a transnational global movement to facilitate a fundamental paradigm shift, a Great Transformation, to a new energy economy that will halt fossil fuel use and development, initially in the western world, in order to create a new global low-carbon, net-zero civilization.”12 This opening sentence is unobjectionable—there is just such a movement to create a net-zero world powered by clean energy and greener economic practices. But Nemeth’s second sentence makes clear that her take on this movement is far from usual. She proclaims, “The first major petroleum industry target being used to accelerate this global transition is the Alberta oil sands.” For Nemeth, as for the Alberta government, the great transformation of the energy economy constitutes a problem instead of a potential solution. Nemeth’s 133-page report—one of a group of three for which the government paid Can$100,000—lays out in detail her understanding of how this problem came to be.13

Nemeth names Gates and his coconspirators as among the most significant actors in the challenges being mounted against extraction in the oil sands and the use of fossil fuels more generally. His coconspirators include (here we go again . . .) Klaus Schwab and George Soros, who are identified as having produced the “coronavirus pandemic in order to anticipate responses and gaps in preparedness” in right-wing challenges that might be mounted against unwanted transformations in the current energy system.14 Nemeth finds that the cabal extends well beyond Gates et al. to include all those assembled at Davos in 2020, where, she notes, “climate change was among the seven main themes”—a fact that constitutes her main point of evidence.15 The list of organizations Nemeth identifies as involved in the attack on Alberta’s extractive economy is too long to reproduce in full; among them are Deloitte, Hitachi, Huawei, Kaiser Permanente, McKinsey, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Chemical, Saudi Aramco, Visa, the American Heart Association, Netflix, and Johnson & Johnson—and, of course, Greta Thunberg and Prince (now King) Charles. (An intriguing cast of characters, to be sure.) Her report attracted derision from the mainstream Canadian press—so much so that she publicly retracted some of her more extreme claims. By contrast, the Government of Alberta stood by it, and the report was one of the group of studies that commissioner Steven Allan had to consider in writing his final report about the Machiavellian conspiracies working to close shop on bitumen extraction. Allan found no evidence that activists had done anything wrong.16

The Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns, which was tasked with the mission to fight misinformation about oil and gas, was one of the first initiatives of the Can$30 million Canadian Energy Centre, established in 2019 by the new Conservative government of Jason Kenney. It was just the latest in a history of campaigns mounted by the Alberta government to challenge threats to what it sees as not just its most important industry but also a defining aspect of its political self-identity (not unlike Texas in the United States). Though modeled on U.S. government inquiries into Russian attempts to subvert the 2016 election, it was clear from the outset that the message the public inquiry wanted to send wasn’t to foreigners but to Albertans, to bring them ever more strongly into the Conservative fold, and to the Canadian federal government, to tell them to back off.17 The appearance of the Gates–Soros conspiracy theory in Nemeth’s report indicates a shift of approach in a long-running federal–provincial dispute. Nemeth reframes a conspiracy born in the United States in relation to political power as being fundamentally about extraction, and she expands the list of conspirators to include all governments and businesses involved in developing a green economy that—were it to become a reality—would threaten Alberta’s right to extract. Given its multiple aims and ambitions, it shouldn’t be surprising that the message the current Alberta government is sending via the efforts of the Canadian Energy Centre is so convoluted: trust government (Alberta), but don’t trust government (everywhere else, but especially the Canadian federal government); trust business (fossil fuel extractors), but don’t trust business (Gates and industry competitors like Saudi Aramco); and trust the reports of a Canadian Energy Centre that, by virtue of its moniker, claims to work on behalf of all Canadians but is in truth an advocate for a single province.

The shape of the contemporary politics of fossil fuels in Canada is the outcome of an extended history of intergovernmental conflict over extraction that has now indelibly sutured the identity of the Canadian right to Big Oil. The origin of the enmity between Alberta and Canada extends back to the 1930s and the birth of the now defunct ultraconservative Social Credit Party. But the start of the disputes whose end result is the Canadian Energy Centre dates to the National Energy Program (NEP), which was initiated in 1980 by the Canadian federal government to (effectively) nationalize aspects of the industry; this was done in part to respond to the financial challenges of the 1973 oil crisis.18 There was fierce and unrelenting opposition to the NEP in Alberta and Western Canada, led by government and the oil industry, which helped to bring about its end in 1985. A popular bumper sticker at the time read “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark”—a sentiment that remains in place up to the present and is kept alive by industry and government in Alberta, either working separately or—as is more common—working together. The perceived overreach of the federal government on resource control and management was also the impetus behind the formation of the far-right Canadian Alliance and Reform Parties, both committed to representing the interests of Western Canadians federally; these parties now form the heart of the contemporary Conservative Party in Canada and the United Conservative Party in Alberta.19 To claim that the desire to control resources was the origin of right-wing populism in Canada would be an overstatement. But to claim that there isn’t a deep interrelation between the two would be to miss why it is so important for the right in Canada to affirm resource extraction as an important element of Alberta’s heritage and tradition, which it perpetually must defend from all those who might seek to end it. (One of the many things lost in the shuffle of this history is that Petro-Canada—a Canadian crown corporation that emerged out of the NEP—was one of the early players in the oil sands and played a key role in the development of the oil sands and the offshore Hibernia oil project.)

The threat posed by the NEP has had repercussions in the fossil fuel industry as well; in its wake, industry has ever more aggressively sought to shape public opinion on the import of extraction to life in Canada. I began these lectures by stating that the era of oil is over. There’s no doubt that Canadian industry recognizes this, especially because its main site of extraction—the Athabasca oil sands—has become a globally recognized sign of everything that is wrong with extractive economies. In response, the Alberta oil industry has sought to legitimize oil sands extraction in whatever way it can. It has supplemented the work sympathetic governments have done on behalf of industry, as exemplified by initiatives like the Alberta public inquiry, with an increasingly savvy undercover campaign intended to gnaw away at public opposition to its practices. To give one example of this, the recently established Pathways Alliance has publicly articulated a plan for how to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands by 2050.20 The Alliance was established by the six companies that together operate 95 percent of oil sands production: Canadian Natural, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Imperial, MEG Energy, and Suncor (the company that, in 2009, absorbed the by then private company Petro-Canada). A visit to the Alliance’s website shows how expertly industry adapts the language of the Paris Agreement to its explanation of how it intends to achieve net zero. The now standard language of environmental goals to be achieved and newfound commitments to be made to sociopolitical issues (e.g., a land acknowledgment appears at the bottom on every page of the website) almost buries the lede: industry hopes to get to net zero not by reducing or eliminating extraction but by using new technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, to manage its greenhouse gas production.

The supposed commitment of the fossil fuel industry to the tenets of the Paris Agreement is just one approach to get Canadians to remain committed to extraction. Another has been to insist on the specific social and political importance of Canadian oil. The campaign launched by industry and government to explain that oil from the oil sands matters because of its Canadianness had two stages. The first was captured in Ezra Levant’s 2010 Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands.21 Levant’s argument is simple. Fossil fuels are still necessary, and as most countries don’t produce enough of their own, they must buy the stuff from somewhere. Most fossil fuels are produced in petro-states with poor human rights records and led by totalitarian governments unable to escape the “oil curse.”22 By contrast, Canada produces a uniquely “ethical oil,” because it originates in a First World, democratic country known for being a global leader in human rights. In opposition to environmentalists who want to limit or stop oil sands production, Levant writes, “The question is not whether we should use oil sands oil instead of some perfect fantasy fuel that hasn’t been invented yet. Until that miracle fuel is invented, the question is whether we should use oil from the oil sands or oil from the other places in the world that pump it.”23 In the years immediately following the publication of Levant’s book, ethical oil was widely employed by industry to reinforce the legitimacy of continued extraction, until the term faded from widespread use. The notion of “ethical oil” was revived in 2018 by Ontario Proud, a right-wing group committed to returning “power to the people,” in a series of ads and via its website StopSaudiOil.com—an older message perfectly suited to the xenophobic Trump era.24

A variant of this approach has been industry’s frequent assertions that it represents Canadian values and plays an essential role in the life of the country. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) has mounted several increasingly sophisticated campaigns along these lines. Its “Raise Your Hand for Canada” campaign shows pictures of (mostly white) Canadians holding a hand up, fingers spread, over which is pasted the outline of a maple leaf. The concluding lines of the ad copy ask the question, “Think energy developed the Canadian way is good for Canada?” The answer the CAPP wants to hear: “Then now is the time to say so by raising your hand.” The latest campaign to marry oil with Canadian values was initiated in the wake of the war in Ukraine. The website “Made the Canadian Way” asks, “If your oil and gas came with a label, what would you learn?” The label posted online tells us that Canada’s oil and gas are “innovation driven” and “responsibly produced.” This campaign was mounted by the Canadian Energy Centre—which, if you remember, was created by the Government of Alberta to support industry in whatever way possible.

What is the takeaway from these government and industry campaigns? Are we supposed to understand fossil fuels as a good belonging to all Canadians, as industry ad campaigns seem to suggest, or to Albertans alone, which is the standpoint of the Alberta government? Is industry genuinely committed to decarbonizing, or do all such claims constitute little more than greenwashing?25 The NEP is long dead. How, then, are we meant to understand the current relationship between the federal and provincial governments? Large segments of the public, both inside and outside of Alberta, continue to believe that the federal government is impeding the financial success of the fossil fuel industry and so must be resisted. While the federal government has begun to implement a carbon tax—the proceeds of which it returns to Canadians—it also continues to provide enormous subsidies to industry; during the pandemic alone, oil and gas industries received more than Can$18 billion in subsidies.26 Four decades on, the legacy of the NEP has been rewritten by successive right-wing governments and their industry comrades in a way that has made the private appear to be public (i.e., that the Canadian public owns oil, when it is in fact owned by private industry), even while managing to retain the notion that there is a danger that the federal government will nationalize the oil industry, that is, make public what ideologically has already been rendered public in most Canadian minds. Rendering oil ownership this way has proved to be incredibly effective common sense that has made any thought of changes to the dominant energy system in Canada hard to parse.

The political common sense I’ve just named is filled with contradictions—deliberately so—organized around oppositions that can flip-flop as needed, from being in favor of business to apparently being against it, from opposing nationalism to embracing it. What is certain, however, is that energy transition and environmental policies, even to a limited degree, have been positioned as threats to established political systems whose ongoing legitimacy deeply depends on continuing fossil fuel extraction. To the frustrated middle classes created by neoliberalism, industry and their governmental representatives have repeatedly offered an answer about what has gone wrong: misguided technocrats are messing with resources essential to your self-identity and livelihood, and they are doing so by employing globalist environmental policies that fail to attend to national identity (sometimes expressed in provincial guise). The result is that in Canada, the xenophobia of right-wing populisms has been shaped not only by exclusions defined by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation but also by differences with respect to energy resources—a unique political configuration with serious consequences for energy transition and climate action in the country.

“Nothing Ever Happens in Ottawa”

Given the confusions I’ve just described, which shape belonging, tradition, private, and public into complex figures, it is perhaps unsurprising that adding one more ingredient to this stew of ideas, positions, and counterpositions would generate new uncertainties that could result in a crisis. The monthlong Freedom Convoy (also known as the Trucker’s Convoy), which made its way across Canada before reaching Ottawa on January 29, 2021, was kicked off by just such an event, which mobilized the center–periphery narratives developed around extraction to new ends.27 The extended occupation of downtown Ottawa in and around Parliament Hill was the immediate result of the imposition of vaccine mandates on truckers crossing the U.S.–Canadian border, which frustrated truckers who had decided not to be vaccinated. To show their displeasure at the vaccine mandate and its impact on their livelihoods, a small minority of the total number of long-haul truckers, accompanied by their supporters, descended on the nation’s capital to vent their frustrations.28 The protest was never very large: on the first day of the gathering in Ottawa, there were an estimated eight thousand protestors (compare this to a 2019 climate march in Montreal that involved five hundred thousand people).29 By the following day, the numbers had dropped to fewer than half, with a continual decline over the life of the protest. The Freedom Convoy ended on February 23, after the imposition of the Emergencies Act, a seldom employed act that grants temporary power to the federal government to deal with emergencies it views as threats to the country’s sovereignty and security. The convoy had a real impact, though owing less to its size or to the length of time it occupied Ottawa than to the X-ray it offered of the contemporary state of Canadian political life. The hesitation at all levels of government to intervene in this monthlong protest highlights the power of an emerging common sense that can transform all contestation into an affirmation of the reality of its paranoid outlook on the world.

There was always something off about the accepted narrative of the principal cause of the protest.30 After all, it was the imposition of the U.S. vaccine mandate for cross-border travel that impeded nonvaccinated Canadian truckers from hauling goods across the border, not a law imposed by the Canadian federal government—a fact that convoy organizers conveniently avoided mentioning. The initial demands for an end to the government vaccine mandate very quickly transformed into a clarion call for prime minister Justin Trudeau to leave office. This was perhaps to be expected. Neither Tamara Lich nor B. J. Dichter—the organizers of the GoFundMe and GiveSendGo campaigns used to generate support for the convoy—was a trucker, nor was Ontario convoy organizer Jason LaFace, a member of the ultra-right group Canada Unity. All three had been associated with prior antifederal movements; Lich, for instance, was a member of the Maverick Party (previously known as Wexit), which advocated for the independence of Western Canada from the rest of the country. Read generously, the Freedom Convoy could be seen as an expression of general frustration against a government unable or unwilling to address the concerns of ordinary Canadians; when asked by media what the demands of the convoy were, Dichter said, “It’s everything, everything.”31 But the reality is more ominous. In addition to a familiar Western separatist ideology (of the kind framed in relation to control over oil extraction), it’s clear that the imperatives of the convoy were shaped, at least in part, by QAnon, conspiracy theorists, and a range of U.S.-based right-wing groups.32 A hack of the donor list of the GiveSendGo campaign confirmed this: 55.7 percent of donors were from the United States, and they included prominent donors to Donald Trump’s campaign—a far greater indication of U.S. involvement in Canadian politics than that found by the Public Inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns led by Allan (which concluded that foreign money given to NGOs opposed to oil sands extraction was insignificant).33

This convoy may have been framed in response to a vaccine mandate as unpopular as Bill Gates is in some parts of the country (according to Google Trends, these two topics share consonant levels of online searches by Canadians). But at its core, this protest was about fossil fuels. To mobilize its participants, the organizers depended on the persistence of a regional politics anchored in deep-seated political disputes originating from the NEP. The right-wing ability to generate legitimacy for its positions by sliding from federal to provincial and back again allowed it to maintain a persistent confusion about the coronavirus pandemic. The federal government was held wholly culpable for an issue that fell under provincial jurisdiction: under the terms of the Canadian Constitution, provinces are responsible for the provision of health. In the wake of its quick abandonment of the plight of the unvaccinated truckers, one of the main demands organizers of the convoy made was for the governor general to dissolve the government, which she cannot do unless the government has lost the confidence of the House of Commons.34 It’s unlikely that anything would have been gained by suggesting to Lich, Dichter, and convoy participants that they read up on the constitution. No argument could possibly cut the ideologically taut Gordian knot that binds two contradictory ideas together: the rejection of any and every action of government (“it’s everything, everything”) and the demand that the selfsame government act to undo itself; the hope that government might be able to undo the wrong it represents due to its very existence is further complicated by the starting premise that it can only ever manage to fuck things up.

The Canadian politics of fossil fuel can be seen as key to the convoy in even more direct ways. The 2022 Freedom Convoy built on the lessons of an earlier truck convoy to Ottawa. In February 2019, United We Roll brought hundreds of truckers to Ottawa to protest the federal government’s introduction of a carbon tax and the development of strengthened environmental assessments of energy projects, as well as its ban on oil tankers on the northern coast of British Columbia. Some of those at the 2019 protest were also there to express their displeasure at the drop in oil prices (and drop in profits and job numbers)—a bizarre demand, if not for the view held by many Canadians that the government has at least some control over prices.35 United We Roll was the concluding act of Canada’s own version of the gilets jaunes protests, which saw yellow-vested Canadians protesting simultaneously against greenhouse gas policies and cultural threats posed by Muslims, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community.36 More recently, there have been calls for yet another convoy, this one to protest the Trudeau government’s announced aim of a 30 percent absolute reduction in nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer use. This has been refigured by some alt-right media outlets as an initiative to ban the use of any fertilizers. According to Joseph Quesnel, a research associate with the right-wing Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a new convoy—the third in three years—“could be fatal for our climate-obsessed PM.”37 Finally, the importance of oil for life in Canada is affirmed in the very form taken by the Freedom Convoy—a protest built out of trucks and saturated by the petro-masculinity and petro-populism connected with convoys ever since the release of the 1978 film of the same name.38

The confusing landscape of popular politics I’ve just painted isn’t unique to Canada, even if the degree to which the right has connected it with the oil industry might be. In his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” Umberto Eco argues that fascism is grounded in a “cult of tradition,” but a tradition that is syncretistic, a combination of different forms of belief and practice that “must tolerate contradiction.”39 In Canada, fossil fuels have shaped right-wing notions of tradition that have proven able to easily navigate such contradictions. The implications of the right’s political syncretism are obvious: nothing needs to be done with the natural world as long it remains the place where money magically flows from the ground; to do anything about climate change is to be both anti-Canadian and dangerously opposed to tradition.

From the House of Commons to the Commons

This is the moment in a lecture series, in the denouement, when the speaker is expected to offer solutions to the various problems identified. I find myself hesitant to do this. I hope my analysis of these emergent narratives of energy transition, each of which makes a case that a specific variant of an energo-political status quo should be the one to determine what comes next, offers ideas for critical pathways to follow and other phenomena to assess and analyze. But I also recognize that the genre of a lecture series demands, at a minimum, an identification of some takeaways and next steps. I offer these tentatively and with some caution, not only because of the brief time remaining, but also because I am aware of how easy it can be to misread still emergent forces and positions.

To the repeated affirmation of the capacities of nations and nationalisms to address climate change by working together as a global collective of good liberal states, we should insist that a just energy transition will happen only through the creation of new international structures and systems truly committed to addressing climate change. Unlike existing international political mechanisms or organizations, such as the UN Environment Programme, these new structures would have the capacity to make decisions—even messy, inexact, or sometimes incorrect ones (because errors are inevitable and important for eventual successes)—on behalf of the planet. No such international structure exists at present in relation to energy or the environment, and one doesn’t seem to be waiting in the wings. In The Ministry for the Future (one of the “hot reads” Bill Gates identifies on his website and the only one he doesn’t entirely like), Kim Stanley Robinson may have come closest to imagining what such a structure could look like, in his account of how the world’s central banks, each employing its institutional independence from the state it represents, manage to create an economic system in which the environment is no longer an unaccounted-for externality and markets reward government, business, and industry for climate action.40 I recognize that this vision of effective international climate actors—national banks lead the revolution!—is far afield from those typically imagined within left environmental politics, but it has the virtue of challenging us to consider the potential of ideologically messy pathways to arrive at the internationalism that the climate crisis demands.

To meta-entrepreneurs and other powerful actors independent of state oversight and control, we need to articulate the desirability and necessity of a commons. Numerous thinkers have recently offered new accounts of the commons (or common in the singular); the best of them have tried to provide models for exactly what mechanisms might enable such new forms of political relationality to come into existence. Chantal Mouffe, for example, has argued that a left populism, fueled by the kind of strong group commitments that underlie contemporary right populism, could be constituted “around a patriotic identification with the best and more egalitarian aspects of the national tradition.”41 This sounds eerily like the way the good liberal nationalisms I critiqued in my first lecture intend to mobilize their citizens to take on the extranational challenge of climate change. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval have described the common as “in the most systematic and profound manner possible, the widespread introduction of institutional self-government.”42 This is what many of us want and hope for when we imagine a new common. But although it’s a laudable goal, it strikes me as very hard to reach in the political circumstances in which we currently find ourselves, and even dangerous if the ideal of self-government needs to emerge via patriotism. The world is replete with examples of patriotism foregrounding violent, exclusionary, and military nationalisms; there are far fewer examples of patriotism leading to the kind of internationalism necessitated by climate change. (World War II, the example of such a transmutation offered by some environmentalists, only holds up if one refuses to look at the deeper consequences of its patriotic fervor.)

As a rejoinder to the climate ideologies developed by meta-entrepreneurs, there may be a way forward that sidesteps some of the challenges inherent in the models and strategies articulated by Mouffe and Dardot and Laval. This is a notion of the common that foregrounds choices we have made to treat natural resources as property. George Caffentzis has pointed out that water and oil are both natural resources important to life on the planet.43 Attempts to turn water into property have been (in the main) successfully resisted, as it seems obvious that no one should possess ownership over a resource so essential to life. Shouldn’t oil and other resources—including the energy of the sun and wind—be challenged on these same grounds? The energy transition now under way is shaking up the old rules of resource ownership, which is precisely why there is a concerted struggle to lay claim to the common sense about the future of the sun on the part of those who want different variants of the energy status quo to prevail. Resource commoning in a post-oil world would put pressure on the continued legitimacy of the “tragedy of the commons,” a narrative that continues to be used to assert the historical necessity of property and capitalism.44 An emphasis on who will own energy resources and why an infinite source of energy needs to be owned at all may be a concrete way of laying the groundwork for the expansive political possibilities envisioned by Mouffe, Dardot and Laval, and others intent on bringing the exclusions and violence of extractive capitalism to an end. Who owns the sun? Everyone! Anyone who says otherwise must be challenged in the strongest terms possible.

This leaves me to account for the ideologues whose positions I have probed in this final lecture. What might be an appropriate rejoinder to their ideologies of resource extraction—an answer, at once conceptual and political, that would effectively unnerve the attempt of the right to lay claim to common sense on energy and our climate futures? The obvious answer might seem to be science, a discourse imagined to be able to puncture through the fictions and conspiracies on which the right depends to strengthen and grow. But science has proven to be limited in its capacities to articulate a new common sense, in part because it positions itself entirely outside of the political spectrum (neither right, left, nor center), and in part because it can so easily be framed as a fiction articulated by government or industry to suppress rights and freedoms; Gates is figured as a representative of science, as is Dr. Anthony Fauci and other senior health officials tasked with developing programs to manage the coronavirus pandemic. Science has, unfortunately, animated right-wing conspiracies rather than bringing unbelievers into the fold; it has also, unfortunately, had a limited capacity to mobilize action on climate change, even among individuals and polities that recognize the import and significance of its findings.

On what grounds does Mouffe believe we should turn to the “more egalitarian aspects of the national tradition,” to create new forms of belonging that would unnerve everything the right tries to negate: difference, justice, and equality? I’ve suggested that her appeal to the nation and to patriotism is problematic, as there is little to guarantee that the egalitarian dimensions of nationalism can be put to different, better ends. But what about tradition—the category that lies at the heart of right-wing populisms and fascisms, the lost object that reactionaries wish to recover? Environmental discourse inevitably stresses the new, that is, what must come-into-being to adequately address the threat of climate change generated by extant ways of doing things. Part of the failure to date of the environmental movement to fully achieve its goals as quickly as the severity of the climate crisis demands lies in the threat posed by rapid, destabilizing change. As a result, however compelling degrowth (for example) might be as a political philosophy, it has a long and challenging path to travel before it might ever become common sense. The indeterminacy and unpredictability of the new, imagined by some as emerging from government conference rooms and via back-of-the-envelope plots by meta-entrepreneurs, can’t help but falter against the comfortable weight of the quotidian, however damaged, desperate, and unhappy a place it might be; this is the lesson of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism.”45

Tradition can be exclusionary, violent, degrading, and demoralizing. One might thus be forgiven for thinking that history has little in it to mount substantial challenges to the narratives I’ve examined here. But remember, tradition is not the same as history. It can be shaped to many ends, as the right knows so well. Tradition makes a demand on the present that can be harder to gainsay than threats posed by an unknown future. Consider the kinds of ideas that might be folded into tradition to challenge the legitimacy of status quo narratives: the common comes before capitalism; community precedes divisions and separations; the nation is little more than a savage fiction; and air, water, sky, and earth—and certainly the energy of the sun!—belong to everyone. Raymond Williams points to tradition as the most powerful mechanism of social incorporation and as fundamental to all politics. For Williams, it is a way in which “from a whole possible area of past and present, in a particular culture, certain meanings and practices are selected for emphasis and certain other meanings and practices are neglected or excluded.”46 The problem is thus not tradition per se but seeing it as fixed and unshakable—something about which there is nothing more that can be said, because the passage of time has made all that has come to be into a common sense that cannot be challenged. Conceding tradition to the status quo means forgoing its potential as a powerful political tool to unnerve the powers that be.

The environmental movement, and the left more generally, has tended to see much of what constitutes tradition today as little more than the “surviving past,” filled with disappointments and dangers.47 It would be wrong, of course, to suggest there is no tradition of left political achievement, of gains made and goals reached, that acts as a resource for contemporary political action and activism. Given what much of the surviving past looks like, progressives can be forgiven for avoiding it, perhaps especially those wishing to insist on the necessity of quick action on energy transition and climate change: the past is a record of climate failure, and what’s needed now is climate success. But along with Williams, I think it is essential for those committed to climate action to make a claim on tradition, even if only as political rhetoric—a means of mythmaking to political ends. I have in mind here a deployment of tradition that might address Roland Barthes’s criticisms of the limits of contemporary left-wing politics, which he sees as emerging from its reluctance to articulate new social myths, even as it labors to take apart the myths of others. Barthes writes,

Left-wing myth is inessential: the objects which it takes hold of are rare—only a few political notions—unless it has itself recourse to the whole repertoire of the bourgeois myths. Left-wing myth never reaches the immense field of human relationships, the very vast surface of “insignificant” ideology. Everyday life is inaccessible to it: in bourgeois society, there are no “Left-wing” myths concerning marriage, cooking, the home, the theatre, the law, morality, etc. Then, it is an incidental myth, its use is not part of a strategy, as is the case with bourgeois myth, but only of a tactics, or, at worst, of a deviation; if it occurs, it is as a myth suited to a convenience, not to a necessity.48

Barthes characterizes the left as, at best, a kind of anti-right, dependent on the ideas of the right even as it rejects them. As such, left politics can at times amount to little more than a softened myth of the right—Mouffe’s appeal to the national egalitarianism offers one example of this, liberalism another. What may be missing on the left is the active use of myth and the employment of its capacity to shape tradition as strategy or tactic, in ways careful not to dismiss the present as nothing other than evidence of historical failure—a challenging political balancing act, to be sure. Mythologies was published in 1957, at a time when what constituted left politics was very different than it is today (i.e., before the civil rights movement, global challenges to colonial power, contemporary feminisms, Indigenous struggles, Black Lives Matter, and the twenty-first-century environmental movement). Even so, his criticism of the left’s capacities for critique and discomfort with myth and tradition still has some bite. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the use of myth and tradition by groups and individuals engaged in climate actions is completely absent. My comments are intended to draw attention to a tendency I see that has made it difficult to sharply challenge the narratives of energy transitions I’ve described here, which are shameless and aggressive in their reconstitution of tradition to their own ends.

Just how might this use of tradition work? Before the Freedom Convoy came the United We Roll convoy; they were animated by similar aims and intentions, and the former drew considerable political energy from the example of the latter. But another convoy headed toward Ottawa well before the right-wingers guzzled gas on their way to Parliament Hill. In June 1935, one thousand residents of a federal unemployment relief camp left Vancouver to take their protest over poor living conditions to Ottawa. Those in the On-to-Ottawa Trek commandeered freight trains to speed their process across the continent. The train convoy picked up strikers along the way, doubling its size by the time it reached Regina, where further progress was blocked by order of the prime minister, R. B. Bennett. Talks to address the strikers’ concerns were initiated with the office of the prime minister but quickly broke down. Bennett’s decision to arrest the trekkers resulted in the Regina Riot, which brought the trek to an end. It also brought an end to Bennett’s career and fueled interest in the Canadian Communist Party, which had provided support to the trek.

Might one critique of the Freedom Convoy be that it dishonored the tradition of the On-to-Ottawa Trek, which was made up of men wanting to be paid more than the Can$0.20 per day they received for their work—a far cry from the convoy’s inchoate demands for the prime minister to resign, just because a few people wanted it so? Might this have offered those who participated in the recent convoy, many of whom have been left behind politically and economically by neoliberalism, new insight into the cognate injustices that have been visited upon them today? And might there be a way of seeing Canada’s NEP in the 1980s not as a failure but as a program intent on honoring a commitment to equality among Canadians, including equality with respect to their resources? In the era of climate change, the reinstitution of a program like the NEP (which, to be sure, was not without its problems) could change the direction of resource politics in Canada; instead, the federal government has chosen to support industry by, for example, purchasing the controversial Trans-Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan in 2018 for Can$4.5 billion. A new program to bring about energy transition—and fast—would bring us nowhere close to the common imagined in political philosophy. But it is a step in a process that may well be crucial to achieving real energy transition and truly addressing the causes and consequences of climate change.

The power of common sense comes from the immediate, intuitive claim it can make to speak on behalf of the center—that apparently nonideological, inclusive, and democratic space in which the only statements made are ones on which everyone agrees. In making this claim, common sense asserts its right to speak for the most salable aspects of tradition. The end of the oil era does not denote the end of capitalism. Nor does the expanding use of renewable energy produce (ipso facto) new, far better ways of living together and in the world: a world of clean energy can fuel a world still shaped by racism, sexism, and discrimination based on class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and more. The future of the sun won’t depend on the technological sophistication of solar panels and the storage capacity of batteries. It will depend on our willingness to forcefully challenge those narratives of energy transition that promise change while insisting that we keep everything exactly as it is. It will depend, too, on our ability to tell convincing stories about the traditions we need and want to honor—and those to which it is no longer worth paying any attention, because they have gotten us nowhere.

Notes

1. 1. Vandana Shiva, “Bill Gates Empires ‘Must Be Dismantled’: Interview with Dr. Joseph Mercola,” Regeneration International, April 5, 2021, https://regenerationinternational.org/2021/04/05/vandana-shiva-bill-gates-empires-must-be-dismantled; Bill McKibben, “How Does Bill Gates Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis?,” New York Times, March 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/books/review/bill-gates-how-to-avoid-a-climate-disaster.html.

2. 2. Bill Gates, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” YouTube video, April 3, 2015, 8:36, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Af6b_wyiwI.

3. 3. The most best single account of the Gates conspiracy theory is offered by Daisuke Wakabayashi, Davey Alba, and Marc Tracy, “Bill Gates, at Odds with Trump on Virus, Becomes a Right-Wing Target,” New York Times, April 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/technology/bill-gates-virus-conspiracy-theories.html.

4. 4. David Dawkins, “George Soros and Bill Gates’ Backed Consortium to Buy U.K. Maker of COVID Tests for $41 Million,” Forbes, July 19, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2021/07/19/george-soros-and-bill-gates-backed-consortium-to-buy-uk-maker-of-COVID-lateral-flow-tests-for-41-million/.

5. 5. Graeme Massie, “Michael Flynn Claims Globalists Will Try to Turn Humans into Cyborgs after Failing to Change Their DNA with COVID Shots,” Independent, January 21, 2002, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/COVID-19-vaccine-michael-flynn-dna-b2172413.html.

6. 6. Flynn’s video is available at https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/CZQZfETl.

7. 7. Ryan Mac and Mike Issac, “Peter Thiel to Exit Meta’s Board to Support Trump-Aligned Candidates,” New York Times, February 7, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/technology/peter-thiel-facebook.html; Rita Trichur, “Elon Musk Has Gone Too Far. It’s Time to Boycott Tesla,” Globe and Mail, October 14, 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-elon-musk-tesla-boycott/. The Musk poll on Ukraine can be found on X (formerly Twitter) at https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1576969255031296000.

8. 8. Rachel E. Greenspan, “TikTokers Are Trying to Prove That Snow in Texas Is ‘Fake,’ Pushing a False Conspiracy Story,” Insider, February 22, 2021, https://www.insider.com/fake-texas-snow-not-melting-tiktok-conspiracy-theory-2021-2. The hashtag #governmentsnow was also being used on TikTok at the time to explain the cause of Texas snow; that is, the Biden administration was also in on the Gates conspiracy.

9. 9. Gates, How to Avoid A Climate Disaster, 178.

10. 10. On eco-fascism, see Casey Williams, “Fossil Fuels, Climate Change, and the Modern Crisis of Imagination” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2022). On religion and environmentalism, see Darren Fleet, “Fuel and Faith: a spiritual geography of fossil fuels in Western Canada” (PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 2021).

11. 11. T. L. Nemeth’s report A New Global Paradigm: Understanding the Transnational Progressive Movement, the Energy Transition and the Great Transformation Strangling Alberta’s Petroleum, April 2020, can be found at https://blog.friendsofscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Nemeth-Report.pdf.

12. 12. Nemeth, 3.

13. 13. Lisa Johnson, “Alberta Inquiry Responses to Criticism It Commissioned Reports Based on Junk Science,” Edmonton Journal, January 15, 2021, https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/alberta-inquiry-responds-to-criticism-it-commissioned-reports-based-on-junk-science. Nemeth received Can$27,840 for her work.

14. 14. Nemeth, A New Global Paradigm, 50.

15. 15. Nemeth, 50.

16. 16. Lisa Johnson, “No Evidence of Wrongdoing Found in Allan Inquiry Report into ‘Anti-Alberta’ Campaigns,” Edmonton Journal, October 21, 2021, https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/long-awaited-allan-inquiry-report-into-anti-alberta-campaigns-released; Kelly Cryderman, “Alberta Energy Inquiry Says No Wrongdoing By Anti-Oil-Sands Activists,” Globe and Mail, October 21, 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-alberta-energy-inquiry-says-no-wrongdoing-by-anti-oilsands-activists/. The final report, which found no evidence that activists had done anything wrong, can be found at https://open.alberta.ca/dataset/public-inquiry-into-anti-alberta-energy-campaigns-report/resource/a814cae3-8dd2-4c9c-baf1-cf9cd364d2cb.

17. 17. One of the principal documents named by Steve Allan as a guide for the inquiry was the U.S. Senate minority report titled The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA, https://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2014/7/post-53280dcb-9f2c-2e3a-7092-10cf6d8d08df.

18. 18. The NEP was crafted around three main principles: “(1) security of supply and ultimate independence from the world market, (2) opportunity for all Canadians to participate in the energy industry, particularly oil and gas, and to share in the benefits of its expansion, and (3) fairness, with a pricing and revenue-sharing regime which recognizes the needs and rights of all Canadians.” Government of Canada, Budget 1980 (Ottawa: Department of Finance, October 28, 1980).

19. 19. See Dean Bennett, “‘Most Discriminated Against Group’: Alberta Premier Pledges to Protect Unvaccinated,” Global News, October 11, 2022, https://globalnews.ca/news/9189811/danielle-smith-sworn-in-albertas-19th-premier/; Max Fawcett, “Danielle Smith’s Anti-expert Crusade Will Crash Alberta’s Health-Care System,” National Observer, October 24, 2022, https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/10/24/opinion/danielle-smith-anti-expert-crusade-crash-alberta-health-care-system?.

20. 20. https://pathwaysalliance.ca/.

21. 21. Ezra Levant, Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands (Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, 2010). For an extended discussion of Levant, see my “How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures,” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 47, no. 3 (2013): 145–68.

22. 22. On the notion of an “oil curse,” see Michael L. Ross, The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013).

23. 23. Levant, Ethical Oil, 6–7.

24. 24. See Mike Ekers, “‘Self’ or ‘Other’? A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis on Canadian Petro-nationalism Based on Social Media Posters,” Social Semiotics (forthcoming).

25. 25. On greenwashing in the energy industry, see Jordan Kinder, Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil in the Age of Social Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

26. 26. Sarah Cox, “Canada’s Oil and Gas Sector Received $18 Billion in Subsidies, Public Financing during Pandemic: Report,” Narwahl, April 15, 2021, https://thenarwhal.ca/canada-oil-gas-pandemic-subsidies-report/.

27. 27. The title of this section comes from Richard Sanger’s report on the Freedom Convoy, “Nothing Ever Happens in Ottawa,” London Review of Books, April 21, 2022.

28. 28. The Canadian Trucking Alliance, a federation of provincial trucking associations, was quick to point out that “the vast majority of the Canadian trucking industry is vaccinated with the overall industry vaccination rate among truck drivers closely mirroring that of the general public.” See “Canadian Trucking Alliance Statement to Those Engaged in Road/Border Protest,” https://cantruck.ca/canadian-trucking-alliance-statement-to-those-engaged-in-road-border-protests/.

29. 29. Andy Riga, “500,000 in Montreal Climate March Led by Greta Thunberg,” Montreal Gazette, September 28, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/get-a-unique-view-inside-and-above-montreal-s-half-million-climate-march-1.5301122.

30. 30. The most detailed counternarrative is offered by Tanner Mirrlees, “The Carbon Convey: The Climate Emergency Fueling the Far Right’s Big Rigs,” Energy Humanities, May 3, 2022, https://www.energyhumanities.ca/news/the-carbon-convoy-the-climate-emergency-fueling-the-far-rights-big-rigs.

31. 31. Brianna Sacks, “GoFundMe Says the Viral Campaign for Canada’s Trucker Protest Hasn’t Violated Its Rule Even Though It Sure Seems Like It Has,” BuzzFeed, February 3, 2022, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/briannasacks/gofundme-canada-vaccine-trucker-convoy.

32. 32. Justin Ling, “5G and QAnon: How Conspiracy Theorists Steered Canada’s Anti-vaccine Protests,” Guardian, February 8, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/08/canada-ottawa-trucker-protest-extremist-qanon-neo-nazi.

33. 33. See note 16.

34. 34. It is worth noting that the original memorandum issued to the governor general to dissolve the government contained no mention of truckers.

35. 35. The West Texas Intermediate cost per barrel of oil in February 2019 was US$49.27. Oil from the oil sands is priced at a discount to WTI prices. See https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=F003048623&f=M.

36. 36. For an account of the French gilets jaunes, see Stathis Kouvelakis, “The French Insurgency,” New Left Review 116/117 (March/June 2021): 75–98. Lich was one of the organizers of the yellow vests in Canada.

37. 37. Joseph Quesnel, “The Next Convoy Could Pull the Climate Curtains,” Frontier Centre for Public Policy, September 3, 2022, https://fcpp.org/2022/09/03/the-next-convoy-could-pull-the-climate-curtains-on-trudeau/.

38. 38. See Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium 47, no. 1 (2018): 25–44, and Caleb Wellum, “‘Keep Moving’: Convoy (1978), Car Films, and Petro-populism in the 1970s,” in American Energy Cinema, ed. Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, 257–71 (Morganstown: University of West Virginia Press, 2023).

39. 39. Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism.

40. 40. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (London: Orbit Books, 2020).

41. 41. Mouffe, For a Left Populism, 71, emphasis original. For the dangers and limits of developing a left politics through the use of populism, see Kai Bosworth, Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), and Geoff Mann, “Who’s Afraid of Democracy?,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 24, no. 1 (2013): 42–48.

42. 42. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Common: On Revolution in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Matthew Maclellan (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 314, emphasis original.

43. 43. George Caffentzis, “The Petroleum Commons,” Counterpunch, December 15, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/12/15/the-petroleum-commons/.

44. 44. See Ian Angus, “The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons,” Climate and Capital, August 25, 2008, https://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/.

45. 45. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

46. 46. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115–16.

47. 47. Williams, 115.

48. 48. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 147.