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.”
Source: Counter Punch
