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.

The post American Oil Marches On first appeared on David Guenette.

Sure, the fossil fuel industry is powerful, but this only means we should go after it as hard as we can. And why prosecute an attack on Big Oil? How about because the industry has been delaying progress on the green energy transition for decades and decades, even while it knew about the greenhouse gas effect. Or how about the fossil fuel industry’s long history of destruction of governments and environments, and its violence against people. How about the fossil fuel industry’s knee-deep involvement in corruption even at the expense of the Earth’s health, the world’s economy, and society’s continuance?

Let’s put the current world of carbon emission reduction in stark terms: Big Oil is fighting tooth and claw to remain relevant, and they’re using big corruption to do it. This isn’t a matter of “good business practices,” not unless you count extortion, bribery, and violence as good business practices. There’s a long history of lawlessness in the fossil fuel industry that spans international bribery, environmental disregard, and actual physical malfeasance and violence, but we’re fast running out of time to put things right.

Search as Catch Can

The beauty of the Internet today is that it is a lot harder to hide information. Even the simple Google search reveals many result pages of blood-curdling histories of Big Oil’s bad behavior, not that you don’t know about bad behavior already on the part of fossil fuels.

Search: “History of fossil fuel industry using force against individuals and groups”

Here’s the AI Summary for this search:

The history of the fossil fuel industry involves extensive use of force, from international conflicts over resources (like WWI/WWII oil/coal) to domestic suppression of Indigenous rights, land defenders, and workers, manifesting as militarized policing, human rights abuses, gender-based violence (especially around “man camps”), and systemic environmental racism that harms marginalized communities, alongside sophisticated legal tactics (SLAPPs) and lobbying to silence critics and influence policy for profit.

It is easy enough to fall down any number of rabbit holes when looking for answers. The answers to this search are wide-ranging, from world wars to SLAPP suits. An article, “Tactics Used by Fossil Fuel Companies to Suppress Critique and Obstruct Climate Action”, by Sophie Hartley in The Commons Social Change Library, has a nifty list of eight tactics employed by fossil fuel corporations, along with examples. The Commons Social Change Library is an Australian online resource “for the change makers of the world and for those interested in social change, activism, advocacy and justice.” You want another seven pages of search results on the query above, just type it into Google.

But we don’t want to hurt the world economy, right? Isn’t this one of the gaslit claims we hear from so many corporate interests?

Search: “What is the role of the fossil fuel industry in negative contribution to the world’s economy?”

A leading question?

Not really. Here’s the first part of the AI Summary return:

The fossil fuel industry negatively impacts the global economy primarily through massive health costs from air pollution (millions of deaths, trillions in losses), enormous government subsidies ($7 trillion globally, diverting funds from other needs), climate change damage (extreme weather, sea-level rise), and energy inefficiency, creating economic burdens that outweigh short-term benefits and hinder sustainable growth. These “hidden costs,” or negative externalities, strain public budgets, reduce workforce productivity, and destabilize economies through climate disasters, even as the industry provides jobs and energy security. 

One of the four cited sources in the summary is “The Incredible Inefficiency of the Fossil Energy System”, by  RMI’s Daan Walter, Kingsmill Bond,  Amory Lovins,  Laurens Speelman, Chiara Gulli, Sam Butler-Sloss, published on June 4, 2024. Here’s how this paper begins:

Today’s fossil energy system is incredibly inefficient: almost two-thirds of all primary energy is wasted in energy production, transportation, and use, before fossil fuel has done any work or produced any benefit. That means over $4.6 trillion per year, almost 5% of global GDP and 40% of what we spend on energy, goes up in smoke due to fossil inefficiency. Literally.

Look, I’m not one of those people who backdate accusations. I understand that fossil fuels play an important part in the development of our societies and technological advancement and general population growth. All hail Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and railroads, refrigerators, oil furnaces, tractors, and clothes washers. Yes, fossil fuels have delivered huge benefits for mankind over the last several centuries. I’m not a big fan of having to cut my own wood to keep my family from freezing.

At least here in the developed world, our age of technology would not have developed, or developed as fast, anyway, without the boost we get from fossil fuels. But we are at the point when fossil fuels should be over, must be over, and thank goodness we have great alternatives in the age of solar, wind, and batteries and all the other digital wonders of The Electrotech Revolution. It is past time for fossil fuels to retire gracefully from the stage, especially for the generation of electricity, but instead Big Oil acts like a belligerent guest who demands another drink even when you’re already in your pajamas and asking the guest to leave, only to hear the guest passing gas then claiming it’s the sound of the floorboards squeaking.

The problem is that fossil fuels have become—and have been for some while—more than an unruly guest insisting on another pour because it makes them feel good.

There’s a killer in the house.

Battle Time: Grid Your Loins

How did I get to this point of thinking about the fossil fuel industry as the killer in the house?

Recently, I was trying to figure out exactly how we’re going to meet the electricity demand growth everyone’s talking about (AI! Data centers!). I’ve written about some other aspects of this, including the likely exaggeration of the load demand growth numbers by Big Oil as justification for building many more new natural gas generation plants, in my post “New Gas Generator Plants and the Plan to Flood the (Electricity Demand Growth) Zone.” One of the interesting point is that supply chain constraints make the industry target of 100 new generators only—at best—30% achievable by 2030, and that’s with everything else going perfectly.

I’ve also recently written about what is often called “Grid at the Edge,” by which is meant the needed upgrading and expansion of our electricity grid to accommodate all that new juicy electricity that is already overwhelmingly from renewables in 2025. The main approach is to add digital intelligence and technology to the grid so that electrical capacity can be handled more efficiently. There are lots of parts to this grid improvement in the U.S.

But what does “the edge of the grid” mean? Here’s another AI Summary result:

“The edge of the grid” refers to the physical boundary where the traditional centralized power system meets end-users (homes, businesses), a zone now filled with smart tech like solar panels, EVs, and batteries (Distributed Energy Resources), allowing for two-way energy flow and localized management, unlike older one-way grids. It’s where innovation meets the consumer, enabling active grid participation but also introducing new security challenges.

The query below was submitted to Gemini under the “deep research” mode.

Query: What conditions (laws, regulations, state or PUC rulings) must be in place for Distributed energy resources and VPPs to be deployed in American electrical grids? What technological capabilities and technologies must be in place? What are the probable timelines for such grid upgrades and the timelines for DER and VPP growth?

The result was a tidy 18-page report titled “The Edge of the Grid: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Regulatory, Technical, and Economic Conditions for DER and VPP Deployment (2025–2030).” The report included 44 endnote source references. Here’s a paragraph from the Executive Summary that goes to the issue I was after:

This report posits that the realistic timeline for a wide DER-enabled grid system in the U.S. has shifted from an optimistic, policy-accelerated horizon of the mid-2020s to a pragmatic, necessity-driven struggle that will likely not achieve broad national scale until the early 2030s. However, this delay is not uniform. We are witnessing the emergence of a “Two-Speed Grid,” where specific regions and sectors will achieve advanced DER integration by 2028 out of sheer survival necessity, while vast swaths of the country will face stagnation, locked in a traditional centralized paradigm until the next decade.

A “shift from an optimistic, policy-accelerated horizon of the mid-2020s to a pragmatic, necessity-driven struggle that will likely not achieve broad national scale until the early 2030s”? That doesn’t sound like the best progress, does it?

Still, the report lacked specificity as to the actual mechanisms contributing to the timelines for the development of edge of grid, so I added my specific query items. Here’s the close of the revised report’s Executive Analysis:

Our findings indicate that while the federal implementation of FERC Order No. 2222 has encountered significant friction—resulting in multi-year delays across major Independent System Operators (ISOs) like SPP and MISO—state-level initiatives have accelerated, creating a “dual-track” deployment landscape. The conditions for success have thus shifted from a reliance on wholesale market access to a mastery of state-specific “value stacks,” requiring aggregators to navigate a complex patchwork of interconnection rules, telemetry requirements, and consumer protection mandates.

Nothing like getting a FERC order number for a sense of specificity. It’s a nifty report and a great primer on the factors determining grid enhancement development timelines, along with breakouts for different states and their own and various legislative mandates, or lack thereof. Still, what the report gained in specificity—I now understand much better the regulatory problems of PJM, for instance—the report lost some clarity as to the overarching challenge. The first version put this forward more forcefully right there in its Executive Summary:

The catalyst for this shift is the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) in July 2025, which has effectively ended the era of federal “green industrial policy” initiated by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The OBBBA’s repeal of key investment tax credits (ITCs) and production tax credits (PTCs), coupled with stringent “Foreign Entity of Concern” (FEOC) restrictions, has pulled the financial rug out from under the residential and commercial solar sectors just as they face their stiffest competition for capital from the booming Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure market.

In other words, the progress we were making got its legs kicked from under it. You can thank Trump and the fossil fuel industry that bought him.

Corruption R Us

And so, back to the malfeasance of Big Oil. We all remember the infamous meeting between Trump and representatives from the fossil fuel industry during the 2024 campaign for the Presidency of the United States, where Trump asked for a $1 billion. There was an uproar about quid pro quo, but that turned into nothing, mainly because the election finance system is already so badly corrupted that even the obvious solicited bribe was seen as “business as usual.”

Big Oil has a long history of bribery, although the bribes to United States officials have been rarer than the bribes to foreign officials. The information is easily available, should you be interested.

Search: “Fossil fuel industry history of bribery and corruption”

Here’s the AI Summary:

The fossil fuel industry has a long, documented history of bribery, corruption, and deceit, from early 20th-century scandals like Teapot Dome involving oil barons and politicians, to modern-day accusations involving climate fraud, lobbying abuses, illegal payments to foreign officials, and the funding of misinformation campaigns to block climate action, using front groups and complex schemes to influence policy and hide harmful knowledge.  

Let’s see. There’s “Climate Change Deception Campaigns,” “Bribery and Illegal Payments,” and “Lobbying and Political Influence” among the “Modern Corruption and Climate Deception” category, with types of activity ranging from bribery, fraud, racketeering, greenwashing, and state capture.

The most brilliant of these criminal activities by Big Oil, at least in our time, has been state capture, which is why I refer to Trump as “President Big Oil Stooge.” Trump has taken Big Oil money and come out swinging against climate change, even while the results are a weakened economy, especially relative to Red China’s economy. Then there’s the problem for us rate payers in that electricity generated with fossil fuels is now intrinsically more expensive, but then “affordability” is a hoax, I guess. There’s the problem with meeting growing demand load, because renewables are the quickest to market and to interconnect, if, that is, the playing field is level, but the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has pressed the greasy thumb of Big Oil on that scale, and viciously.

Oh yeah, there’s also the problem of climate change and the U.S. falling behind on efforts to reduce its carbon emissions, and that leads to all sorts of other rising costs for us and the world.

By the way, let’s take a moment to talk about subsidies. The next time someone tells me that renewable energy is only cheaper because of subsidies, I’ll likely kick that person on the shin. Sure, the Federal government has supported the development of clean energy, as it should do with new technologies with public-facing benefits. Can this person, now hopping about in pain clutching his or her leg, explain to me why the fossil fuel industry, well established in its 150-year-old-plus history, still requires government subsidies, both direct ones and the indirect support from being allowed to freely dump into everyone’s common atmosphere the poison fossil fuel extraction and use produces?

The fact is that the days of fossil fuel being the primary source of energy for the world are over. The fact is that Big Oil is playing dirty to keep their source of revenue and profit in the mix.

Better a Big Oil Dissident than a Victim of Cognitive Dissonance

When I talk about the malfeasance of Big Oil, I’m not talking about the guy pumping gas, the oil field or pipeline worker, fuel tank driver, or refinery engineer. I’m talking about those within the fossil fuel corporations who have known that fossil fuel’s days are numbered, and known it for decades, but who have nevertheless kept pushing for exploration and market expansion instead of looking out for their stockholders by shifting their corporations’ resources toward clean energy, or for that matter, anything other than the polluting and costly business of heating up the globe. If no other charges are to be leveled at such individuals, the failure to act with due fiduciary responsibility is clear. Bribing, corrupting governments, and exercising violence against people and the environment is not exercising fiduciary responsibility, unless, of course, you justify any such action as the means to maximize your shareholders’ value.

But, of course, even five-year-olds understand that “maximizing shareholder value” is neither a sensible nor moral primary action. Even five-year-olds understand that not causing harm to others is a central moral consideration. The day is coming when oil executives will face the gallows and utter, for one last time, “I was only maximizing shareholder value.”

Whoa! Gallows? Really?

Well, as far as I’m concerned, as an anti-death penalty guy, I’d only bring them to the gallows as show and tell, in what would be a moment of somewhat mean-spirited hijinks before carting them off to their new prison home. But I do think that the comparison of the sins of the oil industry with the sins of the Third Reich, as meted out at Nuremberg, is apt. Big Oil seems all too happy to keep turning up the world’s thermostat for a few extra bucks. Their attack on humankind and the very world itself, when such consequences are cumulatively considered, can be counted against the hundreds of millions of people directly suffering and killed and the trillions of dollars in monetary loss that coulda, shoulda been used to better each and all.

Frankly, the climate/clean energy world has been playing far too nice for far too long. We’ve allowed ourselves to be gaslit by those who stand for short-term gain. We’ve offered reason and the benefit of the doubt to those whose only reason to act is to benefit themselves. Big Oil is connected, of course, to other malignant players, and some part of the financial world should be put up in the dock as well, as should some politicians and other enabling operatives. But Big Oil—like Big Tech these days and monopolists—seems happy enough also to undermine the foundations of American Democracy for the sake of a few extra baubles, so the best actions we can take is to understand as clearly as we can that there are bad players in this world of ours. We need to consider not only how best to counter them, but how to bring them to justice.

The post How Do I (Big Oil) Love Thee (Big Oil)? Let Me Count the Money, Despite the Costs first appeared on David Guenette.