How the fossil fuel industry ends.
Nationalization, expropriation and revolutionary violence will sweep away any semblance of an "orderly" transition to renewable energy.
The global warming/climate change crisis is destroying our planet and our civilization. The fix is simple to understand: the fossil fuel industry must be terminated. Looking at the future from the standpoint of history, which is what I do, let me give you the good news first: this will happen. The fossil fuel industry will be terminated, and humanity will end the use of fossil fuels, one way or another. Here’s the bad news: again judging from history, violent political and military upheaval, probably resulting in the deaths of many millions of people, will likely occur before this result is achieved. This is as succinct as I can make my analysis.
For decades, many of us who are alarmed about climate change and working toward solutions have labored under a collective delusion that the transition of the world’s economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy would be gradual and relatively orderly. We’ve watched with eagerness and anticipation the cost of renewable energy go down (solar, for example, went from costing 52¢ per kW/hour in 2010 to just 5¢ in 2017) and the market share of renewables go up. I myself cackled with glee at news of the economic tailspin that had seized the oil industry even in 2019, before the pandemic; proof positive that fossils are a dying industry. And they are. Years ago, when I was still a lawyer, I worked with organizations who spoke glowingly of an anticipated endgame for fossil fuels in which they would be ultimately bankrupted by liability payments and a decarbonization project would be mandated by the courts, similar to the 1982 AT&T antitrust breakup on a larger scale. Even fossil companies themselves supposedly see the writing on the wall and they are (at least pretending to be) investing in “transitional” projects and cleaner fuels. This is the fairy tale we’ve sold ourselves.
But a sober look at history, and extrapolation from recent trends informed by an understanding of how societal-level changes of this magnitude have usually happened throughout the human past, discloses the much more likely future. There won’t be an orderly transition at all. Fossil fuel industries have too tight a death-grip on the levers of policy and economics, and they will never—never—relinquish that hold voluntarily. Their hands will be removed from these levers, but they’ll be removed by strong-arm legislation, revolutionary expropriation, and, I’m sorry to say, ultimately by violence. It won’t matter what the cost per kW/hour of solar energy is, and it won’t matter how profitable (or unprofitable) the industry is. The laws of economics will cease to matter, and “market forces,” whatever those are supposed to be, will have no sway. The transition to a renewable future will occur haphazardly, in an unplanned and chaotic manner, bringing economic ruin to many and unjust rewards to a few. It is also likely to happen at gunpoint. Why do I say this? Because this is how change on this scale has always worked, and if humanity was going to employ a radically different option to effect this kind of change, we would have begun doing so by now. And we haven’t.
Let me give you two historical examples that inform my thinking. The first is the expropriation of the Mexican oil industry, which occurred in 1938 and which remains a prominent historical event that the fossil fuel industry would really rather not have you know anything about. Beginning with its bloody and protracted revolution in 1910, Mexican society underwent a profound change in the early decades of the 20th century. Before 1910, land and wealth were concentrated in the hands of rich landowners, who bought and paid for the plutocratic government, the Porfiriato, named for longtime President Porfirio Díaz. That government was overthrown. Oil nationalization was an outgrowth of what was essentially a labor dispute. Mexico’s oil companies, predominantly owned by foreign interests including British and Americans, refused to pay their workers a living wage and also commonly cheated on taxes and other legal regulations. A powerful union challenged the oil majors. To the fossil fuel companies’ surprise, the Mexican government backed the unions and demanded concessions. The fossils refused. To punish them, on March 18, 1938, Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas signed an order expropriating the assets of the two major foreign oil companies operating in Mexico. This move had the overwhelming support of the Mexican people.
To be sure, Mexico’s oil nationalization was done for totally different reasons than expropriation of fossil assets will be done in the future; it certainly was not done to phase out oil. But the precedent exists. Fossil assets were simply taken over. There was no transition period. No compensation. No lengthy phase-in or legal changeover. I’ve written before about how the rise of revolutionary governments and movements, with the specific purpose of seizing and eventually terminating fossil fuel production and use, has been made historically inevitable by the lack of effective institutional responses to the climate crisis. Once such movements come to power, expropriation will be a no-brainer. Control of the courts will be necessary when fossils come whining to them about their “property rights,” but historical revolutions, including the American, Russian, Chinese and Iranian Revolutions, have always resulted in a shift of legal system. Expropriation was heavily employed, for example, by the new American government after 1776, to transfer property of pro-British Loyalists to the hands of those who supported separation from the crown.
Mexican oil expropriation is a good example because it was, for the most part, nonviolent. There were riots and strikes, but no wars or military invasions were involved. The other example is not so rosy: the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65.
Before the Civil War, slavery was woven deeply into the economic fabric of the entire United States—not just the South. Cotton, a product wholly dependent on enslaved labor, was by far the U.S.’s largest foreign export before 1861. Disengaging the American economy from slave-produced goods was unthinkable and a political non-starter in vast swaths of the nation. The abolitionist movement in the North, however, leveraged the moral atrocity of slavery to its advantage. After the Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln used military authority to terminate the institution of slavery in the states in rebellion against the federal government. Piles of bloated corpses at Antietam and Gettysburg, famously captured by the early photographs of Alexander Gardner, and rows of white headstones at Arlington Cemetery—deliberately built on the slave estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee—attested to the rivers of blood that were required to flush slavery out of the American system.
There are a lot of parallels between the slavery example and the situation of fossil fuels. Before the Civil War, it was a mainstream opinion among Americans, including many Southerners and slaveowners, that slavery would either “die out” on its own, or emancipation of African-Americans would occur by some gradual legal process. Gradual emancipation schemes were how many Northern states ended slavery, usually by declaring that all people born after a certain future date would be free, though their parents and elders who were still slaves were sentenced to die in bondage. Emancipation schemes involving the compensation of slaveowners for their “property” were also popular. Land in the West, stolen from Native Americans, was usually proposed as the basis of the compensation fund.
Note how closely these delusions of gradual emancipation track our commonly held dreams of how fossil fuels will be “phased out” over time. It happens while commerce and life continue apace, with the wheels of economics or legal machinery clicking along happily in the background. Fossil fuels will be rendered obsolete by falling renewable energy prices, just as slaves would be rendered obsolete by technology and market forces. Renewables will come online in a glorious green surge that ultimately swamps dirty fossil fuels, without jagged fluctuations in energy availability or economic shocks resulting therefrom. And, like the pre-1860 slaveowners who were expected to retreat happily into the twilight of history, in our climate change delusion we imagine fossil companies happily counting the profits from the renewable energy investments that they, in their altruistic wisdom, decided to make for the good of the planet. All the while, courts continue to honor everybody’s rights and make the process all nice and legal.
This is not what’s going to happen. African-Americans were not freed from slavery by courts, compromises or the laws of economics. They were freed from slavery by cannons, volleys of rifle fire, ironclad ships and legions of soldiers slaughtering each other in the most horrific battles in American history. Could we have chosen a different path in 1860, 1840, 1820 or 1776? Absolutely. Should we have done so? No question—absolutely. But we didn’t. As a result, the transition from slavery to freedom in America was bloody, chaotic and incomplete. The South was physically ruined and economically impoverished for decades. African-Americans were free, but the failure of the federal government to enforce their rights in any meaningful way meant that it took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s-60s to deliver on the promises, made violently, on the battlefields of Gettysburg and Petersburg. This is how change happens in history, and it’s how it’s going to go this time.
We can already see the beginnings of a violent turn against the fossil industry and the governments who support, coddle and protect them. A lot of people, especially young people in Western European countries, have taken to the streets in mass protest movements. Right now they’re doing things like laying down in front of parliament buildings or blocking traffic on major thoroughfares. This will accomplish nothing in itself, but when it becomes clear that governments aren’t going to be swayed by protest, what do you think the next step is going to be? The leaders of Extinction Rebellion aren’t going to stand there, holding their hand-lettered poster board signs in their wilting hands and sigh, “Well, we gave it our all, but I guess blocking traffic in Piccadilly Circus isn’t enough to save humanity. Let’s go home, guys.” Anyone who thinks they aren’t going to start stockpiling rifles and building homemade bombs in cluttered flats in Copenhagen and Birmingham has no understanding of how historical change actually works.
The day an oil refinery explodes and some revolutionary group you’ve never heard of claims responsibility and drops a manifesto on the internet that includes the hockey stick graph and the Keeling Curve, you will know where the world is headed.
I wish it was not this way. I am not a revolutionary and I’m not advocating violence (though probably some denier will read this and screech that I am to try to silence me). But I’m also not making this stuff up, either. This is how I see history progressing. If we are to make a better world—and save the one we have—we need to be realistic about what’s likely to be in our future.
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