Insight of the Day: The pointless war playing out haphazardly for no defined reason in the no-longer-beating heart of the world’s oil and natural gas industry around the Strait of Hormuz will have massive, long-lasting effects. But will those effects be good or bad? It depends on how you feel about economic growth.

For proponents of capitalism and the economic growth ethic it demands — which certainly includes Donald Trump — it’s bound to be something between a setback and a disaster. A disaster for the entire Mena (Middle East and North Africa) region, which reverberates through the entire world as a constraint on growth. Oil and natgas are the only substantial source of income Mena has at the moment, and the Saudi and UAE strategies for diversifying out of that and into other economic areas are also in shambles. And the Mideast oil and gas trapped in the Gulf is still needed to fuel economic growth elsewhere.

But for those who see the a collapse of capitalism that halts economic expansion in the West and other over-developed regions as a potential salvation for humanity and other Earthly creatures, this could be positive. It’s hardly a preferred path out of intense consumerism, even for degrowthers, given the death and destruction involved. But it may do the trick of hampering, if not halting, GDP growth in fossil fuel-dependent places where constraints are most needed but least likely to be chosen as policy options by national or multi-national governments.

Less Growth — As Problem

What makes recent events in the Middle East uniquely important isn’t the rise in crude oil prices. Similar price spikes have been seen more than once over the last 50 years. What’s unique is that there is an actual, physical shortage of oil for which no one can compensate, as there last was in the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. As in 1973, this shortage originates in Saudi Arabia and its Arab Gulf neighbors, the countries that have held backup supply for use in case of an outage elsewhere since the Petrodollar Accords of the 1970s were signed with Washington. When the Saudis go out, there is no backup.

In exchange for providing this insurance, the Arab monarchies supposedly received another dependable absolute: US military protection. The Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have now seen, and are constantly reminded by Iran, of how undependable that “protection” has become.

China saw more than a decade ago how exposed this arrangement left them, and they set out to build the renewable electricity generation and electrified transport manufacturing expertise that is gradually freeing them from dependence on imported fossil fuels. Oil users other than China and the self-sufficient US — from Europe to Japan, South Korea and elsewhere — are belatedly realizing how exposed they are to supply cuts without Saudi insurance.

Oil is unlikely to ever feel like a safe commodity to any of them again.

Qatari LNG provided similar insurance to natgas users. Although most of it was promised to specific customers under multi-decade contracts, it was seen as totally dependable. From now on, it will be seen as highly risky. My bet is that much of an enormous expansion project underway in Qatar — for which it had yet to sign many long-term sales contracts — will be cancelled because the output will be seen as unsaleable. Solar and coal will be the mainstays of Asian electricity generation instead.

In fact, all the earning capacity of the Arab Gulf states has abruptly and radically shrunk as a result of this war. They still have huge cash hoards to use in trying to convert their economies off exclusive dependence on fossil fuels. But they were already starting to pull back on their decades-long support for client states elsewhere in the Middle East, from Egypt to Lebanon and Syria. This trend will now gain momentum. Also, their willingness to pay the bills to rebuild Gaza and/or resettle those living in Gaza will be diminished. The Arab monarchs’ days as sugar daddies for their Sunni Arab neighbors are over.

Once these shortages of oil and money register fully with the investor classes in the US and Europe, stock and bond markets will fall further and faster there, too. Unless or until the EU welcomes Russian natgas back and accepts cheap, efficient Chinese solar equipment and EVs, energy will remain too expensive for manufacturing to recover in northern Europe. Tourism and luxury goods will have to suffice as the mainstays of the European economy — not a recipe for well-grounded GDP growth.

The oil- and natgas-rich US may fare better for a time. But soon enough, it will become clear that fossil fuels and conventional cars are not just dirtier, but also more expensive than the solar, wind, batteries and EVs China has chosen. Trump is assumed by many to be clinging to fossil fuels in part to thwart China’s growth, as other US politicians have done. But he’s set to end up bolstering China’s renewable energy sales prospects throughout the rest of the world and leaving the US isolated and inflation-ridden.

Less Growth — as Solution

But could there also be an upside to the US visibly becoming an antiquated and expensive fossil fuel-dependent relic? And of Europe trapped as a low- or no-growth Disneyland-equivalent — another sort of antiquated relic of the colonial, fossil-fuel age? It hardly sounds appealing for Americans and Europeans. But leaving already wealthy European and North American economies on a path to continuous GDP growth — even if they follow China into lower carbon emissions while keeping more plastics and other pollutants — is simply not viable.

The Earth cannot continue to absorb more trash and poisons any more than it can absorb the heat from fossil fuels. Western economies have to slow down, not speed up further. A scarcity of oil and gas resulting from war in the Mideast Gulf will act as a brake on Western and over-developed Asian economies like Japan and South Korea.

China has planned for this, so it’s trajectory is harder to predict. But it certainly won’t benefit in absolute, as opposed to competitive, terms from more expensive oil and natgas.

The higher prices and lessened dependability for oil and natgas that the Middle East war has brought will lend impetus to another global trend that could potentially benefit people and the planet: Heightened reliance in the Global South on distributed solar generation that allows them to skip over the economic development phase involving buildout of a heavy-duty power grid. Distributed solar already shows signs of encouraging entirely different economic development models that will perhaps be less carbon intensive and broadly polluting than those followed over the previous two centuries by the West.

When it comes to renewable electricity, Europe is at a major disadvantage to those countries of the Global South that are closer to the equator and therefore have more sunshine year-round. This provides another spur to lower growth in the over-developed West and different, potentially better growth in countries that were heavily exploited in the fossil-fuel era of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It’s anybody’s guess how the US will fit into all this, once it has moved on from Trump and the fixations he personifies with the mistakes of the neoliberal era. Those perceived mistakes encompassd the notion, still prevalent among many political centrists, that the bulk of the populace can be left behind in veritable poverty in order to bolster corporate and investor-class wealth, and that the invisible hand will eventually right this inequity.

The Left-Behind

Many of those left behind in America were looking to Trump to be on their side and to somehow fix things. But unfortunately, he proved to have no solutions. However, his followers are also the Americans who tend to provide the bulk of the professional military that Trump is having so much fun sending on specious missions everywhere from Venezuela to the Mideast Gulf. So far, most of his followers are going along with these ventures, in good soldierly fashion. But their limits of tolerance will be reached soon enough if Trump doesn’t back off first.

While the Gulf Arabs are still reeling from the destructive impacts of Iranian retaliation on their infrastructure and economic prospects, they are clinging to American military guarantees in similar soldierly fashion. But in time, they too are likely to find alternatives, just as they have already done with China on the economic front and as the Europeans are starting to do on the military side as Trump ignores Ukraine. The world will move on, and we can hope not too many will be left behind.

Hormuz: The Good, the Bad and the Left Behind was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the last 24 hours, Israel bombed the giant South Pars offshore natural gas field that largely fuels Iran’s economy, and Iran retaliated with strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility and a Gas-to-Liquids plant on its northern part of the same field. Iran also attacked a natural gas export facility in the UAE, and oil refineries in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Prior to Israel’s strike, oil and gas production and processing facilities had largely been spared by both sides because of the long-term harm their damage or destruction would wreak on the world’s fossil fuel supply. Israel broke the taboo. Like them or lump them, the implications are enormous.

Quote of the day, from the online publication Maritime Executive: Danny Citrinowicz, former chief of the Iran desk for Israeli Defense Intelligence, said Wednesday that Iran’s heavy retaliatory strikes were foreseeable. “What exactly did they think would happen? That Iran would capitulate? That it would open the Strait of Hormuz under pressure?” he said. “The very foundation of this campaign appears to rest on a profound misunderstanding and a severe underestimation of Iran.”

Insight of the day: This crisis will harden a trend already underway in which the South Asian, Southeast Asian and African (Global South) development trajectory is radically altered, moving toward reliance on distributed solar energy backed by batteries, and away from fossil fuels. However it looks initially, this will eventually be to the economic and geopolitical advantage of China and will leave a still-fossil-fuel-dependent US functional but all the more isolated and evidently old-fashioned.

The loss of almost 20% of Qatar’s natural gas export capacity for five years or more in Iran’s overnight retaliatory bombings, as reported by Reuters, and the likely delay or even derailing of Qatar’s massive LNG expansion plans should not result in a global shortage of LNG. Rather, it will eat up much of the immediate oversupply and bring the global LNG market into rough balance. That’s my personal, off-the-cuff assessment, based on more than a decade editing a major industry publication on international natural gas markets.

It will also leave Europe even more dependent on US natural gas, which tends to be highly volatile in price — sometimes quite low, but other times absurdly high. The high-price periods will push Europe back towards the reliance on Russia that the European Commission and a few governments have been working hard to shed.

Because of the oddities of the natgas and electricity pricing systems used in northern Europe, including Germany, this will mean broadly higher energy costs in those countries. Most Mediterranean and some other EU countries shed this absurd pricing regime back in 2022–23, when the Ukraine War caused European natgas prices to soar. It will also add to strains within the EU that will likely weaken that organization.

In summary, what US President Trump has accomplished with his bizarre misadventure in Iran — at an apparent initial cost to the US taxpayer of roughly $200 billion — includes bolstering China’s case for the renewable electricity and EVs in which it is the dominant manufacturer, and speeding the day when US fossil fuels will not be wanted by other countries; undermining US relations with the Arab Gulf monarchies that have long looked to America as a dependable protector; and pushing Europe and Canada further away from the US political orbit.

Not what I’d call a great bargain for Trump — even if it has some potential advantages for the climate and the world at large.

Taboo No Longer Protects Mideast Oil, Gas was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From an energy perspective, the war US President Donald Trump heedlessly launched against Iran in league with Israel this winter and the war Russian President Vladimir Putin launched four winters ago against Ukraine, are arguably not “wars” at all. They are battles in the bigger energy war between the defensive US petrostate and up-and-coming electrostate China. Every time oil and natural gas markets are upended by such battles, it ultimately benefits China’s new system of renewable electricity and electric vehicles (EVs).

Fossil fuel turmoil not only enhances the cost advantages of solar, wind, battery storage and EVs over fossil fuels, it highlights the security advantages of renewable energy systems that require no continuous supply of imported fuel.

However, this gain for renewable electrification may not be as immediately compelling in the Iran War as it was in the early stages of the Ukraine War, when Europe accelerated its shift towards energy efficiency, wind and solar power as alternatives to Russian natgas under its Green Deal roadmap to climate neutrality. Both oil and natural gas were entering a prolonged period of surplus when war broke out in Iran. This limited the initial crude oil market reaction.

Also, both the US as the world’s biggest oil and gas producer and China as still the world’s largest importer of these fuels angled in their different ways to contain the economic damage from closure of the Strait of Hormuz. China can do more in concrete terms to control market chaos, but the US government and its oil and gas companies have louder voices and a clearer narrative on fossil fuel use.

Ukraine War Impacts

The outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022 only shifted oil output around without appreciably reducing its use. But soaring natural gas prices had enormous negative impacts on worldwide prospects for that fuel. They crippled the gas-dependent manufacturing sectors that made Germany and its neighbors so rich for so long. They hardened Europe’s resolve to build out wind and solar generating capacity and reduce energy waste.

And it turned both China and India away from natgas as a bridge fuel between coal and renewables — particularly LNG. While both countries are willing to use more LNG in existing infrastructure when the price is low, both are now inclined to focus on growing solar and renewable generation and to double down coal in the interim, especially domestic production.

The US rejection of China’s voluminous output of renewable generation equipment and EVs, including through the Biden administration, has pushed more of this into Africa and South and Southeast Asia at stunningly low prices. From Pakistan and Vietnam to South Africa and Kenya, countries across the Global South are turning to solar, often in association with batteries, and mostly from China. As they move to solar, many poorer countries are largely skipping over the power-grid stage in favor of distributed generation, boosting the cost savings and spawning novel economic development patterns.

All this is being driven in large part by the low cost of solar and other renewable power. But energy security concerns also strongly favor renewables, despite claims by Team Trump to the contrary. China may dominate the manufacturing of renewable generating equipment, but its control stops once that equipment is installed. The sun and wind don’t have to pass through narrow ocean corridors like the Strait of Hormuz or traverse battle lines like those in disputed eastern Ukraine. They are available everywhere for free. Not in equal measure, but in substantial measure in most of the Global South.

Bigger Iran War Impacts

The long-term impact of the Iran war is likely to be even greater, because of its heavier impact on oil markets and because of the technical and marketing strides Chinese EV manufacturers and exporters have made in the interim. But to Americans and many Europeans, that impact may be less visible than was the case four years ago.

Under intense pressure from Team Trump in Washington and the oil ministry in Saudi Arabia, the International Energy Agency and other oil-industry-linked forecasting agencies last year returned to old methods of estimating future oil and natgas demand that ignore the disruptive effects of the transition to renewable electricity and the electrification of transportation and manufacturing. These methods simply project forward the trends of earlier decades with no adjustment.

Under similar pressure, many energy press commentators have parroted forecasters’ inflated claims about the growth potential for oil and gas. That growth potential was dubious even before the US and Israel attacked Iran. In 2024, the last year before the IEA came under US pressure to inflate fossil fuel prospects, the agency was forecasting peak demand for all three fossil fuels — oil, natgas and coal — by 2030. In 2025, the IEA provided a number of forecasts, but emphasized one that showed continuing oil demand growth.

That was never likely, given that China’s use of gasoline and diesel are both past peak. Those two fuels accounted for half China’s oil consumption, and from 2013 to 2023, China accounted for more than half of all the world’s oil demand growth. It is still the biggest consumer of Saudi, Iranian and Russian crude oil and of Qatari LNG and Russian pipeline gas.

The enormous disruption to oil and gas flows that resulted from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has starkly exposed the vulnerability of fossil fuels — even the supposedly safest supply lines such as that of Saudi oil and Qatari LNG. This will further boost the determination of China and others to find more secure energy alternatives, which basically means renewables and, in the medium-term, coal. This goes for India, the oil industry’s favored candidate to replace China as the prime driver of global oil and LNG demand growth, almost as much as it does China.

China’s Murky Narrative

The petrostates don’t get all the credit, or blame if you prefer, for pushing China’s Iran- and Ukraine-War gains to the background, though. China itself is effectively playing along with aspects of the fossil fuel friendly US narrative. For one thing, it is obscuring the dramatic shift in its national oil demand from growth towards shrinkage. The data on world oil demand published by the IEA and other forecasters reflects consumption of refined products like gasoline, gasoil/diesel, and heavy fuel oil. But Beijing doesn’t break out its demand this way. Chinese oil companies and other forecasters have to estimate demand by extrapolating from official data on imports and exports.

This leads to uncertainty about China’s consumption that is large enough to meaningfully affect worldwide demand numbers. It’s taken as reasonably certain that the spread of EVs and greater use of public transit have pushed gasoline demand into decline in China. Diesel is probably falling, too, meaning that more than half of China’s demand base is shrinking. Whether claims by some analysts that oil use to create petrochemicals can be large enough to keep oil demand overall growing is uncertain and, in my view, doubtful.

Demand estimates for China have become even less precise and open to distortion by others in the last couple of years because Beijing has been building strategic inventories at a rapid but undisclosed pace. The country is now widely estimated to hold 1 billion-1.5 billion barrels in stocks, one hundred times consumption of around 15 million-16 million barrels per day and half or more of global crude oil inventories.

The pace of China’s additions to strategic stocks exercised a major upward influence on global oil prices in the months ahead of the US invasion of Iran, further obscuring any weakness in its oil product demand. Beijing likely halted those additions to inventories when Iran blocked Hormuz, thus damping the upward pressure on prices. China also typically refines more crude oil into products than it consumes and exports the surplus. It called on its refiners to reduce or halt exports early in the war in order to conserve supply at home.

If China is trying to convert itself into an “electrostate,” and to export renewable generating equipment and EVs to the rest of the world, why would it want to camouflage its success by creating ambiguity about its own oil demand? I don’t know with any certainty. But plausible explanations include a desire to preserve the influence it built up during its oil demand growth years among oil exporting counties in the Mideast and elsewhere. It may also want to avoid giving further ammunition to tariff hawks in the US and Europe, who point to its dominance of solar, battery and EV markets as grounds for building higher barriers to imports.

What It Means

In time, the fog of war and of energy transition will dissipate and the advantages of the renewable electrification China champions will be clear. That goes especially for the national security advantages.

Indeed, even with all its oil and natgas production, the US itself may see the risks inherent in fossil fuel dependence sooner rather than later. The runup in LNG prices caused by Qatar’s abrupt halt to all its natgas processing operations is boosting demand for US LNG. This will enrich a few US LNG exporters, but it will also bring higher domestic US natgas prices, on top of the boost to gasoline and other oil product prices.

The ability to control the oil and gas supply chain worldwide that Trump was pushing with such capricious force ahead of his invasion of Iran, notably in Venezuela and Cuba, has also been weakened. The US drive to further shrink Russia’s market quickly dissolved, for example, as Russia could get crude oil and LNG to China, India and other Asian markets without traversing Hormuz.

China’s energy narrative may seem confused at times, but it reflects an appreciation for the complexities and conflicting pressures inherent in international energy markets in times of technological and geopolitical turmoil. It’s a lesson the Trump Team will be learning soon enough.

Iran War: China’s Gain, US Pain was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the US, liberal Democrats tend to think that Republicans, and especially right-wing populists who like Donald Trump, push policies that hurt poor people. Populist Republicans tend to think that Trump has policies that will rescue them from decades of gradual impoverishment at the hands of that same liberal elite. They’re both wrong. Trump 0.1, Biden and Trump 0.2 have all kowtowed to corporations.

Median household income in the US, adjusted for inflation, has not grown appreciable since 1980, even as the percentage of women in the workforce expanded and women’s pay edged up. It’s not hard to see why less wealthy Americans have gotten poorer over the last half century: The money has gone to corporate profits and the stock market. It hasn’t been a zero-sum game. The amount of wealth out there has grown. But it has mostly gone toward making the rich richer, with no trickle down.

The massive, mutual self-deception behind the US political divide is that the policies supporting the wildly differing rhetorics of the two camps differ as wildly as their rhetoric. Government policy has indeed changed and diverged in a few areas over the last decade: Basically, the Democrats support and push identity politics as the path to improving the lot of low-income people; while Trump supports tariffs as a very different path to that same elusive, egalitarian goal.

Neither approach has worked and neither will as long as corporate wealth is Washington’s first priority, as it has been consistently since Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s. The only politicians who have put forward policies that might conceivably have alleviated the inequity that has overtaken over the US — and spread to Europe and the UK — are left-wing populists such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and others such as Maine’s Graham Plattner. So far, they have been blocked by the Centrist, pro-corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

Corporations and Their Owners

Corporate profits over the last four years have claimed the highest percentage of US GDP in 94 years, at an average annual rate of 9%. That 94 years gets you back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first election as US president at the height of the Depression in the 1930s. Roosevelt gradually ushered in the New Deal “Order,” a period of national political consensus in which income inequity plummeted, first in the US and then across the industrialized world thanks to bountiful dollars and American determination to lessen the popular appeal of Communism.

US corporate tax rates soared to over 50% through the 1950s and ’60s. Labor unions strengthened and factory workers prospered. College education was free to all veterans, and healthcare cheap for everyone. The Clean Air and Clear Water acts were both passed. Whether Democrats or Republicans held the presidency, inequity diminished.

Nor was the largesse limited to the US. At the end of World War II, America had virtually all the money and all the factories outside the Soviet Union, and through the next 30 years, it spread both around liberally. Too liberally, in the hindsight of Trump and his cronies, since the exercise over time took many of the best US factory jobs with it, first mainly to Germany and Japan and later to the “Asian Tigers” of South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. All developed rapidly using the same export-driven strategy China would follow after 1980.

Then came the dislocation and transformation of the 1970s. US corporations largely quit investing at home. Cheap oil and other fossil fuels disappeared with the nationalization of their assets by Opec and the two energy crises, one related to the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and one to the Iranian Revolution and its invasion by Iraq. In the US, “stagflation,” followed and, with it, support for New Deal policies collapsed.

Another national political consensus — famously dubbed the “Neoliberal Order” by historian Gary Gerstle — was smoothly installed in its place. The Democratic Party bought into the new “order,” partially under Jimmy Carter and fully under Bill Clinton. A melding of freewheeling social attitudes from the “hippy” days of the 1960s with resentment at continued White working-class support for the Vietnam War and Southern opposition to civil rights created a meritocratic party hinged on educated “elites.”

The ranks of voters needed to win elections were to be filled out with Blacks, women, LGBTQ folks, and others who would vote Democrat because they perceived the Republicans as racist. Economic benefits weren’t part of the package for anybody. The benefits went to the Best, Brightest and most educated Black, female and LGBTQ people, just as they did to White elites. It worked for corporations — which now provide just 1.8% of tax revenue instead of an already measly 4% in 1960 — and it worked by Barack Obama. It did not work out well for poor folk of any “race” or “gender.”

Maga Schmaga

Donald Trump won re-election on the back of votes from a lot of people who thought he would help them at the expense of snooty urban Democratic elites. He has not delivered, by virtually any measure except the venom he spews forth at those self-same elites. And even that venom is by now turning off more than a few near the heart of the Maga camp.

His biggest accomplishments have been to brutally halt immigration into the US and scare some number of people into going back to other countries. The brutishness of the exercise is not a mistake or an overshoot. It’s the means by which this long-elusive goal of controlling immigration has been accomplished. Slowing illegal immigration was a goal of Obama and Biden as surely as it is Trump. They just failed to achieve it. The last president with a different approach was Republican George W. Bush.

Trump has also alienated long-standing US allies in Canada and Europe, raised a fair wad of cash — which may now have to be returned in whole or in part — with tariffs, and made political correctness incorrect at many US college campuses and non-profits.

But what has he done for his loyal non-college-educated voters, i.e. Maga? His tariffs have devasted US farmers, already hit by climate change, plant and animal diseases, and commodity market gyrations. He allowed a mainstream Republican Congress to push through cuts in healthcare for low earning workers. He has raised energy prices by pouring benefits and aid on datacenters. And lately he has taken to starting wars with no benefit to ordinary Americans.

The biggest share of the trade damage has been to the once-tight US relationship with China, though, and particularly the renewable energy and EVs that China picked more than a decade ago as its biggest springboard for high-level development. Trump started attacking China in his first term, but without effective focus on energy. The Biden administration expertly homed in on renewable electricity and microchips in its attempt to stunt China’s economic growth, crippling what could have been an effective solar, onshore wind, battery and EV development strategy in order to pursue new-energy areas that oil companies liked and China didn’t. They’re now mostly being cancelled.

But the Bidens didn’t go all the way. Trump 2.0 has, derailing inside the US the spread of renewable electricity and saddling the country with an even more antiquated, expensive and environmentally destructive energy system than it had to begin with. He has attacked not just costly deep offshore wind projects, but onshore windfarms and solar arrays that were providing income for many Middle American landowners already struggling under his tariff regime. More US factories have been cancelled in the name of avoiding clean energy than have been built for purposes of reindustrialization.

Trump policy is a an anti-Maga, anti-working people mess. Marjorie Taylor Green isn’t the only one who sees that. So far, the one thing Trump has managed to keep on an even keel are the financial markets. So the corporations and banks that are his top priority remain fat and happy. If that shifts, and the stock and Treasury-bond markets come unhinged, the potential will open up for real change in what is the real “Washington Consensus”: further enriching the rich. Then something good might emerge.

Style, More Than Policy, Divides America was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What makes so many people so sure they know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Forget the “so help me God” that follows in US swearing in exercises. If we had God to help, working out the “truth” wouldn’t be so hard. In fact, through most of Western history, all the people most people knew shared a religious base on which ideas of “absolute truth” could be sustained. You knew things because Jesus, or Mohammed, or in parts of Asis, the Buddha told you so.

Then sometime between the 15th and 19th centuries, God “died,” to borrow German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s catchy phrase. It wasn’t that Nietzsche thought everybody had quit believing in God. It was that there was no longer a broad consensus on how or what information God had communicated to people, removing the basis for assurance on what, if any, “absolute truth” humans could know. People could still believe things, but they knew other people believed different things.

Lately, though, “truth” has staged a comeback. For many, from Muslim Salafists, to some evangelical Christians, to many in Israel, the “Word of God” is still a valid base for universal truth, even if that truth doesn’t have universal acceptance. Others push ethnically based national mythologies into the role as a base for unquestioned truth.

For another group, “science” and “experts” provide truth that is beyond legitimate doubt. As they see it, their understanding of the world is factually correct. The other guys are factually wrong. End of story. Any communication with doubters is aimed only at denting the falsity of their beliefs. These are not bad people. On the contrary, they are often kind (in their way), polite, well-educated and well-read, and generous with the time and money they donate to “good causes.” For most of you reading this article, they are not the enemy. They are us, to paraphrase cartoon character Pogo.

Tons of ink has been spilled on examining what makes fundamentalist religious belief and nationalist creeds so powerful — most of it by those in the camp of true believers in science and experts. Since it is the group Donald Trump and many another “populist” Western leader are attacking with such vehemence, maybe it’s time we also started considering what makes this particular segment of True Believers tick — and whether what the group is now is what we truly want to be.

Professional Managerial Class

I remember thinking more than a decade ago that — right below the 1% that was being attacked with such elan at the time by the Occupy movement — there was a tight-knit group making up something closer to 10% of the population who did the “mental work” for that 1%. “White-collar workers” who managed the factories, taught the children, provided medical care and reading material for the capitalists at the top of the heap. And I remember thinking that the interests of this 10% probably aligned better with the 1% they served than with the 89% who were being left to fend for themselves in an increasingly stingy US and many other parts of the world.

I later found that such a “class” was identified as such more than a century ago and a great name was given to it back in the 1970s: “professional managerial class.” This phrase was coined and defined by social critics and working-class defenders John and Barbara Ehrenreich to refer to “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”

Leaving aside the academic jargon, the PMC includes “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers of advertising copy and TV scripts, etc.,” whose work is concerned with social control and spreading the ideology and values of liberal/neoliberal capitalism; and also “the middle-level administrators and managers, engineers, and other technical workers” whose job is to keep the wheels of capitalist production running smoothly. This definition ropes in lawyers, doctors and other medical personnel; journalists and other “content providers” (like me); and code writers who feed the large-language-model AI monsters stalking Wall Street.

These are college-educated “experts” who “believe in science,” i.e. the pool of specialized knowledge held by various trained and often licensed groups within the PMC itself. No wonder the PMC finds it difficult to imagine a world in which the experts do not run everything. After all, they are the experts. They are also products of a strong, self-reinforcing social structure. Products of beliefs and values parents pass onto their children, and teachers and professors to their students. Of beliefs reflected in the media and social media. Values automatically assumed to be shared with neighbors.

What’s more, the Ehrenreichs write, “the relationship between the PMC and the working class is objectively antagonistic… [given] that the professional-managerial workers exist … only by virtue of the expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class.” Think here of all the things that have been given over to “experts” because they’re deemed too complex for “ordinary people” to do, from weather forecasting, to fixing our own machinery, to deciding what books our children should read and what vaccines they should be given.

Already 50 years ago, the Ehrenreichs calculated that the PMC accounted for 20%-25% of the US population, not the mere 10% I vaguely imagined. Until Trump’s “populist” takeover of the Republican Party, the PMC in the contemporary, neoliberal era was divided between “conservatives” on the center-right, led first by US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and “liberals” on the center-left, first led by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, with their zeal for dismantling safety nets and regulatory constraints on their growing body of rich supporters in banking, tech and other “knowledge-based” businesses.

Since Trump’s rise, the PMC has come to equate more narrowly with Democrats in the US. In fact, plenty of neoliberal-style Republicans still populate the “swamp” in Washington that Trump was so skilled at ridiculing in his first term: Remember the RINOS — Republicans in Name Only? Now Trump seems content to give over Congress and the legislation it churns out largely to the RINOS, as long as they pay frequent and fervent public obiesence to The Great Leader. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is an example of the result: An arrogantly pro-business set of policies on the old Republican model. Stick in a little healthcare compensation for the masses if you can, Trump suggests. Or not, whatever works.

Virtue Hoarders

How did the Democrats go from being the party of Depression-era US President Franklin Roosevelt — the greatest of the American left-wing populists, to hear some tell it — to a pro-capitalist party wedded to meritocracy? A party of winners that took turns with the Republicans happily presiding over the deindustrializing of America and an even more viscous surge in inequality than that of the 1920s? How did the Party’s virtue signaling get focused so tightly on race- and gender-related issues, rather than on “ improving the lives of poor people, whatever their color or creed,” as I wrote earlier here in Medium? Especially since, given the relative poverty of women and of Black, Indigenous and Hispanic peoples, an emphasis on economic fairness and balance would mainly benefit those very groups.

Explanations are many and varied for the Democratic Party turn away from “working people” to a party that, under Bill Cliinton, would “end welfare as we know it” and try to force even poor mothers with no childcare to go out to work if they want to eat and feed their children. One explanation that should have been discarded decades ago as certifiably false is that this “move to the center” would win elections. The Democrats have steadily lost ground among governors, state houses, and local institutions throughout the first quarter of this century. And “demographics” aren’t fixing the problem, as many in the party have claimed over the years.

“The Democrats are not a left-wing party. They’re a centrist party, but the left is their heritage. They were a party of the left from William Jennings Bryan [1890s] up to Lyndon Johnson. And you can’t have a party of the left where the main constituency that you care about is highly educated people, experts. It just doesn’t work. The party has to be organized around the aspirations and the needs … of ordinary people.” That’s how Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America and The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism“ put it recently in a Substack chat with famed journalist Seymour Hersh.

What homing in on racial, ethnic and gender issues devoid of economic content did do was allow centrist Democrats to feel “progressive” without offending their supporters in Silicon Valley and the big Wall Street banks. It flowed easily from the flowering in many universities of “social science” programs based on particular social groups, programs their detractors often labeled “identity politics.” Economics, meanwhile, was taken over by largely monetarist econometricians — number crunchers who took capitalism for granted and had little shared language or interest with other “social scientists.”

Catherine Liu, a political commentator and UC Irvine professor, in her 2021 book Virtue Hoarders, says of the members of PMC: ”They still believe themselves to be the heroes of history, fighting to defend innocent victims against their evil victimizers, but the working class is not a group they find worth saving, because by PMC standards, they do not behave properly: they are either disengaged politically or too angry to be civil.”

Left-of-center economic historian Adam Tooze, wrote in his popular Chartbook blog just after the 2024 election: “The besetting weakness of the PMC-Democrats is to imagine that there is nothing beyond their bubble, as defined, for sake of argument, by the weekend edition of the New York Times. Beyond lie only ignorance and sin … The besetting error of the Trump camp, by contrast, is to imagine that the modern world can actually function without the expertise, discipline and labor provided by the PMC… [Each] is a failure of realism.”

The Future

Tooze, Liu, Frank and others see PMC turn neoliberalism and defense of US corporations and banks over US people as directly encouraging the country’s turn to the “populist” Donald Trump, after the Democrats succeeded in beating back the populist left represented in 2016 by Bernie Sanders. Tooze suggests that thinking of Maga as essentially an anti-PMC movement “helps to explain Trump’s ability to mobilize both working-class votes and business support. It also helps to explain the self-righteous rigidity of the Democrats.” The business support is from the oil and coal industries and other manufacturing sectors that have been — and often remain — anti-regulatory Republicans of the old school, but who put up with Trump because he wins; and also because they, too, despise what they see as the arrogance of the liberal PMC.

Finally, belatedly, a growing number of PMC Democrats recently are seeing that their old ways didn’t work and that they need to offer the voters something other than the party’s “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” or drown message of the last 40 years. Too many good and deserving people have drowned. A different message is needed. Many Democrats still cling to the notion that tilting more to the right will pull independent voters away from Republicans, but a growing number see that drilling down on fear of Trump alone will not work — however legitimately scary Trump may be. They see the message of Bernie, and more recently of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, as one they can no longer afford to ignore.

What lies beyond Trump is either a battle between left- and right-wing populists — with centrist Democrats pushed as far into the background as centrist Republicans have been — or a generational takeover by the far right, who are consciously working to establish a new “order” as impregnable as the New Deal and later Neoliberal orders of the last 100 years. That new order may well be the price if the powerful PMC does not learn to look beyond its silo of supposed “truth” and see that truth is a many-sided thing visible from many directions.

Which Class Are You In, Friends? was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Oil has been a key pillar of the domestic US economy and of America’s global leadership for more than a century. When the First World War broke out, the remnants of the Standard Oil Trust created by John D. Rockefeller controlled a large majority of the kerosine — then the most widely used oil product worldwide. Britain and France were also highly indebted to J.P. Morgan and other big US banks who benefited indirectly from strikingly high oil industry profits.

But by the end of WWI, gasoline had displaced kerosene as the biggest selling oil product in the US, trucks and tanks had been introduced to Europe’s battlefields and roads, and the world’s ships had begun the shift to fuel oil from coal — the fuel associated with the declining British Empire.

The Second World War and the super-high-economic-growth decades that followed sealed oil’s ascendancy as a transport fuel, America itself as a car culture, and American oil companies’ iron control over oil production levels and pricing outside the US and the Soviet Union. Five of the so-called Seven Sisters oil giants were US-based. The other two were tied to Britain, those being British Petroleum (originally Anglo-Persian) and Royal Dutch Shell. But Britain was summarily pushed into the role of far-junior partner in oil, as it was in international finance. The dollar was now king of both the global oil industry and broader international trade.

From the 1950s until the more recent “shale revolution” that revived the flagging fortunes of US domestic oil and gas production, however, the US had also been a leader in studying what was known to senior US officials as the “greenhouse gas effect” from burning fossil fuels. Washington and other US institutions were involved in researching technologies that held out the promise of replacing coal, oil and gas before the Earth became too warm. Nuclear power was viewed as an early leader, and the industry played up its fossil fuel-replacement potential.

Tilting Toward Oil

The degree of tilt in American policy toward preserving and encouraging the powerful role of oil, or alternatively, toward the call of climate advocates to replace fossil fuels, had more to do with level of the country’s dependence on imported oil and the cost of those oil imports than it did with breakthroughs in climate science or renewables technology. Partisan politics weren’t that determinant either.

Auto efficiency standards were introduced by Republican President Gerald Ford. Democrat Jimmy Carter openly acknowledged the climate threat, but emphasized the danger of reliance on expensive oil more than climate in selling his policies and promoted coal over natural gas for power generation, in order to save the gas for use in petrochemicals. Both the Bush family presidents were close to the oil industry, but son George W. introduced ethanol additives in gasoline and revived auto efficiency standards that had withered in the cheap oil days of Democratic President Bill Clinton and his climate activist vice president Al Gore. The ambiguity was palpable.

What proved to be the definitive turn back towards fossil fuel and away from energy efficiency or climate-saving renewables came during the administration of Democratic President Barack Obama. The driving forces were, first, the so-called shale revolution, that turned US oil and gas production from decades of decline into a veritable growth machine through the use of fracking; and the realization that China would soon have a larger economy than the US and that Beijing had assigned a key role in its future industrial growth to clean-energy technologies.

The National Security Strategy Reports — statements “articulating the worldwide interests, goals, and objectives of the United States that are important to its security” — issued at either end of Obama’s presidency highlight a striking shift. His first, 2010 Strategy said the US “must develop the clean energy that can power new industry, unbind us from foreign oil and preserve our planet.” His last, in 2015 when the US was approaching self-sufficiency in oil, included the proud statement that “We are now the world leader in oil and gas production.” But ambiguity re-emerged later that year when Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline that now takes Canadian oil to the Gulf Coast export terminals.

Trump claimed in his version of the Strategy three years later: “For the first time in generations, the United States will be an energy-dominant nation.” He was unabashedly pro-fossil fuels in that term, as he has been in his second, with no interest in the climate. Partisanship hardened on the climate issue, as it has in so much else. Democrat Joe Biden temporarily brought ambiguity back, warning of the existential threat of climate change early in his presidency, only to prioritize later on the fight against Chinese solar imports over rapid expansion of US solar and wind.

Energy Dominance?

Where has all this brought the US? And can Trump succeed in re-establishing the pre-1970s-style US energy “dominance” he seems to crave? At home, solar, wind, and EV expansion is slowing dramatically, along with the phaseout of Biden-era incentives for both buying these technologies and building factories for their domestic manufacture — incentives that were supposed to last for a full decade.

Still, signals are mixed. The oil industry is laying off workers and cutting back on drilling in the face of a roughly 30% dive in oil prices as Trump pursues “affordable” energy. Big oil company share prices are up marginally, if at all, since Trump came to office in January, while broad measures of stock market performance have risen by 10%-20%. Forecasts generally show US oil production flattening out any day now, despite its surprising strength so far.

The domestic industry is pinning its hopes heavily on natural gas, projecting that domestic gas demand will shoot up along with the buildout of energy-hungry data processing centers. Whether all that many datacenters will actually be built or the “tech bubble” will burst, and whether natgas will generate much of the electricity such centers do use are very much open questions. A shortage of turbines has slowed construction of new gas-fired power plants, and the big tech companies may well be pulled back towards the renewable generation path most had already charted during the Biden years.

The small modular nuclear reactors some of the tech titans are eyeing are still years, if not decades, away from being available, assuming they work at all. Existing coal-fired power plants could be fired up again, but nobody will build new ones in the climate of intense uncertainty about the country’s future energy path beyond the Trump years.

On the international stage, the big questions are peak oil demand and the outlook for LNG. For now, the Trump team and the oil industry together have managed to blur the demand situation enough that timing of global peak oil use probably won’t become clear for some years. As to LNG, several senior oil industry executives warned this autumn of a pending LNG glut and overbuilding by US LNG project developers. Uncertainty about whether or when Russian natural gas may return to European markets — something the European Commission adamantly opposes, but some East European governments and far right and left political parties favor — could add to the glut and leave US LNG exporters in the lurch.

In any case, the EU is not a growth market for US LNG: natural gas use has fallen by 20%-25% since 2022 and, with solar and wind continuing to spread, it will fall further. US LNG sales gains have come at the expense of Russian natural gas over the course of the Ukraine War, but that pot of gold for American sellers is nearly empty. From here on out, growth in US LNG sales will need to come from Asia. China and India may buy a bit more if tariff negotiations with Trump go well and LNG prices are low enough. But both are focused on solar buildouts and using partially domestic coal as their fossil fuel backup in the interim. Neither will buy much LNG on a steady basis.

Japan and South Korea, the big early LNG customers, have stagnant power demand and declining populations that make a resurgence in electricity consumption unlikely. And Japan is intent on reopening more of its nuclear reactors that have been closed since the Fukushima disaster nearly 15 years ago. Like Europe, these are not growth markets.

Path Forward

How Trump could conceivably turn all this into a path back to US energy dominance is unclear, at best. What seems more likely is that he will simply let energy and the clash between US LNG and Chinese solar fade into the background. He’ll simply talk about something else. Already, prospects have faded for big, long-term oil or LNG components to trade deals that were struck earlier in outline and are now possibly being converted to detailed agreements.

Calling the future in such a highly changeable global atmosphere is a game few bother to play. But a bet on US energy dominance and the fading out of China’s renewable energy and EV threat looks even riskier than most wagers. A return to historic US ambiguity on old versus new energy may prove the easiest path forward as domestic US and Chinese economies diverge every further in energy terms.

US Oil and Climate Ambiguity was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Conservative historian and coiner of clever phrases Naill Ferguson took recently to calling US President Donald Trump the “Disruptor in Chief.” Several liberal foreign policy gurus have latched onto “disruptor” or “disruptive,” too, for describing Trump’s “rude, crude style,” as I call it. But as I noted in dubbing him Donald the Disruptor back in February, the most important question is whether that disruption is achieving its goals. Whether it’s “working.”

Ferguson suggests that, for now, it is. While he gives no sign of approval for overt cruelty to immigrants or others and concedes that such Trump tactics have contributed to a loss of public support for the president, he also touts the “transformational results at home and abroad.” His results list includes the recent Gaza “deal,” which may or may not hold; a plunge in net immigration into the US from 2.6 million people per year on average under Biden to somewhere between 400,000 and a net negative this year; death by “bazooka” of what Fergusen terms the “woke mania” at US universities; and a near 25% drop in gasoline prices (before Trump’s latest oil-price-hiking U-turn on Putin).

However, says Fergusen, the “biggest challenge” by far for the Disruptor in Chief lies ahead: Trump’s unresolved confrontation with China. Hardly surprisingly, given that Ferguson helped coin the “Chimerica” encapsulation of just how interdependent the two economies had become as back as 2008, Ferguson observes that Trump isn’t a doctrinaire China hardliner; that he did a deal with President Xi Jinping in his first term; and that he might prefer a deal to “level the playing field” in US trade with China to the unremitting Cold War with Beijing that many China hawks openly espouse.

China Challenge

Speaking of coiners of phrases, Graham Allison agrees with his sometime-colleague Fergusen that a Trump II deal is possible between the US and China. Allison is the international relations star from Harvard’s Belfer Center who came up with “Thucydides Trap” as an ancient expression of the supposedly still valid perception that rising powers such as China are likely to end up at war with an existing great power such as the US.

Emphasizing that he has no inside confirmation of this, Allison predicts that when Trump and Xi finally meet, they will announce a “Great Rebalancing” or perhaps a “partnership” that includes “advances not only on trade but on other issues, including major investments in energy and manufacturing, a serious Chinese crackdown on exports of fentanyl precursors, a resolution of the TikTok standoff, and promises of Chinese purchases of more U.S. products to reduce the bilateral trade deficit.”

Like Allison and Fergusen – with whom I’ve rarely agreed over the years — I have noticed that Trump seems to have no knee-jerk antipathy to China and probably admires and almost certainly respects Xi and his dealmaking potential. Could it be that Trump has so much confidence in his own vision for Making America Great Again that he would be willing to put it to the test if China made suitable concessions on the three items he recently listed to reporters as the top issues with China: Rare Earth elements, fentanyl, and soybeans.

Fentanyl has been a consistent fixation during this Trump presidency. It’s easy to wonder whether he’s one of those who thinks the Chinese are taking historic revenge for the mid-19th Century Opium Wars in which Britain forced a weakened China to legalize and pay for opium grown in India and used to addict millions of Chinese. It’s seen by historians as ushering in China’s “century of humiliation” and as helping to fund consolidation of the British Empire in India. It’s a tawdry tale of colonialism at its worst, and it was mainly the UK not the US. Still, it’s hard not to wonder.

Whether more diligent Chinese efforts to cut off shipments of the relatively widely available components of fentanyl would make much difference to US supply, much less reduce the number of US addicts and overdoses, is a separate question. But Trump may see the issue primarily as a matter of national pride. It’s humiliating to see 21st Century Americans treated like 19th Century opium addicts in China. All this is speculation, of course. And Trump seems to be using fentanyl as the latest excuse for aggressive naval training exercises everywhere. But fentanyl might still provide an easy “give” for Xi.

Soybeans, too, would be easy for Xi to fix, and Trump’s motives are more straight-forward. Donald needs a deal on soybeans to appease a core group of supporters: American farmers and farm-country folk. They are hurting bigtime from China’s refusal to openly buy a single soybean so far from this year’s US harvest. Instead, China is buying soybeans mainly from Brazil. Trump has promised farmers a cash bailout. Farmers in Illinois and Iowa would probably take the money but don’t like the idea of bailouts. They want fair-market value for their “beans.”

Bringing top global bean-buyer China back to US soybeans would help corn farmers, as well, since high-volume growers have turned to corn as an alternative while soybean prices are depressed by the absence of Chinese buyers.

As to the rare Earth elements that jumped from deep obscurity to massive notoriety when Xi imposed tough export licensing requirements across the board on this group of metals widely used in everything from MRI machines, to windmills, to oil refineries. He was thus implicitly — which is not to say subtly — threatening to break a supply chain that Western analysts suddenly screamed was essential to modern life. This shouldn’t be that tough to settle, either, since there’s every reason to suppose that China is using rare Earths as a bargaining tool, not because it actually wants to stop selling them to the West.

Trading New for Old Energy

The question is what the US can give China in return. Access to that most desirable of commodities, the US consumer, must surely top China’s priority list along with microchips and the machines that make them. Either way, when it comes to things China would like to go back to selling into the US at low or no tariffs, the solar gear, batteries, and electric vehicles that have become central to its industrial strategy over the last decade must surely figure prominently.

If a deal covering solar and batteries were struck, it could be the best news for the climate in many a long, hot year. Opening up China’s oil and natural gas markets to US sellers and, likewise, opening parts or all of the US solar, wind and battery equipment markets to Chinese sellers wouldn’t add to China’s fossil fuel use. It would simply redirect some of China’s purchasing to the US from somewhere else, possibly Russia. And it could make solar and battery installation so much cheaper and easier to obtain in the US that it should easily offset damage to installation rates from Trump’s removal of Biden-era subsidies on renewable energy. Even AI datacenter developers could benefit.

US LNG could work fine for China, as long as they don’t have to agree to anything extending much beyond the end of Trump’s term. China could use more natgas in existing infrastructure and wouldn’t have to lock itself into anything or slow its rapid buildout of solar and wind capacity. International LNG prices are relatively low and expected to remain weak for a few years, at least, given a looming market surplus as new US export capacity comes online. It really doesn’t matter that much to anybody but a few LNG and pipeline gas players.

The revolutionary impact from a new-for-old-energy deal would be in the US. Assuming Trump believes what he told the United Nations in such rude, crude terms in September, he simply does not grasp the economic — much less care about the climate — advantages solar-plus-battery storage at Chinese prices enjoys in power generation over natural gas and coal, even at low US fossil fuel prices. So he might see little to fear at home and much to gain abroad from an energy deal.

The fact that solar generating capacity can be added much faster than new gas-fired capacity if the panels are readily available, as they are in China’s currently glutted market, would surely seal the deal for any datacenter developers who are serious about getting centers up and running quickly. And while some of the desperation might go out of Chinese solar companies’ sales efforts in the Global South, their surplus is big enough that sales would likely continue everywhere.

A deal opening the US to Chinese EVs is much less likely, as I see it. This would threaten the future of the US auto industry that is so important to Trump’s plan for making America Great Again. He may not understand the benefits of solar power, but he probably knows full well that the Chinese make the best and cheapest EVs, which are among the best and cheapest cars and trucks of any sort. And if he doesn’t, the CEOs of Ford, GM and others with old or new auto plants in the US will tell him in no uncertain terms.

It would make many a liberal anti-Trumper cringe to think of Donald the Disruptor pulling off a reproachment with China. You can already sense some of them gearing up to scream about a sellout of Taiwan, as any Chinese deal would likely have to include a strong reaffirmation of the long-standing US “acknowledgment” of Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China. For me, though, the climate is too important and the benefits of a deal for the climate potentially too great not to wish Trump success. A US-China deal is still a long-shot, but better to have a shot at it than not.

A China-US Energy Deal: Conceivable? was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The US energy and political establishments are madly cutting public and private spending on wind turbines, solar arrays and electric vehicles. Madly blaring out claims that US energy consumption is suddenly shooting up as energy-voracious, AI data centers spread. That climate change is a hoax or insignificant, and fossil fuel use can and will grow forever. It’s loud. It’s strident. And it’s increasingly supported by Trumped-up oil industry reports that show oil demand growing and growing.

Out of almost everywhere else comes evidence of surging solar, battery, and EV sales. Terrifying tales of flooded cities, drought-stricken farms, and deadly heat. Mildly reassuring data showing stagnant oil, gas, and coal consumption. And indications that countries across Eurasia, South America, and Africa are not only buying renewable generating equipment made in China, but also building factories to make their own, often in partnership with Chinese companies.

It isn’t news that Trump and his oil buddies don’t like renewables and want to save fossil fuels, or that China is building more, cheaper, better renewables with every passing day. So why has the volume been turned up so loud and the narratives become so conflicting of late? Why did Trump use energy, of all things, to bludgeon other world leaders at the UN General Assembly — surely knowing that few share his cockamamy conviction that the transition is “stupid”?

One likely reason is that the world is rapidly approaching the point of peak oil demand, past which oil consumption will trend lower rather than higher. This will put oil, and soon other fossil fuels, on the wrong side of the core tenet of capitalism: Grow or Die. Fossil fuel use will soon be dying, and even if it’s slow, shrinkage doesn’t easily attract investment.

New BP and Exxon “Outlooks,” and a forecast due out soon from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that will revive previously discarded conservative modeling techniques at Washington’s insistence, all push back to 2035 or beyond what had been rapidly approaching dates for peak oil demand. In contrast, Chinese oil companies see oil use going into decline in that key country as soon as this year. And most non-profit forecasters still expect peak worldwide demand before 2030.

Which narrative is true, you may ask? I’m confident that the energy transition will stay on track and even pick up speed outside the US, motivated by ever-more-destructive and costly climate chaos, and fueled by falling prices and improving performance for renewable energy. I’m confident global consumption of all fossil fuels is near peak, with oil virtually there already.

I may be wrong, of course. The US government and the oil companies lined up to defend Trump’s pro-oil position are formidable defenders. Renewable energy and EVs have huge advantages. But these could yet be quashed by the mighty weight of punitive, politicized tariffs and sanctions and a cleverly constructed storyline about the glorious necessity of fossil fuels — although those with a clear-eyed vision of where staying on fossil fuels would take the world have powerful arrows in their narrative quiver too.

Compare and Contrast

Here are some of the rhetorical ploys being used by the Trump team, and the factual developments they are aiming to obscure:

1. Trump’s stunning attacks on renewable power, EVs and efficiency standards for gasoline cars are getting louder and more frequent, while China’s stunning progress in renewables and EVs is being largely ignored — by Washington, the oil industry, and a domestically orientated mainstream US press.

In fact, while Trump’s policies have had some negative impact on investment in renewables in the US, it’s too soon to know how much. Investment in new US solar and wind installations fell 36% in the first half of 2025 from the last half of 2024, Bloomberg calculates. But much of that reflects the collapse of a few big offshore wind projects under Trump’s direct control, and a spike in spending on renewables in late 2024.

Worldwide, renewables investment was up 10% in 2024, with small-scale solar in the lead.

EV sales worldwide shot up at an even faster 28% rate in the first half of 2024, according to early data. Over half of all EV sales were in China, which saw 32% year-on-year growth. Sales of heavy electric trucks are skyrocketing in China: nearly 80,000 were sold in 2024, and over 80,000 were sold in just the first half of 2025, Bloomberg columnist David Fickling reports. In the US, by contrast, EVs have stalled out at less than 10% of all new-car sales, and large electric trucks are nowhere.

But the US isn’t the world. Most of the world is rapidly following China into renewable electricity and EVs. Renewable energy think tank Ember reported this summer that 63% of all “emerging” economies had a higher percentage of solar in their generation mix in 2023 than the US, which was at just 9%. Those 2023 numbers provide the latest comprehensive view available. But China has been exporting more solar, wind and batteries worldwide since then, despite high new-energy import barriers erected by Biden and raised by Trump. Ember reports a 60% surge in solar panel exports to Africa in the year ended June 2025.

2. The notion that oil and natural gas use can and will grow indefinitely is being written into the script by oil companies and by Washington.

In fact, hard data show world oil demand up by barely over half of 1% so far this year. Oil sales could easily shrink in 2026 if economic growth slows — as many now expect. In China, diesel and gasoline consumption are already in decline, thanks to EVs, and one big state oil company forecasts national oil use overall will peak this year. Another sees peak in 2027. This from a country that accounted for more than half of all the world’s oil demand growth over the previous decade. 2025 oil demand growth is also negligible in India, which many forecasters had pointed to as a likely next driver of global growth after China.

But that’s not how the oil companies tell it. They admit but are obscuring the Asian oil slowdown by technical adjustments to their forecasts. Leaving aside big swings related to the Covid pandemic, changes in global oil usage have been miniscule for years. This means small adjustments can have big apparent impacts. For example, a year ago, both BP and Exxon in their global “Outlooks” were showing peak demand by 2030.

However, adjusting the “scenarios” it uses to frame likely trajectories for oil and other energy consumption allowed BP to delay its projected peak by five years, to 2035 or beyond, even though the growth it shows over those five years adds up to barely 1%. On an average annual basis, that’s less than 0.2% — an amount that could easily result from counting and estimating errors. The reasoning behind Exxon’s change is murkier. They simply claim that, on current trends, fossil fuels will still provide 55% of the world’s primary energy in 2050, while wind, solar, geothermal and hydro combined will provide just 14%. What transition?

This bullish playacting may soon get harder to sustain, as both oil and international gas/LNG markets are heading into gluts. Supply is outpacing demand growth, and prices could easily go into a tailspin. That’s arguably what Trump wants, but it will hit US oil companies in the pocketbook and leave them vulnerable to a stock-market selloff — especially if there’s also suspicion that demand may never fully rebound. Investment in the US oil and gas patch is down, and layoffs are spreading, including by Exxon. “We are bleeding,” one oil field executive told a Dallas Federal Reserve survey.

3. A couple of Chinese policy twists are helping the oil industry’s PR campaign. One is additions to strategic oil inventories. Another is lowballing UN climate pledges.

China does not publicly report changes to the volumes in its “strategic” oil stocks. But “barrel counters” who follow such things estimate additions this year at anywhere from 400,000 to over 1 million barrels per day, equivalent to roughly 0.4% to 1% of global oil consumption. That 1 million b/d is also well above most estimates for all growth in oil use worldwide this year, implying there might be no growth if China quite building inventories.

Why Beijing is adding so much to storage is a matter of debate. It may want to be in a position to heavily affect, if not control, oil prices by buying or selling from stocks. Or it may want insurance against a US move to block tankers from bringing Mideast oil to China. Or it may see a war coming. Who knows? But the result of late has been to prop up oil prices that would otherwise be falling as a result of high sales by Saudi Arabia and others in “Opec-Plus” designed to reverse a long policy of shutting in production capacity in order to support the price. This Chinese policy could change at any moment.

Then there’s the similarly unexplained oddity of Beijing’s highly cautious approach to so-called Nationally Determined Contributions in the UN Climate process. President Xi Jinping by video during a UN General Assembly meeting in late September pledged a new NDC for China of 3,600 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity by 2035. That’s a lot, and it’s packaged with a pledge to provide 30% of the country’s energy from non-fossil fuel sources by 2035. China’s earlier pledge was for 1,200 GW of solar and wind and 25% non-fossil energy by 2030.

In fact, though, China has 1,600 GW of solar and wind now, in 2025, implying it is more than six years early in reaching its previous 2030 target and on track to being another five years or more early in reaching its 2035 NDC. Again, why China is doing this is anybody’s guess. They may fear that a rapid fall will be interpreted by many not as success on the climate front but as a sign that the economic downturn is worse than China shows in GDP-related output numbers. But regardless, the results are evident: Oil company forecasters use Beijing’s highly cautious pledges as a basis for predicting continued growth in China’s fossil fuel demand.

4. Climate change and the weather catastrophes by which that change announces itself are being detached from all discussion of renewable electricity and EVs. The energy transition is being assessed in the US mostly as a matter of what’s cheapest.

In fact, of course, heat records continue to fall, killing thousands more people across large parts of the globe. Storms and floods get more destructive and deadlier worldwide, as do droughts. Ice caps and polar ice cover are disappearing at unprecedented speed. These are things that can’t and aren’t being ignored. They’re just being treated increasingly in a vacuum, at least in the US. Trump’s energy policies have nothing to do with fires in Los Angelos, much less drowned children at Christian camps last summer in Texas. Or floods in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the economic comparisons between fossil fuel and renewable energy that Trump focuses on are subject to policy manipulation. Blocking entry to the US of the lowest priced EVs and solar panels, which come from China, helps Trump’s case. So will a collapse in oil and natgas prices if it comes. So does simply ignoring skyrocketing property insurance costs in California, Florida and other climate-challenged states.

One big question is how long the rest of the world will continue to give the US a nearly free pass on the climate-destructive aspects of its energy policies. Rather than crumbling under pressure from Trump and promising to buy more US oil and LNG, countries worldwide should be lambasting Trump’s climate stupidity, to use a favorite word of his. But will they?

Dissonance in Energy & Climate was originally published in The New Climate. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Strengthening America’s leadership of the Western camp was Part 1 and it’s nearly done. What comes next?

Trying to fit seeming random and sometimes conflicting actions of US President Donald Trump and his crew into a rational framework is arguably a fool’s errand. But having come through largely unscathed from previous forays into Trump policy analysis, I’m prepared to take another stab — aided by bits and pieces from post-colonial and world-systems theories.

A two-part strategy has taken shape around Trump’s campaign to Make America Great Again by rebuilding American manufacturing and making sure everyone everywhere knows who’s boss: the President of the United States, i.e. him.

Part 1 centers on strengthening the US standing within the “Global West,” the “core” that includes developed Asia-Pacific nations Japan, Australia, and perhaps South Korea, as well as obvious members the EU, UK, and Canada. After initial hazing to bring home the point about who’s boss, most of these countries have now concluded suitably humiliating but also vague and largely unenforceable trade deals. Trump himself was personally involved in “negotiating” most of those deals.

What diplomats would traditionally have described as the “hard part,” pinning down details, will presumably continue. Whether Washington will turn a blind eye or Trump will throw a stink when promises aren’t kept — such as the clearly fantastical EU commitment to buy an amount of US fossil fuels that would cover 85% of its energy imports — is unknowable for now.

Given time, a few more factories may be built in the US as a result of those trade deals — although rapid progress on that front seems less likely after the administration’s over-the-top treatment of South Korean and other employees brought in by Hyundai contractors to get a car-battery factory up and running next to the big automaker’s giant EV plant in Georgia.

Folks everywhere from Tokyo to Mannheim will have read about the handcuffs and shackles put on Korean engineers, and seen the videos US authorities issued showing it all. This will make it a lot harder to get ordinary Japanese, Germans, etc. to come over for meetings at US factory sites, much less do extensive training and machinery start-up, even if their governments continue to lick Trump’s boots in order to avoid losing access to the Almighty American Consumer.

But however that develops over time, the tough love, first part of Trump’s strategy for spreading global disorder now looks to be winding down. The headline deals in which Trump personally is involved are mostly done. It’s time to move out from the core to the “semi-periphery.”

Bloodier Eastern Front

Part 2 of Trump’s strategy aims at trying to ensure that neither China nor any of the other middle-income economies can continue down the path of rapid GDP growth resulting from exports of cheap manufactured goods to the US. It also aims at preventing somewhat poorer ones such as India, Vietnam, and South Africa from getting a firmer foothold on that path to glorious GDP growth.

That development path is what Trump and his team blame for the US slide into indebted consumerism — with some justification but few grounds for shifting blame to China or anywhere outside Washington.

It’s the development path that worked for Japan, and the so-called Asian Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. It’s the path that broke America’s post-World War II near-monopoly on global manufacturing — here Germany figures historically, as well — and turned the US into an importer rather than an exporter, and a debtor rather than a creditor nation. It’s the pattern that was working brilliantly for China until Trump called time-out in 2016.

It was a strategy in which every US government under presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama actively acquiesced. It gave Americans extraordinarily cheap consumer goods. It also allowed Washington to consistently spend more money than it took in through taxes, borrowing the difference at low interest rates from manufacturing countries in Asia who saw Treasury bonds as a safe place to stash the dollars earned from their sales to US consumers.

Those nations could have given more of the proceeds back to their own citizens, of course, but that’s not how the development model works. It’s not how the game is played unless or until a nation ceases to have the abundant cheap labor — unusually coming in off farms and through rapid population growth — needed to attract investment from US and other corporations looking for high profits.

It’s the path that Trump is determined to block from here on out. Blocking that path is a critical piece of what MAGA is all about. As the old model functioned, not only did the manufacturing governments limit the income flow to their own citizens, but the biggest consuming government of them all, the US, designed and operated the Global Economic System so as to give ever more money to its banks and corporations, and ever-less to ordinary Americans.

All this means that Trump cannot settle for kowtowing and airy promises with the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and others who have joined that club more recently — the way he did with America’s fellow core countries on the Western Front. To accomplish his goals, Trump needs to slow or halt the export-led growth that put China and potentially other BRICS on a path to overtaking the US in the size of their economies.

China and the other BRICS are the real risk to US global supremacy, not Europe or Japan, whose days of colonial supremacy or cheap-labor and export-fired growth are long gone. And US supremacy — its global economic, financial, and pollical leadership — is what the fight is all about, even if Trump and his Maga buddies often phrase the argument in largely domestic terms.

Much More BRICS Bashing

This is what is now clarifying. It’s the West versus the BRICS. For all the drama, Trump’s Canadian, EU, Japanese, and South Korean deals were merely about strengthening the US position within his own “developed world” team ahead of the real battle, with BRICS.

Hence the comparatively astronomic 50% US tariffs on India and Brazil. They may yet be able to get relief, but only if they offer sufficient obeisance and sever their ties to China. For the moment, neither Narendra Modi nor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva appears to see that as politically palatable. India was ready to jump into the US camp earlier this summer, but it has now “flipped to China,” in the view of many. Trump’s determination to take credit for negotiating an end to a brief war between India and Pakistan in a way that Modi found humiliating is part of the reason. Lula’s poll ratings rise everytime he ignores Trump’s emotional defenses of his political opponent Jair Bolsonaro, recently convicted of trying to stage a coup.

As a neighbor exercising control over the flow of immigrants arriving at the US border, Mexico occupies an ambiguous position in the game. So do the Arab Gulf oil states with their control over the price of oil and the other fossil fuels Trump is retaining as the base for American economic power.

So does Russia, perched as it has been for centuries between Europe and China. For the moment, the Ukraine War has pushed Russia into the arms of the Chinese. Trump wants to lure them back, but the Europeans who happen to be in power in Germany, France, and the UK at the moment are determined to prevent that. Different, more populist governments that are threatening to break through the barricades in all three countries could change that entire equation — as could a Russian breakthrough on the battlefield. It’s impossible to call.

Even the EU is in a somewhat ambiguous position, given its dependence on China to achieve its climate and energy-independence goals, with the alternatives being a return to reliance on Russian natural gas or almost untenably heavy dependence on the US for fossil fuels. As I’ve argued elsewhere, China’s dominance of solar and other renewable electricity gear and of electric vehicle manufacturing, and Trump’s determination to keep the US dominant in and dependent on fossil fuels, have made energy a critical weapon in what will almost certainly be the determining battle in these trade wars: The struggle between the US and China.

Beijing’s skillful diplomatic use of the control its rare-Earth monopolies provide over much of the US economy, and Xi Jinping’s resolute refusal to play Trump’s games, have ensured the centrality of the China-US confrontation for the ongoing rewrite of the rules of the global economy and its geopolitics. It’s the battle for the “core” position in a post-post-colonial world. All the talk about multi-polarity suggests there could be two or more cores, and maybe that’s how things will develop. But it’s not clear that either Trump or Xi sees it that way.

Trump’s Two-Part Strategy — Part 2 was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Population change is getting very political, very quickly, in lots of places. Fertility rates — the average number of children women have in their lifetimes — have plummeted, leaving the worldwide estimate now at 2.2, only marginally over the 2.1 deemed by statisticians to support a stable population over time. China, Japan, and South Korea are all actually losing population. The US and most European countries would have shrinking populations, too, except for immigration. Only Africa is showing solid indigenous growth, and even its rate is dropping rapidly.

For those of us who see climate change, ecological degradation, and resource depletion as massive crises facing humanity, this is fantastic news. Fewer humans born will probably, hopefully translate into a lot fewer deaths from climate catastrophe and disease spread by overpopulation. But we live in a growth obsessed culture, and have for the more than 200 years since the British industrial revolution of the early 19th Century spread growth-dependent capitalism around the globe.

The “grow or die” ethic is deeply rooted in the way many of us see and assess what’s happening in the world. Stability sounds nice, but when it comes to specific situations, people rarely see it as feasible. However, giving up on growth is not just necessary. Increasingly, it seems inevitable. That’s true for the population. It’s true for GDP (gross domestic product). For resource exploitation. For so many aspects of modern life.

What’s more, growth in each of these areas is intertwined with growth in the others. An expanding population, for example, supports GDP growth, which drives energy demand growth. Energy demand needs to grow rapidly to serve a growing population — thus necessitating continued inching up in demand for fossil fuel use — even in the face of rapidly spreading renewable electricity that displaces coal and natural gas, and electric vehicles that displace oil use. Or so oil companies and their defenders regularly tell us.

Asia Twists, Turns

East Asia has been ground zero for the plunge in fertility rates in recent years, taking over from Europe. And more recently, South Korea has emerged with the lowest-of-the-low birth rates in East Asia, dropping to just 0.72 in in 2023. Last year, South Korea’s fertility edged back up for the first time in years, to 0.75, just as some South Korean companies began handing out cash to employees who had babies, regardless of gender. In the well-publicized case of one mid-sized company, the payout was equivalent to over $70,000 per child. That’s on top of already substantial tax breaks and other benefits being handed out by the government.

The fertility rate looks like hitting 0.8 this year, according to reports out of Korea. Cause and effect aren’t clear, but that’s what happened. Even so, official calculations show a likely 30% drop in population within less than 50 years, possibly starting this year. That’s because, in addition to fertility rates still well below half the 2.1 needed to support population stability, the “birth cohort” from the early 2000s was relatively small, and this is the group now reaching childbearing age. Population shifts have momentum that results from earlier growth and degrowth patterns, and in much of East Asia, that momentum is currently pointing to lower total births ahead.

China has been in absolute population decline for roughly four years now, and its fertility rate was only marginally over 1, at 1.01 in 2024, according to UN estimates. China, too, is now offering childcare benefits and cash payouts of $500 per year or more per child under three. Japan has been losing population for years, and its fertility rate of 1.15 in 2024 continues to slide.

India, the world’s most populous country, now has a fertility rate below replacement levels, at 1.9 in 2024 and still falling. Indonesia has hovered marginally above replacement rates in recent years, between 2.13 and 2.2. Vietnam has hovered just below 2.1, and a state-supported news service warned last month: “A silent generation of ‘Three Nos’ is emerging: No home — No marriage — No children.

The Financial Times recently ran an article on one of the most fascinating reactions to this downward turn: Japan, despite its long reputation for being unfriendly to foreigners, is accepting a growing body of relatively well-to-do and well educated Chinese people, who are choosing to move to Tokyo. With the number of Chinese living in Japan approaching 1 million, the trend is seen as having an impact on real estate prices, leading “some [to] predict a full nationalist backlash,” writes the FT. So far, the article says, Chinese authorities have paid little attention to these emigrants, but that could change if there’s any indication that Chinese living in Tokyo are combining to form a “meaningful” source of potential opposition to the regime in Beijing. In any case, Japan feels it needs more people.

Can America Be “Great” If It’s Shrinking?

One factor cited by the Financial Times for the movement of Chinese intellectuals to Tokyo is US President Donald Trump’s overt antipathy to foreigners coming to the US. Trump’s scare tactics have already succeeded in radically lowering the number of immigrants showing up at US borders, and he is now doubling down on dramatic shows of using federal law enforcement officers and troops from the National Guard to expel undocumented foreigners.

An early September raid on the site of a large Hyundai EV manufacturing plant and battery factory construction site in the state of Georgia, which resulted in the reported arrest of 300–450 South Korean citizens, certainly sent a message: The Thursday raid “was front-page news for most of South Korea’s daily newspapers on Saturday, with footage of workers shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles and marched onto buses causing rage,” Bloomberg reported. This should disabuse anybody in Asia of the thought that US anger was directed mainly at Mexicans and Central Americans. Perhaps that was the point.

The political impact was heightened by the fact that Trump had met and signed a trade “deal” with the president of South Korea just two weeks before — a deal that included promises of massive manufacturing investments by Korean companies in the US. Hyundai alone has pledged $26 billion in US spending, much of it from back in the Biden years.

A stunning concurrence of events saw the announcement in July, just a month before the Hyundai and other worksite raids by immigration police, that the US fertility rate slipped under 1.6 in 2024. It’s been less than the 2.1 needed for stability since 2007, after nearly 30 years near replacement level. The US population has continued to grow overall though — thanks to immigration. What happens now that Trump has not only quashed new entries at the border — legal and illegal ones alike — but is aiming to send home or otherwise scare off from going to work millions of people who are already in the US illegally. In the staunchly pro-Trump farm belt of middle American, farmers are voicing fear that they may not have enough workers to harvest crops this autumn.

To help bring the numbers into perspective, just over 3.6 million babies were born in the US in 2024, official numbers show. The Pew Research Center reported that the overall number of immigrants (legal and illegal) in the US fell by more than 1 million in the first half of 2025, to a total of 51.9 million. That’s 15.4% of the population. Pew estimates that not quite half of those are naturalized US citizens and just over one-quarter are legal green-card holders or have short-term work visas, leaving roughly another quarter as illegal. That would be roughly 13 million people.

Trump’s aim seems to be not to try to physically deport all those people, but rather to stage occasional very high-profile and aggressive raids that will scare most illegal and some legal immigrants into going back home — on their own tab. No bills for Washington to pay.

I Ask…

The question I’m posing is how the US public, and Trump himself, will respond if he’s successful in that strategy, leading to shortages of workers that harm strong supporters like those in the farming community. Leading to constraints on the manufacturing construction that is at the core of his policy. And, ultimately, leading to falling population numbers for the US. Remember, population is supposed to grow, just like everything else. Indeed, population growth is arguably a pre-requisite of growth in everything else, from GDP, to church and school attendance.

Many Americans think only wimpy Europeans — and more recently, Japanese, South Koreans, and Chinese — don’t have enough babies to grow their population. The US hasn’t had enough for years now either, as noted, but that fact has been hidden from sight — people don’t look very hard — by the population growth that goes with relatively strong immigration. Population will get political when they realize they were, and are, wrong. There will doubtless be efforts to spur people to have more children. But with few economic or other expensive benefits to back it up — the kind of benefits traditional Republicans have just slashed in new tax legislation — the experience of other countries suggest just words won’t work.

Politicizing Population was originally published in No-Nonsense Musings on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.