“Rich Man’s Trade Union”

George Monbiot

Why does capital lovefossil fuels? They exist in a small number of discrete locations, where the right to exploit them can be owned and monopolised. Most can be extracted commercially only at scale, excluding small competitors. They can be stored and traded all over the world, allowing prices to be optimized across time and space. Renewable energy, by contrast can be generated almost anywhere, by almost anyone with a small amount of money to invest.

Renewables might be now be cheaper than fossil fuel in the vast majority of cases, but this makes them less attractive to capital, not more. Fossil fuels are uncompetitive and highly profitable. Renewables are highly competitive and not very profitable.

As a result, fossil fuel extractors will fight tooth and nail to prevent market forces from operating. They demand the equivalent the royal monopolies granted by the English Crown centuries ago, excluding competitors and enabling old technologies to fend off newer ones. Their enormous profits allow them to bend politics to their will, attacking and maligning their critics, sowing disinformation and denial and assisting the election of those who favour them. In Donald Trump, they have found the monarch who will grant them their exclusive charter.

This industry several methods to maintain its profit pipeline. These range from bank-rolling Trump’s election in order to extract the brutal environmental rollbacks he has ordered on its behalf, to the unprecedented congressional lobbying campaign it has funded, to the funding of secretive junk-tanks and the financial fuelling of the far right–which channels, as it has done throughout history, the demands of powerful corporations and oligarchs.

Around the world, oil, gas and coal companies use an ever-widening set of tactics to crush competition and opposition, including lawsuits that seem designed to shutdown environmental groups and punish them physically and financially.

Perhaps the most powerful weapon in the hands of the fossil fuel companies is the media. The billionaire press has defended their interests at every turn. It remains the principal outlet for their denial, disinformation and delaying tactics. Some of its proprietors have heavily invested in fossil fuels. As a body, they belong to what one of their editors once called the “rich man’s trade union”: they perceive an attack on any aspect of rapacious capitalism as an attack in themselves.

[George Monbiot, Guardian Columnist]

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 13, Sep 21 - 27, 2025