The Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy  

Norman Solomon

February 28, 2025



Image by Thomas Hawk.

Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism.

Trump first ran for president nearly a decade and a half after the “Global War on Terror” began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The crusade’s allure had worn off. The national mood was markedly different than in the era when President George W. Bush insisted that “our responsibility” was to “rid the world of evil.”

Working-class Americans had more modest goals for their government. Distress festered as income inequality widened and economic hardships worsened, while federal spending on war, the Pentagon budget, and the “national security” state continued to zoom upward. Even though the domestic effects of protracted warfare were proving to be enormous, multilayered, and deeply alienating, elites in Washington scarcely seemed to notice.

Donald Trump, however, did notice.

Pundits were shocked in 2015 when Trump mocked the war record of Republican Senator John McCain. The usual partisan paradigms were further upended during the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump denounced his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “trigger happy.” He had a point. McCain, Clinton, and their cohort weren’t tired of U.S. warfare — in fact, they kept glorifying it — but many in non-affluent communities had grown sick of its stateside consequences.

Repeated deployments of Americans to war zones had taken their toll. The physical and emotional wounds of returning troops were widespread. And while politicians were fond of waxing eloquent about “the fallen,” the continual massive spending for war and preparations for more of it depleted badly needed resources at home.

Status-Quo Militarism

President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represented the status quo that Trump ran against and defeated. Like them, he was completely insulated from the harsh boomerang effects of the warfare state. Unlike them, he sensed how to effectively exploit the discontent and anger it was causing.

Obama was not clueless. He acknowledged some downsides to endless war in a much-praised speech during his second term in office. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he affirmed at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer hailed that instance of presidential oratory in a piece touting Obama’s “anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society.” But such concerns were fleeting at the White House, while sparking little interest from mainstream journalists. Perpetual war had become wallpaper in the media echo chamber.

President Bush’s messianic calls to rid the world of “evil-doers” had fallen out of fashion, but militarism remained firmly embedded in the political economy. Corporate contracts with the Pentagon and kindred agencies only escalated. But when Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, being a rigid hawk became a negative with the electorate as pro-Trump forces jumped into the opening she provided.

Six weeks before the election, Forbes published an article under the headline “Hillary Clinton Never Met a War She Didn’t Want Other Americans to Fight.” Written by Doug Bandow, former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, the piece exemplified how partisan rhetoric about war and peace had abruptly changed. Clinton “almost certainly would lead America into more foolish wars,” Bandow contended, adding: “No one knows what Trump would do in a given situation, which means there is a chance he would do the right thing. In contrast, Clinton’s beliefs, behavior, and promises all suggest that she most likely would do the wrong thing, embracing a militaristic status quo which most Americans recognize has failed disastrously.”

Clinton was following a timeworn formula for Democrats trying to inoculate themselves against charges of being soft on foreign enemies, whether communists or terrorists. Yet Trump, deft at labeling his foes both wimps and warmongers, ran rings around the Democratic nominee. In that close election, Clinton’s resolutely pro-war stance may have cost her the presidency.

“Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump,” a study by scholars Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen concluded. “Our statistical model suggests that if three states key to Trump’s victory — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.” Professors Kriner and Shen suggested that Democrats might want to “reexamine their foreign policy posture if they hope to erase Trump’s electoral gains among constituencies exhausted and alienated by 15 years of war.”

But such advice went unheeded. Leading Democrats and Republicans remained on autopilot for the warfare state as the Pentagon budget kept rising.

On the War Train with Donald Trump

In 2018, the top Democrats in Washington, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, boasted that they were fully aligned with President Trump in jacking up Pentagon spending. After Trump called for an 11% increase over two years in the already-bloated “defense” budget, Pelosi sent an email to House Democrats declaring, “In our negotiations, congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense.” The office of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer proudly stated: “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request.”

By then, fraying social safety nets and chronic fears of economic insecurity had become ever more common across the country. The national pattern evoked Martin Luther King’s comment that profligate military spending was like “some demonic destructive suction tube.”

In 2020, recurring rhetoric from Joe Biden in his winning presidential campaign went like this: “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever alter the character of our nation.” But Biden said nothing about how almost 20 years of nonstop war funding and war making had already altered the character of the nation.

At first glance, President Biden seemed to step away from continuing the “war on terror.” The last U.S. troops left Afghanistan by the end of August 2021. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly weeks later, he proclaimed: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” But even as he spoke, a new report from the Costs of War Project at Brown University indicated that the “war on terror” persisted on several continents. “The war continues in over 80 countries,” said Catherine Lutz, the project’s co-director. The war’s cost to taxpayers, the project estimated, was already at least $8 trillion.

Biden’s designated successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, displayed a traditional militaristic reflex while campaigning against Trump. In her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention she pledged to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Such rhetoric was problematic for attracting voters from the Democratic base reluctant to cast ballots for a war party. More damaging to her election prospects was her refusal to distance herself from Biden’s insistence on continuing to supply huge quantities of weaponry to Israel for the horrific war in Gaza.

Supplementing the automatic $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel, special new appropriations for weaponry totaling tens of billions of dollars enabled mass killing in Gaza. Poll results at the time showed that Harris would have gained support in swing states if she had called for an arms embargo on Israel as long as the Gaza war continued. She refused to do so.

Post-election polling underscored how Harris’s support for that Israeli war appreciably harmed her chances to defeat Trump. In 2024, as in 2016, Trump notably benefitted from the unwavering militarism of his Democratic opponent.

Overseas, the realities of nonstop war have been unfathomably devastating. Estimates from the Costs of War Project put the number of direct deaths in major war zones from U.S.-led actions under the “war on terror” brand at more than 900,000. With indirect deaths included, the number jumps to “4.5 million and counting.” The researchers explain that “some people were killed in the fighting, but far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of disease.”

That colossal destruction of faraway human beings and the decimation of distant societies have gotten scant attention in mainstream U.S. media and politics. The far-reaching impacts of incessant war on American life in this century have also gotten short shrift. Midway through the Biden presidency, trying to sum up some of those domestic impacts, I wrote in my book War Made Invisible:


“Overall, the country is gripped by war’s dispersed and often private consequences — the aggravated tendencies toward violence, the physical wartime injuries, the post-traumatic stress, the profusion of men who learned to use guns and were trained to shoot to kill when scarcely out of adolescence, the role modeling from recruitment ads to popular movies to bellicose bombast from high-ranking leaders, and much more. The country is also in the grip of tragic absences: the health care not deemed fundable by those who approve federal budgets larded with military spending, the child care and elder care and family leave not provided by those same budgets, the public schools deprived of adequate funding, the college students and former students saddled with onerous debt, the uncountable other everyday deficits that have continued to lower the bar of the acceptable and the tolerated.”

While the warfare state seems all too natural to most politicians and journalists, its consequences over time have been transformational for the United States in ways that have distinctly skewed the political climate. Along the way, militarism has been integral to the rise of the billionaire tech barons who are now teaming up with an increasingly fascistic Donald Trump.

The Military-Industrial-Tech Complex

While President Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power, many other tech moguls have rushed to ingratiate themselves. The pandering became shameless within hours of his election victory last November.

“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory,” Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote. “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.” Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, Whole Foods, and the Washington Post, tweeted: “wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

Amazon Web Services alone has numerous government contracts, including one with the National Security Agency worth $10 billion and deals with the Pentagon pegged at $9.7 billion. Such commerce is nothing new. For many years, thousands of contracts have tied the tech giants to the military-industrial complex.

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and smaller rivals are at the helm of corporations eager for government megadeals, tax breaks, and much more. For them, the governmental terrain of the new Trump era is the latest territory to navigate for maximizing their profits. With annual military outlays at 54% of all federal discretionary spending, the incentives are astronomical for all kinds of companies to make nice with the war machine and the man now running it.

While Democrats in Congress have long denounced Trump as an enemy of democracy, they haven’t put any sort of brake on American militarism. Certainly, there are many reasons for Trump’s second triumph, including his exploitation of racism, misogyny, nativism, and other assorted bigotries. Yet his election victories owe much to the Democratic Party’s failure to serve the working class, a failure intermeshed with its insistence on serving the industries of war. Meanwhile, spending more on the military than the next nine countries combined, U.S. government leaders tacitly lay claim to a kind of divine overpowering virtue.

As history attests, militarism can continue for many decades while basic democratic structures, however flawed, remain in place. But as time goes on, militarism is apt to be a major risk factor for developing some modern version of fascism. The more war and preparations for war persist, with all their economic and social impacts, the more core traits of militarism — including reliance on unquestioning obedience to authority and sufficient violence to achieve one’s goals — will permeate the society at large.

During the last 10 years, Donald Trump has become ever more autocratic, striving not just to be the nation’s commander-in-chief but also the commandant of a social movement increasingly fascistic in its approach to laws and civic life. He has succeeded in taking on the role of top general for the MAGA forces. The frenzies that energize Trump’s base and propel his strategists have come to resemble the mentalities of warfare. The enemy is whoever dares to get in his way.

A warfare state is well suited for such developments. Pretending that militarism is not a boon to authoritarian politics only strengthens it. The time has certainly come to stop pretending.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.


Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, is published by The New Press.

Cruel Hoax: the Political Economy of Anti-immigration

Richard D. Wolff

 February 28, 2025

Ema

Photograph Source: Travis Wise – CC BY 2.0

Deporting immigrants may deliver electoral wins to politicians if voters have been sufficiently cultivated by years of demonizing and scapegoating them. For its victims, the cruelties involved are horrific. Yet such deportation makes little sense economically. It represents a nationally self-destructive program based on a faulty grasp of immigration economics. What once “made America great” (at least for the majority white population) were its successive waves of immigrants. What underscored the American economy’s strength was its ability to absorb and integrate those waves despite frictions among them: a genuinely productive melting pot. My American schooling through my PhD stressed such points.

What then reversed such a positive understanding of immigration? What converted immigration instead into an urgent danger to American greatness? What lets Trump pose as “protecting” us by sharply reducing immigration and massively deporting immigrants? (By “immigrants” I mean the vast majority of people who are poor and join the working class at low levels of pay. Foreign-born U.S. residents comprise about 14 percent of the total population or roughly 46 million. About 12 million of them are undocumented.)

Answers to such questions lie in the political economy of immigration. Yet those answers and the political economy that generates them are stunningly absent from popular debates and consciousness. The Republican party’s recent years of anti-immigration rhetoric plus the immigrant deportation policies in place across the last three presidencies illustrate that absence. Many politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties support deportation as the necessary response to the “costly invasions” of immigrants (often equated to criminals). Yet evidence for this demonization program has been very scarce. Its proponents seem largely ignorant of the actual economics of immigration.

Most immigrants coming to the United States are young adults. The young can best manage migration’s hardships and dangers. They can most readily fill the hardest jobs at the lowest pay that their desperate and vulnerable circumstances force on them. The undocumented among them are the most vulnerable. They dare not complain to the police or other government officials when employers take advantage of them and abuse them. Immigrants often send portions of their wages (“remittances”) back to the countries they left. Remittances help care for children, the elderly, and others who remained there and partially compensate those countries of origin for losing their emigrants’ productivity.

Before adult immigrants arrived in the United States, their upbringing was financed by their countries of origin. Their families and governments spent considerable sums feeding, clothing, sheltering, educating, etc., them from birth to 15-18 years of age. They “invested” in their young people but obtained little income from that investment because the young adults migrated to the United States. Their years of productivity benefited the U.S. economy, not the economy of the countries that invested in them.

In contrast, people born and raised in the United States face heavy economic costs for the U.S. economy before they become working adults. U.S. families partly defray those costs (food, clothing, and shelter). The federal, state, and local governments defray other parts of those costs (public schooling, public services, etc.). Since relatively few U.S. adults emigrate, the U.S. economy reaps their adult productivity as a return on its investment in their upbringing. Added to that payoff, the United States secures the productivity of immigrants they did not invest in.

Since many of the countries immigrants belong to are often among the poorer countries, the immigration of their citizens to the United States represents a subsidy from and by the poor nations. Migration not only reflects the international inequalities of global capitalism but it also worsens them. Migrants’ countries of origin lose the adult productivity they need most. Migration transfers those benefits to the rich countries that need them the least.

That “great” American past that MAGA celebrates comprised many decades of massive and successive waves of immigrants. Impressive U.S. GDP growth in the 19th and 20th centuries owed more than a little to the subsidies provided by immigrants. Early waves of immigrants stimulated economic growth that in turn attracted, welcomed, and incorporated later waves. Each immigrant wave struggled, and most of them eventually achieved rising wages; some even rose out of the working class to become employers. Immigration and growth facilitated each other in a cycle that many found “exceptional.”

As each immigrant wave arrived, its members mostly endured the worst jobs and the lowest pay and lived in the worst housing and neighborhoods underserved by public services, such as inferior schools for their children. When the next wave arrived, its members accepted the same. The economic growth that earlier waves of immigrants contributed to eventually enabled their struggles for better jobs, pay, and housing to succeed. That growth also enabled the later waves of immigrants who replaced the earlier ones at the lowest rungs of the nation’s social ladder.

Thus, almost all immigrants could reasonably foresee better years ahead. The United States could boast about a remarkable degree of “social mobility.” Carefully exaggerated by “rags to riches” fables like those in the many novels of Horatio Adler (1832–1899), working-class belief in social mobility served social peace and often blunted socialism’s appeal.

This analysis has so far treated migration in terms of its national or macroeconomic effects. Migration also has microeconomic effects: its impact on the employee-employer relationship. Immigrants usually work for less pay than native-born employees will accept. Undocumented immigrants accept still less. Because immigrants can represent a real competitive threat, the native-born, better-paid workers can fear, resent, and oppose their presence. Demagogues often see opportunities to obtain votes by reflecting and reinforcing that resentment and opposition. If the migrants display “racial” differences, demagogues can integrate racism (traditional or new) to aggravate the competition between immigrant and native-born employees.

Employers have often played immigrants against native-born employees and undocumented immigrants against both. Employers’ divide and conquer methods have prevented united actions by native and immigrant employees and blocked or destroyed labor unions and strikes. On the other hand, in recent years, significant portions of the U.S. labor movement have revived partly by pointedly unifying immigrant (documented and undocumented) and non-immigrant employees and, thereby, defeating employers. Not surprisingly, some employers, worried about a reviving labor movement, cultivated a backlash to reinforce divisions among employees. Demonization of immigration appealed to them. Denunciations of and demands to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commitments became popular covers for and companions to anti-immigrant agitation.

In the United States, recent presidents have sought votes by using hostile words and actions against immigrants. Those presidents’ plans and resulting deportations responded to several years of large immigration. Political demagogues and racists played their usual roles. Trump lifted them into his campaigns and presidencies. His second term targets the most massive deportation in U.S. history.

U.S. employers will regret the deportations’ reduction of profitable and low-wage immigrant employees (and especially undocumented employees). Of course, employers retain their usual alternative of automation: replacing ever more workers with computers, robots, and AI. Millions deprived of government jobs (via Trump, Musk, and DOGE) will join those technologically displaced to compete for shrinking job opportunities in the U.S. private sector. The Trumpian objective is a working class cleansed of immigrants, unions, and DEI sensitivities. It is a MAGA world that has successfully resubordinated most non-whites, women, immigrants, and all others deemed inferior by the likes of Trump and Musk, and those they select.

Immigration always served chiefly the needs of U.S. capitalism. Migration was always costly, dangerous, and painful to the migrants who mostly lacked other ways to survive. The U.S. working class was often threatened by immigration and thus saw it negatively, but it lacked the political power to stop it. On the other hand, the working class also appreciated the survival and opportunities immigration offered their families and ancestors. In that way, they saw immigration positively.

Over several recent decades, slow, uneven economic growth redistributed U.S. wealth and income upward. A declining U.S. empire coupled with rising global competition (especially from China), climate change’s mounting effects, and consequent global conflicts drove large migrations to the United States just as its jobs, incomes, and opportunities were being squeezed. Immigration’s perceived negative effects came to outweigh the positive ones. Enough of the U.S. working class’s sympathy for and appreciation of immigration declined to give right-wing demagogues their latest big opportunity.

The demagogues exploited the changed conditions and attitudes of the United States working class to shake up U.S. politics. Daily executive orders have undone the formerly stable political consensus of alternating GOP and Democratic governments during the upswing of the U.S. empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, as the U.S. empire and capitalism commenced their mutually reinforcing decline, Republicans and Democrats turned ever more harshly on each other. Their old political establishment crumbled in bitter conflicts.

Immigration became one flashpoint, one way to define a new political direction out of the decline that no party politician could dare admit to. Trump has so far best grasped the opportunity to ride an extreme position on immigration—mass deportation—to power. However, since it will soon become apparent that deporting immigrants solves little and worsens the U.S. decline, the political project’s prospects are dubious.

Much the same applies to other projects envisaged by him and Elon Musk. These include the neocolonialist plans to take over the Panama Canal, Greenland, and Gaza, and make Canada the 51st state of the United States. These also include imposing tariffs around the world and disconnecting the United States from global efforts related to climate change and health initiatives (WHO). Abandoning the Ukraine war and shifting its costs onto the Europeans may provoke their resistance and reactions frustrating Trump and Musk in unanticipated ways.

As with immigration, the political economics of other Trump-Musk projects (and much of Project 2025) raise similar profound questions about their logic, blind spots, and unintended consequences. The deep contradictions of anti-immigration—and other projects—are not overcome by hiding them under the veneer of slogans like “America First.” We continue to experience the American version of what “declining empire” means.

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

The End of Oil and Empire

John K. White

 February 28, 2025

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Oil refinery near Ashland, Kentucky. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s anti-environmental “Drill baby, drill” stance, now may not seem the time to champion a greener future, but we have no choice if we want the earth to remain habitable. Across the globe, the politics of oil continues causing conflict, millions of people die each year from pollution, while rising global temperatures devastate more and more communities. Perhaps we can look to Trump himself for the solution after he noted in his January 20 inaugural speech, “Sunlight is pouring over the entire world.” Yes, it is – 170 petajoules every second. More than enough to power the future.

Much of today’s fractured geopolitics can be dated to 1960 and the formation of OPEC, when a group of oil-rich countries led by Saudi Arabia and Venezuela decided they wanted more wealth – their own wealth as they noted – which until then had mostly accrued to the so-called Seven Sisters petroleum giants. The bickering hasn’t stopped amid fake gluts and shortages. Today, the oil market is a multi-trillion-dollar business, where seven of the top 50 global companies are oil majors (Forbes), while the partially public Saudi Aramco is the third richest in the world with almost $500 billion in annual sales and a $2 trillion market value (behind JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway). Ten of the top 100 are also car companies, led by Toyota with $310 billion annual sales and $270 billion market value.

Conflict is also the norm when it comes to oil and money: Nigeria, Ecuador, Iraq, Venezuela, and the Middle East, to name a few. In 1973, the “oil weapon” was used for the first time to restrict exports to the West after the United States sent $2.2 billion in arms to Israel, because of Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack to regain lost territory in the 1967 Six-Day War. The price of oil rose from $2.70 to $11.00 per barrel, a.k.a. the First Oil Shock. The Second Oil Shock came after the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979, further raising prices from $13 to $34. Call it “petronomics” as transactional as any Trump tariff or quid-pro-quo land deal.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is also about oil and natural gas, especially the control of pipelines into Europe and transit fees, while conflict with China is ratcheting up in the West partly because of the increased flow of oil from the Caspian region to Xinjiang, China’s “Gateway to Europe.” China’s financial interest in the Panama Canal is also being cited as a potential flashpoint if access to American LNG tankers or warships were to be restricted in time of strife or from increased fees (roughly $1 million per ship). South Sudan is suffering its own horrors because of restricted pipeline access to the coast, while Yemen has become a pirates’ haven in what The Economist called a “Red Sea protection racket.”

Even Gaza can be seen as a petroleum war with trillions of dollars in play after a natural gas field was found 35 km off the coast in 2000 and another nearby in 2011, holding ten times Britain’s North Sea reserves. Split among Lebanon, Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean could become the next oil hot spot as competing nations attempt to transport their branded liquid gold to market with the added twist that Lebanon and Israel don’t have an agreed border, while an ongoing territory dispute exists between Greece and Turkey, who grudgingly share the island of Cyprus. Forget the obvious canards designed to hog the news cycle and enrage non-MAGA followers, Trump’s proposed Gaza land grab has oil written all over it. The interest in Gaza is about territorial rights, not non-existent international “Riviera” resorts. Clearly, the United States is no longer interested in being considered an honest actor on the world stage when one has to play follow the peanut without the peanut.

The health problems associated with fossil fuels have been known since we first started burning coal. According to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, coal contributes to four of the top five causes of deaths in the US: heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic lower respiratory diseases. Ill effects include asthma, lung disease, lung cancer, arterial occlusion, infarct formation, cardiac arrhythmias, congestive heart failure, stroke, and diminished intellectual capacity, while over half a million American children a year are born “with blood mercury levels high enough to reduce IQ scores and cause lifelong loss of intelligence.”

The World Health Organization reported in 2018 that air pollution was responsible for 6.7 million premature deaths per year, 4.2 million from outdoor air pollution. That’s more than 10,000 people per day, while a European Public Health Alliance report calculated that traffic pollution alone costs over €70 billion annually in Europe. Fracking also comes with numerous public health issues, including fugitive emissions, water contamination, and transport leaks on top of downstream pollution and increased global warming from burning methane (CH₄), the simplest hydrocarbon.

The Keystone pipeline has rarely been out of the news as the world’s leakiest pipeline nor the proposed larger KXL pipeline to transport oil sands from Alberta to Texas through environmentally sensitive lands. Expect Trump to refloat KXL despite the bafflegab about not needing anything Canadian, netting its owners $20 billion a year and Texan refineries billions more. The world’s largest oil sands deposits in Athabasca in northern Alberta holds an estimated 160 billion barrels, 10% estimated global reserves, lagging only Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. “Here, “Drill baby, drill” means “Suck man, suck” at great environmental cost.

The ecological impact is incalculable, beginning at the source as particulate matter and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are deposited into the Athabasca River over a 50-km range at spring melt each year, equivalent to a 13,000-barrel spill, while heavy metals are deposited into the river, such as arsenic, thallium, and mercury at levels 30 times the permitted guidelines. In nearby Fort McMurray, forest fires raged for two months in 2016, forcing an entire city of 88,000 people to evacuate including almost 14,000 oil workers. Next-door British Columbia has suffered similar fire horrors over the past few years.

Environmental damage is also the norm when extracting and transporting oil. Who can forget the devastation from Deepwater Horizon (200 million gallons, 11 workers dead), Exxon Valdez (11 million gallons), Lac-Mégantic (2 million gallons in 74 exploded railcars that obliterated a whole street and killed 47), or thousands more spills across the globe? A Frontier Group analysis noted that the ecological damage caused by Deepwater Horizon is still being felt 14 years on as “many of the species impacted by the spill have still not recovered,” while lessons go unheeded as more offshore drilling is proposed. The Niger Delta is still a toxic wasteland after decades of failed clean-ups and corruption (700 million gallons spilled), while the Ecuadorian Amazon remains ravaged from drilling (17 million gallons spilled).

The destruction never stops. 3,000 tons of heavy fuel oil leaked into the Black Sea after a December 15 crash between two Russian tankers near the Crimean bridge to Anapa. Both sank and are listed in a Greenpeace report of the most dangerous tankers, “due to technical defects and dangerous ship-to-ship transfers of crude oil.” As many as 100 people died on January 18 in a gasoline tanker explosion in Nigeria after a failed transfer from the crashed tanker to another truck. Some killed were trying to collect leaked gas for personal use. Mine accidents also regularly occur as in recent fatal events in South Africa, Ghana, and the DRC.

We all know that heat-absorbing carbon emissions (mostly CO₂ and CH₄) are responsible for our worsening climate, although some still pretend not to understand for political gain. Based on the work of American climate scientist Eunice Foote, Anglo-Irish physicist John Tyndall, and Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who studied the composition of the earth’s 100-km-thick atmosphere, a 1912 Popular Mechanics article (“Remarkable Weather of 1911 – The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate: What Scientists Predict for the Future” – noted that the atmosphere contained 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and that the “combustion of coal at the present rate will double it in about 200 years.”

Alas, Popular Mechanics couldn’t have anticipated the extraordinary growth in the fossil-fuel industry that has poured CO₂ into the atmosphere for over a century, such that the doubling occurred in 40 rather than 200 years. Climate scientist James Hansen recently stated that even 2 ºC (3.6 ºF) is “dead,” never mind 1.5 ºC, while the new US energy secretary mused over reopening closed coal plants to power AI data farms. Business as usual is cooking the planet.

According to a 2025 Nature study, one-third of the Arctic is now a source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) rather than a sink, because of increased temperatures and fires. The rapid warming of northern permafrost soils, which holds nearly half of the world’s soil organic carbon stocks, “could considerably exacerbate climate change.” Instead of providing an essential uptake of GHGs, the Arctic could spiral out of control in a fast-acting feedback loop. What’s more, the Arctic ice melt is now almost year-round.

So-called “once-in-a-millennium” events continue to occur, increasing the likelihood of more disasters, such as another “weather whiplash” that generated a wind-fuelled firestorm in Los Angeles in January, destroying over 12,000 buildings (not caused by lasers, aliens, or fish-production regulations). Flash-flooding in eastern Spain last October killed 232 people as flood waters raged through narrow streets and swept away cars and people in minutes, three of whom still haven’t been found. Bad air days in India, China, and southern Asia are also worsening – 200 schools were closed in Bangkok in January because of pollution. A 2024 National Academy of Science study found that wildfire smoke exposure contributes to increased mortality from heart diseases, diabetes, and weakened immunity.

Simply put, we must stop burning carbon. Easy to say, but hard to do, especially in a world built on oil and gas. If you have ever smoked, you know how hard it is to quit. One solution is to imagine yourself in the future, say 25 years from now. Are you a smoker? If you don’t see a smoking you in the future, you must have quit between then and now – why not now? When you do, each day becomes a little easier until you are free. The same goes for those addicted to social media. Remove Facebook or Instagram from your phone and see how soon you lose interest in someone else’s idea of essential viewing (and not adding to a tech billionaire’s coffers). No one wants their epitaph to read “I wish I watched more TikTok.”

Change is not easy. It requires effort. Some of us need a push. I wonder how events changed my life, such as a movie, book, song, or speech. For me, Gallipoli, Midnight Cowboy, and If You Love This Planet changed me. I saw the horror in glorifying war, the sadness of a soulless life, and the dangers of nuclear destruction. The Great American Novel by Philip Roth, John Steinbach’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher similarly moved me as I examined the pitfalls of exceptionalism, the agony of the migrant’s plight, and the importance of fairness for all. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech still stirs me to a better future. We all have our own stories that inspire change from within.

Of course, good habits are hard to form and bad habits hard to break, but we have to find ways to change. Little things count, more than we imagine. There are alternatives, especially for liquid fuel. Cost and security are the rate-determining steps to decarbonize liquid fuels. The cost is higher (excluding externalities) but are improving as the economies of scale are worked out, while security becomes more assured with local production as more middlemen are removed, primarily in the Middle East.

Liquid fuels not sourced from fossil fuels are becoming more feasible. Work has begun to change natural gas networks to green hydrogen (GH2) and biomethane, similar to how dirty town gas was replaced by cleaner natural gas in the ‘70s. GH2 is made via water electrolysis using wind turbines or solar panels, while biomethane is produced from organic farm and food waste in an anaerobic digester that would otherwise seep out of an unmonitored landfill. Many countries are setting up green hydrogen and biomethane plants for transportation and home heating, while Texas aims to become a GH2 leader along with its plentiful wind power.

GH2 is also being touted as a carbon-free way to make steel, cement, and fertilizer (e.g., Hydrogen City and HyDeal Ambition), although there are delays over the extent of financing between government and private industry, e.g., the European Union and ArcelorMittal (the world’s number-2 steel maker with 10% of global sales behind China’s state-owned Baowu). Companies typically want to make as much profit as they can, while paying as little in wages, taxes, and environmental safety. Recent US tariffs such as 25% on steel and aluminum will complicate cooperation, no doubt as intended to keep the home fires burning on coal and natural gas, cars running on gasoline/diesel, and coal-fired high-temperature manufacturing.

There are risks to green hydrogen if electrical costs rise and demand falls. How to price the risk is still being negotiated. The European Union’s newly announced “Clean Industrial Deal” aims to offer guaranteed minimal electricity prices with subsidies to support GH2 as a high-temperature manufacturing feedstock, beginning with steel. Sweden’s Stegra will be the first commercial green steel plant, shifting the foundation of Western industrialization after three centuries of coal, from which others can follow to make affordable low-carbon steel. However, GH2 is easily controlled at the pump as with gasoline and diesel, generating usual supply issues for consumers. Although water is more accessible, water resources are also an issue.

Development is still constrained by lack of investment, the slow pace of innovation, and higher costs ($1/kg is the goal), but hydrogen-fuelled trains are running in Germany, the UK, and Chile (where costs are lower than the global average), replacing the need for diesel, battery electric, and overhead catenary lines, although some routes in Germany have been paused for now. Over half of European railways are already electrified, but elsewhere more is needed to curb pollution in high-density areas. Growth is still tepid amid concerns over infrastructure and costs.

Hydrogen-fuelled shipping, tugs, and solar-hydrogen hydrofoil boats are being trialled to provide sustainable water transport, further reducing pollution from dirty sulfur-laden heavy fuel oil (HFO) in the marine environment. The change will take longer to replace larger HFO diesel-engine ships, especially cruise ships that emit much more sulfur-dioxide than the automotive industry, just as HFO replaced a bulkier, more plentiful, and dirtier coal fuel after World War I. Battery-powered electric shipping is also increasing for smaller boats, such as at numerous water crossings in Norway and the iconic Maid of the Mist ferry that started in 1846 at Niagara Falls.

Geothermal is still considered esoteric to some but is also increasing even in the unlikeliest of places. In 2022, a Montreal co-op started heating homes retrofitted with geothermal heat pumps via eight, 150-m-deep geothermal wells dug in a private backyard to connect 50 local residences. Although heat is generally a greater concern during the frigid cold of a Canadian winter, air conditioning is also available when needed. A geothermal pilot project in Alberta began extracting heat at a former drilling site in 2019, installing a 2.5-km closed loop between existing wells. The $10-million first-of-its-kind system is on a much larger scale than a standard home unit but doesn’t require any new thinking to distribute the heat (via the second law of thermodynamics) or generate electricity.

Heat pumps are being installed in greater numbers using electricity straight from the grid rather than liquid-fuel home heating. Better insulation is also a win-win for the environment and our pocketbooks, sadly overlooked in many national energy plans. One size does not fit all, but we can heat our homes without fossil fuels. Home-grown electricity via rooftop solar panels is also on the rise and making a dent in petroleum sales across the globe as are thermal water heaters and electric vehicles (EVs), especially in China from vast solar and wind farms. The Financial Times recently called EVs “epochal” (17 million sold in 2024).

Controlling green supply chains for a larger electric world is important, but despite unrivalled financial might the United States is falling behind China, whose photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbine (WT) installations continue increasing year on year. China has one-upped the American vertically integrated corporation model by providing more funding, internalized regulations, and less bureaucracy. Centrally planned command economies generally function more efficiently if appropriately directed, hampering indecisive economies in the West. One of the goals of the new authoritarian US government is to improve delivery by cutting regulations and streamlining decisions, but doesn’t apply to a burgeoning green economy. The brown status quo maintains the favored treatment from above.

But despite continued US backing, the oil industry pushing more carbon fuels, and the usual naysayers who delay and deny that carbon-induced global warming is an existential crisis, the transition to renewables will continue with or without American input. We are not comparing competing models of innovation – oil and gas is now more expensive, while wind, water, and solar (WWS) are cleaner, cheaper, and renewable – we are deciding who will run the future.

The problem is not price as noted in a 2025 study on California, which produced 47.3% grid electricity demand from WWS in 2024. Led by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, the study stated “Wind-water-solar is not the cause of high California electricity prices; to the contrary, most all states with higher shares of their demand met by wind-water-solar experience lower electricity prices.” The study also showed that the transition advances where policy allows: “10 countries produced 99.5–100% and 64 countries produced 50–100% of all the electricity they generated from WWS.” Scotland and West Australia’s grid is now 70% wind or solar.

With no moving parts, a PV cell makes no noise, emits no pollution, and requires no fuel other than the sun. PV solar is now the most efficient energy source (over half of all energy from burnt fossil fuels is wasted as heat) and the cheapest at half the cost of coal. Indeed, more sales generates more supply at lower prices, such that a PV cell today costs over one thousand times less (8 cents/watt) than 50 years ago. In 2024, the world installed more solar panels per day (roughly 2 GW) than in a single year two decades ago, generating more grid electricity than coal for the first time (10,000 TWh). Once installed, the power is free.

Why is the United States so opposed to change, other than the obvious loss of established petroleum markets? One reason is that the vast shale oil reserves and fracked natural gas of the last two decades have made the US less reliant on others and disinclined to cooperate with the transition. The US has never had so much energy and wealth before that rather than providing more security is fuelling a new divide. As Steven Johnson noted in The Invention of Air, “radical increases in energy have led, almost without exception, to two long-term trends: and overall increase in wealth, and an increase in social stratification.” American economic policies are designed to ensure that the oil business and its managers remain the beneficiaries. Alas, the richest country in the world is fuelling its own demise.

In fact, the US is losing out in an empirical death trap by prioritizing wealth accumulation, the downfall of all great powers as the rich benefit at the expense of a financially disadvantaged workforce. As Giovanni Arrighi noted in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, “systemic cycles of accumulation has shown that every material expansion of the capitalist world-economy has been based on a particular organizational structure, the vitality of which was progressively undermined by the expansion itself,” not least because a “growing proportion of the economic space needed to keep returns rising or high.” The US has become enamored by its own presumed economic beauty.

Arrighi’s “crisis of accumulation” follows from Joseph Schumpeter’s conclusion that capitalism “undermines the social institutions which protect it, and ‘inevitably’ creates conditions in which it will not be able to live.” We are on the crest of that inevitability as the neoliberal cum libertarian takeover reduces the power of everyday workers. It’s not rocket science to see how money produces more money, “living off the buying and selling of others” as Carl Fox (Martin Sheen) tells his son Bud at the end of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. Is there any other result to a game designed to make winners and losers, now supercharged to the extreme by instant-transaction technologies and oligarch favoritism? Trump’s MAGA smokescreen is in fact “Make Aristocracy Great Again” as workers are distracted by overblown cultural wars and petty grievances. The revolution is being won by the guys with the loudest whistles. What’s next – rechiseling Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore as the masses line up to kiss his slippers on Emperor’s Day in the year 1 AD (After Don)?

Alas, empires come and go. The American empire is no different as inequality rises and workers are derailed – in 1979, 20% of US jobs were in manufacturing, down to 5% today. As explained by the Pareto Principle, the rich always grow richer in any competitive system left to its own devices (e.g., 20%-80%). Add in laws to rig the system and the twenty percent becomes the one percent becomes the 0.1% and 0.01%, producing even more perfect hoarders. The math doesn’t lie – in the US, three people now have more wealth ($880 billion) than HALF the population.

The world’s great empires have turned from renaissance and enlightenment to industrialization and innovation as economic wealth reorients itself with the latest technology while ensuring it controls the levers. Despite nativist politicians trying to rally the US to produce more local manufacturing, the future is being stamped with “Made in China.” Having started with the help of fossil fuels and the tools of the previous empire, China is working towards peaking its emissions via a vast supply of clean, green renewables. The end of oil signals the end of the American empire or at least the end of an oil-based American empire. The speed of the transition may determine the survival of the planet.

As noted by Arrighi, the four great wealth-accumulating powers in history were the Spanish, Dutch, British, and the US. Energy is one of the deciding dominoes – wind power (Spain) lost to improved wind power (the Netherlands) that lost to coal (the UK) that lost to oil (the US). The American empire is now losing to China because of renewables, rare-earth minerals, and lithium. As if full circle, the old “new world” was founded on wind when Columbus crossed the Atlantic on his famous 1492 voyage, while the new new world is being powered by the wind and sun. As if to christen the change, China unveiled the largest-ever wind turbine (26 MW) that can power a single home for a year in one turn. Ironically, Columbus was looking for China.

China continues to remake its carbon economy on the back of green power. Its Wind Base program will reach 1 TW by 2050, generating 75% of national grid power. Nine of the top ten global solar panel makers are Chinese, led by Jinko Solar, LONGI Green Energy, and JA Solar. US manufacturing has made a comeback via the 2023 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and supplies 52 GW/year, enough to meet American needs and ahead of 2030 projections after ceding manufacturing to China in 2010. Domestic cell production has begun again, including Suniva (3 GW), QCells (3 GW), and Silfab (1 GW), although one wonders how much will be gutted if green tax credits are curtailed by an ever oil-obsessed US.

Chinese electric vehicles supply 90% of the global market, while half of all cars in China are now EVs with some models selling for as low as $10,000. China’s BYD surpassed Tesla in overall sales last year and now produces almost 40% of the global output, including an envious fleet of EV buses, while Tesla has stalled on its goal of transitioning from selling a high-cost, luxury car to a low-cost, mass-market car as stated in CEO’s Elon Musk’s original 2006 Master Plan.

There are still bumps in the road. The pace of EVs sales has slowed because of higher prices, albeit offset by lower fuel prices and maintenance. Tesla has seen a drop off in sales in part because of Musk’s right-wing idolatry and lack of a promised low-end car, while other carmakers have seen an uptick, especially the more affordable BYD. Despite pausing new EV models for two years, Ford CEO Jim Falon stated that Ford was committed to an EV strategy. Range is now over 400 km (260 miles) for many EVs, easily covering most daily commutes. Improved locator technologies help to optimize road-side charging, charged to 80% within half an hour although most electric refilling is done at home. Some EVs are now equipped with heat pumps, essential in colder climates and less of a battery drain.

In a bizarre confluence of conflicting interests, the US government plans to buy $400 million in armored Teslas, likely its underperforming Cybertruck. Silent and smokeless, EVs are better in the field than noisy and dirty diesel vehicles and can be strategically important, essentially permanently powered by a solar panel add-on. More EVs will naturally lower gasoline consumption in the US military, one of the largest petroleum users in the world.

Large chemical battery storage sites are being built alongside PV and WT farms, both new and old. Shared real-time management from nearby sites and interconnectors help to cover the inherent intermittency of wind and solar to share the load. Down sun and the dark doldrums (“Dunkelflaute”) are no longer a deal-breaker to keep the lights on. Home electrical battery storage (and dormant EVs) can also provide backup power during increased outages from climate-affected infrastructure, a.k.a. “climate resilience.” Along with home electrical needs, water and communications also need electrical backup.

The changes are dizzying and coming faster than many can assimilate. The US can pause the transition for a while with inflationary tariffs and protectionist supply chains, but can’t stop the inevitable. A $100 trillion world GDP economy won’t allow it, especially as the US national debt grows beyond $36 trillion (over 100% of GDP). The only question is how much of US society will be remade and how much the environment will suffer as the new libertarians continue their full-throttled plans to advance the petroleum economy, gut emission standards, and dismantle environmental regulations. Can Trump’s bluster distract long enough to install an unbreakable, oil-run island economy? Or will another empire expire as the wrong future is backed? – a failed “trickle-down” oil economy rather than a self-reliant clean green world.

No amount of aggressive MAGA rhetoric, anger-filled mocking, or scattershot reactionary nonsense – such as exploding paper straws or fake annexation fantasies – can stop the change. A proposed $44 billion Alaskan pipeline to supply Japan with LNG by 2031 will be lauded by oil executives, but is more of the same hyperbole, literally a pipe dream. A 25% tariff on steel and aluminum will harm wind-turbine and solar-panel companies as well as car manufacturers and the building trade, an American own goal that will not win voters in 2026. “Buy Canada” and expanded east-west provincial trade in Canada is replacing 150 years of cross-border trade with the US, while national barriers in Europe are being removed. Trump’s intransigence is promoting unity elsewhere and a reduced reliance on American goods.

The pretend annexation of Greenland and Canada as well as laughable statements about occupying Panama and Gaza are about distracting from job losses, regulatory cuts, and gutted environmental protection at home. The now-standard barstool antics by Trump and his “First Buddy” wingman are intended for the news feed to sow discord, amplified by a compliant and uncritical mainstream press, sadly legitimizing the lies, pathetic trolling, and bizarre obsessions, such as fentanyl (more illegal drugs move from the US to Canada) or calling Canada the 51st state run by Governor Gretzky. Underscoring the nonsense, according to NATO’s Article 5 the US must aid Canada in the event of an attack – will the US be at war with itself? Of course, the goal may be to leave NATO when the dust settles on a new Russian American alliance.

The real story is access as in Trump’s shameless play for Ukraine’s resources, masquerading as improved economic ties with Ukraine in exchange for American security guarantees, a.k.a. “payback” against further Russian aggression. As usual, the math doesn’t work in Trumpland with $100 billion in arms for $500 billion in proposed resources, mainly petroleum reserves, lithium, and critical minerals. Ironically, lithium is mostly needed for EVs and smoothing solar- and wind-powered electrical grids, supposedly anathema to Trump. Threats of lost internet access via SpaceX’s Starlink add to the cruel gamesmanship and worry for Ukrainians after three years of war.

As usual, the real story lies elsewhere as the United States attempts to compete with Chinese dominance in the new green economy, including rare earth elements (REEs) via the proposed weapons sales with Ukraine in an obvious American protection racket. The rare earths (not “the rare earth” as Trump calls them) are seventeen heavy metals, including the 4f lanthanide elements in the periodic table – 57 (lanthanum) to 70 (ytterbium) – prized for their use in magnets in cell phone and headphone speakers, electric motors (300 kg of neodymium is used in a WT motor magnet, USGS). and batteries. The US is playing catchup in a global market that has been shifting eastward for decades to China, India, and Asia.

Greenland is also rich in rare earths as well as gold, copper, and nickel, all essential for renewable energy, hence the increased international interest. Amaroq Minerals CEO Eldur Olafsson noted that Greenland “can be the supplier of all the minerals the Western world will need for decades. And that is a very unique position.” Greenland holds the eighth largest reserves of REEs. China is number 1, making Greenland’s resources strategically important to Europe and the US via its clumsy attempts to update the Monroe Doctrine.

The new American prospectors should pay attention, however, as most Greenlanders want independence from Denmark and not union with the United States. Greenland is also one of the windiest locations on the planet, perfect for setting up a world-record wind farm with interconnectors to supply green clean energy to the highest bidder. Greenland could supply all the energy needs to a high-flying future America far from Chinese supply chains in a truly transformative great-making endeavor.

Why are people unwilling to see renewable energy as essential to counter global warming? And why are some people so afraid of change? Is it change itself? More likely it is control of the change. The new libertarians are in charge for now, but the technological control of capital is under threat by increased self-reliance, such as rooftop solar and battery backup. The playing field has not yet been corrupted to ensure maximal financial control over the new energy sources, but the wheels are turning via disinformation, obstruction, and the usual Trump two-step.

The end of oil does not necessarily mean the end of the United States, but it does mean American business losing out on the next energy wave to China, India, and Europe as they forge on without their cooperation. What is the point anyway? To get to the end first or travel with as many friends as possible? Soon, it may be about survival. It’s time to start counting lives and not dollars. The United States will become even more isolated as it increases oil production, limits green investments, and ditches science.

Is the end of oil a fantasy? We will run out eventually, possibly by 2100, and have to stop at some point – why not sooner than later, before we have no choice? That means leaving much of what remains in the ground and finding an alternative such as 170 petajoules every second, i.e., 170,000,000,000,000,000 watts, from one 2-billionth of the sun’s radiated power as it converts hydrogen into helium, heat, and light becoming 4 million tons lighter every second. So easy to make America and the world great.

We have come a long way since Bell Lab’s first 6%-efficiency solar cell in 1956 and Japanese electronics company Sharp’s first solar-powered calculator in 1976 that remained a novelty for so long, but the quest for more remains the same. As Sharp’s founder noted, “I believe the biggest issue for the future is the accumulation of solar heat and light. While all living things enjoy the blessings of the sun, we have to rely on electricity from power stations. With magnificent heat and light streaming down on us, we must think of ways of using those blessings. This is where solar cells come in.”

The future is already here as noted by a self-proclaimed king, overlooking a failing empire on a cold January 2025 morning – “Sunlight is pouring over the entire world.”

John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS and author of The Truth About Energy: Our Fossil-Fuel Addiction and the Transition to Renewables (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Do The Math!: On Growth, Greed, and Strategic Thinking (Sage, 2013). He can be reached at: johnkingstonwhite@gmail.com