Is Humanity in ER?
Carbon, Control, and the Machinery Behind the Calm Language.
Emergency rooms are not places of chaos. They are places where systems are overwhelmed and normal regulation has failed. What we are seeing now across energy, food, biology, money/finance, identity/data and governance fits that definition precisely.
Not collapse, or apocalypse but systemic overload. Stop, Look and Listen to what is happening today and what you can do to ‘Calm Ya Farm’ by Bronwyn Holm, Founder of Earthfood, Farmers’ Friend, Growers’ Guide and a ‘Relentless’ Life*.
Start with Tasmania: the battery island
Through the Marinus Link project, Tasmania is being positioned as a renewable energy battery for mainland Australia, with infrastructure designed to move vast amounts of electricity via undersea cables into Victoria.
But this is not just about Melbourne keeping the lights on. The long-term logic is export capacity.
Tasmania’s hydro, wind and land are being integrated into a regional energy system that ultimately feeds energy-hungry data centres, industry, and offshore markets, particularly through Southeast Asia. Singapore is central here because it lacks land, lacks energy, but hosts enormous financial and data infrastructure. Singapore does not need farms. It needs power. Tasmania supplies it. Particularly as it is 'green' and that country loves to be seen to be green.
The environmental cost stays local. The repair of the land after 20 years+ of landscape change stays local, and the financial return flows elsewhere.
Why superannuation is involved
Major Australian Superannuation Funds Involved in Infrastructure & Energy Investment.
Australia’s superannuation system has rapidly expanded into infrastructure, energy transition projects, and private markets. This is not a niche activity it is now core to how these funds grow assets and generate returns for members.
This concentration of capital also creates a closed loop of opportunity for those inside the system. Large infrastructure and transition projects generate well-paid advisory, consultancy, legal and governance roles, often circulating among the same networks of firms, executives and policy insiders.
Meanwhile, the returns flowing back to ordinary superannuation members are diffuse, long-dated and difficult to trace directly to improved retirement outcomes. For decades, small businesses and workers have carried the burden of compulsory contributions, even through downturns, lockdowns and economic shocks, reinforcing the sense that superannuation is treated as an endless pool of capital rather than hard-earned deferred wages.
This raises an uncomfortable but legitimate question. In times of fiscal stress, how secure is this money in practice? Australia has historical precedent for governments absorbing or redirecting private and retirement savings during national crises, including the consolidation of funds into public revenue streams in the early twentieth century.
While no such move is formally proposed today, the growing entanglement of superannuation with government priorities, infrastructure financing and national policy invites scrutiny. If retirement savings are increasingly treated as a public financing tool, Australians are entitled to ask where the line sits between private ownership, fiduciary duty and state control.
AustralianSuper, Australian Retirement Trust (ART), CareSuper, Cbus Super, UniSuper, HESTA, Hostplus, and REST Super all jointly released a policy blueprint to accelerate super’s role in energy transition investment, explicitly calling for government support to facilitate infrastructure and net-zero investment pathways.
The discussion is that these investments do not stop at Australia’s borders. Superannuation funds and their investment managers increasingly allocate capital into offshore infrastructure and energy projects, including large-scale developments in the United States and other jurisdictions, where the primary economic benefit accrues locally to those economies, not to Australian communities.
These are not loans repaid to members in any direct sense; they are equity exposures taken in pursuit of long-term returns. For ordinary Australians, this means decades of compulsory retirement savings are being deployed globally to support foreign projects, foreign jobs and foreign growth, while domestic small businesses and workers continue to shoulder economic pressure at home.
The question is not whether these investments are legal or prudent on paper, but whether Australians fully understand how their deferred wages are being used, and whose prosperity they ultimately serve.
Projects like Marinus Link do not exist without superannuation capital. Australian super funds are now deeply embedded in energy infrastructure, utilities, ports, data centres and land aggregation. Workers cannot access their own money in hardship, yet that money is actively reshaping the country, like it or not.
Super funds partner with global asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, whose mandate is not national wellbeing but long-term yield stability. Energy infrastructure ticks every box, the incentive is locked in.
Energy is not the end goal. Data is. Energy is the enabler, not the prize.
Data storage requires exponential energy growth. As does the changing world processes:
AI processing, Surveillance systems, Digital identity infrastructure, Behavioural analytics.
Digital ID is not a standalone policy. It is a gatekeeping layer for data systems that require constant power, constant uptime, and centralised control. You cannot run a biometric society on backyard solar.
The more identity, payments, health records, carbon tracking and compliance are digitised, the more energy-intensive the system becomes. ENERGY and WATER. And once built, it must be fed.
Data becomes behaviour. Behaviour becomes billing. This is where fear becomes rational.
Google, Meta and platform ecosystems already model behaviour. What you search, buy, eat, move, believe, and hesitate over is logged, scored and predicted, even your pattern of texting. Carbon accounting is now being quietly introduced at the consumer level as a feature now. The screen shots are from my own carbon credit backend in Google. (Month of Dec 2025).
Already a feature of assessment although Australians have no idea this is graded now. No money to pay but structure is alive, this is just one app – after many others we use on the devices etc. that monthly expense is included as the ‘cost of me’. That month is 500 Carbon Credit DEBTS – I would owe as deemed from my Carbon “insights”. Once billable, it becomes controllable, always being adjusted.
Steak becomes expensive. Crickets become “responsible”. Narrative settles in normalcy of language and expectations as we roll on into ABC reporting and brain bashing.
Not because of scarcity, but because of scoring.
Speaking of scoring, now, banking - Long before carbon credits reach the checkout, the infrastructure to profile behaviour is already in place. Transaction-enrichment technology developed by Look Who’s Charging Pty Ltd ABN 95 082 851 474 in Melbourne, Australia, and now owned by Experian Australia categorises everyday spending through bank statements and card data, creating detailed behavioural maps of how individuals live, consume and prioritise.
Framed as consumer convenience and compliance under evolving KYC (Know Your Customer) and AFCA guidance (AFCA is a powerful administrative layer that quietly influences banking behaviour, data handling and consumer treatment without the transparency or accountability of formal legislation** [for side note]).
Often shaped by advisory frameworks from firms such as EY (Ernst and Young), in EY2020 programs of control, these systems normalise deep financial surveillance without new laws being passed, laying the groundwork for future scoring, nudging and pricing mechanisms, including carbon-based consumption models, to be introduced as a logical next step rather than a visible policy shift.
EY2020 third-party “Look Who’s Charging” Aussie fintech startup that built technology to enrich and categorise bank transaction data translating cryptic merchant codes into readable merchant names and spend categories and helping digital banking apps give customers clearer visibility of their own spending patterns. (HAHA)
NOW THIS: Overlay this with biosecurity mandates, agricultural chemicals, feed additives, health directives, and regulatory fog. Information is fragmentation where responsibility is diffused, and stress increases. This is not accidental.
Overloaded populations are easier to manage than informed ones. When people are anxious, tired and financially pressured, they do not organise. They comply.
Across Australia, heavy-handed biosecurity directives and the widespread authorisation of agrichemicals and feed additives often proceed without transparent authority or clear long-term safety data, creating a regulatory environment where untested poisons enter food systems and supply chains under the banner of “risk management.”
At the same time, in the UK, companies like Raynor Foods have begun placing carbon footprint labels on pre-packaged sandwiches now indicating the percentage of a “daily dietary carbon allowance” the product represents highlighting how carbon metrics are already being embedded into everyday consumer goods long before any formal mandate.
The carbon-based pricing embedded into packaged foods and products demonstrate how carbon accounting is bleeding into everyday commerce, quietly layering price signals onto staples like bread and sandwiches long before public policy has been debated or enacted.
This confluence of invisible pricing regimes, unchallenged chemical approvals and biosecurity policy by executive fiat reflects a broader shift: biological and food systems are being routed through administrative regimes shaped by corporate data platforms and market mechanisms, rather than by open scientific assessment, democratic oversight or community consent.
None of this is being driven by law. It is being driven by corporate first-mover advantage. Companies are voluntarily embedding carbon metrics, labels and pricing signals into products and services to secure market position, data advantage and future relevance ahead of any regulation.
By moving early, they shape consumer expectations, normalise new standards and capture behavioural data, positioning themselves to profit when governments later formalise these frameworks. This is not compliance it is pre-emptive commercial strategy in a race to monetise carbon, behaviour and perception before public debate catches up.
While Australians absorb the pressure, political leadership continues as usual.
Gas sold offshore. Water privatised. Land consolidated. Food exported. Debt ballooning into the trillions. No shame. No restraint. No accountability. The public tightens belts. The elite eat export-quality steak. This is not conspiracy. It is structural betrayal.
So where does this leave us?
If humanity is in ER, then panic is not the cure. Neither is denial. Emergency medicine is about stabilisation, not control. You stop the bleeding. You restore regulation. You give the body space to recover.
Carbon credits, data scoring, digital identity and behavioural pricing are not the core problem. They are attempts to manage complexity after natural systems have been broken. When soil dies, food weakens. When food weakens, health collapses. When health collapses, systems multiply to compensate. Control rushes in where coherence has been lost.
The mistake is believing these systems are inevitable. They are not.
The most powerful response available to ordinary people is not protest, panic or compliance. It is withdrawal from dependency. It is rebuilding life where life works in soil, in local food, in water, in community, in skills, and in biological intelligence that does not require permission, passwords or scoring. But it is convenient - right? The short term convenience is the long term pain thereafter. The short term quick spend is the long term struggle of ignorance as expensive.
10 years ! Nitrifying Soil Microbes can cut that time frame to 18 months. Healthy soil does not need carbon accounting. Living systems do not require surveillance.
Regeneration does not ask for consent forms.
Every time land is restored biologically, the need for synthetic fixes, chemical inputs, carbon offsets and behavioural management falls away. Not ideologically but practically. The quieter truth is that functioning ecosystems reduce the very pressures these systems claim to solve.
This is not about rejecting technology or modern life. It is about remembering order that life is self-regulating when not interfered with, and resilient when supported rather than managed.
‘Calming the Farm’ means:
- stepping out of fear-based narratives
- refusing to outsource responsibility for food, health and land
- choosing life-supporting systems over extractive ones
- and understanding that sovereignty or independence begins where biology is alive
You do not need to fight the machine. You need to starve it of relevance.
How? By buying local, your local butcher, your grocer, your Gumtree purchase, your local dressmaker with fabrics for lasting wear and repurposing fabrics, swapping foods, seeds and plants and so on.
Stop the Woolies, Aldi, Coles Bunnings, Spotlight, Temu, Ebay, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Visa, Mastercard, OPEC and foreign-owned energy giants like Shell and BP, Coke and its bottled water, feeds offshore systems that profit from dependence, while choosing local food, soil, water, skills and modest off-grid energy quietly withdraws consent, restores resilience, and starves the machine of relevance without ever having to fight it.
Together, these platforms extract everyday spending of fuel, fees, entertainment, travel, housing inputs and redirect profits offshore, leaving Australia with rising costs, hollowed-out local industry and less capital circulating where people actually live and work.
Bunning Gardening section profits $48B alone from about 5m gardening customers.
NAB, WBC, et al all making millions upon millions from spine of the worker with 25 years home loan and insurance companies pour money into their coffers. So much waste for the pleasure of overseas profiteering from the 'ants' of Australia.
The future will not be saved by better scoring systems.
It will be stabilised by living soil, living food, living water and people who remember how life actually works. That repair does not start in parliament, platforms or policies.
It starts under our feet.
You don’t overthrow systems, you outgrow them.
Calm the farm. Feed life. Starve what no longer serves.
Withdraw attention. Restore biology. Everything else follows.
* RELENTLESS podcasts: Relentless from Courage is Cure
**SIDE NOTE
AFCA stands for the Australian Financial Complaints Authority.
AFCA is not a government department and not a law-making body. It is an industry-funded external dispute resolution scheme set up in 2018 that banks, insurers, super funds and financial firms are required to belong to.
NOTE! : AFCA does not make law, but its rulings are binding on financial institutions, and its operational rules increasingly shape how banks behave in practice. Over time, AFCA guidance, compliance expectations and dispute precedents start functioning like de facto regulation even though they have never been voted on in Parliament.
This is why people experience new “rules” in banking, KYC, account monitoring and data handling that feel mandatory, even when no specific law has changed. Institutions comply upstream to avoid complaints, penalties and disputes downstream. It is about risk and litigation.
AFCA functions less as consumer protection and more as a litigation-avoidance mechanism, driving banks to over-comply through data collection, monitoring and behavioural controls to reduce legal risk rather than because Parliament has required it.
Thank you for reading my very long article and hope you join the Earthfood movement to future proof our nation. Stay close. Calm Your Farm.
Bron