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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Does Big Oil want Venezuela’s broken infrastructure of heavy oil?
“Trump hasn’t minced words in his justification for the raid and capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro: he wanted to ‘take back the oil’ that was nationalized by the Venezuelan government.
“But even as their stocks ratcheted up in the wake of the raid, industry sources are saying that Big Oil is actually hesitant to make the expensive and risky investment in Venezuelan oil infrastructure. So what does Big Oil really want from Venezuela?
Antonia Juhasz — “I’m very much of the opinion that primarily what is happening is a combination of US oil companies’ long-standing interests in directing Trump’s actions; and then Trump being Trump, who’s a very difficult person to direct.
“If the greatest lie the devil ever told was to convince us that he wasn’t real, the greatest lie the oil industry ever told us is to convince us that they don’t want oil. They want to control when they produce it and how, and under what terms. They need to show a growing amount of oil that they can count as their reserves.
“There are very few big pots of oil left sitting around. The big oil companies were producing in [Venezuela] not that long ago, and they have wanted to get back into but on their own terms. What this is about is: Will there be terms that will make it worth their while to go back to Venezuela.
“They [also] want greater access. Exxon is also operating in waters offshore Guyana. Marco Rubio said we will defend Exxon from Maduro. This is a massive new production that Exxon started from scratch and has hardly cost them a penny, because Guyana is fronting the bill.
“So Putin maintains his sphere of influence, and [Crown Dictator] Mohammed bin Salman maintains his sphere of influence, and Trump gets his sphere of influence. Putin and bin Salman need a world committed to fossil fuels to maintain power. The United States is not dependent on fossil fuels at all, but US oil companies are.”
The Donald’s “Donroe Doctrine”
“An elite arm of the U.S. military kidnapped a notorious caudillo, Nicolás Maduro, killing his Cuban security detail. Yes, Cuba depends on Venezuela’s oil. Yet the precision extraction left Maduro’s political machine in place where it lords over a failing petrostate.
“After the illegal extraction, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, a convicted felon, said he will ‘run’ the country. The impetuous imperialist boasted that U.S. oil companies will revive Venezuela’s degraded heavy-oil infrastructure with billions of dollars and that oil will make Venezuela great again. Venezuelans, of course, have heard this promise before from demagogues of every political stripe.
“A central message emerges. In the Western Hemisphere no government is now safe from U.S. intervention. The United States now looks and behaves more like Putin’s mafia state, and wasn’t that the point all along?
“The second significant message concerns the Monroe Doctrine, [referenced in] last November’s new national security strategy. It must be read fully to be appreciated:
‘After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere’.
“The restoration of the Monroe Doctrine has a Trumpian twist: a focus on corralling energy resources in this hemisphere. Venezuela, you should know, contains the world’s largest proven oil reserves of some 300 billion barrels. Canada is fourth at 163 billion barrels. America’s shale fields, the source of light oil, are declining, and the U.S. empire carries a perilous debt load.
“In this new world disorder — a new Cold War really — the Russians claim that Europe should be theirs to control while the Chinese regard the Asian Pacific and much of Africa and Latin America as their rightful neighbourhood. As the United States has made plain in Venezuela, it will forcefully impose its will on the Western Hemisphere, a region that includes Canada, Greenland and Panama.”
Growth driven ecocide can be reversed by degrowth
“Let me start by putting things bluntly. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion, almost half of the world’s population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. The American president seems intent on making it so much worse.
“The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse-gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars.
“All of that is linked to the single-minded pursuit of economic growth [or GDP] by the owning and investing classes. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. The mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.
“If the corporate and political powers carry on with business as usual, such growth will end in chaotic, violent collapse (Think Mad Max). But if the elites can be thwarted and we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other resources in a reasonably well-planned way, we might be able to avoid that fate.
“That’s the pitch put forward by the degrowth movement. In essence, it’s a refutation of the ‘green growth’ doctrine that claims that technological ‘innovation’ will ensure that economies can continue to grow indefinitely. In that debate, degrowth finally seems to be getting a leg up. A 2023 survey of nearly 800 climate-policy researchers found that almost three-quarters of them favored degrowth or no growth over green growth.
“It’s ever more important that people in rich, overconsuming countries like ours stand up to the forces of ecocide. Starving militarism and automobile supremacy of resources, while improving the quality of life of our communities, would go a long way toward halting the ecological breakdown of this planet.
“Topping the list that a degrowth economy could starve would be the U.S. military-industrial complex. After all, the Pentagon is actually the largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world. To begin shrinking our military’s now trillion-dollar annual budget would not only prevent a significant amount of global warming but also save countless human lives and greatly enhance the quality of life in this country and across the planet.
“If human needs were no longer subordinated to those of gasoline-driven motor vehicles, our collective quality of life would improve dramatically. Motor vehicles are regularly among the top 10 causes of death for U.S. residents under the age of 55. With degrowth and the end of automobile supremacy, we’ll no longer risk being killed while simply walking, biking along a roadway.”
Strategies to advance a degrowth agenda
“I agree with what Jason Hickel wrote in a recent blog, that we need a mass political party that would implement a degrowth agenda, and that currently the degrowth movement does not have a political agenda or capability.
“I have advocated for a synergy of bottom-up and top-down strategy. Bottom-up follows scales from local to regional to (inter)national, rather than political hierarchies. Conversely top-down means strategy begins at the largest scale.
“Yes, we have to take power, but we cannot do it without mass engagement. We already know that degrowth is popular and its label is a strength not a weakness as many have remarked already. The 28% support in the US for the label ‘degrowth’ without a description attached is meaningful.
“The upcoming degrowth-friendly parties should consider the following: [internal] governance based on qualified sortition (random selection). Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, recently said that he is a strong advocate for sortition, and he is confident that people selected at random will rise up to the task.
“Let us be super frank: representative democracy is a failure and elections are a circus. If we want to reform democracy, elections have to be abolished. Getting degrowth done would require a separation of policy writing from policy selection.
“The policy instruments that hit the right-wing ethos hardest are those from the limitarian space: limits on wealth and rationing. A mass party should lead, loud and clear, with anti-capitalist policy proposals, and the idea that having too much is a really bad idea.
[Other strategies]: “Running candidates in jurisdictions where centrists often rotate with right-wingers. Designing policy that aims at the fundamental causal structure of capitalism. Joining or creating an international political alliance. Leaders should not be tainted with perceptions of elitism and credentialism. Significant effort should be deployed to popularize ethics of sufficiency.”
Strategies to advance a relocalized bioregional economy
“In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions. The fundamental follow-up question is, ‘How’?
“Bioregioning efforts are taking place all over the world, including those supported by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collaborative. It may be helpful to start by mentioning just four books [about] the rationale and overall direction of re-localization efforts:
- The Community Resilience Reader, edited by Daniel Lerch (2017)
- Ancient Futures, by Helena Norberg Hodge (1992)
- Surviving the Future, by David Fleming (2016)
- Think Like a Commoner, by David Bollier (second ed., 2025)
“Always look for a local option first. A great place to start re-localizing your food system is to support farmers in your bioregion. Shop at farmers markets and take note of the origin of foods you buy at stores. If your community has a food co-op, support it. And grow more of your own food, take a permaculture course, and join (or start) a community seed bank.
“We need more young farmers, but it’s a hard profession in which to get started. One of the biggest obstacles for young people wishing to farm locally and regeneratively is access to land. One solution is farmland trusts, ensuring the land stays in farming through tools like conservation easements.
“When many of us see the word ‘economy’ we think ‘money’. Most Indigenous economies functioned for millennia without money. Money has one big downside: it enables the accumulation — sometimes to absurd and dangerous levels — of wealth and social power.
“How can we keep distant financial centers from controlling and preying upon local enterprises? First, banks should be set up to serve the public good rather than rich investors. Ellen Brown has founded the Public Banking Institute, advocating for community-owned banks to keep money local. Another approach: credit unions, which are nonprofit local banks.
“Moving your community away from reliance on money means rebuilding the commons—a project that is the focus of several organizations (see Michel Rauchs’s article, Tools for Growing the Commons). Other slightly trendier but sometimes misleading names for the commons are ‘the sharing economy’ and ‘the gift economy’.
“Some of the most important new thinking about bioregional economics is expressed by David Bollier & Natasha Hulst, who propose an entirely new theory of value founded in the integrity of the living world, using an array of strategies including mutual credits systems (like time-banking), import replacement, and bounded market structures.
“More so than money, energy is the basic enabler of all economic activity. Fossil fuels are the world’s main current sources of energy. Bioregional energy efforts typically focus on four strategies:
- find ways to use less energy overall (conserve)
- localize electricity generation and control
- electrify more energy usage, and
- shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables.
“A healthy bioregional economy requires free sharing of accurate information, especially information that’s relevant to the history and sustenance of the bioregion. That seems a far cry from current reality in most places. Today, most information is produced via giant media conglomerates and often bubbling with disinformation. The solution: localize the ways information is produced, distributed, and processed.
“Until recently, most communities had at least one locally produced newspaper. Now, city papers are dying or being swallowed up by conglomerates. News flash: your smartphone does not hire local reporters. The same goes for local broadcast media that are being devoured by mega-corporations, often ones with far-right political agendas.
“Schools, at their best, teach not just general knowledge and skills, but how to sort and prioritize knowledge — critical thinking. Since a healthy bioregional economy requires thoughtful, informed people, local schools have a big role to play in nourishing the bioregional economy.”
Karmic cryptocurrency?
“SMPLE-KOIN is a hypothetical cryptocurrency inspired by Buddhism. It will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity.
“The goal is to solve critical ‘coordination problems’ in game theory, and thereby facilitate a global transition to ‘simpler’ lifestyles of sustainable consumption supported by degrowth economies. At the very least, this essay might help people walk the spiritual path of industrial civilization’s demise.
“The core thesis: A near-term future is envisioned in which civilization is shaped by an artificial superintelligence, a benevolent entity known as ‘Cholom’. Cholom creates a global cryptocurrency called SMPLE-KOIN, which is stored in digital repositories called Karmic Wallets. Accordingly, the goal in life is to become spiritually rich, as quantified by SMPLE-KOIN, the perfect unit of karmic accounting.
“Let us damn the Matrix together, in joyful and poetic revolt. Might there be times when less really is more?”
Non-capitalist finance embraces relationships, not profit-taking
“There is an urgent need to develop new types of finance to meet social and ecological needs at bioregional levels. Unfortunately, neither the financial industry nor national governments are likely to rise to this challenge. While many self-styled green initiatives purport to address ecological needs, they often perpetuate, in new guises, the core premises of conventional finance – value-extraction, private power, economic growth, hierarchical, top-down management.
“In this essay, we propose the framework for a new sort of non-capitalist finance that can support the eco-stewardship of place-committed projects and cultures. We call it relationalized finance, a term designed to accent the central role of relationships — practitioner care, participation, and community control in directing flows of capital. The point is to escape the dictates of conventional finance and support new types of socio-political relationships at bioregional levels, especially through commons-based projects and loosely bounded, socially embedded markets.
“A new sort of non-capitalist eco-finance requires more than ‘new plumbing’ for flows of money. It requires associated social transformations in organizational forms, relational practices, and social norms. That is the only way to catalyze effective, durable forms of eco-protection and restoration while building self-reliant, resilient, bioregional economies.”
Jevons Paradox, energy efficiency, and increased electricity use
“Mainstream economists and environmentalists share something in common — both tend to tout efficiency, and think better light bulbs are the solution to climate change and all our other environmental problems. But the little understood Jevons Paradox intervenes to overwhelm any progress that comes from improved efficiency. So I want to talk about EVs for a little bit.
“Well, you have an EV in your family. I have one. We’re not anti-EV necessarily as people, but there’s something going on with EVs right now, which is a lot of fixation on power. There’s a great piece actually that was published in Wired magazine called ‘EVs have Gotten Too Powerful’, and it talks about how there are all these super cars that have EV versions that can go like 200 miles per hour.
“Here we’re talking about this rapid increase in power, but the things are heavy too. I’ll just give you guys a few of the winners. So coming in fourth place is the Tesla cyber truck at 6,600 pounds. You got the Rivian R1T at 7,100 pounds. And as usual, the winner goes to that venerated Hummer SUV that’s almost 10,000 pounds — 9,700 pounds.
“People have touted the efficiency gains of electric vehicles over internal combustion engine vehicles. But what we’re seeing here is kind of the wrong type of efficiency that’s all about the efficiency of time — how quickly you can get from one spot to the other. It’s not about the resource efficiency.
“To think about measuring things differently, let’s think about the distance traveled per energy input into it. So you take the Hummer EV SUV, that’s 0.7 kilometers per megajoule. Well, back to the bike, my favorite piece of technology that humanity has ever invented. It’ll go nine kilometers per megajoule. So that’s almost 13 times more efficient than the fricking Hummer.
“So William Stanley Jevons was a British economist who in 1865 wrote a book called, ‘The Coal Question’. He actually covers a lot of stuff like limits to growth, overshoot, return on investment, and renewable energy alternatives. But what stuck around with his name is this Jevons Paradox. Here’s what he said verbatim: ‘It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth’.
“So it’s an example of a microcosm that just because it’s more efficient doesn’t mean you’re using less, right? You’re finding other ways to use it. I was wondering if we can take the Jevons Paradox and think of some of our favorite examples happening out here in the real world.
“The one that really hit me was refrigeration. Refrigerators have gotten way better — a lot more energy efficient — and as that’s happened, of course they’ve gotten cheaper. And so what happens, households now have huge refrigerators.
“This also expands out into the rebound effect because as people can have better refrigerators in the home, you can have more refrigerated products. The demand for that goes up. So now you’ve got stores with huge refrigerated sections. And you’ve got trucks running around carrying food. This demand begets that demand.
“Let’s talk about lighting, because we’ve actually seen tremendous gains in lighting efficiency just in the last decade or so. But what did we see? We see increased use of lighting all over the place, including at day. And having more of it because it’s cheap, right? You know how freaking many lights they put on billboards? And I’m sure you can find a billboard that’s advertising efficient LED lighting as its product.
“Hey, I’m saving money on my lighting, my home lighting or my home heating or whatever. Because I’ve saved that money, what am I going to use it for? I’m going to use it to get on a plane or on a cruise ship or whatever it is, right?
“Thank you, energy efficiency.”
Local resilient communities as response to system fragmentation
“The U.S. is in a crisis of historic proportions. The immediate challenge is a lawless administration that withholds funds appropriated by Congress, ignores court orders, and deploys camouflaged troops on city streets.
“The deeper challenge is a drift away from democratic institutions with the rise of an oligarchy increasingly concentrating power in its hands. Trump was elected with the backing of oligarchs such as Elon Musk. Overall, the guardrails against an increasing accumulation of political and economic control have been breached.
“It’s a glum picture. But every disease spurs its antibodies. Out of the crisis confronting us, communities of resistance are emerging. But we need to go further, to dig down into the roots of our crisis, to plant seeds for a new system that frees us from oligarchy.
“It is impossible to sort out the multiple crises facing us, political, economic and ecological. They are all mounting at once, and feeding off each other. So the one scenario I have to offer is an iteration and refinement of ideas under the rubric, building the future in place.
“We will not return to the situation as it was before. A hope for return to normalcy, say with the election of Democrats, is in vain. The system exhibits a kind of hardening of the arteries that makes it too rigid to make the deep changes necessary. Instead, the system is going to have to crack, and we need to prepare by acting now where we still have some level of democratic potential, to plant those seeds of a different order.
“It is a principle of contingency planning that you not only plan for the most likely possibilities, but also for worst case outcomes.
“First, the political system. We rightly fear the imposition of an autocracy. But the U.S. is a large and complex nation. When one element goes for absolute power, the most likely outcome is backlash and division. Some states and cities will outright deny federal authority. So while we might hope to restore some modicum of balance, we must prepare for national political breakdown.
“Next, the economic system. How many bubbles have been blown up by the oligarchy? Behind that is an unprecedented level of federal debt with interest payments now exceeding the military budget. The mass of people appear to be maxed out, struggling with food, electricity, rent, etc. Is a massive economic downturn around the corner? So while we might hope for a soft landing, we must prepare for a sharp economic break.
“Finally, the ecological underpinnings of it all. In the foreground is the climate crisis. But it’s not only climate. Increased prices for materials are ramping up construction costs. More areas are going water-short. The oligarchic powers have not paid heed to limits, and really cannot under an economic system conditioned on growth.
“These crises must be dealt with as a whole. The place where we can most effectively begin to craft responses and plant seeds is in our communities. In the U.S. especially, the bonds of community have grown thin. Thus, the solution is to rebuild connections at a local and bioregional level, to create caring communities that break through social isolation. There are so many ways to do this in civil society – mutual aid networks, community food banks, tool sharing, etc.
“The more we build solidarity at a community level, the stronger position we will have to resist autocratic moves coming from the federal level. It is hard to rule over communities that have a strong sense of self-awareness. No one locality or bioregion can do it on its own, so we need to find ways to work horizontally, networking across the landscape.”
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