The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the…

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol https://t.co/I1I1SfKlSM https://t.co/SLuPvGdqk3

Those who have spent 50 years substituting a fiction called ‘the Economy’ for society have been extremely successful in painting our past 2 years as a ‘lockdown’. As a stopping of society, that had to end as a matter of urgency. But that’s not what the past two years were. /2 https://t.co/CHIoj2nKRE

It certainly was a stopping of a way of doing things, particularly those things that involved guzzling lots of fossil fuels. There’s a fun joke that says you can identify a bogan by the amount their recreational activities rely upon petrol. But that’s most…/3 https://t.co/nKZZFJIEDH

…of the Economy crowd, everything we call the ‘Economy’ is heavily about the consumption of fossil fuels. About moving things around, people and resources. About transport, roads, ships, planes. I’ve Tweeted before about how the ‘Economy’ is really our old colonial past,…/4.. https://t.co/1dvm7mvYoV

…re-badged with new modern economic pseudoscientific language, but still undertaking those old imperial tasks of dislocating people and resources and moving them to centres of power and wealth. The ‘Economy’ was the way those who profited from empire steered emerging…/5 https://t.co/c8SGyl04tE

…democracies back to their comfort zone of imperial, feudal society, while appearing to be ‘modernising’ things. They basically replaced political economy with a ridiculous equilibrium-based simplified mathematical model in economics, which they call the ‘market’. /6 https://t.co/Pichul3htY

A market which miraculously continuously equilibrates, with an equally miraculous ‘invisible hand’, towards themselves holding most of society’s wealth. Praise the Lord. And then along comes Covid, and we have to shut down much of that imperial, fossil fuel-driven gravy train. /7 https://t.co/T76fFy0S3h

Many peasants (us) in the modern imperial economy actually have never been richer than during the past 2 years. Our savings surged. We spent more time with our families than we have ever, in our lifetimes. We got to stop and think about the meaning…/8 https://t.co/tG116FkcPX

…of it all, leading to an international ‘Great Resignation’, as we peasants started to question the modern slavery our economic societies are imposing on us, with stagnant wages, unaffordable housing and other basics of life, etc. All of this is…/9 https://t.co/mjRsh7aUBH

…a clear existential threat to existing ‘economic’ elites, who have spent 50 years replacing sovereign national states with a globalised market, to promote ‘free trade’ i.e. destruction of any remaining barriers to the great imperial dislocation and accumulation machine. /10

All powered by coal and oil. This is what the study the ABC describes shows more fundamentally, I think. Those who benefit from replacing societies and nations with an Economy know very well what a threat to their privilege the pandemic represented. Here’s what they did next. /11

We know, we’ve lived it. A colossal propaganda war began, very early in the pandemic, to paint all public health action, the stuff that made us all richer and healthier and happier than we had ever been, as a ‘lockdown’ of our lives. Like we were being oppressed. /12

We’re now living in the lethal ruins of the success of that propaganda war. Astonishingly, so successful that many genuinely believe that ‘living with’ a lethal pathogen is not only desirable, but is somehow what we have always done. Both lies, laughable lies. As the study…/13

…shows, the lockdowns weren’t the disaster. We need to repeat them, for years to come. THEY should be the ‘new normal’. The redistribution of wealth towards ordinary people, the massive reduction in fossil fuel consumption, the improvement of quality of life. The authors…/14

…make abundantly clear, this isn’t about stopping society. It’s just about decoupling it from fossil fuels. The greatest funders of the ‘Economy’ idea in the first place? The fossil fuel industry, it’s their money that funds the majority of the ‘economic’ think tanks and…/15

…media that continuously act to obstruct essential action against threats like climate change and Covid. Our ‘lockdowns’, again, need to be our ‘new normal’. We were already finding ways to work, for example, with much less (fossil-fuel driven) mobility, ‘commuting’. /16

The Economy crowd, who love building big expensive roads for that commuting, are already desperately trying to ‘get everybody back in the office’. They know the threat to their lifestyles. Desperately spinning the new normal as a disaster, and let’s have the old normal back. /17

Let’s not. /end