Trump may be leading the parade, but the only way fossil fuel conspiracy prevails is if America fails

When it comes to Trump, it’s definitely a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that Trump—and all the top political appointees riding along with him in the clown car—are ignorant, stupid, and incompetent. The bad news? Trump and his gang of kleptocrats, would-be fascists, and white nationalists hold enormous power, and all seem happy enough to ignore the Constitution.

So, yeah, bad news.

“Trump taking ‘drill, baby, drill’ plan to Venezuela ‘terrible’ for climate, experts warn,” says The Guardian’s Dharna Noor and Oliver Milman, on January 6, 2026, running the sub-title “‘Everybody loses’ if production supercharged in country with largest known oil reserves, critics say.” The article begins:

Donald Trump, by dramatically seizing Nicolás Maduro and claiming dominion over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, has taken his “drill, baby, drill” mantra global. Achieving the president’s dream of supercharging the country’s oil production would be financially challenging – and if fulfilled, would be “terrible for the climate”, experts say.

In his eagerness to serve his oligarchical masters, Trump has delivered much of what Big Oil dreams of and the latest oil-slick dream is Venezuela. But even here, Big Oil may be less pleased about this imperial gift, with talk flying about regarding risks and costs that give the fossil fuel titans pause, just like we’ve been seeing in Big Oil’s reactions to much of the expanded lease offers, including the long-marveled Alaskan options.

“Nobody knows exactly how much it will cost to rebuild Venezuela’s broken-down oilfields, but everyone agrees it’s a lot—and there’s no guarantee that U.S. companies will be chomping at the bit,” writes Ben Geman in January 6, 2026’s Axios Future of Energy, in an article titled “Sizing up the cost of Trump’s Venezuelan vision.”

It all might make you wonder about there being a conspiracy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, There is a Conspiracy

Let me start by saying “Thank god for Emily Atkin.” It’s not just her, of course. There is a growing number of climate writers willing to call a spade a spade, and this particular spade is that Big Oil is a monster that is willing to devour the world for a few dollars more. There’s more about her and others and what they’re saying below, but it’s important to define just what kind of mind-fuckery we all being exposed to these days.

According to Wikipedia, “In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly or subconsciously hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions.” In When Prophecy Fails (1956) and A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world.

No one likes cognitive dissonance.

For example, you may hold true to the belief that America is an exceptional country because of its dream of democracy, where people’s rights are protected and made equal under law, all drawn from the Constitution. Sure, we’re aware that we fall short, and that racism, sexism, and selfishness that unfairly puts ourselves ahead of others are wrong, but we know, too, that the project that is America is always striving for perfection, even if we’ll never quite arrive.

But for citizens of the United States today, in this era of Trump and his wholesale ignoring of the Constitution, we’re all confronted by situations that create dissonance. There are several ways to reduce this dissonance, whether by changing a belief (e.g., MAGA), by explaining something away (e.g. Republicans in Congress), or by taking actions that reduce the perceived inconsistency. The only way America survives the ongoing attempt to impose fascism is to double down on the American dream and act to reject the great inconsistency that is Trump.

One important action for progress is to name things for what they are. In the climate action world, this has been a hard lesson to learn. Yes, we can reference science and point to negative consequences of ever-growing greenhouse gas emission. We sign petitions, donate to climate groups, change our own carbon behavior, and try to electrify everything we can, including voting for politicians who hold similar values. But too many of us, to admit there are concerted forces that have effectively arranged themselves against addressing climate change, we fear being handed a tin foil hat.

We’re too timid, too polite, to point out the monsters in the room.

As I write The Steep Climes Quartet, I sometimes doubt my portrayal of Big Oil. There are operatives clandestinely working for fossil fuel-supported think tanks, machinations and trickery in legislative work, dark money spent lavishly, and lies and deceptions that are cynically pressed into service to keep profits up for Big Oil as well as to protect their assets.

I’ve spent far too many hours online checking the track record of Big Oil and how big a choice is, say, murder for corporations and businesses. I’ve read a lot about dark money and am a fanboy of Senator Whitehouse and his speeches about the money/Big Oil interests capturing the Supreme Court, and there is Dark Money, by Jane Meyer and other such investigations. I’ve written posts like “Writing Villains on Both Sides in Climate Fiction” and “Murder, Oil, and Blood Money: Is the climate fiction plot line of fossil fuel interests murdering someone far-fetched?”  I follow court cases against Big Oil, both because this is an important topic in and of itself, but also because over the course of the four books of The Steep Climes Quartet, court cases become a bigger and bigger part of the story of constraining the power of Big Oil, and to the point, by the last book (which takes place in 2047), there are a number of International Criminal Court cases that have been decided and there are executives of fossil fuel corporations serving time.

Over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that Big Oil acts criminally. One of my more recent posts is “How Do I (Big Oil) Love Thee (Big Oil)? Let Me Count the Money, Despite the Costs.” I’ve looked at related issues in other posts, including “Putting the Bite of Law on Fossil Fuel Corruption,”  “Democracy, Climate Action, Climate Fiction… and Criminality,” and “Big Oil in the Dock: Can Suing Fossil Fuel Corporations Answer Climate Change?”

By the way, Big Oil has a long and bitter history of malfeasance, in case I wasn’t being clear.

So, back to Emily Atkin, and her January 7 Substack, “It’s time to embrace climate conspiracy: Trump’s Venezuela oil play exposes what climate reporting has documented for decades—if we’re willing to say it out loud.” Here’s how this begins:

I hate conspiracy theories. I always have. As a journalist, they’re usually the thing I’m pushing back against.

And yet, for a few years now, I’ve found myself saying something slightly heretical on panels and in conversations with other reporters: we need to start engaging in more overtly conspiratorial language. Because the actual story of climate change—the one we’ve reported exhaustively—is one about coordinated power, deliberate deception, and a bought-off government that repeatedly acts to promote an industry that is poisoning humans and the environment for profit. It just so happens to be a real conspiracy.

Her post is well worth the read—beautifully written, well documented, and on target. And, hey, Andy Revkin re-posted this one, so there you go.

ExxonKnews, a Substack by Emily Sanders, posted “On Venezuela and ‘the greatest lie the oil industry ever told us’,” on January 9, 2026, running the deck “Author and investigative journalist Antonia Juhasz, an expert in wars fought over oil, weighs in on U.S. oil companies’ efforts to distance themselves from Trump’s raid in Venezuela’.” ExxonKnews describes itself this way: “ExxonKnews shines a light on the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving the climate crisis — and the growing movement for accountability.” This Substack is a top-notch resource for the Big Oil-criminal curious.

Speaking of top notch, One Earth Now, a website by Dana Drugmand, also covers a lot of what ExxonKnews covers, but One Earth Now has a broader purview. She also puts out another website called Climate in the Courts, which describes itself this way:

The unfolding climate emergency is the biggest story on the planet, affecting all dimensions of our society from human health to national security to business and financial markets. One important aspect to this story is the fight for justice and accountability being waged in the courts. Through law and litigation, efforts are underway to hold powerful actors – typically governments and corporations – accountable for actions contributing to climate change and for harms resulting from it. Climate accountability litigation is a burgeoning battleground in the larger fight for a healthier, more sustainable and just planet, and courts are the arena where these battles are playing out. 

On January 8, 2026, Drugmand posted “The Unraveling: U.S. Attacks Venezuela and Turns Its Back on the World: The international legal system is collapsing, experts warn, and so too is the climate system.”

Here’s how this post starts:

Where do we go from here? Honestly my head is spinning with the news cycle developments over the last few days – from President Trump’s illegal military intervention in Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and his claims that his administration will be “running” the Latin American country, to Trump and his energy secretary’s brazen assertions that the U.S. and its big oil companies will be taking control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and selling this oil “indefinitely,” to Trump’s latest directive withdrawing the U.S. from dozens (66 in total) of international organizations, treaties and conventions, many of which we had been part of for decades like the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Worst Case: A Broken Dream… and Planet

You don’t have to read all that widely anymore to get the clear picture that Big Oil is neck-deep in the move toward American oligarchy or, for that matter, that they’d be just fine with fascism here in the U.S.A.

This is another sin to be added to Big Oil’s metaphysical ledger. Not only does the fossil fuel industry have a history of lying and pushing back against what it has long known about the climate change consequences of its products, but the American fossil fuel corporations open to Trump’s entreaties relative to Venezuela really should be telling him that he’s acted illegally and that they will have nothing to do with him. But that’s not expected, since they went through all that trouble buying him already.

The news reports that today CEOs from Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Continental, Halliburton, HKN, Valero, Marathon, Shell, Trafigura, Vitol Americas, Repsol, Eni, Aspect Holdings, Tallgrass, Raisa Energy, and Hilcorp will be at the White House for the meeting with Trump, President Big Oil Stooge himself, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The topic is about “investment opportunities that will restore Venezuelan oil infrastructure,” according to White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers.

Let’s get this straight: American oil companies are in conversation with a president who is acting post-constitutionally—that is, illegally—when it comes to Venezuela, which is the topic on the table. And then, of course, this administration is acting illegally in many other ways, too, including violating the Emolument Clause, rejecting and ignoring court orders, turning a blind eye to the Impoundment Act, considering the Hatch Act irrelevant, weaponizing the Department of Justice and other agencies for partisan aims, and so much more, like dispatching ICE and CBP as an astonishingly well-funded secret police to terrorize large parts of the nation.

Do these sound like corporations that value American democracy? But shareholders before country and liberty and rule of law, I guess. Of course, what more might we expect from companies that knowingly continue to poison the world and expand their businesses even while playing dirty with clean energy that outcompetes fossil fuels in speed and cost of deployment and with lower cost for electricity customers.

Or as Dana Drugmand concludes in her post mentioned earlier:

That may not matter much to a president that seems intent on disregarding norms and the law, both domestic and international. But it should matter to the rest of us who care about trying to preserve the rule of law and some semblance of a habitable planet – a planet that our children and future generations are inheriting and that is rapidly becoming less safe and less stable.

The fight for a better climate future, at least here in America, is now the fight for democracy. At least in a democracy, there’s some chance of laws being written and applied toward cleaner energy and lower damages.

Here’s the last word, from Emily Atkin’s HEATED:

So no, you don’t need to worry about chemtrails. You need to worry about who controls energy—and what they’re willing to do to keep it that way.

Let’s conspire to kick these S.O.B.s out, and let’s aim at prison cells for their landing pads.