It’s Time To Nationalize Our Oil Industry and Transition to Clean Energy
Eric Hetzel need to start having a conversation about something that could take
decades to accomplish but probably should’ve been started decades ago:
nationalizing the U.S. oil industry along with our other carbon
polluting fossil fuel businesses. However, unlike cases in other
countries from Iran to Venezuela,
the point of nationalizing the U.S. oil industry is quite the opposite
of its historical goal abroad. Rather than removing fossil fuel
exploitation from the private sector so all can share in the profits
reaped from the natural resources we all “own,” we need to nationalize
our fossil fuel industries with the eventual goal of shutting them down
entirely.
For the readership of Progressive Army, I hardly need to review the errors, excesses, and crimes of Big Oil, so I’ll keep this portion short. We all know that the burning of carbon-based fuels has created climate change which is causing the melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice in record levels
and the consequent sea level rise that threatens not only coastal
communities around the world but even the existence of island nations
like Kiribati. We all know that sixteen of the seventeen hottest years on record have happened since 2001, with 2016 being the hottest of them all. We all know (or should know by now) that Exxon Mobil knew about climate change and hid the truth from us.
We all know that more powerful storms, floods, fires, and droughts are
in store for us and we must tackle this problem. The big question is how
do we tackle it?
The #KeepItInTheGround
movement has exactly the right idea. If you could snap your fingers
tomorrow, you would transform the Earth into a world where we need no
fossil fuels and we have the ability to do exactly that – keep them in
the ground. But that is a fantasy. We need more than the Paris Climate
Accord which is a praiseworthy effort but falls way too short of the mark
to truly combat climate change. Among progressives at home and
seemingly everyone overseas, moving to an entirely green energy economy
is commonly talked about with goals like 50% renewable energy by 2030 in California or halting the building of new pipelines entirely
exciting those who care about the issue and giving us hope. Hope is a
great motivator but hope alone doesn’t write laws or execute fanciful
notions, as the previous administration demonstrated for us. So let’s
face it. None of these alone and all of these together are not going to
put an end to the largest problem standing in our way – fossil fuels are profitable.
As
long as the profit motive keeps powering the fossil fuel industries,
the titans of Big Oil are not getting out of the way for the good of
anyone – not you, not me, not marginalized communities
disproportionately impacted by climate change and certainly not for the
good of humanity itself. To make themselves as profitable as possible,
Big Oil has used its sway over our politics to take massive subsidies despite their even more massive profit margins. And with the amount of money that pours in
from Big Oil to our elected politicians, one can argue that the
opposite of nationalization has already occurred. One party is so bought
off that it’s willing, en masse,
to deny the science of climate change. The other party is bought off
just enough that while it might talk green, it pursued an “all of the above” energy policy
that didn’t threaten the fossil fuel industry and even helped it expand
one of its dirtiest practices, hydraulic fracturing. Our elected
representatives are supposed to represent all of us, not an industry
that is harming us. Big Oil has privatized our government. It’s high
time to turn that around.
Other
countries, cities, and regions have shown that it is possible to take
larger steps in the right direction despite the power of the industries
that might stand in their way. Denmark has just sold its last oil company and will use the profits from the sale to invest in green energy. Britain has banned the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2040. Catalonia has passed a law to reduce carbon emissions by 100% by 2050. In fact, climate change laws have increased around the world by a factor of twenty over the last twenty years.
These are all the kind of big ideas we need to truly combat climate
change. Unfortunately, they’re also all only small steps in the right
direction. But as the Tao De Ching teaches us, even a journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step.
all these steps begin a journey of a million miles for life on Earth as
we know it, we need bold decisive policies at home to do our part in
combatting climate change. Whether it’s New York State’s ban on fracking
or Obama’s now defunct coal reductions, they’re all small steps and
they all count. But they are dwarfed by the sheer size of the
competition. In 2015, America’s top six oil companies had revenues exceeding $730 billion.
We all know the golden rule – whoever has the gold makes the rules. So
we can talk all we want about a hundred percent renewable energy at some
point in America’s future, but it’s not going to happen as long as
these companies exist and continue to reap massive profits. The small
steps being made around the world threaten their revenue, but only at
the margins. They don’t threaten their very existence. And their very
existence is the problem.
So
the federal government needs to acquire, by any means necessary,
America’s largest fossil fuel companies and go through a process that
leads to, one day, shutting them down entirely. The first step will be
to take control of the companies. I’m open to all kinds of possibilities
from buying them outright (a few trillion dollars to save the Earth
seems like a bargain to me) to simply having the feds walk in, kick
everyone out and just take over the companies in a reverse form of
eminent domain. For the safety and security of the planet, it has to be
done. Even if we could agree on a price at which to buy these companies
to transfer them from the private sector to the public sector, it
doesn’t mean they would sell. That probably means we need to build the
political will to pass legislation allowing the government to
nationalize the industries, which will take years. Once these companies
are under the control of a powerful federal authority, a ten or
twenty-year plan to go from current extraction levels to minimal
extraction will have to be put in place. And while it might be nice to
dream of zero extraction, one also has to dream up renewable jet fuel
and renewable forms of every petroleum product in use today before you
can get to zero extraction. Yet another thing to be hopeful about.
Obviously,
nationalizing oil is politically impossible today. At any point, no
matter how bad the climate crisis gets, this won’t be easy. It will be
met online with tweets of “Communism!” and “Fascism!,” even if the two
are diametrically opposed. Serious thinkers will also make strong
arguments against nationalization. Just look at how people on the right reacted to the temporary nationalization of financial institutions
after the 2008 crash to keep them alive. Those same people are
perfectly happy with Rex Tillerson running the State Department as an
extension of Exxon Mobil, but the thought of the process working the
other way around and the government running Exxon Mobil will have them
screaming their fool heads off. At the same time, anyone who thinks
we’re going to get to a 100% green economy while private interests run
oil, coal and natural gas is kidding themselves. Add to that the
excesses of the Trump administration’s goals of killing the EPA and
opening up public lands and offshore territory to drilling and one
realizes that we’ve done far worse than cancel the Paris agreement,
we’ve swung the pendulum in the opposite direction in favor of fossil
fuels even further than most imagined before Inauguration Day.
Progressives
should be talking right now about swinging that pendulum back and
swinging it back as far as possible. This idea isn’t new and it isn’t mine alone.
These companies are destroying the planet and, in our up-is-down
system, they have the same rights as people. Well, someone actively
killing off people (as the droughts and storms of climate change are)
would be thrown in prison and stopped forever. It’s time we start
tackling how we let these companies pay the penalties a person would pay
and end their pathological attacks on the people of planet Earth.
