by Naomi Klein
I am not saying a nuclear war is likely. But in Trump’s very short time in office, there has already been a level of military escalation that is both chilling and bizarrely haphazard. As indicated by his early deployment of the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB—Trump is drunk on the allure of showing the world he’s top dog. Which is why Mikhail Gorbachev, who worked toward disarmament when he was Soviet leader, wrote in Time magazine that today “the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.” (And that was before Trump upped the ante with North Korea.)
There are many reasons why people around Trump, particularly the many who came straight from the defense sector, might decide that further military escalation is in order. As we saw, Trump’s April 2017 missile strike on Syria—ordered without congressional approval and therefore illegal according to some experts—won him the most positive news coverage of his presidency, with liberal hawks fawning over him as enthusiastically as his superfans on Fox. His inner circle, meanwhile, immediately pointed to the attacks as proof that there was nothing untoward going on between the White House and Russia. “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie,” Trump’s 33-year-old son Eric told the Daily Telegraph (perhaps inadvertently revealing that there might have been more than sympathy for “beautiful babies” behind the decision to stage such a dramatic strike).
Exxon’s Wars
There is another reason why this administration might rush to exploit a security crisis to start a new war or escalate an ongoing conflict: there is no faster or more effective way to drive up the price of oil, especially if the violence interferes with oil supplies making it to the world market.
Particularly worrying on this front is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s relationship with ExxonMobil, one of the oil giants that would benefit most directly from a price spike. Yes, Tillerson agreed to divest from the company, and to recuse himself from decisions that specifically relate to ExxonMobil for one year. But his ties to the company remain deep. Not only was Tillerson at Exxon for forty-one years, his entire working life, but ExxonMobil has agreed to pay him a retirement package worth a staggering $180 million, a sum so large (especially given how far the company’s fortunes fell under his leadership) that it may well inspire some feelings of gratitude in the secretary of state. (How would you feel about a corporation that provided you with a $180-million exit package?) As Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, puts it, “You can take the boy out of Exxon but you cannot take the Exxon out of the boy.”
Moreover, while Tillerson may be excluded from decisions relating to infrastructure in which ExxonMobil has a clear interest (such as approval of the Keystone XL pipeline), he cannot recuse himself from the many foreign policy decisions that could impact oil prices—decisions potentially worth billions to the company. That, after all, would mean recusing himself from any discussion of military conflict in oil-rich regions, or direct discussion with the leaders of petrostates. We have already seen that Tillerson is doing no such thing.
The link between war and oil prices is not hypothetical. When oil prices go down, instability increases in oil-dependent countries such as Venezuela and Russia. Conversely, when conflict breaks out in countries with considerable oil assets—whether Nigeria or Kuwait—the price of oil shoots up as markets anticipate a contraction in supply. (The price of oil even got a small bump when Trump ordered the April missile strike on Syria.) “There is a close correlation between oil prices and conflict,” explains Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. Exhibit A of this phenomenon was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which helped send the price of oil soaring from around $30 a barrel at the start of the invasion to above $100 by 2008. That, in turn, is what triggered the boom in tar sands investment and the rush to the Arctic. And this dynamic could be repeated. A war that takes large state-owned oil reserves offline, or which significantly weakens the power of OPEC, would be a boon for the oil majors. ExxonMobil, loaded with tar sands reserves and with megaprojects pending in the Russian Arctic, would have a huge amount to gain.
Perhaps the only person who would have more to gain from this kind of instability is Vladimir Putin, head of a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, and its second-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia). When the price was high, this was great news for Putin: prior to 2014, fully 50 percent of Russia’s budget revenues came from oil and gas. But when prices plummeted, the government was suddenly short hundreds of billions of dollars, an economic catastrophe that has had tremendous human costs. According to the World Bank, in 2015 real wages fell in Russia by nearly 10 percent; Russia’s currency, the ruble, depreciated by close to 40 percent; and the population of people classified as poor increased from 3 million to over 19 million. Putin plays the strongman, but this economic crisis makes him vulnerable at home.
Which is why many have speculated that Russia’s high-risk military involvement in Syria is partly driven by a desire to get oil prices back up. This theory has been floated most prominently by Alexander Temerko, a right-wing, Ukrainian-born British businessman who works in the oil industry. In 2015, Temerko wrote in the Guardian:
Prolonged war in the Middle East would serve Putin’s interests perfectly. The deeper and more widespread the conflict, the more world oil and gas prices are likely to rise, helping him stage an economic recovery at home and render the sanctions useless.
Ushering in better times at home is therefore Putin’s ultimate aim as he seeks to prop up a system that takes advantage of people’s patriotism and public spirit. The grand plan is for his vital oil and gas revenues to recover so he can buy the loyalty of Russia’s 140 million-strong population.
(This is something of an oversimplification: Putin has other reasons for being in Syria as well, including a desire to access the country’s ports and potentially its oil and gas fields—and war, as ever, is a great distraction from the misery at home.)
We’ve also heard a lot about how ExxonMobil made a massive deal with the Russian state oil company Rosneft to drill for oil in the Arctic, which Putin bragged was worth half a trillion dollars. That deal was derailed by US sanctions against Russia imposed under the Obama administration. It is still eminently possible, despite the posturing on both sides over Syria, that Trump could lift those sanctions and clear the way for that deal to go ahead, which would quickly boost ExxonMobil’s flagging fortunes. (Months after Trump took office, the company requested a waiver from the US sanctions, and was denied.)
But even if the sanctions are lifted, there is another factor standing in the way of the project moving forward: the depressed price of oil. Tillerson made the deal with Rosneft in 2011, when the price of oil was soaring at around $110 a barrel. Their first commitment was to explore for oil in the sea north of Siberia, under tough-to-extract, icy conditions. Since the oil price collapse, other oil majors, including Shell and France’s Total, have backed away from Arctic drilling, in part because frozen conditions drive up costs so much. (The break-even price for Arctic drilling is estimated to be around $100 a barrel, if not more.) So even if sanctions are lifted under Trump, it won’t make sense for Exxon and Rosneft to move ahead with their project unless oil prices are high enough. In other words, both parties have significant and multi-layered reasons for wanting the price of oil to shoot back up.
Which is why we need to be very clear that a state of instability and uncertainty is not something that is feared by core figures in and around the Trump administration; on the contrary, many will embrace it. Trump has surrounded himself with masters of chaos—from Tillerson to Mnuchin. And chaos has a long track record of sending
the price of oil up. If it rises to $80 or more a barrel, then the scramble to dig up and burn the dirtiest fossil fuels, including those under melting ice, will be back on. A price rebound would unleash a global frenzy in new high-risk, high-carbon fossil fuel extraction, from the Arctic to the tar sands. If that is allowed to happen, it really would rob us of our last chance of averting catastrophic climate change.
So, in a very real sense, preventing war and averting climate chaos are one and the same fight.
Economic Shocks
Just as Trump could not be unaware that his anti-Muslim actions and rhetoric make terror attacks more likely, I suspect that many in the Trump administration are fully cognizant of the fact that their frenzy of financial deregulation makes other kinds of shocks and disasters more likely as well. Trump has announced plans to dismantle Dodd–Frank, the most substantive piece of legislation introduced after the 2008 banking collapse. Dodd–Frank wasn’t tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.
Trump’s team are not unaware of this, they are simply unconcerned—the profits from those market bubbles are too tantalizing. Besides, they know that since the banks were never broken up, they are still too big to fail, which means that if it all comes crashing down, they will be bailed out again, just like in 2008. (In fact, Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the specific part of Dodd–Frank designed to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the bill for another such bailout—an ominous sign, especially with so many former Goldman executives making White House policy.)
Some members of the administration surely also see a few coveted policy options opening up in the wake of a good market shock or two. During the campaign, Trump courted voters by promising not to touch Social Security or Medicare. But that may well be untenable, given the deep tax cuts on the way. An economic crisis would give Trump a handy excuse for abandoning those promises. In the midst of a moment being sold to the public as economic Armageddon, Betsy DeVos might even have a shot at realizing her dream of replacing public schools with a system based on vouchers and charters.
Trump’s gang has a long wish list of policies that do not lend themselves to normal times. In the early days of the new administration, for instance, Mike Pence met with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to hear how the governor had managed to strip public sector unions of their right to collective bargaining in 2011. (Hint: he used the cover of the state’s fiscal crisis, prompting New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to declare that in Wisconsin “the shock doctrine is on full display.”)
The picture is clear. We will very likely not see this administration’s full economic barbarism in the first year. That will only reveal itself later, after the inevitable budget crises and market shocks kick in. Then, in the name of rescuing the government and perhaps the entire economy, the White House will start checking off the more challenging items on the corporate wish list.
Weather Shocks
Just as Trump’s national security and economic policies are sure to generate and deepen crises, the administration’s moves to ramp up fossil fuel production, dismantle large parts of the country’s environmental laws, and trash the Paris climate accord all pave the way for more large-scale industrial accidents—not to mention future climate disasters. There is a lag time of about a decade between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the full resulting warming, so the very worst climatic effects of the administration’s policies won’t likely be felt until they’re out of office.
That said, we’ve already locked in so much warming that no president can complete a term without facing major weather-related disasters. In fact, Trump wasn’t even two months in before he was dealing with overwhelming wildfires on the Great Plains, which led to so many cattle deaths that one rancher described the event as “our Hurricane Katrina.”
Trump showed no great interest in the fires, not even sparing them a tweet. But when the first superstorm hits a coast, we should expect a very different reaction from a president who knows the value of oceanfront property, and has only ever been interested in building for the one percent. The worry, of course, is a repeat of Katrina’s rip-offs and Iraq’s “missing billions,” since contracts handed out in a hurry are ripe for corruption, and it is evacuees and workers who pay the price.
Luxury Disaster Response
The biggest Trump-era escalation, however, will most likely be in disaster response services marketed specifically toward the wealthy—what a New Yorker headline recently dubbed “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” When I was writing The Shock Doctrine, this industry was still in its infancy, and several early companies didn’t make it. I wrote, for instance, about a short-lived airline called Help Jet, based in Trump’s beloved West Palm Beach. While it lasted, Help Jet offered an array of gold-plated rescue services in exchange for a membership fee.
When a hurricane was on its way, Help Jet dispatched limousines to pick up members, booked them into five-star golf resorts and spas somewhere safe, then whisked them away on private jets. “No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first-class experience that turns a problem into a vacation,” read the company’s marketing materials. “Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems Help Jet, far from misjudging the market for these services, was simply ahead of its time. These days, luxury real estate developments in New York have begun marketing exclusive private disaster amenities to would-be residents—everything from emergency lighting to private water pumps and generators to thirteen-foot floodgates. One Manhattan condominium boasts of its watertight utility rooms sealed “submarine-style,” in case another Superstorm Sandy hits the coast. Trump’s golf courses are trying to prepare too. In Ireland, Trump International Golf Links and Hotel applied to build a two-mile-long, thirteen-foot wall to protect the coastal property from rising seas and increasingly dangerous storms.
Evan Osnos recently reported in the New Yorker that, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there—the ultimate Green Zone.
At the ultra-extreme end of this trend is PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and member of his transition team. Thiel underwrote an initiative called the Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) in 2008. The goal of Seasteading is for wealthy people to eventually secede into fully independent nation-states, floating in the open ocean—protected from sea-level rise and fully self-sufficient. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the movement’s manifesto states, “vote with your boat.” Thiel recently has appeared to lose interest in the project, saying that the logistics of building floating nation-states were “not quite feasible,” but it continues.
What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income—precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina. (The survivalists refer to FEMA as “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid”—a joke that is only funny if you have the means to pay cash for your own escape.)
This two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a “concierge” service to their exclusive clients: when wildfires threaten their mansions, the companies dispatch teams of private firefighters to coat them in fire-retardant. The public sphere, meanwhile, is left to further decay.
; California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves about a billion dollars a year through this program—a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.
I Don’t Feel Hot—Do You Feel Hot?
The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.
So far, much of the discussion around Trump’s environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: what everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that can’t be replaced with a new mansion in the mountains.
What matters isn’t their stated views on the science of climate change. What matters is that not one of them appears to be worried about climate change. The early catastrophic events are playing out mostly in poor parts of the world, where the people are not white. And when disasters do strike wealthy Western nations, there are growing numbers of ways for the wealthy to buy their relative safety. Early in Trump’s term, Republican congressman Steve King caused a controversy by tweeting, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” It was a revealing comment on many fronts. Climate change is not a concern for the Republican Party because a great many people in positions of power clearly think it’ll be “somebody else’s babies” who will shoulder the risks, babies who don’t count as much as their own. They may not all be climate deniers, but almost every one of them is catastrophically unconcerned.
