The world's most destructive industry is dying — and taking democracy with it
The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful and destructive industry in the history of the world. Right now the fate of our planet hangs on our ability to defeat the political power of that industry. It is ready to do anything, including making alliances with pro-fascist forces to maintain its ability to make profits. Understanding the insidious ways it has worked to undermine democracy will be helpful for protecting democracy and challenging the destructive actions of this industry.
Capitalism is the practice of putting profits at the center of how decisions are made about how to produce and distribute resources. Those with capital are able to shift social institutions to enable them to gain even more capital. Entities, such as corporations, come to be self-perpetuating agents whose only goal is profit making.
Capitalism existed long before fossil fuels. But for over a century, fossil fuels, and fossil fuel-based corporations, have been at the heart of capitalism. Fossil fuels have made energy plentiful, which has led to the development of forms of industry and approaches to agriculture that use a lot of it. As we are seeing with the war on Iran, fossil fuels have become the life blood that keeps the global capitalist economy running. Fossil fuel-centered corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the world.
Over time, and in many places, capitalism extracts profits, exploits labor, and despoils nature with very little force. It becomes a matter of course how the systems function. But the original forms of accumulation that allowed some companies to be enormously powerful, and to shape the regulatory world in which they operated, came from brutal expropriation. Capitalism began with slavery and colonialism and a willingness to do anything to make profits.
As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks.
The fossil fuel industry has, from its beginning, supported violent overthrows and encouraged states to install authoritarian governments to ensure its ability to engage in extraction. Many of the places where fossil fuels are extracted have been controlled politically by brutal forces kept in power by so-called liberal democratic forces. We see this story in Mexico in 1911, in Iran in 1954, in Shell Oil’s despoliation of Ogoniland in Nigeria in the 1980s.
Outside of those extraction zones, for many years, and in many places, the fossil fuel industry was compatible with liberal democracy. The US was able to have a liberal democratic government, and most countries in the world could as well, as long as those governments supported political and economic practices that allowed for the profitability of powerful industries. The markets constructed to facilitate capitalist processes can generally function fine in collaboration with governments that allow for high standards of living, social safety nets, and civil liberties, as long as those governments have kept processes in place that allow for the extraction of profits. As soon as any government gets in the way of that ability, the so-called liberal democratic order that dominates the global economic system has been prepared to overthrow those governments to put new ones in place that are willing to act in its interests.
Retired General Wesley Clark has argued that US foreign policy has focused on keeping regimes in power that would support the continued use of the dollar as the currency used for trading oil—the petrodollar. By ensuring that regimes are in power that support the continued use of the petrodollar, the US is able to ensure that it has some control over the continued flow of the lifeblood of the global economic system.
Capitalism is compatible with democracy as long as that form of democracy allows the economic world to be dominated and controlled by markets, which are constructed in ways that make them immune from accountability. The fossil fuel industry has functioned in alliance with a nominally democratic US, as long as the US government has also engaged in military action when it was needed to keep the oil, and profits, flowing. It is new that the fossil fuel industry has been aligned with fascism in the US and other Western countries.
Fascism is a particular form of authoritarianism that grows when a capitalist elite worries that its power is going to be threatened by democratic forces. An authoritarian government is one that tries to control all aspects of society and close down dissent. It holds power closely in a small group and is not accountable to its people. Fascism is authoritarianism that runs on popular support. It emerges in contexts that require elections to hold governmental power, where the people are in danger of not acting in elite interests.
A fascist government generally creates in-groups and out-groups in order to get people to bond emotionally with its movement. It uses the power of the government, violence, and threats of violence to intimidate people into compliance. It acts in the interests of an economic elite while pretending to be anti-elitist. And it uses anti-intellectualism and attacks on media and other cultural systems to pull people into its way of thinking and feeling. It often harks back to a mythical past where the in-group had more power and prestige, and society was stable.
In the middle of the 20th century, Germany, Italy, and Spain had nominally democratic governments that were in crisis. The governments were not able to keep the economy functioning in the interests of elites. In the political chaos that comes from an economy that is not functioning well, parties emerge that use extreme racist nationalism to consolidate popular support for authoritarian regimes. It is that move, of using hatred to consolidate popular support, that distinguishes fascism from other forms of right-wing or authoritarian politics.
As the climate crisis has developed, people all around the world are working to shift how we meet our needs in society away from a dependence on fossil fuels. With clean forms of energy fully developed and ready to take over as the energy sources running our economies, the fossil fuel industry is in a fight for its survival. It is aligning itself with fascist forces to remain profitable. To survive, it is prepared to take the whole planet, as well as liberal democracy, down with it.
In the past, the industry has impacted US politics by donating to and leaning on both Democratic and Republican politicians. For example, the industry remains the largest donor to California’s politics, even as that state has a two-thirds Democratic majority. But as renewables become more economically competitive, and many forces are challenging their ability to profit, the industry is seeing a bleak future. And so, for many years, it has been participating in a broad set of challenges to democracy as a strategy to maintain the conditions needed to maintain its profitability.
The move toward fascism in the US has come as a result of the success of the Reagan Revolution’s attack on the New Deal and anything that remotely resembles socialism. The fossil fuel industry has been a part of that revolution every step of the way. There is a line of thinking that was crystallized in the 1971 memo “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” written by the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo outlines a blueprint for how to fight back against emerging challenges to corporate power. Oil barons and political activists the Koch brothers were influenced by the memo and went on to found the think tank the Cato Institute to promote a free-market ideology that argues against regulations on industry in general, and especially against environmental regulations that might impact the fossil fuel industry. It also argued against social safety net programs, such as the programs put in place under the New Deal. Other powerful think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have worked assiduously to promote that set of ideals. That organization was founded by Richard Melon Scaife, heir to a Gulf Oil fortune.
The work of these forces paid off with the election of Ronald Reagan and the triumph of the Reagan Revolution. That revolution challenged the power of unions, destroyed the social safety net systems developed under the New Deal, and rolled back environmental regulations and other limits on corporate power. It allowed inequality to flourish.
Part of what fueled popular support for the Reagan Revolution was the mobilization of racial resentments, used to encourage white voters to blame their precarious situation on people of color, especially on Black people. The Democratic Party decided to ride that wave, and Bill Clinton ran for the presidency on the idea that he would get rid of social safety net programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children and get tough on crime, coded in the public imagination as Black. The Reagan Revolution led to extreme pro-business decisions by the Supreme Court, such as Citizens United, which have further eroded our democracy. Many other court decisions over the past decades have allowed monopoly power to go unchecked.
The extreme free market form of capitalism engendered by the Powell Memo and the Reagan Revolution have led to a crisis in capitalist democracy in the US. As people’s lives have been made increasingly precarious by the lack of a safety net and by extreme inequality, they have been ripe for a revolt against the dominant system. In the 2016 election many voters favored populist Bernie Sanders and others favored right-wing pseudo-populist Donald Trump.
The democratic party decided to make its peace with the populists and began working for a return to support for some New Deal social programs as well as strong action to address the climate crisis. The Republican Party went all in on a pro-corporate fossil fuel dominated pseudo-populism, and won in 2016. That coalition won again in 2024. It did this by leaning hard on people’s resentments against the system and elites, and by mobilizing people’s passions against imagined enemies, such as immigrants and trans people.
As the US has traveled this destructive path, the fossil fuel industry has walked right along with the Republican Party. The fossil fuel industry contributed heavily to the climate denial movement and the right-wing think tanks that linked climate action with the bogeyman of socialism. It has funded extreme right-wing politicians, including President Trump. It wrote the chapter on energy in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 policy manifesto. It is pushing for legislation to make itself immune from lawsuits to hold it accountable for the destruction it causes. Many of its former industry executives are in Trump’s cabinet. The only way for this dying industry to maintain its hegemony is to hide behind the mask of nationalism, a way to get people to vote for politicians who clearly act against their interests.
As we fight to protect democracy, we need to challenge any attempts to distract our attention from the forces causing our precarity. We need to engage in deep forms of solidarity, where we encourage others to not fall for political rhetoric that blames the wrong people for why we are experiencing extreme inequality, ecological devastation, war, and the unraveling of the systems that support stable lives.
As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks: the fossil fuel industry. The future of democracy requires an end to the political power of the fossil fuel industry.
At this crucial moment in world history, it is incumbent on all of us to fight for accountable democratic politics, and to challenge the political imperatives being driven by an industry that is flailing and causing unprecedented devastation to our planet and our politics. It is up to us to consign it to the dustbin of history before more damage is done.