2017 is shaping up to be a complete change and political watershed with significantly related world crises looming, including nuclear proliferation and risk of nuclear war, ecological kick back and cancellation of the Paris accord, and the reassertion of global oil and gas sector. It also includes possible trade wars, security conflicts in the South China Sea and Sino-fication of the Pacific, and blowback on migration in the rich Atlantic democracies with the corresponding rise of nationalistic populism, intensifying anti-globalization sentiments in Western deindustrial areas and the potential breakup of Europe. It does look like pieces of a global territorial puzzle with the deepening of Islamic jihadism even although ISIS has been contained and knocked back in the Levantine. There are signs of a corresponding and increasing focus on growing forms of Asian Islamic extremism, especially in Indonesia and a further Islamification of Malaysia.
Economically and politically, the shift represents the reassertion of oil and gas global capitalism where Trump’s presidency provides the perfect vehicle for the robber barons to take back what they consider they have lost under the reign of global liberal internationalism. This is a fundamental axial shift that makes oil buddies of Trump and Putin, signified by the appointment of ex-CEO of ExxonMobil Rex Tillerson’s appointment as Secretary of State. Tillerson developed close ties with Russia overseeing Exxon drilling project in 1996 signing a Production Sharing Agreement that became commercial in 2001 and approved by Russian government to begin full-scale construction in the Sakhalin-1 consortium in 2004.Footnote1 Tillerson brokered an agreement to drill for oil in the Russian Arctic Ocean (even though Obama made sure Alaska remains off limits for the time being) with Rosneft, the massive Russian State oil company headed by Igor Sechin—a long-time ally of Putin, ex-KGB and politician in his own right.Footnote2 The Exxon-Rosneft worth tens of billions struck oil in 2014. The containment of oil spills to Russian held territories in the region makes a mockery of national territoriality when considering the Arctic ecosystem.
Despite Obama’s late ban of oil drilling in the Federally owned areas of the Arctic and Atlantic to protect the unique Arctic ecosystem a Republican-controlled Congress may yet be able to rescind the law, viewed by some as a last ditch attempt by Obama to protect his climate change legacy against Trump’s climate change denying cabinet and his promise to renege on the US commitment to the Paris agreement. The White House Press released the joint US/Canada Leaders’ statement on 20th December.
President Obama and Prime Minister Trudeau are proud to launch actions ensuring a strong, sustainable and viable Arctic economy and ecosystem, with low-impact shipping, science based management of marine resources, and free from the future risks of offshore oil and gas activity.Footnote3
While Obama and Trudeau have blocked drilling in the Arctic until 2022 it is to be noted that Obama had some ten potential lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico in his proposed five-year draft program (2017–2022).Footnote4 Even although oil is not a scarce resource anymore, it seems likely that the Arctic will emerge as an environment flashpoint in the next five years along with Syria. It has been claimed that the international oil prices correlate with Russian politics and its aggressive foreign policy, and that the Saudi Arabia-US (Kerry-Abdullah secret) 2014 deal was really an oil gas pipeline war where Saudi full production and cheap prices was designed to weaken Russia and Iran.Footnote5 Europe, the second largest market, cut its crude oil trade with Russia to trade with Saudi Arabia. American’s status as an emerging oil and energy superpower strengthened during 2016 (especially shale gas), further weakening OPEC’s hold over the global market and Russia’s stranglehold over the European market.Footnote6
Oil and geopolitics have been strongly linked to US dominance over control and access of foreign fields in the period before 1970 when US oil production peaked and also determined US Cold War position with the Soviet Union after the first oil shock in 1972 (Painter, Citation2014). Part of Trump’s energy vision is to ‘Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves’.Footnote7 Trump’s intended geo-political actions of oil saturation has undoubted consequences for both Russia and Saudi Arabia. William Engdahl (Citation2016) writing for the New Eastern Outlook begins by clearly stating:
In a fundamental sense the entirety of the five-year-long war over Syria, as well as the entire Arab Spring from Libya to Egypt to Iraq has been about control of hydrocarbon resources—oil and natural gas—and of potential hydrocarbon pipelines to the promising markets of the European Union.Footnote8
The recent renewal of the plan to build a Russian-Turkish natural gas pipeline under the Black Sea to service both the Turkish and Southern Europe to be operational by 2019, leads Engdahl to suggest that ‘Putin has Trumped USA Energy War in the Mideast’. He argues that Russia’s decision to support Bashar al Assad in 2015 ‘is also strategically and geopolitically tied to the entire issue of the future supplies of European Union natural gas’.Footnote9
Trump’s plans also have huge consequences for the coming ‘environmental wars’ at home and abroad when he lifts the moratorium of coal and begins to dissemble the Environmental Protection Agency. Hydraulic and gas fracking will be encouraged as Trump eliminates all controls on exploitation of oil, gas and coal. This almost certainly will also lead to the cancellation of US commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement and an end to the curtailment of US carbon emissions which will jump significantly encouraging China and India to ignore the new Paris protocols. His policies could set back the environmental cause a generation.
To some extent Trump’s politics look like a consolidation of oil and gas allegiance of oil companies especially the appearance of a new compact between Russia and the US, and the growth of Russia at the expense of Europe, together with a greater regionalization with China as the major power in the Asia-Pacific which represents a major challenge to ‘Chimerica’ (and the Walmart consumer economy). Britain has been left out in the cold and will not easily be able to recapture its world status as a trading nation especially in a rewired anti-globalization sentiment against free trade signalled in another context by the fall of the TPP. Obama had promised a larger trading unity as part answer to the trading growth of China especially in the Asia-Pacific, and in part to foster American soft power in the region.
The TPP has quickly become a dead duck even though it had huge support from Obama and Pacific nations like Australia and NZ that are not part of any trading bloc that confers regional advantage. This was really to be Obama’s contribution to liberal internationalism to make the world safe for American business especially the digital service economy but now we have a retrenchment of oil and gas and a rebuttal of Obama’s unheralded trade diplomacy.
The Post-truth era also demonstrates how easily governments and multinationals can systematically lie as a mode of governance, utilizing natural bias and capitalizing on historic we-they attitudes in order to foster national unity and create enmities, religious conflicts, and divisions abroad while pursuing national self-interest.
Education, sometimes seen as a bulwark against discrimination, based on the teaching liberal tolerance and cultural understanding, risks become more nationalistic, and jingoistic in extreme cases with a more exclusive focus on national cultural values and hero worship of national values. One prominent example is the jingoistic redrafting of the national schools history curriculum by Gove in the UK.Footnote10 How easily the ‘Trumpists’ govern through manipulation of what the ancients called the manipulation of ‘the passions’. These official tweeters can whip up bad feeling against all outsiders and against Nature in the name of global capitalism (Peters, Citationin press).
All of this means that the ecological university and school become both more significant and yet more distant in policy terms. The worldwide the ecological movement will come closer into contact in zones of action and conflict with the reassertion of oil and gas as dominant form of global capital. The international and national courts will be less open to international climate agreements. At the same time the oil and gas sector will see natural alliance with a raft of new nuclear energy plants turning away from the emerging solar and wind industries. The results, an eco-nightmare, represent the brazen reassertion of oil and gas.
David Greenfield (2009) writes of an environmentalist eschatology short on theology: ‘The secular apocalypse of the eco-nightmare, the environmentalist Armageddon doomed to strike at an ever-changing date, is a green boschian vision of a sinful humanity being punished for its sins against Mother Earth’.Footnote11 Writing in a pre-Trump era he suggests the power of eco-nightmares ‘is leveraged to frighten and intimidate people into surrendering power over their lives and pumping untold billions into a variety of schemes to stop a crisis that doesn’t actually exist’. The litmus test for Greenfield’s counter-argument is about to begin when Trump comes to office on 21st January. The eco-nightmares about to unfold may represent a fundamental reversal of the popular momentum of international green politics but it may heighten environmental sensibilities and community action rather than diminish it. Whether Trump survives his first term is anyone’s guess. I think that he will quickly tighten his grip on power and the major contest for power will be at the end of the second term unless he is impeached or a conflict of business interests prevails or indeed he is deposed in the American way that also removed Kennedy and other presidents.
In The Age of Ecology the Weberian Joachim Radkau (Citation2014) traces the development of the environmental movement that has flourished since the 1970s and become a world ‘revolution’ by linking a series of single issue and somewhat disparate endeavours. Whether it has the power to become a truly global eco-social movement both anti-statist and anti-corporate will depend to large extent on the ‘movement’ is able to define itself in solidarity across all lines to formulate a climate action agenda in adverse times that heightens collective awareness and ecological consciousness to converge on a single and concerted history after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
University of Waikato
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Notes
1. The Odoptu field was identified as holding potential oil and/or gas reserves in 1977, followed by Chayvo (1979) and Arkutun-Dagi (1989), see http://www.sakhalin-1.com/Sakhalin/Russia-English/Upstream/about_history.aspx.
2. In the largest privatization deal of 2016 in the oil and gas field, the Russian government announced a sale of 20 per cent of Rosneft in a $11.3 billion deal to commodity trader Glencore and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/business/dealbook/russia-oil-rosneft-glencore-qatar.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FRosneft&action=click&contentCollection=business®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection.
References
- Engdahl, W. (2016). Russia trumps USA energy war in mideast, New Eastern Outlook. Retrieved from http://journal-neo.org/2016/09/17/russia-trumps-usa-energy-war-in-mideast/
- Painter, D. (2014). Oil and geopolitics: The oil crises of the 1970s and the cold war. Historical Social Research, 39, 186–208.
- Peters, M. A. (in press). Education in a post-truth world. Educational Philosophy and Theory.
- Radkau, J. (2014). The age of ecology. Cambridge: Polity Press.