The US Is a Violent Petro-State
Trump’s attack on Venezuela illustrates fossil fuels’ many perils.
A man holds a plaque reading “No War for Oil” in front of the US Embassy in Dublin.
(Natalia Campos / Getty Images)“Petrostate” is a term usually applied to countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Nigeria, where the production and, crucially, the export of oil and gas are fundamental to the domestic economy and foreign policy. Rarely, however, is the term applied to the world’s oldest, richest, and mightiest petro-state. That distinction belongs to the United States, which a few days ago attacked a fellow petro-state, Venezuela, with the announced aim of seizing control of its oil operations. Oil is clearly at the heart of the Venezuela story, which means that climate change is as well.
Although most coverage has neglected the climate angle, a Guardian article published on January 6 offered an illuminating exception. Noting that Venezuela holds the world’s largest known oil reserves, The Guardian reported that “even raising production to 1.5m barrels of oil a day from current levels of around 1m barrels would produce…more carbon pollution than what is emitted annually by major economies such as the UK and Brazil,” citing University of California, Santa Barbara, professor Paasha Mahdavi. That, Mahdavi said, would be “terrible for the climate.”
The United States has been a petro-state since long before Donald Trump came to power, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. It was under Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden that the United States regained its position as the largest annual producer of oil and exporter of gas. Oil company CEOs populated the cabinets of Republicans George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush (whose family wealth was built on fossil fuels).
“The United States is as much of an OPEC nation as most OPEC nations are.” So said Everett Ehrlich, who chaired the interagency deliberations on climate change in Bill Clinton administration’s, in an interview for my 2010 book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. Ehrlich was explaining why a government that boasted Al Gore as vice president was much more timid about cutting greenhouse gas emissions than its European and Japanese allies were. “The US is more like an OPEC nation—an energy producer—while the Europeans and Japan are energy-consumer nations,” Ehrlich added.
The United States’ vast oil reserves have been key to its superpower status for more than a century. During World War I, the United States supplied most of the oil that helped Britain and France prevail over Germany. US oil companies have worked alongside the White House, the State Department, and other US agencies ever since, at home via pro-monopoly regulation that pushed prices above free-market levels and abroad via such collaborations as the Red Line Agreement, which in the 1920s gained US companies access to Middle Eastern oil.
Discoveries of massive deposits in Texas, Oklahoma, and California in the 1930s reinforced the country’s dominance; unlike any of the Axis or Allied powers, the United States had its own oil to fight World War II. Its abundant domestic supply also transformed the US economy after the war, enabling Americans to buy more cars, move to expanding suburbs, and drive on new interstates. Building all those cars, suburbs, and highways propelled a decades-long economic boom that ranks among the most spectacular in human history.
But the climate crisis underscores a truism about petro-states: Oil can be more a curse than a blessing. Scholars and journalists have documented that most petro-states are plagued by blatant corruption and inequality. Elites grab the revenues; poverty engulfs the masses. Violence is another byproduct: Since 1973, one-fourth to one-half of the world’s wars have been “connected to oil interests,” according to Jeff D. Colgan of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. And, of course, burning oil is a primary driver of climate change.
The US attack on Venezuela is but the latest example of these destructive tendencies. Journalists need to help audiences understand the attack’s connections to oil, as well as what scientists have long warned: Humanity’s future depends on rapidly phasing out fossil fuels.
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