The Hidden Cost of Our Oil Addiction
Let us abandon diplomatic niceties and confront an uncomfortable truth: Western obsession with Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs is not random geopolitical posturing. For over a century, foreign interventions in these regions have been fundamentally driven by one factor—the fossil fuels buried beneath their soil.
Iran's Democratic Betrayal
Consider Iran's current status as a Western adversary. This hostility traces directly to 1953, when Winston Churchill's government orchestrated a CIA-backed coup against Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh's crime? Attempting to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to prevent foreign exploitation of Iran's resources. The successful coup reinstated the brutal Shah dictatorship, sowing seeds for the 1979 revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power. Without Western oil greed violently crushing Iranian democracy, the current regime might never have existed.
The Myth of Free Market Capitalism
Step back from this specific history, and a broader pattern emerges. The notion of "free market capitalism" stands as one of history's most successful deceptions. True freedom involves none of the following: resource plunder, military enforcement against resistance, profit shifting from poor nations to wealthy ones, labour intimidation, consumer deception, rent extraction, or environmental cost dumping. These are coercive, expensive practices where markets barely exist—land, commodities, and labour are often simply stolen, while public resources like oil reserves are gifted to private monopolists at bargain prices.
The rich receive state bailouts during crises while the poor are left to sink or swim. This system depends on military might to deliver resource profits—especially oil profits—to banks, shareholders, commodity traders, and hedge funds. Simultaneously, a vast persuasion infrastructure of lobbyists, media, and social media algorithms ensures that amoral, bellicose leaders are selected to maintain commodity flows for capital, regardless of human cost.
Underestimating Public Will for Change
This system deliberately obscures public desire for transformation. For instance, 89% of people globally want stronger climate action, yet most believe they're in the minority. During the Covid-19 pandemic, majorities worldwide hoped for a post-crisis world prioritising health, wellbeing, and environmental protection over economic growth. Instead, governments spent billions restoring dysfunctional systems.
As green technologies threaten hydrocarbon industries, fossil fuel interests have tightened their grip on governments and media, funding climate denial and dissuasion campaigns. Politics has grown harsher, less open, and less tolerant—a democratic recession largely driven by fossil fuel interests. The entire planet suffers this resource curse.
Oil's Role in Empowering Capitalism
Oil did not create capitalism, but it has massively extended and empowered it. Reducing oil dependency disrupts some of the world's most violent, exploitative relationships. It defuels dictators, war machines, coups, assassinations, invasions, and nuclear threats. While conflicts over water, land, and minerals would persist, the scale of violence would diminish significantly.
Most importantly, breaking oil addiction defuels the greatest violence humans have waged against each other: climate breakdown through environmental degradation. The political and environmental emergencies are inseparable. We need an anti-war footing with wartime urgency—an emergency programme to eliminate fossil fuels faster than any government currently plans.
The Path Forward
Initiatives like the National Emergency Briefing, which organises volunteer-hosted cinema screenings to pressure governments for proper crisis explanation and full-scale mobilisation, are crucial. Critics cite costs, but consider this: the UK Climate Change Committee estimates that a single fossil-fuel price spike like 2022's costs roughly the same as achieving net zero by 2050. Trump's attack on Iran could trigger an even larger spike. Oil spikes give us nothing in return, while net zero delivers a new, more secure, cheaper energy system.
Defeating the fossil fuel machine is not easy. Capital will use every tool to stop us, as Extinction Rebellion discovered with harsh new UK protest laws, Standing Rock campaigners found facing oil pipeline opposition, and global south Earth defenders experience through paramilitary violence. Resource control drives politics; democracy often feels like a lightshow on castle walls.
Concentrated fossil power leads to concentrated political power.With less fossil fuel dependency, we might have avoided Presidents Trump and Putin, the ayatollahs, and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Fossil fuels push the world toward autocracy. Overthrowing demand for them overthrows much current tyranny. Imagine a greener, cleaner, cheaper, kinder, fairer world—what a beautiful possibility awaits if we break this destructive cycle.
