CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

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........

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