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........

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