Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry

We are sitting on a time bomb: more than 500 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the United States completely under the control of unaccountable fossil fuel corporations. These companies have so many incentives to turn their reserves into profitable returns on investment—are we really ready to stake our collective future on the hope that these companies go green in time to avert climate catastrophe? As the Trump administration continues to run down the carbon clock as quickly and as irresponsibly as it can, the time has come to promote solutions that can deal with this massive private control of fossil fuel reserves. A future government may have no choice but to de-privatize control of these reserves, which would detach them from single-minded profit interests and take fossil fuel companies, powerful forces of climate opposition, out of the equation as we genuinely figure out the rest of the green transition.

The Exxon Mobil refinery in Baton Rouge, La., is one of the
largest in the country. It stands at a stretch of the Mississippi River
 known as "cancer alley" for its high number of oil and gas industry
 sites. To shut down the industry for good, the government must buy
 out privately owned fossil fuel reserves. 

The 2017 Atlantic Hurricane season kicked-off with a series of record-breaking storms hitting the United States, leaving behind scenes of complete destruction in large areas of Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It has been scary to see climate scientists’ predictions unfold before our eyes, and realize that this is our new “normal.” But the lack of debate around real solutions to mitigate further climate impacts is even scarier—as we’ve seen this week at the UN climate conference in Bonn, Germany, where the United States attempted to promote fossil fuels as the “answer” to the climate problem, an initiative that former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has compared to “promoting tobacco at a cancer summit.” This season made crystal clear we need a game-changing solution to ensure that fossil fuels remain unburned and in the ground.

Read the In These Times story by Carla Skandier - “Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry.”