The anonymous energy & finance Substack collective behind the green chicken (doomberg.substack.com) — running synthesis of its appearances, with per-appearance breakdowns and a stock index. Energy-realist and pro-hydrocarbon, China-realist on manufacturing and technology, sceptical of valuations that exist to be taxed rather than to produce, and increasingly focused on jurisdiction risk — including America's own.
The exhibit for the leapfrog thesis: zero to 5 million cars a year "like nothing," and "no Western manufacturer will compare to BYD very soon" — a call on competitive position rather than a formal share rating.
The other defendable Standard Oil remnant — and the subject of Doomberg's first-ever single-company deep dive (2026-AUG Doomberg Zoom), a tell about where they think durable US industrial value sits. 2026-SEP-02 gives it a live catalyst: the incumbent operator inside Venezuela is the near-certain beneficiary of the reopening — "if you think Chevron is just going to sit there and watch Venezuela get turned into a Guyana and not do something about it, of course they're going to jump on the bandwagon," because "once the billions start flowing, it's in everybody's interest to keep this going."
Not investable (Québec state-owned) — catalogued as one of the physical levers Canada holds in the trade war: hydro power into the US Northeast alongside Ontario power into the heartland and Alberta heavy crude into Midwest refineries built for it. "Turn all those off all at once" and "the US has gone to war over far less" — a tail risk they war-game, not a base case.
Not a pick — the archetype of the trillion-dollar "gigacorn" whose real function, on Doomberg's read, is fiscal: an enormous capital-gains base for the US to harvest, created "out of whole cloth."
One of the few remaining places US strength is real — a "remnant of the old Standard Oil empire" whose hundreds of billions of market cap is "defendable" because it sits on producing physical assets, not on the IPO printing press. Reinforced 2026-AUG-28 on jurisdiction: what makes Guyana valuable "is not just the quality of the resource" but that "that jurisdiction was there to be shaped effectively by Exxon" — a barrel whose legal terms are locked, unlike Vaca Muerta's. 2026-SEP-02 makes Guyana the benchmark in the governance test: Guyana embracing Exxon versus Hugo Chávez changing the terms after the capital was sunk, offered as "an agnostic observation" — and Venezuela "getting turned into a Guyana" is the phrase that forces a competitor to move.
The losing side of the BYD comparison — "ask the chairman of Ford how he's going to— he gets beat, it gets BYDs"; the market's relative valuation of the two is offered as the verdict.
In one line:China has already leapfrogged the US in technology — treated as "an axiom for analysis," not a forecast — so no AI-and-robots story reshores American manufacturing; meanwhile the headline proof of US strength, its giant market caps, is better read as fiscal monetization than as industrial power. The constructive corollary: the one place US strength is real is the hydrocarbon and resource complex, and the realistic goal is to be a highly competitive multipolar power, not the unipolar one. The 2026-AUG-28 conversation adds the counterparty half of the same argument: the US is no longer seen as "agreement capable," which prices into everything from Venezuelan oil terms to the demand for treasuries as neutral collateral. The 2026-SEP-02 conversation supplies the epistemics and the constructive trade: the oil market carries better information than the stock market (they own being "dead wrong" on $150–200 oil rather than reaching for a manipulation story), and the Western Hemisphere is where the cheap energy actually is — Venezuela's return toward 4 mb/d being the live case, with the Iran war judged a straightforward mistake against it.
The lead test kills the AI/robotics rescue. "AI and robotics can only save the US relative to China if there's a lead against China. There is no lead against China in these critically important supply chains." China is "miles ahead of the US in robotics"; the only remaining US advantage is chip-making, and that gap is closing "shockingly fast." The leapfrog is an axiom: "anybody who's been to China knows it… go to a Chinese factory."
"Cheaper and eventually better" is the recurring pattern, and it has reached the AI frontier. The same arc that ran through energy production, electric cars and manufacturing now runs through frontier models: US labs led, then a free-to-download open-source Chinese model landed "basically in line with the absolute frontier models."
"Define biggest" — market cap as monetization ("stealth financial repression"). The US still has the largest companies only if biggest means market cap in dollars, and "that is a form of monetization." Capital-gains tax is "the driving function of US tax receipts today," so each trillion-dollar IPO is "150 billion in capital gains tax potentially collected by the US to close its fiscal gap" — a system that "enriches rich people and creates taxable income… out of whole cloth." The verdict: "what is the purpose of a system is what it does."
Defendable market cap vs "gigacorns." The dividing line for equities is whether the valuation is backed by producing physical assets. Exxon and Chevron — "the remnants of the old Standard Oil empire… reconstructing themselves" — have "a real market cap that is defendable to the tune of hundreds of billions"; the contrast is "these fantasy trillion-dollar unicorns, or gigacorns" coming off the Wall Street IPO printing press.
The US endowment supports a strong multipolar role — if that is named as the goal. Most oil produced in the world, most natural gas, a fleet of 90 operating nuclear reactors, among the largest proven coal reserves, and "a Western Hemisphere to itself" (Canada, the Arctic, Mexico, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Chile, Argentina; Brazil the wild card). "It cannot be the unipolar power anymore. And the quicker that realization is internalized, we think the better."
"Agreement capable" is the counterparty half of the thesis. The US and its European allies "are viewed in the rest of the world as not being agreement capable" — a Russian phrase, but the exhibits are American: a UN-blessed Iran nuclear deal ripped up by the next president, and "tens of billions of dollars worth of risk capital… incinerated on a political whim" in offshore wind. Because "the capital planning cycle of heavy industry is longer than the political cycle of most western democracies," any deal that can't bind a successor carries a discount — the Argentina problem, where "no law that Milei passes can bind future governments." The corollary for oil: what made Guyana valuable was not only the rock but that "that jurisdiction was there to be shaped effectively by Exxon."
Treasuries' product is neutrality — and it is being spent. "What makes the holding of US treasuries attractive… is its neutrality and its liquidity"; every use of the dollar system as a weapon means "the gun barrel gets a little warm" and that attractiveness diminishes. If a P5 co-victor's reserves can be frozen — and now even Canada is under fire — "why does Brazil want to hold any US treasuries?… Why would New Zealand?" — precisely as the US must place "$2 trillion worth of on the run paper every year." The pristine collateral "is a hot potato."
North American energy is the underpriced tail, not the Strait of Hormuz. A formal lateral-thinking exercise: Canada halts Alberta exports, cuts Hydro-Québec power to the Northeast and Ontario power to the heartland, and strands the Midwest refineries built for Canadian heavy crude. Their base case is that Carney doesn't do it — but "the US has gone to war over far less," and the received wisdom that Canada would suffer more fails the possession test (Europe cutting off Russian gas "didn't hurt Russia"). The Middle East, meanwhile, is "Schrödinger's Strait of Hormuz — both open and closed at the same time depending on who you ask."
The oil market is a better information source than the stock market — grade a market before you trust its price. Score any market on purpose ("to ensure a steady supply of crude oil to refineries at a price that they can earn a spread on"), structure (futures "largely settled by delivery," with delivery and expiration as forcing functions equities lack — "the IPO stocks are basically immortal") and participants (refiners, their banks and arbitrageurs, versus "everybody participates in the stock market"). Hence the standing rule for disruption stories: "whenever anybody tells you commercial satellites say this, CENTCOM says that… because Brent is in the 80s, everything else is noise." They apply it to themselves — "we like everybody else were dead wrong thinking oil would go to 150 or 200" — and the discipline is to diagnose the mechanism rather than assume manipulation. Two teaching corollaries: "oil is worthless until it gets to a refinery," so a high crack spread means a refining shortage, not a crude one; and "the oil business is run on credit" — pre-sold barrels mean a price spike margin-calls the very drillers it appears to enrich.
The Western Hemisphere play is the constructive side of the thesis, and Venezuela is the live case. "The only difference between Venezuela and Alberta is governance" — they did 4 mb/d before and "could easily do that again"; July was already 1.1 mb/d, and Permian ultra-lights are being slipstreamed in as diluent for the heavy barrel. The under-covered mechanism is the money vehicle: the Pentagon taking "a 35% passive stake" in a Venezuelan businessman's company, through which "hundreds of billions of dollars" of sovereign-wealth money flow at zero US taxpayer cost, with Washington taking ~20% of the barrels — "people are radically underestimating the cleverness of this deal," and Chevron will "jump on the bandwagon." Against that, "all of this only shines a light on what a terrible decision it was to go to war in Iran." The SPR is a "canard" — a net exporter doesn't need one, and tank bottoms constrain Washington's ability to subsidise the rest of the world's fuel prices, not the US motorist.
What it is: Doomberg is an anonymous collective publishing written research pieces (a Substack). In these appearances they reference their written work directly — a piece titled stealth financial repression, and a draft in progress on the Canada–US trade war — plus a standing framework they call the "doomsaying presentation" built on six mental models, and a recurring member session, Doomberg Zoom. The only call to action given on the record is "head over to doomberg.com and sign up"; nothing about pricing or tiers is stated.
Offering
What it is
How they run it
Seen in the index
Written pieces
Standalone research essays on macro/energy themes.
Named example: stealth financial repression — the argument that US market cap functions as debt monetization via the capital-gains tax base. Self-deprecating on reach: "we think all of our pieces are underappreciated." Pieces are written against the news cycle: on 2026-AUG-28 the live draft was on Canada — "we actually have a different view as to what's actually going on which we're writing about right now." A published example is walked through on screen on 2026-SEP-02: "…with American Characteristics", out that morning on the Venezuela deal, with the paywall cut visible mid-post and a deliberate in-joke for regulars — "this is our way of signaling to our readers like yeah, we know who this guy is." Pieces answer reader pushback in later appearances rather than in the comments.
Drives the macro view, not a single ticker. CVX
Lateral-thinking sessions
An internal weekend exercise that generates the premises the pieces are built on.
"When we were doing some brainstorming over the weekend applying our classic lateral thinking techniques, one of the premises that we brainstormed around was Canada halts all oil exports to the US." The output is an inventory of fragile assumptions, kept explicitly separate from the base case.
Hydro-Québec
The "doomsaying presentation" — six mental models
A framework of six mental models they expect "will prove prescient."
One of the six is the China technology leapfrog, applied here as "an axiom for analysis" rather than a debatable call. The other five are not enumerated in this clip.
BYDDY, F
Doomberg Zoom
A monthly live session for the audience.
This month's is "a deep dive on Chevron… our first single-company deep dive since Doomberg was a thing" — i.e. single-name work is the exception, not the format.
CVX
Frameworks over tickers. The output is mental models a reader can rerun — the lead test, "define biggest," the endowment audit — with individual companies appearing as evidence. A single-company deep dive is a first in the outfit's history, which makes the choice of company itself informative.
Plain-spoken about its own limits. The stance is argued from publicly checkable facts (production rankings, reactor counts, unit volumes) rather than proprietary data, so a retail reader can audit the claim rather than take it on faith.
Appearances
One dated page per appearance — each has its stock table, talking points and an "In plain English" section. Newest first.