Peter Smith

Why the Epstein Class Always Push for War & the One Way We Can Stop Them The coming oil, gas and food shock will not arrive as a single dramatic event. It will unfold through conflict, disruption and human tragedy on a vast scale. Before it is an economic story, it is a moral one. War is not an abstraction. It is the destruction of homes, the collapse of food systems and the loss of tens of thousands of innocent lives, many of them women and children. The current trajectory of escalating conflict risks dragging entire regions into prolonged instability. There is a profound stupidity to this. At a moment when the world faces shared pressures from climate, energy and food security, governments are choosing confrontation over cooperation, multiplying risks that will fall most heavily on those with the least protection. The consequences will not remain confined to the battlefield. They will move through oil markets, fertiliser production, shipping routes and grain supplies. Prices will...

A conversation between Fred Harrison and Peter about the 5,000-year trap we cannot seem to escape There is a particular kind of cruelty in being shown a vision of how life could be, knowing all the while that nothing is going to change. We have been subjected to it for centuries. Politicians, philosophers, economists and well-meaning idealists of every stripe have offered us their blueprints for a better world, and the world has stubbornly refused to become one. This is the subject at the heart of a recent conversation between Fred Harrison, economist, author and Research Director of the Land Research Trust, and his interlocutor Peter, a conservationist who has spent decades watching his own well-intentioned ideas get captured and corrupted by the very forces he was trying to overcome. What began as a discussion about utopias became something more interesting: an unflinching examination of why good ideas fail, who ensures they do, and what — if anything — might finally break the cycle....