Fossil fuels cause local pollution where they are produced and used, and their ongoing use is causing lasting harm to the climate of our entire planet. Nonetheless, meaningfully changing our reliance on fossil fuels has been seemingly impossible.
“We know that oil contributes to climate change most people polled would say even acknowledging the myriad other environmental problems — why do we still use it? Why don’t we just quit already?,” It's because of greed! We have found multiple good substitutes for oil, in terms of its availability and fitness for purpose. The five primary alternatives to fossil fuels are renewable energy, nuclear power, hydrogen, biomass, and geothermal energy. Renewable energy is defined as power derived from natural sources that can replenish themselves, such as wind, solar, tidal or hydroelectric. Although the supply is finite, oil is plentiful and the technology to extract it continues to improve, making it ever-more economic to produce and use despite the damage it is causing and its threat to human life. The same is also largely true for natural gas.
Many of us remember the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” in which a fictional corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, pronounced that “greed is good.” In his view, greed not only saves companies, it would also save America. As cynical as that statement is, it can be true. An industry’s greed can beneficial when perfectly aligned with the public good. But it is not true when greed is misaligned — that is, when industries profit by undermining public health, the environment, or even national security. Big oil is doing all of the above but we are trapped into maintaining it because our dollars value is based on continuing the profitability of oil not lowering it!
The system was developed in the early 1970s When Nixon made an executive order with the help of Wall Street make sure the Bretton Woods gold standard was ended. At the time, the United States entered into an agreement with Saudi Arabia to standardize oil sales in the USD. This would force every nation who wanted to purchase Saudi oil to purchase it with American dollars. The explanation for this relationship is based on two well-known premises. A barrel of oil is priced in U.S. dollars across the world. When the U.S. dollar is strong, you need fewer U.S. dollars to buy a barrel of oil. When the U.S. dollar is weak, the price of oil is higher in dollar terms
On July 1, 1944, as the battles of the Second World War raged in Europe and the Pacific, delegates from forty-four nations met at the secluded Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to participate in what became known as the Bretton Woods Conference. The dollar's status as the global reserve currency was cemented in the aftermath of World War II by the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, in which forty-four countries agreed to the creation of the IMF and the World Bank.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank share a common goal of raising living standards in their member countries. Their approaches to achieving this shared goal are complementary: the IMF focuses on macroeconomic and financial stability while the World Bank concentrates on long-term economic development and poverty reduction. The only problem is when a country doesn't want to accept the loan and would rather use its own resources to build itself then the "Big Guns" come out. Literally.
Countries are kept in debt perpetually by a system which takes monies earned by the country to pay off debt and hold all the country's assets in foreign banks. These banks mainly from the 44 originating nations hold the poor nations money and collect interest and utilize it to build their nations when a third world country needs money they must borrow their own money and pay compounded interest on that money as it is considered another loan!
But instead of canceling all odious debt, the IMF and WBG continue their predatory lending practice by granting onerous loans such as policy prescriptions like tax hikes, privatization, and other policies favoring corporate interests over nations' welfare, especially in the Global South. According to John Perkins in his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, the United States of America, “funnels money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources.”
The US has been using and is continuing to use institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank to ferment conditions that make developing countries subservient to imperial powers. institutions such as the IMF and the World bank, facilitated the advancement of loans to developing countries for the development of infrastructure, such as electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, etc., a condition of such loans always being that engineering and construction companies from the US must build all these projects. That means money doesn’t leave the US, “it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco,” leaving the already poor country riddled in debt.
Perkins makes a very shocking revelation. These loans are deliberately made so large that the poor country “is forced to default on its payments after a few years.” Like the mafia, the US will demand its pound of flesh, usually in a form of control over UN votes, installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil. This is modern day colonialism at work. “We cover conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics,” Perkins states. “If we fail, the (CIA) is always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown through coups or die in violent ‘accidents’. And if by chance the CIA fails, as they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq, then old models resurface, leaders are portrayed as evil criminals who their people are terrified of and young Americans are sent in to kill and die to protect profits.”
Fossil fuels the most profitable of the modern resource scramble has a long history at the heart of global conflict. It stems as far back as World War I when oil became crucial in the mechanization of armies — both the UK and US navies switched from coal to oil — but also as a catalyst for conflict, as the global thirst for petroleum grew. In fact the IMF rarely misses an opportunity to scare people away from green technology and ways to give the masses free energy. The current resurgent popularity of green industrial policy in the USA is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the protectionist provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were critical to the passage of the most significant US investment in climate action ever.
Yet we know that the plan of reducing US emissions 50–52 percent by 2030 will not be allowed to happen. The same protectionist provisions have deeply frustrated US trade partners and aggressively bend—if not altogether break—international trade rules under the World Trade Organization (WTO) regarding equal treatment of foreign and domestic oil suppliers. However, this friction may be only the opening salvo in a decade marked by green trade tensions. It would be naïve to think that the intersection of trade and climate policies will lessen—and not accelerate—with time. And fiscal analysts are gearing up to yell that the sky is falling and free energy will be the death of the dollar, while simultaneously the biggest investment areas are in green technology. Its like horse dealers in the 18th century laughing at the automobile publicly while trying to buy stock in the company privately!
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