Oil’s Last Stand and the End of the American Empire?
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Before Ronald Reagan became the 40th US president, he sold anything and everything from toasters to refrigerators as the TV host and travelling spokesperson for General Electric. Today, Donald Trump’s salesmanship reveals more about his unvarnished support for Big Oil and a staggering ignorance about the world, even compared to the Gipper. But with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and resultant loss of millions of barrels of shipped oil per day from the Persian Gulf in the ongoing US-led war against Iran, change is coming. Beleaguered citizens everywhere are looking for alternatives to oil and gas, sick of the endless war games, violence, cost, and loss of control in their lives.
With each hike in gas prices, lost fertilizer sales, and million-dollar spent missiles – all the result of failed Trump policy – the world is waking up to the charade. American leadership, influence, and empirical reach are failing with ever-declining returns as the United States extends itself further in another losing Middle East conflict over oil. Citing Winston Churchill in 1942 at a turning point in World War Two after the Allies repelled the Germans in North Africa, “It is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”
Is the American attack on Iran another turning point in the transition from brown to green as governments across the globe attempt to deal with the fallout from lost oil supplies? Subsidizing energy costs to counter the growing impact will force the world to change its dependence on oil as lost public revenues pile up and domestic well-being suffers.
In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn noted that “Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute.” Today, renewable energy is cleaner, safer, and cheaper than petroleum as wind, water, and sun continue to replace a century of dirt, danger, and greed. Over a century ago, horses lost out to the internal combustion engine, now losing ground to a green electric grid and chemical storage batteries. Renewables and the Revolution Revolution are driving the future.
Alas, the dominoes of change don’t fall cleanly or easily. Benjamin Franklin (1752) was lucky he didn’t electrocute himself when he stuck a key on the end of a kite string in an electric storm, showing that lightning was static electricity. Alessandro Volta (1799) understood that the legs of a frog twitched when touched by two different metals (copper and iron) because of their different electronegativities, sparking his idea for the first-ever electrochemical battery, while at the same time disproving his rival Luigi Galvani’s “animal electricity.” Edwin Drake (1859) almost gave up bashing for oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, before raising enough crude to finance the first American commercial oil well, which set the United States on its path to riches and eventual collision course with a changing climate.
Change is slow until it isn’t, from Aristotle (geocentric universe) to Copernicus (heliocentric universe), from Newton (gravity) to Einstein (relativity). Thomas Edison (1882) in Lower Manhattan and Nikola Tesla (1900) at Niagara Falls developed the electric grid that lit the world, Russell Ohl (1939) and Walter Brattain (1954) developed the differentially doped p-n junction at Bell Labs that lead to the transistor and photovoltaic (PV) solar cell, and James Hansen’s report to Congress (1988) helped show how industrial carbon dioxide changes the atmosphere and climate for the worse.
Each change remakes the economy and our everyday lives. Before coal ceded to oil, Great Britain ruled the waves (more than half the world’s wealth). Today, the US produces a quarter of global GDP ($30 trillion). But as economist Giovanni Arrighi noted, wealth-accumulating empires fail when finance dominates manufacturing, citing Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. In the US today, a few super-rich control most of the country’s wealth, while $1 billion a day is spent on war and the public debt passes $39 trillion (up $3 trillion since the start of Trump 2.0!). Socialism for the rich. Poverty for the rest.
China is the main beneficiary, a next empire in waiting. As in the past, Spanish sails gave way to bigger Dutch rigging that fell to British coal that in turn lost to American oil, China is now reaping the spoils of a new paradigm – the sun. While oil and gas imports decline from a clogged Middle East transit route, China continues to sell more solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles than any other country. Chinese renewable energy is winning today’s shift from old to new. Exponential growth rules as costs decrease and uptake increases.
With an untenable surcharge on imported petroleum since the start of the American attack on Iran, EU citizens are spending €500 million more per day in fuel. The worst is in Germany, where consumers aren’t as sheltered as in other European countries. Ireland saw a week-long protest when farmers, fishermen, and truck drivers blockaded cities to protest higher fuel costs. The impact is felt everywhere with reduced social spending, anger toward oil companies, and customers queuing to buy off-the-shelf, plug-in solar panels.
In Pakistan, rooftop solar panels and EV sales are rising. In the Philippines, gas rationing has begun. Canada removed federal taxes on gasoline, diesel, and aviation fuel. But while citizens around the world suffer, American oil companies profit even more from US military action in Iran. Is Trump rewarding his Big Oil friends who so generously donated to his election?
According to an analysis by The Guardian, “The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30 million every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran.” Top of the list are the main global warming deniers, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and ExxonMobil. In response, an energy policy expert at the E3G think tank called for “taxes on windfall profits to accelerate the transition to green energy, rather than deepen dependence on fossil fuels.” Indeed, why should Big Oil prosper as governments respond by making fossil fuels cheaper, instead of working to build new green infrastructure?
Clearly “the system” doesn’t work, be it unregulated capitalism or unchecked presidential firepower. But change is coming. We have no choice, because of the earth’s limited petroleum supply (44 years?) and our worsening climate (430 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide). Fortunately, solar power scales via manufacturing not geology (technology > extraction) – no moving parts. Unfortunately, Big Oil is the friction in the system – it’s all about the money. But we are the answer. In the words of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch after returning home from the moon, “Planet Earth, you are a crew.”
Financial wealth doesn’t define a nation. In fact, excess money management signals the end, when nurses, teachers, firefighters, and everyday workers can’t pay the monthly bills, can’t save for a rainy day, can’t keep the wolves from the door because transactional players are gaming the system, aided and abetted by a beholden government and war-mongering president who wants to sell even more blood-soaked oil.
Why do we continue to pay for yesterday’s dirty world when the future is clean, green, and safe? It’s time to bet on a future we all support.
