“While Americans suffer from high prices and the Iran war imposes tens of billions of dollars of new costs on the American public, the oil industry wins big.”
Over 50% of the profits from recent oil supply shocks went to the top 1% of Americans. The bottom half received just 1%. The Iran war likely triggered another massive transfer to the very richest.
The global energy system was not built around oil simply because it was cheap. It concentrated economic and political power in specific chokepoints that enabled forms of state power premised on managing, rather than dispersing, these flows.
In the mid-1990s Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP denounced the military junta for failing to enforce regulations on oil companies. They were given a summary trial, then rushed to the gallows.
Mariel Lutz and Jenny Rowland-Shea
Center for American Progress
Oil and gas companies have been cheating the leasing and drilling system for years, but the Biden administration has the tools to hold them accountable.
The Gulf of Mexico is littered with tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells, and toothless regulation leaves climate warming gas emissions unchecked.
However severe the current crisis, and whatever the outcome in November, big changes are coming in how the U.S. economy functions, how this country is ruled and its role in the world.
The force that threatens our existence isn’t an alien invasion — it’s climate change — and the response from mankind has been less that inspiring. So why hasn’t our species come together, in dramatic fashion, to save the day?
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