Climate Change Surveillance
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Dear privacy seekers,
Ah, climate change: where the weather is always your fault, and the solution is always communism. As someone once said. Regardless of what you think or feel or believe about climate change, people see it as a problem—many and powerful people—and not just a small problem. It threatens national security. It threatens our health. It exposes Ice Age pathogens that are released from the warming polar ice caps. Doctors in Canada are diagnosing distressed people with “climate change.” Climate change threatens our very existence. Accordingly, the methods for combating climate change must be equally severe. Stop oil and coal production immediately. Shut down factories. Stop driving petrol vehicles. Eradicate capitalism. Survey everyone’s carbon footprint across the globe. One person even wrote an article for The Guardian called “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet” and concluded that the Mongol’s massacre of 40 million people scrubbed 700 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere: “an intriguing notion.” I wish I were joking. You see, if one believes climate change to be an apocalyptic problem, then any solution is justified.
In this episode we won’t touch on the scientific truth of climate change. We can, however, briefly and easily touch on the moral truth of solving climate change. And that goes something like this: no “solution” delivered top-down (that is, via coercion) is ever morally justified. Period. Governments have two powers: they can forbid and they can take. Notice that neither of these are productive powers; they are only negative. Governments cannot create things, and when they pretend to do so (such as with fiat currencies), they end up ruining them because you can never escape the metaphysical reality of supply and demand. So please forget about any and all government “solutions.”
Wow—how about that. The moral realization that we should not force other people to do what we want them to do stopped all our bickering right there. Now if you want to find a solution for climate change for everyone, you can go do it yourself: invent something, write a book or create at a viral video about how to reduce your carbon footprint. Get a degree in engineering instead of “sustainability studies” and change the physical world instead of trying to control the people of the world. And of course practice what you preach: stop driving, stop flying, stop using heating and cooling in your house, give up all electronics and plastic products, etc.
Okay. How does surveillance fit into climate change? It’s simple. There is a perceived problem and a perceived solution, and all that’s left is the enforcement. As I’ve said many times through my episodes: what gets surveyed gets controlled. If you need this basic principle expanded upon, try Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish or Arthur C. Clark’s Childhood’s End. Everyone understands this phenomenon even if they don’t fully appreciate it. Those who watch others can control them by that very act, and are certainly able to apply coercion and incentives to alter behavior. If the powers that be monitor the carbon emissions in all their forms, then they can begin to control these emissions and the people who emit them.
So where do we see climate change surveillance around us? Let’s start with “carbon credits.” Maybe you’ve heard of these. The idea is basically that one has to purchase allowances to pump any kind of carbon into the environment. Usually a single carbon credit is equivalent to one metric ton of carbon, and these things can be bought from governments.
Wait a second—did you see what happened there? When did one’s ability to use a resource from the planet become something for which one must get permission? Don’t I as a human spit out carbon dioxide every few seconds? One thinks of the Sesame Street scene where Ernie is sold a bottle of air by the resident shyster. Obviously air is desirable and necessary, so when it is presented in a bottle with a price tag on it, the confused Ernie decides that he should probably buy it. If a common commodity is put it in a bottle with a label on it, then it becomes something else, something “official,” and something that can be sold and regulated. As with all permission systems, the carbon credit ploy exists not to give you something—you already have that thing—but to manufacture an opportunity to punish and control you.
If one is granted a carbon credit, then by necessity monitoring becomes part of the deal. If company X is allowed four carbon credits, then they are going to either have to keep track of that output on their own, or have a government or third party monitor it. Of course, it doesn’t even have to be the government. Companies no doubt will also strive to keep each other in check, since a credit system does not work unless everyone is playing by the rules. Factories and businesses will have to install new systems to manage all of this where before they did not. You see how this works now? Carbon credits start the process of setting up a surveillance and recording infrastructure.
Oh, and don’t expect carbon credits to just keep the nasty, brutish, overly-rich Fortune 500 companies from pumping out carbon. On the contrary, any time regulations come into play the largest companies will take advantage of their relationship with the government via lobbying. You can expect, for example, laws to be passed that make it more difficult for start ups to make use of carbon. There goes the competitors. And, conveniently, militaries tend to escape climate change surveillance and international treaties, even though according to some studies they contribute up to a whopping 5% of carbon emissions. Regulations, as always, help big businesses and politicians first and foremost.
The monitoring of resources is not new, even if climate change is the recent huge spin on it. We’ve had this monitoring with us via smart meters for a while now. And the story of smart meters tells us what we can expect in upcoming years. The smart meter phase of the last couple of decades started with energy companies, who have always had cozy relationships with governments, one day say that they have invented new technology to monitor energy usage, and that they need to install them: everywhere. The reasons were hard to argue against: this was the future, this would help them monitor energy and adjust their production accordingly and, they said, everyone will benefit in the end since these smart systems will reduce energy usage by sheer efficiency. After, all, they are SMART. If you were anti smart meter you were anti progress; you were, I guess, dumb. Well, you can watch a documentary called Take Back Your Power to see how all of this went. Suffice it to say that utilities companies and sometimes local law enforcement have been and continue to invade private property across the US and Canada—and elsewhere—to install meters that give them big chunks of data on energy usage. The usage is enough to have a sense of what activities a household is up to at any given time, in addition to reported bodily damage from the EMF radiation.
You might even say that Smart Meters were conditioning people to have their stuff monitored. And frankly, monitoring things is such an easy sell. Think back to the Snowden revelations. How many people have you talked to then and since—perhaps even you yourself have mumbled this—who simply believe that if something can be monitored, well, it should be, right? Sure there might be some checks and balances, but we should have some monitoring. It’s like all these runners trotting around with their Garmin watches who feel a cold sweat of panic if they forget to start it at the correct time. We all know that without timers that collect all our previous runs we would be incapable of putting one foot in front of the other. “Anything that can be measured should be measured” is the motto of this mindset. It was also, interestingly, the motto of the father of fingerprinting, inherited intelligence, and eugenics: Francis Galton. In a scientific age of big data and data accumulation monitoring becomes a given, a basic concept that of course we should do. Because where have surveillance and data accumulation applied to societies ever gone wrong?
Climate change surveillance shows up in other ways. We see casual manifestations all the time now. MasterCard has a new Carbon Calculator program, which allows “banks to adopt and customize for eco-conscious consumers who are looking for more ways to be informed about their spending.” Google Flights as of 2021 shows the carbon footprint of flights. The examples are myriad, and it’s all fun and games until someone takes it quite seriously. And why shouldn’t they, if they believe that climate change is apocalyptic? If you haven’t noticed the last few years of cancel culture, we’ve seen conservatives and various other deviants shut out of online accounts and even financial accounts for saying the wrong thing online. This was amplified with COVID-19 and, more recently, regarding Russia, where Western companies have decided to play politics and shut out Russians from many of the services that everyone takes for granted. Over the course of a few weeks 150 million people lost access to credit cards, online accounts, and even McDonalds. You really think that these companies in the future won’t try to dictate what you can and cannot do with their services based on the carbon cost?
What’s the worst that can happen with climate change surveillance? Fortunately—or unfortunately—we don’t have to imagine. On his Medium page the godfather of climate change, Al Gore, wrote an article in 2020 titled, “We Can Solve the Climate Crisis by Tracing Pollution Back to Its Sources. A New Coalition Will Make It Possible.” In the article Gore spells out how technology of the last decade has finally made it feasible to perform mass monitoring, even of something as ephemeral as carbon in the air. So what’s the idea? Basically to make use of satellites and other ground and sea-monitoring tools to create a surveillance network and use it to hold companies accountable. Various think tanks and companies are mentioned as part of this tracking project whose goal will be to “[create] a high-tech solution to independently detect emissions and where they’re coming from, everywhere in the world, in real time. It’s a feat that’s never before been possible — until now.”
So how is this going to work? Let me quote directly from the article:
when monitored by global sensor networks including satellites and ground- and sea-based instruments, all connected to a purpose-built AI engine, emissions have nowhere to hide. This new machine learning/AI tool will make it possible for everyone — from scientists and regulators, to the news media and citizen activists, to investors and business leaders — to see exactly who is responsible for GHG pollution in real time, where it’s coming from, and whether the amounts from each significant source are increasing or decreasing. We believe this can lead to a new era of transparency and accountability.
Let me give you a translation for transparency and accountability: surveillance and coercive control. Let’s continue:
The AI then can be “trained” to spot even extremely complex and subtle hints of what pollution looks like by using countless records of when, where, and how emissions came about in the past, collected from ground- and sea-based physical emissions sensors, government environment ministries, corporate disclosure forms, and other sources.
In short, ladies and gentlemen, this is collaborative big data pollution tracking plan. And I have no doubt there’s something to this, even if I don’t presently understand all the engineering behind it. In the future I hope to dissect that further, but for now, this gives you a taste of where things are going.
Let’s return to the worldview of these projects. The moral standpoint of these people is always the same. X problem is observed. The solution has to be a top-down intervention. Anyone with a brain can understand what Al Gore means by accountability: it means that those exposed as using too much carbon according to some politician whose voting base came from TikTok, are either going to be taken down by the police or crushed by cancellation from the private sector. Anytime you come across surveillance: just say no. I don’t care what the topic is or what your stance is: there is no world in which surveillance is good at the societal level.
Here’s the scariest thing about all of this. People are going to listen to this episode and say, “what’s wrong with any of this? Gabriel is over-reacting. Of course we should at least monitor carbon emissions.” This is wrong-headed. Surveillance rarely serves merely an advisory role; when things are monitored, the temptation to intervene is immense; it’s unstoppable. Whether that is the new census data of the late nineteenth century that ushered in the welfare state and big government (look at all these poor people), or the popularization of economics (putting the economy under a microscope) leading to the formation of the Federal Reserve and central planning. The ills of the twentieth century all stem from big data, from surveillance. The mentality of “of course we should monitor” is even more damaging than government-corporate surveillance itself. Call it the banality of evil, order-following, gas-lighting, a road to hell paved with good intentions or all that’s required for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing—however you want to phrase it, the way that coercive systems come into place is by gradual acceptance by the masses.
So what is to be done about climate change surveillance?
I have a few brief thoughts in conclusion. Obviously stand against it wherever you can. Don’t even get into the science question if you don’t feel up to it. And you don’t have to. Stick with the moral principles. Surveillance has never been a benefit when used by government. Draw a line in the sand and do not compromise and do not be moved.
Choose the companies you support carefully. MasterCard is leaning toward climate change surveillance—well, there are other options. Start using more cash and crypto, for one, which is something everyone should be doing. And if you see some company that you use starting to talk about monitoring carbon, send them an email or a Twitter DM saying that you will stop supporting them if they keep on this path. Don’t support mining companies that promote ESG (environment, social, governance) initiatives and don’t put your money into the carbon credit scam. And remember libertarian investors that by purchasing public stock in a company, you’re not getting one over on the green agenda; you’re helping to push up the price of the green stock and enriching its main stockholders. And I have a few ideas what they might do with that money.
Okay, what about real strategies. It is certainly true that monitoring is here to stay. Satellites blanket our planet right now and it’s only going to get a lot more crowded up there. Now you can imagine the terror of Americans as the Soviet satellite Sputnik flew overhead in 1957. What can you do about it? First recognize that the face of the planet is simply going to be surveyed. So you can live in a place with many trees, build metal enclosures, always park in garages and not outside, build a basement and work on all your major projects there. There’s also a guy named Joel Skousen who wrote a book called The High Security Shelter where he discusses how to privately build an underground shelter. I believe he also builds these things for people.
But of course this does not protect you from the vast data collection and carbon detection that Gore mentions in his dystopian project. As far as staying off the grid of carbon emissions, you can simply get ahead of the game. It can’t hurt to do what they say and migrate toward renewable power as your money allows it. It has the added benefit of, well, getting you off the grid and not recorded by and dependent on others. Solar panels are a long way off for most people because of their cost and their inefficiency. But if you can afford them, and you live in a sunny enough area, you might consider installing as many as you can, testing them out, especially if you have some money to spare. The funny thing is, places like Spain are actually starting to regulate and tax the sunlight that you extract from solar panels. Amazing, but predictable. As a privacy person it never hurts to get off the grid if you decide to stay in one place.
Maybe you could move to Iceland and have hot springs power all of your Bitcoin rigs. Or if you live in Kansas make use of the ample wind. You might of course decide to live in a country that won’t put up with this crap. Do you think India and China and Brazil, who are burning carbon like crazy, are going to let their growth be stunted and lose to the US because of the opinions of climate warriors and a few international treaties? Probably not. You still have billions of people without consistent electricity or running water and certainly without cars; and trust me: they want these things. Only Western countries with bizarre death fetishes are interested in handicapping themselves. Though keep in mind that some of these places are irrational and unpredictable; India has in the past couple of years prohibited people from driving on certain days for pollution reasons. That’s one example. But if you have a serious business to start up, or simply want to escape some of this crap, choose where you put your business and physical body carefully. And remember that the average person is going to suffer not from having factories monitored and crippled, but from the trickle down effects of such actions.
Yours in peace and privacy,
Gabriel Custodiet