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Oil. From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the petrochemical industry. The story of oil is the story of the modern world.
The rulers of this oiligarchy — the Rockefellers at Standard Oil, the British royals at BP, the Dutch royals and the Rothschilds at Royal Dutch Shell — were not content with mere financial domination. The power that came with their near-total monopoly on the world’s most important commodity, big oil, was enormous, and they had no qualms about using that power to re-make the world in their image.
The message could not be clearer. The pre-summit in Rome, and the New York summit take place under the strict direct control of multinationals. It is they, the Masters of food, who are in, and want to maintain, control. And if they decide to talk about “transition”, they themselves will do so in their own way, convincing us that their solutions will be ecological enough to keep the current system of interests intact.
Zero-Sum, symbolized by an image of hundreds of hand paintings on rock walls. Reaching, until defaced by graffiti from a bleak future?
Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new useless class. People who are useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.
Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand, where every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two.