Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

I wrote this in 2020 and posted it in early ‘21. It was the first piece in the overall project I’m still working on. It sorely needed revision. I’d thought I could do the whole petrohistory of America in 2,000 words, but in fact I was just beginning a bigger project. Now that this revision is done, I consider this to be the starting place for anyone coming to my project for the first time. I'm very grateful to those of you who came to my work at various points and had to figure out what the f**k I was talking about with no or poor context. The following piece might be about as clear as mud, as they say, but at least it’s intended to be The Beginning, to be followed by the Apocalypse Confidential essay in the book that will someday maybe exist.

Speaking of the book that may someday exist, my goal with this substack is to generate a large enough list that a publisher will feel comfortable taking a risk on the book even though my work is…not for everyone. Since this is meant to be the beginning, this is the piece to share. If you like what I’m doing here, please help me grow my audience.

One of the mistakes in the original: I said that Fritz Haber went to Japan after he was finally unseated from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. I’m not sure where I got that idea. He literally and figuratively died on his way to Palestine, only finally embracing his Judaism via Zionism. Read Nitrogen for context on that.

Co-hosting on the audio version are my Hermes 3000, which typed the pages included as images, and my Outside Typewriter, the Rambo of Ultraportables, the very thocky Antares Parva.

"The Sixth Hyperstitional Entity of Oil: Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice: a post-apocalyptic entity composed of organic corpses flattened, piled up and liquidated in sedimentary basins (mega-graveyards); geologists suggest that if a high sedimentation rate preserves organic material, a catastrophic sedimentation rate (The Flood) would uproot, kill, and bury organic material so rapidly as to cut the porphyrin off from oxidizing agents which would destroy them in the ocean water. Oil as the post-mortem production of organisms is bound to death. Since its ethos — both origin and end — is purely teleological, whatever it inspires is founded on death and the logic of death and eventual conclusion. Oil as hydrocarbon corpse juice is itself a mortal entity which has been the source of ideology for petro-masonic orders and their policies — from OPEC to the agencies of the War on Terror to pomo-leftists.… It is extracted through teleological instrumentalization of the socio-political body of the Earth.” —Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

All energy on the planet is solar energy. This solar energy exists here on earth as movement, heat, and biochemical energy. It matters what machines we use to convert that solar and photosynthetic energy into survival, and, ultimately, wealth. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of those machines were animals, including most importantly, human animals, who could convert biochemical energy into muscle power and so labor power. Under this preindustrial regime, the most efficient way to gain power was to accumulate and control human bodies: slaves. Ultimately, slavery was the engine of colonialism — the energy that drove the domineering Europeans to invade, occupy, dominate and control so very many communities around the world. Slavery came to demand a total logic of white supremacy that infected everything. And then, our story begins:

In 1880, Pattillo Higgins, a White Supremacist in Beaumont, Texas, with a fourth grade education, threw a bomb into a Black church and started shooting into the windows. I don’t know whether he killed any of the churchgoers, as far as I can tell, it wasn’t recorded. However, Patillo got in a shootout with the cops who responded to the scene, and he killed one of them. Pattillo was acquitted of the murder, since after all, he was simply performing his duty as a young racist to terrorize Black people in their own church, and the cop was a race traitor for defending them, and this was Eastern Texas in 1880 (“self-defense”). He was seventeen.

Living free in Beaumont without fear of reprisal, Higgins became active in his Church, and somehow ended up teaching a girl’s Sunday School class. As you might expect from someone of his caliber, he “fell in love” with one of them, which to me must mean that he raped her. He did name his oil company after her. Anyway, one Sunday he took the girls up to a hill outside of town, called Spindletop, and thought he smelled oil. He bought the land and spent the next nine years trying to drill for oil there, and failing to do anything, wasting intolerable amounts of capital, and yet always getting bailed out (just like that jury did back in Beaumont). Then in January, 1901, oil erupted out of the hole, destroying the machinery and shooting 100 feet above the derrick. It flowed for 9 days at a rate of 100,000 barrels a day, as if it was eager to be free of its subterranean lair: not quite as a caged animal would escape into freedom, more like an ejaculation that doesn’t end. That 900,000 barrels of oil was the vanguard of oil’s entropic conquest of America, as Texans and other White southerners made themselves rich and Capital was mobilized to tap the flow of distilled photosynthesis spurting out of the ground, turning money into oil’s key instrument to get itself into combustion chambers to release its pent-up joules.

Suddenly we could tap hundreds of thousands of years of photosynthetic energy at once, millions of metric tons of oil just bursting out of the ground, flinging itself at us like a horny teenager. After Spindletop, new oil fountains kept leaping up around Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, each one creating a new capital stream, each one making rich first a few White men, then groups of them as the streams began to run together into rivers: Texaco, Chevron, Hunt Oil. This was the birth of a new global power with a center of gravity in the former Slave states, where, at the time, the Civil War was referred to as “The Lost Cause.”

(It is worth mentioning that coal, which was the tellurian entity that spawned the first phase of the industrial revolution, and which continues to be a major necrotic agent today, has its own personal history, different from but related to that of oil.)

So, modern American petrohistory is about 120 years old. Not a long time, just longer than the life of a real person, and indeed, many people still alive have lived through the great majority of it. On a timeline, the fossil fuel age looks like the flame on a long cigarette. And it’s creating an epochal extinction event that will be quite unpleasant to live through.

But apparently 120 years was long enough to seem like it’s always been here, and always will be. Apparently, it was long enough for capitalism to complete its domination around the globe, long enough for it to grow into maturity as colonialism’s replacement. Long enough to spread the false dogma of progress, of a natural human right to air conditioning, internet, and power tools (none of which I’m prepared to live without). Long enough to make it seem like anyone without a national regime of mass consumption has been left behind, and need to be doing everything they can to “develop.” Long enough to create a third world and intentionally, cruelly impoverish it, long enough to destroy the idea of a second world, the only alternative that gained enough power to pose a dialectic challenge to capitalism: Communism. Long enough to irrevocably change the climate of the world and trigger a mass extinction event that will be the defining feature of the 21st century. Long enough, in other words, to remake the world.

I believe that oil is a sentient entity, with its own intelligence and motivations. That it has manipulated humanity into its own self-demise. To make myself seem moderate and mainstream, I’ll start by citing Amitav Ghosh, who, building on the fact that today scientists accept that trees in a forest are able to communicate with one another, develops a very common sense vision of arboreal consciousness:

“In that humans lack the ability to communicate as trees do, could it not be said that for a tree it is the human who is mute? If trees possessed modes of reasoning, their thoughts would be calibrated to a completely different timescale, perhaps one in which they anticipate that most humans will perish because of a planetary catastrophe. The world after such an event would be one in which trees would flourish as never before, on soil enriched by billions of decomposing human bodies. It may appear self-evident to humans that they are the gardeners who decide what happens to trees. Yet, on a different timescale, it might appear equally evident that trees are gardening humans.”

Well said, as always; but why are you talking about trees in such necrophiliac terms? Trees may well be our best allies and friends, one of our best defenses against the real enemies: Fossil Fuels. Oil, Gas, and Coal are directly changing the climate. They are the direct and proximate cause of warming the planet. Why should we not believe they are doing so on purpose? If humans are in control, why do we have so little control here?

If oil were intelligent, it would be a deeply inhuman intelligence — alien in a terrestrial sense — and so, as Stanislaw Lem illustrates, utterly unrecognizable and incomprehensible to us. Oil doesn’t speak human languages, and we may never know just what it wants. But we can guess, by interpreting its behavior. The humans who are indentured to the cause of Oil — for instance, “oil companies” — do not speak or act for oil, even though they work in oil’s interest. Nonetheless, by looking at the actions of those people and corporate persons, we may discern the outlines of oil’s plan: “moving the Earth’s body toward the Tellurian Omega — the utter degradation of the Earth as a Whole” (Cyclonopedia, 17).

Oil is the most influential nonhuman consciousness in the history of humanity. Oil was on every side of every war of the 20th century. And so, it can be said that in the 20th century, history stopped being human history.

Oil is inhabited by war machines, a tendency toward violence and domination; a unification of power by the fascist forces of combustion. Any one agent of this power is completely disposable and replaceable, any individual easily sacrificed. It’s in the action of sacrifice where the profit is made. The fissuring of carbon structures, the release of Joules into Watts.

History can now only be told of the ascent from the ground of this primordial power, the ongoing apotheosis/combustion of fossil fuels into atmospheric carbon. And once burned, of course, that carbon could heat the earth. Perhaps its goal is to recreate the conditions of the biosphere from 358 million years ago, when most of that stuff was alive.*** Reptiles ruled the world when the solar energy was captured by the plants that went on to become oil; it is their world that we burn. What should we call this? I suggest we stick with the obvious: Petrolocism (petrolocized, petrolocization) is the process of being reconstituted by oil, and thereby accelerated greatly. Look, for example, at the agriculture sector: Food production was petrolocized after Fritz Haber invented nitrogen fertilizer in 1909. And so on, for every area of the economy.

This is where Gravity’s Rainbow picks up the story. Gravity is what the rocket must push against: a force and a counterforce, a We system and a They system. It is also the force that created oil by repressing and condensing organic matter over time.

Lyle Bland, the billionaire Masonic spiritualist, who “has had his meathooks well into the American day-to-day since 1919,” digs very deep into the occult and spiritual aspects of his business club, and begins his own spiritual journey:

Bland, still an apprentice, hadn’t yet shaken off his fondness for hallucinating. He knows where he is when he’s there, but when he comes back, he imagines that he has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth’s mind, and that there are layers, set very deep, layers of history analogous to layers of coal and oil in Earth’s body. The foreigners sit in his parlor, hissing over him, leaving offensive films of sebum on everything they touch, trying to see him through this phase, clearly impatient with what they feel are the tastes of a loafer and vulgarian. He comes back raving about the presences he has found out there, members of an astral IG, whose mission—as indeed Rathenau implied through the medium of Peter Sachsa—is past secular good and evil: distinctions like that are meaningless out there. . . .

“Yess, yess,” all staring at him, “but then why keep saying ’mind and body’? Why make that distinction?”

Because it’s hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he must soon let it go. . . . To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody . . . having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics—

Worth noting that Bland is maybe the only character who’s entirely in control of himself because he’s in control of everything around him, unlike Slothrop, who has no idea what’s really going on, and knows it.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel in which the War is the main character. War is explained to be a self-reproducing iterative program, a driving essence that we call Capitalism, but was never about competitive markets. It was instead about funding and allocations of capital. This “real War” was a machine that was in “perfect working order” as soon as the war ended, when it could pivot from opposition to acquisition of the Nazi war machines, and reoriented against the Soviet Union.

The Cold War was never really about the Russians, it was about the takeover of America. It was about making a world in which there is no alternative to whatever degraded state of monopoly-captured Capitalism we now find ourselves in. Communism was the last dialectical challenge to Petrocapitalism. They did destroy the very real Communist and Socialist movement in America, and destroyed labor organizations. But they were collateral damage to the “real War.” Very convenient to have them out of the way.

Oil rode the Cold War to utter domination in the form of American Capitalism, in part by creating better consumers. Through the actions taken by Cold Warriors, oil put itself in a position to wage an extermination campaign — an ecocide — against humanity and many thousands of other species in an the fastest and most intense mass extinction event in the history of the world, which is now only beginning to gain its momentum. It did so by creating a permanent state of war, a fight against an Other to drive policy and accumulate wealth, sometimes also called “funding,” rather than a positive ideology like Socialism, which could have distributed funding to the people’s needs.

It has built a world where constant consumption of petroenergy is an inevitability, all day, every day. I don’t want to live without it, certainly not unilaterally. If we all could commit to an energy use strike, I’d consider the practicality of joining myself. But since we can’t even approach collective action, I’m enjoying my comfort.

In the end, this is not about humans. We’re not going to survive (or maybe some version of “we” will), but the earth will. So we’re not really the protagonist of our own history now. Now we are an instrument of Oil, and our tenure is but one battle in a much longer struggle between void and combustion, gravity and matter, an entropic dialectic played out presumably around every star in the galaxy. Energy gets radiated, absorbed, subsumed, and then released again. Life is just a sometimes-artifact of this flow.

Feed My Ego With Your Email Address (But I Prefer Feedback — Please Comment!)

If you want to keep reading the Hydrocarbon Corpse Juice project:

The Autonomous Chemical Weapon at Apocalypse Confidential Part I

The Autonomous Chemical Weapon Part 2

Nitrogen

Plastic

Environmentalism (ideology)

And I’m writing Methane and Coal.

Or you can wait until I synthesize all this into a book, and read it in its final version. I’m thinking it will be organized chronologically, rather than a separate chapter for each type of material.

Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

I thought that this essay on plastic would make a good second read-aloud. It was before I came to Snuckstack, so I don’t know if people have looked at it.

This time I got fancy with audio mixing — this is my first time playing with audacity or recording audio, so forgive me my amateurism. There was this weird impulse to try to bring you into my brain-space.

Last we left off, our historical protagonist, petroleum, was starting up the cold war. I thought that to begin the last half of the 20th Century, I could pivot to plastic as a downstream spawn of petroleum. I was wrong: although plastic is much more visible to us, the main story of environmental history remains the burning of fossil fuels, the suicidal drive to self-immolation, release of energy, and then atmospheric freedom.

Plastic is a mere byproduct of that need for combustion. You’ve got to refine petroleum to make fuel, and you’ve got to get rid of whatever’s refined out. It’s industrial waste that they’ve found a way turn a profit on, no matter how cheaply they sell it. A defecation of the oil refinery.

The biochemicals in petroleum that were entangled while they were buried for millions of years together, forming the muck we call crude oil, are refined apart into different products, but they remain aspects of the same project of petroleum: “moving the Earth’s body toward the Tellurian Omega — the utter degradation of the Earth as a Whole” (Cyclonopedia, 17). They are equal and opposite petrological drives: fuel is consumed immediately, plastic lives forever, and they both are world-destroyers.

Plastic invaded material life utterly and became a cornerstone of the ideology human exceptionalism that is necessary to justify the degradation of the ecosphere. It is infinite in its potential to realize human fantasy: material doesn’t have to look like itself anymore. Here we have a thing that would never exist but for industrial chemistry. What gets lost in this plastic utopianism, on both the consumerist and environmentalist side, is plastic’s origins in petroleum. The oil — infected as it may be with war machines — becomes organized on a molecular level. Does this make the war machines inert, as if trapped in amber? Or do they gain significance and influence? If so, they are masters of camouflage, to appear to be mere subjects of human desire. But that is precisely how they reproduce.

Plastic is unique in that it can never be returned to the earth; everything else can be returned to the biosphere eventually, even at the molecular level — dust to dust — but a synthetic polymer will never break down, will never be metabolized. It is free from, and excluded from, the biological processes that were formerly only transcended by nirvana. A fish may eat it, but it will never become fish. Anywhere it does break down into small enough bits to be ingested (“microplastics”), it will act as a toxic invader, cause cancers and digestive problems, and stubbornly remain itself. Plastic is petroleum made immortal.

Plastic is a core substance to the ideology of petrocapitalism: the visible end of the ideological spectrum. An omnipresent physical reminder that we are not animals anymore (according to the ideology. Out here in reality, of course, we are very much animals). The idea that anything can be artificial or synthetic is itself engineered to make us feel special about ourselves. To make us feel like we alone can instantiate something new into the universe: a substance that didn’t evolve along with everything else here on this planet, Something New Under the Sun. The cost of this hubris is, of course, ultimately borne by the inhuman. And so the mythos of a Synthetic substance come alive, a coming synthetic world, straight into the stupid Singularity. Stupid or not, the fact that plastics will be on this planet forever does, by itself, offer some promise of a post-human epoch on this planet. Perhaps something will evolve that eats plastic, maybe evolve out of the plastic-eating microbes we’ve already released into the ecosphere.

Polymer describes the structure of a molecule: a long chain, comprised of component “monomers.” These molecules are huge; one plastics worker described a polypropylene molecule as a “cathedral that goes on for miles and miles.” Polymers are quite common in nature; DNA is also a polymer.

In an essay about how plastic is alive, it might seem pseudoscientific to point out that DNA is a polymer. But that doesn’t change the fact that the components of plastic and DNA have a basically similar molecular architecture. In the case of plastic, chemists insert different precursor molecules onto the chain to change the physical attributes of the final material. DNA does the same thing, but with much more complexity. Nonetheless, even with simple molecules, over time impressive things can happen once chemicals begin to engineer (or be engineered for) their own reproduction.

Plastic doesn’t reproduce sexually; it has a much more efficient process: reproduction by symbiosis with humans. This turns out to be much faster, more efficient, and more fecund than old fashioned sex. Simply by appearing to be a material, it has colonized every niche of economic activity and every micro-ecosystem. The endless variation of polymer structure, able to become a huge range of different end products, makes it infinitely adaptable. And instead of relying on random mutations for evolution, it uses human engineering, which in turn allows us to feel as if we are gods.

Does plastic have to be formally “alive” to be recognized as an invasive species? Plastic has enabled levels of consumption exponentially higher than any other time before. The endless variation in polymer structures allows it to be endlessly and rapidly adaptable, which is rewarded with massive material proliferation. And, it may be needless to reiterate, it will outlast us.

Just as industrialization had a coal-driven phase and a petroleum-driven second phase, so did plastics. The first plastics, which dominated before and during World War II, were derived from coal ash and tar. After the War, the industry largely shifted to petrochemicals. The plastics made from coal products were largely thermosets, which means they can’t be melted, while today thermoplastics are more common; they can be melted. It was in that moment of transition from one to the other, plastic invaded and quickly dominated our material lives and became fundamental to the ideology of petrocapitalism. That moment climaxed in 1952, when Du Pont and ICC (in Britain) lost control of the formula for polyethylene in an antitrust judgement.

Besides their material differences, thermosets and thermoplastics have different cultural and political resonances, identified with their distinct historical contexts. The dominant feature of early plasticity in the reign of the thermosets was strength. That gospel of synthetic strength reached its climax in and after World War II, and Pynchon does a virtuosic job of making fun of it in Gravity’s Rainbow. Ten years after the war, when polyethylene became the first mass thermoplastic, the key aspect of plasticity became disposability. Strength or durability is an attribute of the material itself, but disposability is an attribute imposed from outside by economic need filtered through ideology.

It’s worth briefly going back to thermosettical times, if only to see what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in our thermoplastic world.

Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weiße

From the beginning, plastic was declared immortal by the marketing guys supporting the Bakelite brand, which was the first mass-market synthetic polymer. (Celluloid came first, but celluloid, made from cotton, is an antebellum story, and I’m restraining myself from writing about it). The name Bakelite has nothing to do with its bakeability ( you shouldn’t put plastic in the oven, though it won’t melt). It was named after its inventor and chief egotist Leo Baekeland. It entered the market in 1907, and it’s made of coal tar and formaldehyde.

In 1924, the company’s publicity guy hired a freelance writer named John Mumford to write a book about it. He boasted that Bakelite has “a solidity that mocks at the disintegrating forces of heat and cold, time and tide, acid and solvent; with a dielectric strength which fits it to withstand high voltage.” The chemists weren’t looking for a cheap substance, they were looking for a strong one that wouldn’t degrade. Mumford’s book, Story of Bakelite, starts:

Why did we want it that badly? Because,

Plastic and fuel are intertwined not only in their common origin, but in their functions. Electrification would have been impossible without the simultaneous development of plastics. The day of crying need: to combust fossil fuels for power. The need to have power. Certainly aligned with our desires, but can we really take all of the credit for it? It was already “outgrowing its master” in 1924.

Just as plastic was essential to “confine” electricity, so was it able to set the terms for the internet, to define the space of digital disposability and abundance.

One thing that’s hard not to notice about Mumford’s text is that he speaks of both electricity and plastic in an active way that implies that the material has intentionality: “Bakelite, though it had no name then, had been playing ‘face-tag’ and ‘blind-man’s bluff’ with chemists for fifty years.” This is echoed in a 1947 article by journalist Ruth Carson in Colliers magazine: “You feel, when you go into a chemical plant where plastics are made, that maybe man has something quite unruly by the tail.” The material had not yet become inert in public consciousness. It hadn’t yet been fully assimilated into the realm of the human, the way it is today.

As previously discussed, Standard Oil and IG Farben set up a shell company (also a Shell (Royal Dutch) company) in Germany to trade patents related to polymers and their raw materials. This worldwide conspiracy of polymers was satirized heavily in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon gives the back-story to plastic in purely nonfiction terms on page 249 of Gravity’s Rainbow:

This was the same Carothers, Wallace Carothers, who died two weeks before du Pont filed a tranche of patent applications that included one for a chemical called Cadaverine, which could be gathered from the runoff of decaying human corpses, giving rise to the rumor that Carothers had really, ahem, thrown himself into his work. Although Cadaverine could be had more cheaply from coal tar, du Pont’s PR department didn’t do anything to dissuade the public of this misconception, because du Pont didn’t have a PR department, because President Lammont du Pont didn’t give a s**t about what the public thought of his company, nor did he need to. Nonetheless, the Cadaverine rumor was eventually squelched by the plastics ideology machines. Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weiße.

(Dr. Jamf, the archscientist in Gravity’s Rainbow, whose name stands for Jive-Ass Motherfucker because the book loves a dumb joke, doesn’t have a direct historical analog but the chemist Hermann Staudinger was a virtuoso of polymers; in 1933, Martin Heidigger, out to cleanse the Nazi party of ideological impurity, very publicly and angrily denounced him for being a pacifist in World War I.)

The Invention of Disposability

In terms of locating plastic in postwar culture, there is no other place to go — you know it, you want it:

“I got one word for you, kid: plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it? Will you think about it?”

1963, The Graduate came out. The only memorable line in Dustin Hoffman’s career, and it was said to him by the d-list actor Walter Brooke in his most famous role, Mr. Maguire. It resonated because the main character’s refusal of plastic was the only indication whatsoever in the whole movie that he was trying to free himself from the advantages of peak-prosperity American Capitalism. Because why would you want to, in 1963? Communism had been erased from America twenty years before, the no-alternative world was shaping up in Cold War paranoia, and the economy was surging ahead, exponential growth every year, fueled by…fuel. And so, Mr. Maguire, yes, let’s think about plastics.

Remember that du Pont lost control of polyethylene in a 1952 antitrust suit. This was government working as it should: unleashing an avalanche of garbage onto our heads. This is the moment when Plastic loses its narrative history and becomes a diffuse and omnipresent substance that saturates everything, because that caused the price of polyethylene to fall from the forty cents to ten cents, and lower, per pound. At the time, the price of the ethylene monomer at the refinery’s spigot was less than two cents a pound, and before the IP to make polyethylene was widely available, a lot of it was just getting flared off or dumped into the river. (There’s an apocryphal story of J. D. Rockefeller himself visiting a refinery, seeing the flare, and ordering his minions to find something profitable to do with the ethane.)

The key utility of plastic was not to the consumer, but to the owners of oil refineries, who got to move these byproducts into the “profit” column. Ethlyne and other precursor chemicals continued to be cheap forever; it was less than two cents a pound in 1952, and it’s .19 cents a pound in 2020. Because with 4–13% of a barrel of oil made of these chemicals, you’re always going to have people looking to unload it on the market. Sheer volume is the only way to make a profit in the business. Plastic’s compatibility with that endless, 24/7 flow of petroleum was absolutely dependent on its disposability; for millions of pounds to be made, millions of pounds had to be disposed. It was never a question whose job it was to dispose of it; always the public, assumed to be a municipal service that could later be privatized profitably at the public’s expense. In fact, it soon became necessary to ship out our plastic waste to dump, ahem, “recycle” in poorer countries.

And so the plastic industry paid the culture-makers at Madison Avenue to invent disposability, which is an utterly colonialist idea. Lloyd Stouffer, awarded “packaging man of the year” said at an industry conference in 1956, “the future of plastics is in the trash can.” Reflecting in 1963 on his own prophetic words, addressing his beloved “packaging industry,” Stouffer continued, “You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps, and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages — and now, even plastics cans. The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.” It is difficult to imagine the euphoria of a man getting so rich so easily. Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate was very dumb not to get in on this.

It is true that there was initially some resistance to disposability. There’s a true story of a riot at a public water fountain when the communal tin cup was removed. More to the point, the plastics salesmen had been marketing their product as an indestructible, high quality material, and they were not happy at being told to contradict themselves to their accounts. Maybe Mr. Maguire complained it to his wife at night, maybe he missed a few sales targets.

But overall the public took to disposable plastic products like flies on s**t. The ad-men easily linked convenience with disposability, and thereby linked disposable products to first-wave feminism — liberating women by reducing household drudgery, a familiar story.

Disposability was uniquely compatible with the American colonial mindset founded upon infinite expansion. Indeed, probably the only reason the idea didn’t take hold earlier was material limitations — no matter how many resources we stole from native peoples, there’s no stream of material in this world quite like plastic in its bottomlessness.

But that doesn’t mean that the rise of disposability was inevitable. As opposed to strength or durability, disposability isn’t a feature of the material itself, just a change in how we use it. However, disposability is a feature inherent in the flow of petroleum through our industrial processes. Along with the sheer quantity of energy that petroleum presented to humans in exchange for its liberation from the earth into the atmosphere, it came with all of its byproducts. With the adoption of disposability, we adapted to petroleum byproducts, rather than adapting them to our ends. We molded ourselves, our lives, our habits, around the inevitability of cheap ethane and other petrochemicals. ‘The consumer’ was instantiated as a category as a polyethylene sink. Just as the oceans and the wetlands absorb pollution, so do we. And we pay for the privilege.

But we’re not a permanent waste sink; we can buy the plastic, but we can’t store it long-term. That job remains with the land and, to a lesser extent, oceans.

3. Virgin Nurdles

There was an “environmentalist” movement, but that proved to be (or was designed to be?) a weak idea. It wrongly separates humans from the problem. While non-human things are affected by environmental degradation, it’s natural for humans to mostly care about themselves. An effort to get us to care about something outside of ourselves — and at our expense, at that — was doomed from the beginning. That doesn’t mean we’re ideologically powerless against total plastication; now we correctly call it plastic colonialism, and so place it within the scope of human exploitation.

The first little crusade of environmentalism in re: plastic was of course litter. As long as the plastic was put in its proper place, it was fine. That Proper Place is the landfill: the goal is to contain all the plastic on a certain piece of land. Max points out that this assumes a theoretically infinite supply of land — a trash manifest destiny, and practically, a huge amount of the land that is appropriated for landfills are on native territories and sited near communities of color. And once it is covered in dirt, there it stays. Forever, or at least five billion years until the sun engulfs the earth. That time and place — four billion years from now, with still a billion years left — will exist, it will take place, regardless of whether anything is there to witness it. And so will exist all of the plastic.

Following littering, the plastic companies found a more effective message: recycling. I am sure that you already know that plastic recycling is an idea without any reflection in material reality: a scam, not to make money directly, but to keep the oil flowing. Back at the peak of recycling, when China was accepting it, the most that has ever made it into the recycling process was 10% of all plastic waste. We now know that the oil and chemical industries paid for the whole PR push behind recycling that we’ve all been subject to. So all the plastic ends up in the same place, the landfill, whether or not it’s been reduced reused or recycled.

The plastic guys lucked out by associating their version of “recycling” with the re-use of other, real, materials like aluminum and glass. Recycling aluminum and glass and other metals is a real industry with real finances. But plastic recycling was always just a performance. Because you can melt down metal and glass into a relatively homogenous mixture. Not so with plastic, which isn’t consistent with itself at all. Each piece of plastic in your recycling bin is unique — you know this, they put lying little numbers on the bottom of everything made of plastic, so that you would think it was recyclable. It can be sorted in to types and melted down, but the resin degrades every time you do that. Most of the recycled plastic products you see for sale look like melted-together balls. Virgin nurdles, the raw form in which thermoplastics are sold to manufacturers, on the other hand, are completely cheap.

The popular discourse around plastic requires me here to take a detour into the ocean. Because this is what we hear the most about these days: ocean plastics. In fact, this framing of a real ecological crisis is a cover to obscure the real problem, the fishing industry. At least half of the plastic in the oceans is from discarded fishing gear, like nets. Also, that half does the most damage, because it’s specifically designed to kill fish and ocean animals indiscriminately. So remember that the next time you’re snipping a six-pack ring, imagining the turtle that won’t get caught in it. Also, much of the rest of the plastic in the oceans is PRE-consumer waste, in other words, industrial waste. Max Liberion, again, has found Nurdles on remote beaches in the Canadian north Atlantic.

It turns out that this pollution directly from plastics factories has a long and venerable history, and that liberal environmentalists have a long complicity in it.

In March 1972, Edward J. Carpenter of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute announced publicly that he had found tiny bits of plastic in Long Island Sound at a density of one to twenty samples per cubic yard of water. He suggested that toxic plasticizers were being released into the marine food chain, and that plastic provided surfaces for bacterial growth and blocked digestive tracts of smaller fish. The next month, he quietly told the President of the Plastics Industry Association, Ralph L. Harding, Jr., that the plastics he was referring do were fresh spheres of polystyrene resin (nurdles), which indicated dumping by a plastics processor. Carpenter told Harding that when he released his report to the public, he hoped to also report, “that we have had the cooperation of the plastics industry in locating the source” of the industrial dumping. Harding sent a letter to his members and the culprit came forward and agreed to end the dumping in exchange for anonymity and non-prosecution.

And that’s where it stands today: Non-prosecution.

Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce in public a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

I read this essay into a microphone. 10,000 words is a lot to read sitting at a computer, and I hope that the audio may make it more accessible to folx. It’s also a way to provide more content without compromising my creative process. I may, at some point, do readings of other essays—please comment if you want me to do so.

Written Version:

Part I

Part II