Carbon and the New Imperialism

2026, much like 2025, has gotten off to a fierce start with fresh crises, uncertainty, and instability. Much like last year, the eye of our present geopolitical storm is Donald Trump, whose gaze has turned towards Greenland. Conditions have since escalated, with nearly every member of NATO deploying token military forces in support of Denmark and Greenland against a possible US invasion and Trump threatening new tariffs on the EU in retaliation at time of writing. The politics of empire, it seems, are on the march.

Less visible yet equally present in this geopolitical confrontation are the politics of energy. Just beneath the surface of the growing confrontation over Greenland is the fear that Europe is too dependent on US energy exports, especially natural gas, to effectively confront the Trump regime. How, some argue, can the EU effectively stand up to a power who is responsible for providing the energy that heats their homes, powers their businesses, and keeps the lights on across the Union? 

These energy realities have once again exposed the dangers of the energy politics of fossil fuels while drawing attention to the security offered by renewable energy. Energy transition, when viewed in this light, promises a world where the incredible leverage enjoyed by oil and natural gas producers willing to weaponize their energy for political gain will soon be a thing of the past. The specters of fossil fuel power and energy crisis which have haunted much of the modern era may soon find themselves banished by the growing renewable energy transition. This threat of exorcism has spurred fossil fuel power to increase their support of authoritarian politics in the vain hope that fascism will halt energy transition and preserve the influence granted by control of energy resources.

The most visible example of how the power of fossil fuels manifests is through control over the flow of oil and natural gas. Cheap oil and gas can float an economy to prolonged prosperity just as disruptions or shocks to fossil fuel supplies reliably depress economic growth and significantly increase inflation. These problems took center stage for Europe in 2022 when Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, disrupted the international oil and gas markets, and unleashed the latest oil shock.

This was, in part, because Europe, prior to the war in Ukraine, long depended on Russian natural gas for energy. Russia provided one-third of all of Europe’s natural gas supply and European leaders long feared Putin would use this leverage to extract concessions from EU members with tactics similar to Russia’s 2015 halt of gas exports to Ukraine. Even though a larger shutdown has not occurred, natural gas prices experienced a serious shock following the outset of war due to the destruction of key production facilities in Russia & Ukraine, the collapse of Russian exports, and sanctions against Russian corporations. This sent shockwaves through the continent as energy price hikes further weakened the heavily disrupted, vulnerable post-lockdown global economy. 

Resolving the Russian energy crisis has, somewhat ironically, created the conditions for the present American energy crisis.  Though energy transition was and is a priority in the EU, the quick and easy solution to the 2022 energy crisis was swapping Russian gas for increased imports from the United States, a policy which Biden and Trump, initially, were more than to happy to oblige even though these exports have contributed to rising energy bills at home. These supplies, along with growing renewable energy capacity, were why the EU voted in late 2025 to phase out all Russian natural gas imports by 2027. 

Unfortunately for all involved, Trump’s obsession with becoming the latest fascist to invade a place best known for subzero temperatures has eclipsed all reason. The EU must, once again, face a fossil-fuel-brandishing strongman who is willing to weaponize European energy supplies in the name of territorial conquest. But this time Europe lacks an easy alternative source of natural gas. The EU’s members have, thankfully, been building their renewable energy systems, in part because of these energy security concerns, but current rates of construction still lag behind demand. One recent study from Nature argued it is possible for the EU to replace up to half of their natural gas consumption with solar and wind by 2050 but this will require substantial, targeted investments focused on overhauling the most natural gas-dependent sectors to achieve. Truly solving this dependency will require even greater investments and international cooperation to ensure the needed commodities, technologies, and production systems can flow freely between economies pursuing renewable energy transition.

If energy politics were only facing such problems then that would be quite a significant burden. Unfortunately, Europe’s natural gas crisis is one facet of a larger pattern of behavior.  Its cause is the rise of renewable energy which has created an existential crisis for the fossil fuel industry. In the world of fossil fuels, value is derived both from what the fossil fuel industry pumps out of the ground and discovered but not yet exploited oil and gas reserves in the Earth. If, however, they were replaced with renewable energy then oil and gas would transform from two of the most valuable industries on the planet to ground zero for the implosion of the carbon bubble, an asset bubble based on the climate-destroying assumption that the fossil fuel industry will drill, pump, and refine every scrap of energy they’ve claimed. Energy transition would also spell doom for the finances of the authoritarian regimes of Putin’s Russia and Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia.

These existential stakes are essential for understanding why the response from the fossil fuel industry to these realities has been doubling down on their support for far-right, authoritarian politics. The United States and United Kingdom are probably two of the clearest examples where oil wealth has joined with far-right politics in a bid to preserve the empire fossil fuels has built. Donald Trump, quite famously, enjoyed the support of the oil industry in both of his presidential campaigns even though his 2024 run followed his January 6^th coup attempt and the exposing of many of his other criminal activities. Clearly bigoted, antidemocratic politics are an acceptable price to pay for the fossil fuel industry if it meant guaranteeing the smorgasbord of giveaways promised in Project 2025 and its promised destruction of the renewable energy threat. This support is also only the latest in a pattern of patronage by fossil fuel wealth of evangelical, right-wing Christianity, MAGA precursors like the Tea Party, a history of cooperation between the industry and authoritarian regimes as detailed by journalist Steve Coll, and over four decades of climate disinformation campaigns conducted despite Exxon’s scientists knowing climate change was happening and was driven by growing fossil fuel emissions.

This approach has jumped across the Atlantic to influence British politics. Recent investigations into the funding for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party have found the bulk of his party’s funding has come from wealthy fossil fuel interests. The party’s platform on energy leaves no question why; Reform has promised to revitalize the UK’s oil and gas sectors while actively rolling back support for renewable energy. These incentives and Reform’s denunciation of net-zero as economic suicide are clearly more than enough for the fossil money behind Farage to overlook his party’s lust for mass incarceration and mass deportation.

This drive for unfettered fossil fuel exploitation may also be manifesting in the politics of the Arctic in a truly nihilistic fashion. Control of Greenland, as it turns out, is a critical component to Project 2025’s Arctic strategy.  Their Arctic policy flows from the following core assumptions (Project 2025, p. 189):

The United States has several strong interests in the Arctic region. The rate of melting ice during summer months has led to increased interest not only from shipping and tourism sectors, but also from America’s global competitors, who are interested in exploiting the region’s strategic importance and accessing its bounty of natural resources.

Greenland is named as essential for executing Project 2025’s Arctic policy of asserting US primacy, a telling contrast to their silence on preserving the fragile Arctic environment or respecting the region’s indigenous inhabitants.  While Greenland is not explicitly called out for its resource wealth, the Arctic policy’s emphasis on securing the region’s vast potential, the island’s known yet mostly inaccessible mineral deposits which include significant fossil fuel reserves, and Trump’s consistent demands for access to Greenland’s minerals suggests they are very much on the regime’s mind.  The only fly in the ointment is these resources are currently quite inaccessible but if, as the Arctic policy states, the climate were to further warm due to unrestrained fossil fuel use or a sufficiently unscrupulous government took charge then it might become possible to exploit the wealth of the Arctic.

It also just so happens that such a mentality may already be shaping policy for one major petro-state with significant interests in the region.  A 2024 study in WIREs Climate Change by a group of sixteen US Russia experts concluded that Russian policy, from Putin down, has been following a consensus for the past decade that climate change would actually be good for the Russian economy.  The reasoning is that a warmer world means more of the Russian tundra could be used as farmland and the 80% of all natural gas and 17% of all oil reserves in Russia located in the rugged Arctic regions would be economical to exploit.  Such policies go hand in hand with Russia’s prolonged, deliberate climate disinformation dissemination through outlets like RT and Sputnik, their opposition to any form of fossil fuel phase-out at COP 30, and support for fossil fuel-friendly far-right political parties as shown in research conducted by Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian energy transition advocacy organization.  In other words, these petro-bosses have concluded the best response to the ecological crisis posed by a warming Arctic is doubling down on the activities which caused the problem and exploiting the consequences to the fullest possible extent.  

Even though the potential energy crisis posed by Trump’s threatened invasion of Greenland is thanks to the disruption of needed natural gas supplies, this crisis has further exposed much deeper questions on the politics of energy. The European Union’s present economic vulnerability to fossil fuel pressure is a pointed example of how a truly free and democratic society is not possible when the kings of oil and gas can threaten their stability, pollute their information systems, and poison their politics at a whim. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was born by declaring independence from the rule of the British monarchy. Today, we must do the same with the petro-kings and the unreliable energy which has enthroned them or suffer under the boot of fossil fuel fascism and climate catastrophe.

Featured image is "Flag of Greenland"