Trump Again Lies for Poison Profit Oil
A "Make America Great Once more" baseball cap rests on the knee of a person at the "Rally to Protect Our Elections" event in Phoenix, on July 24, 2021.
Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Nostalgia for empire is what seems to drive Vladimir Putin — that and a desire to overcome the shame of punishing economic shock therapy imposed on Russia at the end of the Common cold War. Nostalgia for American "greatness" is function of what drives the motion Donald Trump still leads — that and a desire to overcome the shame of having to face the villainy of white supremacy that shaped the founding of the United states of america and mutilates it still. Nostalgia is too what animates the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month, wielding their ruddy-and-white flags similar a conquering regular army, evoking a simpler fourth dimension when their consciences were undisturbed by thoughts of the bodies of Ethnic children, whose remains are however beingness discovered on the grounds of those genocidal institutions that once dared to telephone call themselves "schools."
This is not the warm and cozy nostalgia of fuzzily remembered babyhood pleasures; it's an enraged and annihilating nostalgia that clings to false memories of by glories against all mitigating evidence.
All these nostalgia-based movements and figures share a longing for something else, something which may seem unrelated but is non. A nostalgia for a time when fossil fuels could be extracted from the earth without uneasy thoughts of mass extinction, or children enervating their right to a time to come, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic change reports, like the i just released yesterday, that reads, in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, like an "atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership." Putin, of grade, leads a petrostate, ane that has defiantly refused to diversify its economic dependence on oil and gas, despite the devastating issue of the article roller coaster on its people and despite the reality of climatic change. Trump is obsessed with the easy money that fossil fuels offering and as president made climate deprival a signature policy.
The Canadian truckers, for their office, not just chose idling 18-wheelers and smuggled jerry cans every bit their protest symbols, but the leadership of the motion is also deeply rooted in the extra-dirty oil of the Alberta tar sands. Earlier information technology was the "liberty convoy," many of these same players staged the dress rehearsal known equally United We Roll, a 2019 convoy that combined a zealous defense of oil pipelines, opposition to carbon pricing, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and explicit nostalgia for a white, Christian Canada.
Oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview.
Though petrodollars underwrite these players and forces, information technology's critical to understand that oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview, a cosmology deeply entwined with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, which ranked human equally well as nonhuman life within a rigid bureaucracy, with white Christian men at the pinnacle. Oil, in this context, is the symbol of the extractivist mindset: not only a perceived God-given right to keep extracting fossil fuels, but also the correct to keep taking whatever they want, exit poisonous substance behind, and never look dorsum.
This is why the fast-moving climate crunch represents not but an economical threat to people invested in the extractive sectors simply also a cosmological threat to the people invested in this worldview. Considering climate change is the Earth telling us that naught is complimentary; that the age of (white, male person) human being "dominion" has ended; that there is no such thing as a ane-way human relationship comprised only of taking; that all actions accept reactions. These centuries of digging and spewing are at present unleashing forces that brand even the sturdiest structures created by industrial societies — coastal cities, highways, oil rigs — await vulnerable and fragile. And within the extractivist mindset, that is incommunicable to take.
Given their common cosmologies, it should come as no surprise that Putin, Trump, and the "freedom convoys" are reaching toward ane some other across disparate geographies and wildly different circumstances. So Trump praises Canada'due south "peaceful motility of patriotic truckers, workers, and families protesting for their most basic rights and liberties"; Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon cheer on Putin while the truckers sport their MAGA hats; Randy Hillier, a fellow member of the Ontario Legislature who is one of the convoy'south loudest supporters, declares on Twitter that "Far more people have & will dice from this shot [the Covid vaccines], than in the Russia/Ukraine war." And how about the Ontario restaurant that last week put on its daily specials lath the declaration that Putin "is not occupying Ukraine" but standing upwardly to the Great Reset, the Satanists, and "fighting confronting the enslavement of humanity."
These alliances seem deeply weird and unlikely at first. Merely look a little closer, and information technology's clear that they are bound together by an mental attitude toward time, 1 that clings to an idealized version of the past and steadfastly refuses to face difficult truths about the futurity. They likewise share a delight in the practice of raw power: the 18-wheeler vs. the pedestrian, the shouted manufactured reality vs. the cautious scientific report, the nuclear armory vs. the machine gun. This is the energy currently surging in many unlike spheres, starting wars, attacking seats of government, and defiantly destabilizing our planet's life back up systems. This is the ethos at the root of so many democratic crises, geopolitical crises, and the climate crunch: a tearing clinging to a toxic by and a refusal to confront a more than entangled and interrelational future, one bounded by the limits of what people and planet tin take. It is a pure expression of what the late bell hooks oft described, with a playful wink, as "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" — considering sometimes all the big guns are needed to depict our world accurately.
Photo: Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The virtually urgent political task at manus is to put enough force per unit area on Putin that he sees his criminal invasion of Ukraine equally too bully a risk to sustain. But that is only the barest of beginnings. "There is a brief and apace closing window to secure a liveable time to come on the planet," said Hans-Otto Portner, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic change working group that organized the landmark report released this week. If in that location is a uniting political job of our time, information technology is to provide a comprehensive response to this conflagration of toxic nostalgia. And within a modernistic world birthed in genocide and dispossession, that requires laying out a vision for a future where nosotros have never been before.
The leadership of our various countries, with very few exceptions, are nowhere near coming together this claiming. Putin and Trump are backward-facing, nostalgic figures, and they have plenty of company on the hard correct. Jair Bolsonaro was elected by playing on nostalgia for Brazil's era of military rule, and the Philippines, alarmingly, is poised to elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as its next president, son of the belatedly dictator who pillaged and terrorized his nation through much of the '70s and '80s. But this is not only a right-wing crunch. Many liberal standard bearers are deeply nostalgic figures besides, offer as antidotes to surging fascism nothing but warmed-over neoliberalism, openly aligned with the predatory corporate interests — from Big Pharma to large banks — that have shredded living standards. Joe Biden was elected on the comforting promise of a return to pre-Trump normal, never listen that this was the same soil in which Trumpism grew. Justin Trudeau is the younger version of the same impulse: a shallow, attending-economy echo of his male parent, the late Canadian Prime number Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In 2015, Trudeau Jr.'s first statement on the globe stage was "Canada is back"; Biden's, v years later, was "America is back, prepare to lead the world."
We will not defeat the forces of toxic nostalgia with these weak doses of marginally less toxic nostalgia. It's not plenty to be "dorsum"; we are in desperate demand of new. The good news is that we know what information technology looks like to fight the forces enabling imperial aggression, right-wing pseudo-populism, and climate breakup at the same time. It looks very much like a Green New Deal, a framework to get off fossil fuels past investing in family unit-supporting unionized jobs doing meaningful work, similar building light-green affordable homes and proficient schools, starting with the most systematically abandoned and polluted communities first. And that requires moving away from the fantasy of limitless growth and investing in the labor of care and repair.
The Green New Bargain — or the Red, Black, and Green New Deal — is our best hope for building a sturdy multiracial working-class coalition, based on finding common footing across divides. It likewise happens to be the all-time way to cutting off the petrodollars flowing to people like Putin, since greenish economies that have beat the habit to endless growth don't need imported oil and gas. And it's also how we cut off the oxygen to the pseudo-populism of Trump/Carlson/Bannon, whose bases are expanding because they are far better at harnessing the rage directed at Davos elites than the Democrats, whose leaders, for the nigh part, are those elites.
Russian federation's invasion underlines the urgency of this kind of dark-green transformation, but information technology too throws up new challenges. Before Russia's tanks started rolling, we were already hearing that the best way to stop Putin's aggression is to ramp up fossil fuel production in North America. Within hours of the invasion, every planet-torching projection that the climate justice movement had managed to block over the past decade was being frantically rushed dorsum onto the table past right-wing politicians and industry-friendly pundits: every canceled oil pipeline, every nixed gas consign terminal, every protected fracking field, every Arctic drilling dream. Since Putin's war machine is funded with petrodollars, the solution we are told, is to drill, frack, and ship more of our own.
There is no such thing every bit a curt-term fossil fuel play.
This is all a disaster capitalist charade of the kind of I take written nigh too many times before. Get-go, Prc will keep buying Russian oil regardless of what happens in the Marcellus Shale or the Alberta tar sands. 2d, the timelines are fantastical. There is no such matter as a short-term fossil fuel play. Every one of the projects being flogged as a solution to dependence on Russian fossil fuels would take years to have an bear on and, in order for their sunk costs to brand financial sense, the projects would need to stay in functioning for decades, in disobedience of the increasingly drastic warnings we are receiving from the scientific community.
Simply of course the push for new fossil projects in North America is not about helping Ukrainians or weakening Putin. The existent reason all the onetime pipe dreams are being dusted off is far more crass: This war has fabricated them vastly more assisting overnight. In the week that Russian federation invaded Ukraine, the European oil benchmark, Brent crude, reached $105 a butt, a price non seen since 2014, and it is still hovering above $100 (that's twice what it was at the end of 2020).
Banks and energy companies are desperate to make the well-nigh of this price rally, in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Alberta.
Equally surely as Putin is determined to reshape Eastern Europe'due south postal service-Common cold State of war map, this ability play by the fossil fuel sector stands to reshape the energy map. The climate justice motion has won some very of import battles over the last decade. It has succeeded in banning fracking in entire countries, states, and provinces; huge pipelines like Keystone 40 have been blocked; and so have many export terminals and diverse Chill drilling forays. Indigenous leadership has played a cardinal role in well-nigh every fight. And remarkably, equally of this week, $forty trillion worth of endowment and pension funds at over 1,500 institutions have committed to some form of fossil fuel divestment, thanks to a decade of dogged divestment organizing.
But here is a clandestine our movements frequently keep even from themselves: Since the price of oil plummeted in 2015, we have been fighting an industry with one paw tied behind its back. That'due south because the cheaper, easier-to-admission oil and gas is by and large depleted in North America, so the pitched battles over new projects have primarily been over unconventional, costlier to excerpt sources: fossil fuels trapped in shale rock, or under the seabed in the deep body of water, or under Arctic water ice, or the semi-solid sludge of the Alberta tar sands. Many of these new fossil fuel frontiers only became profitable afterwards the U.Southward. invaded Iraq in 2003, which sent oil prices soaring. Suddenly, it fabricated economical sense to make those multibillion-dollar investments to extract oil from the deep ocean or to plough Alberta'due south dingy bitumen into refined oil. The boom years were upon us, with the Financial Times describing the frenzy in tar sands equally "due north America'south biggest resources blast since the Klondike gold blitz."
Notwithstanding, when the price of oil collapsed in 2015, manufacture'south decision to go along growing at such a frenetic step wavered. In some cases, investors weren't certain they would earn their money back, which led some majors to pull back from the Chill and the tar sands. And with profits and stock prices downwardly, divestment organizers were suddenly able to brand the case that fossil fuel stocks weren't just immoral, they were a lousy investment, even on commercialism'due south ain terms.
Well, Putin's deportment have untied the paw behind Big Oil's back and turned information technology into a fist.
This explains the recent moving ridge of attacks on the climate movement and on the handful of Democratic politicians who have advanced science-based climate action. Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican from New York, claimed last week, "The United States has the energy resources to knock Russia out of the oil and gas market place entirely, merely we don't use those resources considering of President Biden's partisan pandering to the environmental extremists of the Autonomous party."
The precise reverse is true. If governments, many of whom ran promising Light-green New Bargain-like policies over the past decade and half, had actually implemented them, Putin would not be able to flout international law and stance as he has been doing then flagrantly, secure in the belief that he volition nonetheless have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons. The underlying crisis we face up is not that Due north American and Western European countries accept failed to build out the fossil fuel infrastructure that would let it to displace Russian oil and gas; it is that all of u.s. — the U.South., Canada, Deutschland, Japan — are all the same consuming obscene and untenable amounts of oil and gas, and indeed of free energy, period.
Nosotros know the way out of this crisis: Ramp upward the infrastructure for renewables, power homes with wind and solar, electrify our transportation systems. And because all energy sources bear ecological costs, nosotros must besides reduce demand for free energy overall, through greater efficiency, more mass transit, and less wasteful overconsumption. The climate justice movement has been saying this for decades now. The trouble is not that political elites have spent also much time listening to and then-called environmental extremists, it'due south that they accept hardly listened to us at all.
At present nosotros find ourselves at a foreign moment, when a swell deal feels upwardly for grabs. BP appear on Sunday that it will sell off its 20 percent pale in Russian oil giant Rosneft, and others are following its pb. That'southward potentially practiced news for Ukraine, since pressure on this most disquisitional sector will certainly get Putin's attention. However, we should also be clear that it is likely only happening because BP is planning to take full advantage of the oil and gas frenzy, unleashed by higher prices, in North America and elsewhere. "BP remains confident in the flexibility and resilience of its financial frame," it reassured marketplace watchers in its press release announcing the Rosneft move.
Information technology'south pregnant likewise that BP's news came within hours of German language Chancellor Olaf Scholz announcing that his country will build two new import terminals to receive shipments of natural gas, farther locking in dependence on fossil fuels in the middle of a climate emergency. The terminals had long been opposed by German environmentalists, yet now they are being pushed through under cover of war, presented as the just way of making up for the gas that Scholz had recently announced would not flow through Nord Stream 2, the newly congenital pipeline running nether the Baltic Body of water. That move turned a land-of-the-art piece of fossil fuel infrastructure into an "$11-billion hole in the ground," in the words of The Globe and Mail's European agency main, Eric Reguly.
Nonetheless it's not only fossil fuel projects that are being killed and revived. "We are doubling down on renewables," Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Committee, announced ahead of Russian federation's invasion. "This will increase Europe'due south strategic independence on energy."
Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Watching these geopolitical chess pieces fly across the board in a matter of days, along with the latest wave of dramatic sanctions against Russian banks and air travel, there are plenty of reasons for dread, including a echo of measures that punish the poor for the crimes of the rich. Only there are flashes of optimism besides. What is heartening is less the substance of any individual move than their sheer speed and decisiveness. As in the early months of the pandemic, the response to Russia'southward invasion should remind u.s.a. that despite the complexity of our financial and energy systems, it turns out that they can nevertheless be transformed by the decisions of mere mortals.
If BP can walk abroad from a xx percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot be abased if information technology is premised on the destruction of a habitable planet?
Information technology's worth pausing over some of the implications. If Deutschland tin carelessness an $xi billion pipeline because it's suddenly seen as immoral (information technology always was), then all fossil fuel infrastructure that violates our right to a stable climate should likewise be up for debate. If BP tin walk away from a 20 percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot be abandoned if it is premised on the destruction of a habitable planet? And if public money can be announced to build gas terminals in the blink of an eye, then it'southward not too belatedly to fight for far more solar and current of air.
As Pecker McKibben wrote in his excellent newsletter last week, Biden could help in this transformation, using powers merely bachelor during times of emergency, by invoking the Defense force Product Act to build large numbers of electric heat pumps and shipping them to Europe to mitigate the pain of losing Russian gas. That is the artistic spirit we need in this moment. Considering if we are building new energy infrastructure — and we must — surely it should be the infrastructure of the future, not more toxic nostalgia.
There are many lessons we must accept from the trembling moment we are living through. Near the dangers of assuasive nuclear weapons to proliferate unchecked. About the curt-sightedness of shaming once great powers. Well-nigh the grotesque double standards in Western media virtually which lands, and which lives, are treated as invadable and disposable. Nigh which forced migrations are treated equally crises for the people moving, and which are treated as crises for the countries they are moving to. About the willingness of everyday people to fight for lands — and near whose fights for cocky-determination and territorial integrity are historic equally heroic, and whose are cast as terrorist. All of these are lessons we must learn from living through this moment of naked history.
And nosotros must larn this i also: Information technology is still possible for humans to change the world we have built when life is on the line, and to do it quickly and dramatically. As we were two years ago when the pandemic was beginning alleged, we are in yet another terrifying but highly malleable moment.
War is reshaping our earth, but so too is the climate emergency. The question is: Will we harness wartime levels of urgency and activeness to catalyze climate action, making us all safer for decades to come up, or volition we allow war to add more than fuel to a planet already on fire? That challenge was put well-nigh sharply recently by Svitlana Krakovska, a Ukrainian scientist who is part of the Intergovernmental Console on Climate change working group that produced this calendar week's written report. Even as her country was nether the Kremlin'south attack, she reportedly told her scientific colleagues in a virtual meeting that "Man-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the aforementioned roots, fossil fuels, and our dependence on them."
In one case you've denied climate breakup, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much any course of objective reality is a light elevator.
Russian federation's outrages in Ukraine should remind us that the corrupting influence of oil and gas lies at the root of virtually every strength that is destabilizing our planet. Putin's smug swagger? Brought to you by oil, gas, and nukes. The trucks that occupied Ottawa for a month, harassing residents and filling the air with fumes and inspiring copycat convoys around the word? One of the occupation's leaders showed up in court a few days ago wearing an "I ♥ Oil and Gas" sweatshirt. She knows who her sponsors are. Covid-denialism and surging conspiracy culture? Hey, one time you have denied climate breakdown, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much any form of objective reality is a lite lift.
At this late phase in the debate, much of this is well understood. The climate justice motility has won all the arguments for transformational action. What nosotros hazard losing, in the fog of state of war, is our nervus. Because naught changes the bailiwick like farthermost violence, even violence that is beingness actively subsidized past the soaring price of oil. To prevent that from happening, nosotros could do far worse than to take inspiration from Krakovska, who apparently told her colleagues at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Modify in that closed-door meeting, "We will non surrender in Ukraine. And nosotros hope the world will not surrender in building a climate-resilient futurity." Her words so moved her Russian analogue, heart witnesses reported, that he bankrupt ranks and apologized for the actions of his government — a brief glimpse of a world looking forward, not back.
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Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/war-climate-crisis-putin-trump-oil-gas/
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