Pirates of the Anthropocene

"I assume we're going to keep the oil."

I don’t know enough maritime law to tell you exactly why it’s wrong for America to be dropping troops onto tankers to seize them—just to say that, no matter what legalistic excuse the administration cooks up, it looks exactly like being a pirate. (It’s worth remembering that the US Navy was founded largely to take on piracy, and thanks to the Barbary corsairs, the early Americans had a lot to say about the subject. George Washington, for instance: pirates are “enemies to mankind.”)

But I can tell you this. In the ever-shrinking mind of our current president, the reason why it’s good to seize a tanker is because it carries oil, and oil is the source of all strength, his contemporary equivalent to pieces of his eight. It’s “a large tanker, very large,” Mr. Trump explained, continuing (inevitably) to describe it as “the largest one ever seized actually.” When asked what would happen to the cargo, he said “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”

Oil is, and always has been, at the center of our concerns with Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven reserves (though much of it is in the incredibly dirty and hard-to-recover form of tarsands). At the moment it’s a major supplier to China, and it claims sovereignty over a major oil field in Guyana which has attracted big investment from Exxon and Chevron. So if you wonder why we’ve been attacking “drug boats” from Venezuela on the grounds that they’re carrying fentanyl, which Venezuela does not produce, that may give you some sense. Indeed the pressure has been so intense that the Maduro government in Caracas apparently offered to essentially turn over its oil and mineral resources to America in October negotiations; we’ve apparently decided we’d rather just take them.

This kind of coercion on behalf of the hydrocarbon industry is becoming old hat for the Trump administration. It’s used tariff policy, for instance, to force country after country to agree to buy huge quantities of American liquefied natural gas. As CNBC reported last spring regarding one deal with the EU

“They’re going to have to buy our energy from us, because they need it,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can knock off $350 billion in one week,” the president said. The European Union faces a 20% tariff rate if it does not reach a deal with Trump.

(Justin Mikulka has a pointed take on why this strategy won’t work for the LNG industry, and new data emerged this week showing just how badly it is going to penalize Americans who depend on propane for heating, since they’re now competing with so many other places for our supply of natural gas).

And of course in another sense we’ve been pirating the atmosphere for more than a century, filling up what is a common property with our emissions—America got rich burning fossil fuels, and the main result for other countries will be an ever higher temperature.

But for the moment let’s just think about the flow of oil, because it’s been behind, in large part, so much of the geopolitical tension of the last hundred years. Japan’s quest for oil played some real role in the attacks on Pearl Harbor; Germany invaded the USSR in no small part to secure the oil fields of the Caucasus. The Suez crisis hinged on the transport of oil to Europe. OPEC seized on our thirst for oil as a powerful weapon in the 1980s, and America’s determination to keep oil flowing has determined much of our global stance in the postwar years—I’ll never forget a sign I saw at an early demonstration against the war in Iraq: “How did our oil end up under their sand?”

The point here is that conflict like this is probably inevitable as long as the world depends on an energy source that is available only in a few places. Control of those places becomes too important—you end up with oligarchs, and with people who want to topple them.

So how nice to imagine a world where location doesn’t matter—where instead we depend on energy from the sun and the wind, available everywhere. In the crudest terms, it’s going to be difficult to fight a war over sunshine. No one will ever seize a tanker to get at its supply of solar energy. Which is good news for everyone except those profiting from the current paradigm—Trumpism represents its dying twitches, but obviously those twitches can do great damage, as the last 24 hours indicates.

Yes, we need sun and windpower to take a bite out of the climate crisis. But we also need it to take a bite out of the authoritarianism crisis. Our job is to make this transition happen faster; every new solar panel erodes just a little bit the logic of oil imperialism. The push for clean energy is the push for peace.

In other energy and climate news

+A federal judge has struck down Trump’s order stopping work on offshore windfarms.

The judge ruled in favor of a coalition of state attorneys general from 17 states and Washington DC, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, that challenged Trump’s day one order that paused leasing and permitting for wind energy projects.

Andrea Joy Campbell, the Massachusetts attorney general, hailed the ruling as a victory for green jobs and renewable energy.

“Massachusetts has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into offshore wind, and today, we successfully protected those important investments from the Trump administration’s unlawful order,” Campbell said in a statement.

Special shout out to the Alliance for Clean Energy, an NGO that joined the suit

Marguerite Wells, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, said: “As we look to build the electric grid that will power America’s future, wind energy is a key component. It is currently one of the most cost-effective ways to generate power, and is being used successfully not only in the United States, but across the world. With this ruling behind us, projects can now be judged on their merits. We thank the attorneys general who helped us get this case over the finish line.”

And here’s a fine report from Dana Drugmand making clear that when these big offshore windfarms get built they work like a charm

Benthic monitoring results indicate that the project is actually co-existing with the marine environment, as the turbine foundations function as artificial reefs supporting a variety of species. “We have some amazing underwater photos showing the sea life that’s developed around the foundations of the South Fork, and it’s beautiful – mussels, star fish, barrel fish surrounding the site,” National Wildlife Federation’s Amber Hewett, one of the organizers of the boat tour, told me. She said that fishermen, even ones who fish recreationally, have testified during hearings that the fishing has actually improved in this area.

As for generation output, South Fork has achieved an average capacity factor of about 46 percent for its first year of operation, and for the first half of 2025 the capacity factor average was even higher at 53 percent, which is on par with performance data for natural gas plants in New York. “It’s doing really, really well and probably exceeding our expectations for power production,” Hansen said of the wind farm’s performance. Moreover, he noted that South Fork Wind was found to be generating about 92 percent of the time. “[The project] is not very intermittent. It’s pretty consistently producing power almost all the time,” Hansen said.

+Just noting for the annals that the EPA spent the week systematically scrubbing mention of climate change from its websites. As Shannon Osaka reports

In October, the EPA page on “Causes of Climate Change,” for example, included a statement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that noted, “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.”

That clear statement has been deleted from the page, which now mentions only climate changes from natural sources, such as volcanic activity and variations in solar activity.

A spokeswoman for the administration offers an entirely rational and low-key explanation

“Unlike the previous administration, the Trump EPA is focused on protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback, not left-wing political agendas,” Brigit Hirsch, EPA press secretary, wrote in an email. “As such, this agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult.”

Take that, physics!

+As Oliver Millman reports, the fight against new data centers is really heating up. It’s taken a little while for civil society to figure out the dimensions of this new threat, since it’s springing up in so many places, but this week

A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.

The green groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Food & Water Watch and dozens of local organizations, have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and exacerbating electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year.

“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate and water security,” the letter states, adding that approval of new data centers should be paused until new regulations are put in place.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg points out that even if you wanted data centers, you’d need to build solar and wind to power them

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment right now to get the power to supply this,” said Robert Whaley, director of North American power at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy. “In the next 10 years, there’s really nothing to replace renewables.”

+Paul Greenberg on why climate change might cause us to think a bit differently on holiday gift-giving.

An estimated 30 percent of unwanted holiday gifts go directly in the trash. There they off-gas their CO2 into the atmosphere as the landfill slow-cooks them. The luckier gifts sit on our shelves, descending from visibility to obscurity, eventually heading toward the garage

+Interesting: China has planted so many trees in an effort to slow desertification that it’s changed the way water is distributed across the country.

Between 2001 and 2020, changes in vegetation cover reduced the amount of fresh water available for humans and ecosystems in the eastern monsoon region and northwestern arid region, which together make up 74% of China’s land area, according to a study published Oct. 4 in the journal Earth’s Future. Over the same period, water availability increased in China’s Tibetan Plateau region, which makes up the remaining land area, scientists found.

“We find that land cover changes redistribute water,” study co-author Arie Staal, an assistant professor of ecosystem resilience at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science in an email. “China has done massive-scale regreening over the past decades. They have actively restored thriving ecosystems, specifically in the Loess Plateau. This has also reactivated the water cycle.”

Meanwhile, Amy Harder reports that China is not just dominating the race for global EV dominance, it’s actually extending dramatically the margin of its lead. Quoting a new report from McKinsey, she writes “not only is China winning the clean energy race, but it’s picking up the pace when most other economies — including the U.S. — are slowing down.”

+New recycling processes means that 99% of the nickel and cobalt from batteries can now be recovered. As Georgina Jedikovska explains,

Often referred to as “urban mines” due to their abundance of critical metals such as nickel (Ni), cobalt (Co) and manganese (Mn), Li-ion waste batteries have become a pivotal focus in the global push for resource recovery.

+Asia’s sodden autumn continues apace, with virtually the entire region reporting flooding. Lyndal Rowlands:

On Indonesia’s Sumatra, many survivors were still struggling to recover from the flash floods and landslides that hit last week as Indonesia’s meteorological agency warned Aceh could see “very heavy rain” through Saturday, with North and West Sumatra also at risk.

Aceh Governor Muzakir Manaf said response teams were still searching for bodies in “waist-deep” mud.

However, starvation was one of the gravest threats now hanging over remote and inaccessible villages, he said.

“Many people need basic necessities. Many areas remain untouched in the remote areas of Aceh,” he told reporters.

“People are not dying from the flood, but from starvation. That’s how it is.”

Last week’s flood came as two typhoons and a cyclone swept through the region at the same time, causing heavy rains, which experts told Al Jazeera are becoming more likely due to climate change.

And here, from Dyna Rochmyaningsih, is a truly chilling estimate of the impact

In late November, three tropical cyclones — Senyar, Ditwah and Koto — devastated cities and villages in countries around the Indian Ocean. In Indonesia’s Sumatra, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, torrential rains, high winds, landslides and flash floods killed at least 1,000 people, buried homes beneath metres of mud and destroyed roads and bridges.

The storms’ destructive scale is close to that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, as Muzakir Manaf, the governor of Aceh, Indonesia, said in a statement. However, the world has mostly overlooked this emergency. Millions of people have been displaced, and many are sick or starving, yet aid has been slow to arrive. Few people have recognized the cyclones’ unusual nature and what they herald for the world’s future.

The rainfall was so intense that it created ‘a rough sea on the land’, as my friend in the Sumatran city of Langsa told me before we lost contact. One week of non-stop deluges induced a powerful tsunami-like river current that washed away concrete bridges, dragged giant timber trees from encroached forests and inundated people in their homes.

+Finally, if you like diving into the technical details of the energy transition, here’s an engaging video about a new form of electric motor—an “insanely efficient” one, which is saying something since even the current generations of electric motors are far far more efficient than their internal combustion counterparts.