The Trump Administration's recent attempts to achieve "energy dominance" via fracking and gas exports has been rightly met with serious concerns by environmentalists throughout Europe and the wider world as a move that will put the environment in peril and hold Europeans hostage to US exports. What has received less attention, although it is equally significant, is fracking's potential to forever undermine the chances for Third World sovereignty, Palestinian activism, and a global redistribution of wealth under a regime of degrowth.
In July 2017, the Trump administration unveiled the term "energy dominance" to describe a key plank in the American plan for global economic and strategic hegemony. But although the State Department under former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has pushed the policy into the limelight, it has long been an aim of the US, especially under President Obama, whose TTIP and TPP trade deals would have greatly aided American companies, like Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) in pushing their fracking and pipeline agenda.
These deals were also part of a push by the United States to re-emerge as an exporting country, a status it lost in the 1960s and was further exacerbated by the events of the 1970s.
In the 1970s, the Arab world discovered their potential to influence the policy of the Global North through their control of the world's primary energy source. At the same time, the Soviet Union began to tap their own oil supplies and link up with radical nationalists in the Middle East and elsewhere.
It was a threatening time for multinational corporations, who were increasingly and correctly recognised as the cause of inequality and alienation by Third World leftists, student anarchists, and even states. It was also a time when the governments of the Global South were pressured into using their energy weapon to push for the rights of Palestinians and national liberation movements across the world. The United States and Israel could do little when, at the height of Third World and Soviet power, the UN General Assembly accurately declared Zionism to be a form of racism, linking it with great foresight to apartheid South Africa.
By 1978, Germany and France were holding "North-South Dialogues" in an attempt to satisfy Third World demands with a massive transfer and redistribution of wealth. The United Nations began to draw up plans for a "New International Economic Order," where planned economies facilitated this sort of transfer.
Degrowth, first brought to public attention by the Club of Rome and Rene Dumont, was even seriously considered as a policy option in many First World countries, including the United States, where the Democratic Congress attempted to pass a ban on large cars.
The NATO countries wriggled their way out of this situation in a few ways. Germany, France, and Japan pushed to develop sources of energy not dependent on Third World sources. Germany went all in on coal, with RWE, the company behind today's pillage of the Hambach Forest, becoming a key player in the "energy wars" against the state socialist bloc (for this and other crimes it was targeted by anti-NATO communist and anarchist guerillas like the Red Army Faction and Action Directe).
France, meanwhile, sought to build up nuclear power as the main alternative to Libyan oil.
Japan, highly dependent on oil, moved towards nuclear as well, with disastrous consequences that are now well-known.
At the same time, the United States developed a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia, enshrined in 1974 under a deal with far-reaching effects. The Saudis would receive unwavering US support militarily in exchange for cheap oil and investment in US treasuries that gave America debtor nation status, but an unsurpassed economic and financial might, increased via the financialisation of the US economy, leading in many ways to the neoliberal policies that have held the world in an icy grip ever since.
The Third World, and the USSR, lost much of its power and ability to bargain with the Global North. But after the Cold War ended, Russian gas companies began to develop a strong foothold in Western Europe. Meanwhile, insurgent leftist regimes in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, and especially Venezuela, began to hold greater sway in international trade organisations designed as playthings of wealthy US investors, such as the WTO. This, along with the fiery activism of alter-globalisation campaigners, threatened to unravel the power of US Empire.
It was at this point when the Obama administration pursued a policy of all-out support for the extractive industry at home, with fracking, pipelines, and the shale boom sending world oil to rock-bottom prices and causing the economies of Venezuela, Iran, and other Third World nations into a tailspin. These moves were vigorously opposed by US activists and indigenous peoples against ecocide, who were treated as full-scale combatants in the global battle for energy dominance, subject to teargas, infiltration, and lethal force.
The fall in gas prices did not fail to effect America's old allies the Saudis. The "Saudi Vision 2030 Plan," the main priority of the current crown prince, outlines a programme of diversification for the nation's economy, one warmly received by American companies like Google, itself an important player in the US service export business. Among other steps, the plan also outlines plans to pour money into US infrastructure, including fracking and extractive sites, via the BlackRock investment firm owned by Trump's friend Larry Fink.
Most significantly, the Saudi national oil company Aramco will be partially privatised, with firm potentially becoming the most valuable company in the world. Theresa May and Donald Trump have bent over backwards to accommodate the regime in order to get Aramco shares on their countries' stock exchange.
Theresa May has lured the Crown Prince with arms and publicity, but the Trump administration has offered something far greater- a chance at regional hegemony. It has sat back while Saudi armies have committed genocidal acts against the people of Yemen, and aided the regime in its proxy war with Syria.
The US-Saudi prize, however, is Iran. Drunk on the power of cheap oil from fracking, the two powers have aligned with Israel in attempting to wipe out the Third Worldist network of regimes that, whatever their faults, oppose neoliberalism and unstoppable economic growth- Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and the Palestinian people, who are only protected from total ethnic cleansing by the solidarity of Third World people, the European Left, and Arabs who have, thanks to fracking, lost much of their bargaining power.
The US plan for the Middle East would also target the people of Afrin with the creation of a Saudi-Israeli proxy in the region. Aligned with Turkey, the Islamist regimes have already taken on greater characteristics of subfascism-defined as a fascistic politics coupled with extreme inequality and domination by the multinational corporations.
It is the left, activists, and ordinary people of the Third World, Europe and the US who more than anyone have the power to stop this agenda. Pipelines, fossil fuel depositories, and nuclear plants are weapons of war in today's environment. Opposition to these, the trade deals that facilitate them, and the governments that support "energy security" as a policy, has scared states so much that they have begun to seriously crack down on activism and human rights in the metropole.
But Third World solidarity campaigns for unbowed peoples, such as the Palestinians and the Kurds, frighten the states of Europe, North America, and Israel most of all, as they only hint at the potential power of the world's oppressed majority, inside and outside the metropole, that could bring down their toxic, ecocidal global hegemony forever.
These deals were also part of a push by the United States to re-emerge as an exporting country, a status it lost in the 1960s and was further exacerbated by the events of the 1970s.
In the 1970s, the Arab world discovered their potential to influence the policy of the Global North through their control of the world's primary energy source. At the same time, the Soviet Union began to tap their own oil supplies and link up with radical nationalists in the Middle East and elsewhere.
By 1978, Germany and France were holding "North-South Dialogues" in an attempt to satisfy Third World demands with a massive transfer and redistribution of wealth. The United Nations began to draw up plans for a "New International Economic Order," where planned economies facilitated this sort of transfer.
Degrowth, first brought to public attention by the Club of Rome and Rene Dumont, was even seriously considered as a policy option in many First World countries, including the United States, where the Democratic Congress attempted to pass a ban on large cars.
The NATO countries wriggled their way out of this situation in a few ways. Germany, France, and Japan pushed to develop sources of energy not dependent on Third World sources. Germany went all in on coal, with RWE, the company behind today's pillage of the Hambach Forest, becoming a key player in the "energy wars" against the state socialist bloc (for this and other crimes it was targeted by anti-NATO communist and anarchist guerillas like the Red Army Faction and Action Directe).
France, meanwhile, sought to build up nuclear power as the main alternative to Libyan oil.
Japan, highly dependent on oil, moved towards nuclear as well, with disastrous consequences that are now well-known.
The Third World, and the USSR, lost much of its power and ability to bargain with the Global North. But after the Cold War ended, Russian gas companies began to develop a strong foothold in Western Europe. Meanwhile, insurgent leftist regimes in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, and especially Venezuela, began to hold greater sway in international trade organisations designed as playthings of wealthy US investors, such as the WTO. This, along with the fiery activism of alter-globalisation campaigners, threatened to unravel the power of US Empire.
Under Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon-Mobil, the Trump administration has explicitly ratcheted up these efforts, with the US congress and media acting to smear anti-fracking protestors as "Russian-directed," while Trump himself bragging about his energy policies before the well-heeled crowd at Davos.
The fall in gas prices did not fail to effect America's old allies the Saudis. The "Saudi Vision 2030 Plan," the main priority of the current crown prince, outlines a programme of diversification for the nation's economy, one warmly received by American companies like Google, itself an important player in the US service export business. Among other steps, the plan also outlines plans to pour money into US infrastructure, including fracking and extractive sites, via the BlackRock investment firm owned by Trump's friend Larry Fink.
Theresa May has lured the Crown Prince with arms and publicity, but the Trump administration has offered something far greater- a chance at regional hegemony. It has sat back while Saudi armies have committed genocidal acts against the people of Yemen, and aided the regime in its proxy war with Syria.
The US-Saudi prize, however, is Iran. Drunk on the power of cheap oil from fracking, the two powers have aligned with Israel in attempting to wipe out the Third Worldist network of regimes that, whatever their faults, oppose neoliberalism and unstoppable economic growth- Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador, and the Palestinian people, who are only protected from total ethnic cleansing by the solidarity of Third World people, the European Left, and Arabs who have, thanks to fracking, lost much of their bargaining power.
It is the left, activists, and ordinary people of the Third World, Europe and the US who more than anyone have the power to stop this agenda. Pipelines, fossil fuel depositories, and nuclear plants are weapons of war in today's environment. Opposition to these, the trade deals that facilitate them, and the governments that support "energy security" as a policy, has scared states so much that they have begun to seriously crack down on activism and human rights in the metropole.
But Third World solidarity campaigns for unbowed peoples, such as the Palestinians and the Kurds, frighten the states of Europe, North America, and Israel most of all, as they only hint at the potential power of the world's oppressed majority, inside and outside the metropole, that could bring down their toxic, ecocidal global hegemony forever.
