Presentation short abstract

From the ‘Freedom’ Convoy’s truck occupation to the European farmers’ tractor blockades, use of the internal combustion engine as a tactic of carbon populist protest has gone viral. We examine the class composition of these two protest cycles and the far-right conspiracy theories fuelling them.

Presentation long abstract

In 2022, the use of trucks and tractors as a tactic of carbon populist protest became increasingly evident as a hallmark of the conjuncture. In the early part of that year, hundreds of trucks occupied large swathes of downtown Ottawa for weeks, filling the capital city with diesel fumes and the blaring horns of big rigs. Later that summer, Dutch farmers once again started up their tractor engines, as they had in 2019, this time spurring on a pan-European, multi-year wave of farmers’ convoys. In both cases, the internal combustion engine provided form and content: a carbon-intensive protest tactic in defense of carbon- and nitrogen-intensive production.

In this presentation, we examine the class composition and resource infrastructure of these two protest cycles, while tracing the far-right ideologies orbiting and fuelling them. We pay special attention to globalist conspiracy theories of food, which fused pandemic paranoia around ‘climate lockdowns’ with forecasts of meat bans and mandatory insect-based diets, with disgust mobilised to connect the dots between invasive species and population ‘replacement’. This dovetailed with cults of bodily purity and renewal: a corporeal anti-globalism crystallised into carbon-intensive diets promising national rejuvenation. At the more extreme end, these territorial associations blended into fascistic themes of ‘blood and soil’, stark gendered binaries, and wellness obsessions with raw food diets and extreme fitness. The convoy-based protest cycles, we suggest, accelerated a broader moral panic cycle, defending energy-intensive metabolisms framed as central to the vitality, strength, and virility of nationalist bodies: the metabolism of the nation.