How to End Wars for Oil: Stop Burning Oil Altogether

The U.S. military’s brazen kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, under orders from President Donald Trump, was all about controlling Venezuela’s oil supply. Trump has made no effort to conceal his intentions, proclaiming the morning after the kidnapping that “we’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in….We’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” Trump even volunteered that he had alerted all of the major U.S. oil company CEOs prior to the Venezuelan invasion, a gesture that he extended to no U.S. Congress members, Republicans included. Trump’s imperial adventure has clearly been undeterred by the fact that most of Venezuela’s oil reserves are of low quality—expensive to extract and refine—and the country’s existing extraction and refining infrastructure is decaying. 

This latest Trump foray into global oil geopolitics is, of course, nothing new. Only last November, Trump fawned over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salam during bin Salam’s White House visit. Trump was distracted from his nonstop groveling only once, to scold a reporter for asking bin Salam about his role in the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khaghsshi, a Saudi journalist who dared to denounce the Saudi government’s brutal repression of dissidents. Saudia Arabia is the world’s second largest oil supplier at present, after the United States, and, in sharp contrast with the Venezuelan supply, pumps out high-quality oil from its reserves at low cost.

In response to the Maduro kidnapping, progressives all over the world are demanding that there be “no war for oil.” This is an absolutely justified and critically important response. But it is equally critical that we also push beyond this demand to call for the dismantlement altogether of the world’s existing fossil fuel-dominant global energy infrastructure.  

The most important reason for this ratcheted-up demand is straightforward: burning oil, along with coal and natural gas, is by far the main driver of the global climate crisis. The impacts of the climate crisis, in terms of heat extremes, droughts, floods, storms, and crop destructions, continued to intensify this past year. In its 2025 annual report, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) reaffirmed that “drastically reducing fossil fuel emissions remains the key policy to prevent the worst climate impacts.” Friederike Otto, WWA’s cofounder, emphasized that “Decision-makers must face the reality that their continued reliance on fossil fuels is costing lives, billions in economic losses and causing irreversible damage to communities worldwide.”  

Despite this, Trump and his minions have, of course, maintained an ongoing assault on policies to address the climate crisis, in full accord with his multipronged project to control the global oil supply. But all such efforts by Team Trump notwithstanding, it is clear now that a viable climate stabilization project is advancing, both in the United States and globally. More specifically, the creation of an alternative global clean energy infrastructure—whose central features are large-scale investments in both energy efficiency and zero emissions renewable energy sources, starting with solar and wind power—continues to move forward.

As one major piece of evidence, an April 2025 report by Trump’s own Department of Energy estimates that by 2030, solar and wind power will generate a kilowatt of electricity at less than half the cost of fossil fuel energy sources. Similarly, a December 2025 article published by Dan McCarthy in Canary Media was titled “The year that Trump tried and failed to stop clean energy.” McCarthy reports that “through November, a whopping 92% of all new electricity capacity built in the U.S. came in the form of solar, batteries, and wind power. Electric vehicles hit a record too.” This clean energy transition is advancing still more rapidly outside the United States. Science magazine pronounced in an article published last month that “The seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy is Science’s 2025 breakthrough of the year.”  

Creating this clean energy-dominant infrastructure will also deliver a range of additional large-scale benefits. One is that investments in clean energy are a major source of employment creation—generating, in particular, a large proportion of well-paying, working-class jobs. Running an economy on clean energy rather than oil, coal, and natural gas also drastically reduces air pollution, and correspondingly raises public health standards.  

Still another benefit returns us to our current central focus on struggles to control the global energy supply. Unlike the world’s geographically concentrated oil reserves, clean energy resources are abundant across all countries, regions, and climates, wherever the sun shines and the wind blows. Solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage units can be installed everywhere at reasonable costs. Moreover, and again in sharp contrast with the current fossil fuel-dominant global energy infrastructure, clean energy systems can operate efficiently at a small scale. This creates unprecedented opportunities for cooperative and community-level ownership arrangements. The benefits of such arrangements are especially promising for rural communities in low-income countries.     

This is not to suggest that creating a global clean energy-dominant infrastructure is a panacea. Multiple incentives for imperialism, social injustice, and environmental degradation will remain and will need to be resisted. But at least wars for oil, abducting heads of state to control another country’s oil supplies, and related depravities will have been relegated to history’s dustbin.  

Robert Pollin is a Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.