Just possibly it's the oil?

A solar panel is the new peace sign

It’s far too early to prophesy the effects of the American attack on Venezuela, though recent history provides plenty of ugly warnings.

And it’s a thankless task to list all the reasons for the attackj, from Epstein distraction to a sphere-of-influence carve-up of the planet (watch out Taiwan) to the basic idea that Trump opposes any and all restraint on his power. (The UN charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” The U.S. constitution: The Congress shall have the power…To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”) Also, so much fun playing Army: here’s the president of the U.S. this morning: “I watched it literally l like I was watching a television show. If you would've seen the speed, the violence -- it was an amazing thing."

(I think we can take it for granted that the stated charges from the attorney general this morning are not the reasons, since pretty much everyone agrees that that Venezuela is not a big drug exporter to the US and the president just pardoned the president of Honduras who actually was a serious pusher. Oh, and “Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns” is something we now encourage for Americans.)

But the chart at the top of this small essay is certainly suggestive. Those are the countries on earth with the biggest oil reserves, and they are almost without exception the same places we’ve been involved in endless fighting or, in the case of Canada, endless threatening. (Greenland, by the way, also has significant oil reserves; it put them off limits in 2021, banning oil exploration on climate change grounds). We probably don’t care much about human rights violations in Venezuela, because human rights are not currently on the top (or the bottom) of our State Department’s concerns (except for white South Africans). But we almost certainly care deeply about that oil. In fact, it’s not exactly hidden—here’s what Trump said in mid-December.

"They took our oil rights — we had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back."

And as he said this morning on Fox News, regarding the Venezuelan oil industry:

“We’re going to be very strongly involved in it.”

I do not, in the short run, know of a way to rein in this kind of imperialism. Congress as currently constituted will not stand up to Trump, and we don’t get a chance to start reconstituting Congress till November; even if the Democrats controlled the House and Senate and even if they grew some serious spine, it’s not clear how they’d prevent this kind of overreach. Without the two-thirds of the Senate needed for impeachment, it’s become increasingly clear that the constitution is a nominal document.

But I do know how to dramatically reduce the motivation for this kind of grab, and that’s to convert the planet off oil as fast as possible. Oil is unique in being extremely valuable, extremely dense and hence relatively easy to hoard and control, and extremely concentrated in a few places around the world. It is a curse to those places —look again at the list above, and with the exception of Canada ask yourself how well they’ve been governed. (And Canada’s oil wealth may yet be its undoing, as Alberta threatens over and over to disrupt the nation unless it gets its oily way). And it is a curse to the planet—because of the climate crisis, obviously, but also because anything worth this much money will inevitably destabilize international relations. As the late Richard Cheney, then the head of oilfield-services giant Halliburton, remarked in a 1998 speech,

“The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is.”

But what it it the business wasn’t there any more? What if we could, simply by supporting an environmentally and economically sound transition to clean energy, remove the reason for the fighting? I don’t know how to stop the bully from beating people up for their lunch money—but what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money? Not for the first time, and not for the last, I’m going to make the observation that it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.

What I’m trying to say is, if you’re for peace and democracy, then a solar panel is a valuable tool (and a valuable symbol, a peace sign for our age). Every one that goes up incrementally reduces the attractiveness of the oil that underlies so much conflict and tyranny. Right at the moment treaties and charters and constitutions offer limited protection at best; we should work to restore the national and global consensus that makes them valuable, but we should also work to push out the kind of energy that can’t be hoarded or controlled.

Why does Trump hate solar and wind energy so passionately? It’s because they’re somewhat outside his or anyone else’s control. A nation that builds its prosperity on oil makes itself a target; a nation that depends on imported oil to survive makes itself a vassal. A nation (say, China) that rapidly builds out its own supply of energy from the sun—energy that can’t be embargoed or effectively attacked, energy that is by its nature decentralized, energy so spread out that no particular bit of it is all that valuable—is a nation that can go its own way.

America is, by any definition, a rogue nation this morning. It does what it wants, without effective constraint by anyone. It, in the image of its leader, is a bizarrely destructive and absurdly oversized toddler, unable to reason beyond its own wants and impulses. We should try to teach it some manners, but we should also childproof the planet.

In other energy and climate news:

+A new study that provides one more reason for Trump’s psychosis. Apparently, many men downplay the threat of climate change for fear of appearing ‘feminine.’ The research, by Michael Haselhuhn in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, finds

that expressing concern about climate change is associated with traditionally feminine characteristics of warmth, caring and compassion and predicts that, because of this relationship, men who are more concerned about maintaining their sense of masculinity will express less concern about climate change.

Perhaps I’ve spent my life on this work because I’m well-grounded in my masculinity, or maybe I’m girly; I’m good with either.

+Nina Lakhani has been a vital chronicler of the climate movement for the last decade. She’s moving on from the Guardian but in her last essay for them she offers some useful observations:

Despite the UN climate negotiations in Belém failing to agree, yet again, to phase out fossil fuels, Cop30 did establish the first-ever just transition mechanism (JTM), a plan to ensure that the move to a green-energy economy is fair and inclusive and protects the rights of all people, including workers, frontline communities, women and Indigenous people.

While far from perfect, the JTM was agreed only after years of civil society organising, including impossible-to-ignore protests during Cop30. The mechanism represents an important step in putting people at the centre of climate policy after decades of technocratic fixes, according to Puentes.

There were also encouraging signs that a growing number of states – from the global south and north – have had enough of the inertia and obstructionism blocking meaningful action, and are prepared to stand with affected communities and go their own way.

Colombia and the Netherlands, backed by 22 nations, will independently develop a roadmap to fossil fuel phaseout, beginning with a conference in April 2026 in the coal port city of Santa Marta, Colombia. The plan is for states, cities, affected communities and health, science, human rights and other experts to share experiences and best practices, and implement policy ideas outside the snail-paced, consensus-based Cop process.

+Zohran Mamdani took control of New York this week, and environmentalists, among many others, are excited. Clark Mindock has had an inside look at some of what’s being planned

He promised to retrofit hundreds of public schools with modern HVAC systems, green spaces and rooftop solar — a goal that ties in with his message to make the city a more livable one. His platform also indirectly touches on sustainability through its focus on building dense housing stock near mass transit hubs.

And while improving public school efficiency may sound niche in a city as sprawling as New York, it isn’t. Buildings account for the vast majority of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions, and a recent study found that burning fuels for space and water heating accounts for around 40% of the city’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Enter what could be an area where Mamdani will have a lot of relatively quiet leverage: Local Law 97. The law, passed in 2019, requires reduced emissions in most buildings with at least 25,000 square feet in order to help make the city carbon neutral by 2050

The measure requires increasingly strict compliance measures, and the mayor will have sway over upcoming deadlines — specifically, whether to give big building owners some amount of leeway to comply with the law or pass regulations that require stringent adherence.

Mamdani, for his part, has promised to strictly enforce the law — a position among many that has created friction with the city’s powerful real estate lobby. The outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, came under fire during his administration for rules that delayed compliance deadlines and gave large building owners the ability to buy renewable energy credits to offset their emissions, which critics said gave well-heeled companies the ability to buy their way out of their obligations.

“If the mayor wanted to change certain regulations to make things harder, make buildings do more on-site, the mayor can exert significant control over the rulemaking process,” Katrina Wyman, a professor at NYU School of Law, told Landmark, noting that the next set of Local Law 97 targets will take effect in 2030 and include much more difficult obligations for building owners than those that have already been imposed. “That’s very important.”

+From the wonderful Somini Sengupta, an in-depth report on how solar power is beginning to quickly reshape Africa (and, by implication, why it’s such a threat to the big oil players)

No longer do South Africans depend entirely on giant coal-burning plants that have defined how people worldwide got their electricity for more than a century. That’s forcing the nation’s already beleaguered electric utility to rethink its business as revenues evaporate.

Joel Nana, a project manager with Sustainable Energy Africa, a Cape Town-based organization, called it “a bottom-up movement” to sidestep a generations-old problem. “The broken system is unreliable electricity, expensive electricity or no electricity at all,” he said. “We’ve been living in this situation forever.”

What’s happening in South Africa is repeating across the continent. Key to this shift: China’s ambition to lead the world in clean energy.

Over the past decade, while the United States ramped up fossil fuel exports, China has focused on dominating renewables. Today, Chinese companies make so many of the world’s solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries that they are slashing prices and scrambling to find buyers.

Tariffs have thwarted them somewhat in the United States and Europe, but they’re finding enormous new markets in Africa, where around 600 million people lack reliable electricity. Across the continent, solar imports from China rose 50 percent the first 10 months of 2025, continuing a trend, according to a review of Chinese export data by Ember, a British energy tracking group.

South Africa was the largest destination for Chinese solar, but not the only one. Sierra Leone imported the equivalent of more than half its total current electricity-generating capacity, and Chad, nearly half.

+Fron Spencer Glendon, a lovely meditation on lighthouses—which warn us to steer away from danger—and the climate crisis

I have come to believe that lighthouses are excellent symbols of the best aspects of civilization, the millennia-long process of settlement, urbanization, specialization, governance, trade, and overall complexity. When it works well, civilization enables people to plan, work together, learn from each other, make long-term investments, worry less about risks, and undertake adventures.

The wealthy people who advocated for and found ways to fund illuminated stone towers wanted their societies to thrive and worried that hard-to-see perils might undermine their communities’ chances at prosperity. These were people who understood uncertainty and risk. As Nancollas writes in Seashaken Houses, “Then, the sea was an unknown realm that could lead to new territories with resources to capture and exploit.” His book focuses on the remarkable structures that sit entirely on barely visible rocks and reefs off the coast of the British Isles:

It is not easy to establish an enduring presence in an unstable medium like the ocean. Firm structures are seemingly incompatible with this fluid setting. All too frequently, man-made things lose their buoyancy and plummet to the sea floor. Flotsam is ushered toward land and ground to pieces in coves until nothing is left, as though the sea is in a never-ending cycle of erasure.

+Benoît Morenne, writing in the Wall Street Journal, points out that fracking the Permian Basin—which includes reinjecting the briny water produced in the process—is causing some pretty wild problems

Producers in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico extract roughly half of the U.S.’s crude. They also produce copious amounts of toxic, salty water, which they pump back into the ground. Now, some of the reservoirs that collect the fluids are overflowing—and the producers keep injecting more.

It is creating a huge mess.

A buildup in pressure across the region is propelling wastewater up ancient wellbores, birthing geysers that can cost millions of dollars to clean up. Companies are wrestling with drilling hazards that make it more costly to operate and complaining that the marinade is creeping into their oil-and-gas reservoirs. Communities friendly to oil and gas are growing worried about injection.

+If you had a bunch of EVs, and you hooked their batteries together for the 95% of the time they’re not being driven, you’d have a honking big power plant—indeed, says Toyota, the four million EVs on the American road today would be the equivalent of 40 nuclear reactors.

While gasoline-powered cars can only send energy in one direction—into the wheels of the car itself—an EV’s ability to share power could be a huge boon to the grid as energy demand rises and costs rise along with it. According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Energy Department expects the average residential electricity rate to jump 4% next year, even after a 4.9% increase in 2025.

Clearly, EVs alone can’t solve that problem. And Toyota itself does not currently offer any EVs with V2G or V2L capability, unlike Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, General Motors and others. But it seems inevitable that Toyota will jump in eventually.

And as this scales, it could be more beneficial than many people realize. “By enabling bidirectional charging, we’re exploring how we can help customers potentially save money while also reducing carbon emissions from the grid,” Christopher Yang, senior vice president of Enterprise Strategy & Solutions at Toyota Motor North America, said in a statement. And that, he said, is “a win-win for drivers and the environment.”

+Perhaps not a great day to be touting the power of international law. But as Brett Simpson points out in the Atlantic, while we have covenants covering land and sea, the huge icy areas of the oceans are largely excluded

Much of the ocean’s center, the northernmost stretch surrounding the pole, will be subject to the lawlessness of the high seas—which will become a problem as more ships try to navigate a mushy mix of water and sea ice. And although the Arctic is the world’s fastest-warming region, and contains its most rapidly acidifiying ocean, it has few environmental protections. Scientists don’t have a clear idea of which species might need defending, or of the climate effects of unbridled shipping. (Ships puff black carbon, which reduces ice reflectivity and, in the short term, causes up to 1,500 times more warming than carbon dioxide.)

In October, the United Nation’s special envoy for the ocean, Peter Thomson, called for countries to agree to a “precautionary pause on new economic activities in the Central Arctic Ocean” to buy time to study the climate and environmental risks of increased activity. Others are asking for an agreement akin to the 2020 Artemis Accords, which committed 59 nations to the “peaceful” and “sustainable” exploration of space. But some polar-law scholars argue that curbing climate catastrophe may require a more radical reimagining: to make sea ice a legal person.

+Best graphic of the new year comes from the BBC, which has figured out a way to illustrate how solar power is growing in the UK. And hey, we need something warm to end on this bleak day.