Here's the strange thing: With the recent bombing of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife, all -- according to "our" president -- thanks, at least in part, to that country's remarkable oil wealth, that source of energy has indeed been back in the headlines in a big-time fashion. As Trump put it, "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go and spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure" of Venezuela. But how curious that, despite all the writing about such developments, just about no one in the mainstream media -- and this is so typical these days -- even bothers to comment on what it would mean to extract and use so much more oil from Venezuela, which is believed to have the greatest oil reserves in the ground of any country, in terms of climate change and the long-term destruction of this world of ours. (The rare and always superb exception is the Guardian.)
Doesn't that strike you as faintly strange on a planet that's already beginning to overheat from the burning of fossil fuels in a distinctly significant fashion? Just consider that, as Dana Nuccitelli of Yale Climate Connections reports, "from 2020 to 2024, humans exacerbated the problem [of climate change] by adding about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases to the atmosphere."
If only we humans were on a different planet, not the one now going down in a big-time fashion with, unbelievably enough, a climate-change denier at the helm (for the second time!) of the country that still may be the greatest power (at least in terms of harm to the environment) on Earth. And with all of that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox take you into a future world of "degrowth" in which we would no longer need Venezuelan oil or Donald Trump making mincemeat of this planet of ours. Tom
We're Racing Down the Highway to a Mad Max World
But There's a Degrowth Exit Up Ahead
By Stan Cox
Let me start by putting things bluntly: Don't bother to tell Donald Trump, but with his distinct help, we're doing nothing less than cooking ourselves. Thanks to the continued use of fossil fuels in a staggering fashion and the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, almost half of the world's population now suffers through 30 additional days of extreme heat annually. Heatwaves roll in thicker and faster every year.
On average, according to the medical journal The Lancet, 84% of the extremely hot days we've faced over the past five years would not have occurred without human-induced climate change that the American president seems intent on making so much worse. Heat-related deaths are already 63% more frequent than in the 1990s. That Lancet article also reported that heat- and drought-related hunger, as well as deaths from wildfire smoke and industrial air pollution, are breaking records globally almost yearly.
Climate Impacts Tracker dubbed 2025 "The Year of Climate Disasters," noting,
"Flash floods tearing up a Himalayan village in India, hurricanes and wildfires ravaging the U.S., heatwaves and wildfires scorching Europe, record-breaking heat in Iceland and Greenland, torrential rains and floods roaring through Southeast Asia -- 2025 marked yet another year of human tragedies, driven by extreme weather events."
The number of environmental disasters and their destructiveness are only ratcheting up in step with increases in global greenhouse-gas emissions, ever more extraction of key minerals, the ever-greater exploitation of biological resources, and outbreaks of resource wars (most recently with the U.S. assault on Venezuela). All of that is linked to one crucial phenomenon: the single-minded pursuit of economic growth by the owning and investing classes. Not surprisingly, they reap the lion's share of the benefits from such growth and bear next to none of its devastating consequences.
Though it's seldom highlighted, the world economy has indeed reached an astounding physical scale. During the past century, resource extraction has doubled every 20 years or so. Indeed, humanity reached a grim milestone in 2021, when the global quantity of human-made mass -- that is, the total weight of all things our species manufactured or constructed -- surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on this planet. And worse yet, that mass of human-made stuff continues to grow, year by year, even as the natural world diminishes further.
In other words, our species is vainly striving to circumvent what's come to be known as Stein's Law from an aphorism credited to economic guru Herbert Stein: "If something can't go on forever, it won't."
Count on this: at some point, global economic growth will finally have to grind to a halt and shift into reverse. After all, if the corporate and political powers carry on with business as usual, such growth will end in chaotic, violent collapse. (Think Mad Max.) But if the elites can be thwarted and we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other resources in a reasonably well-planned way, we might be able to avoid that fate.
That's the pitch put forward by the degrowth movement. In essence, it's a refutation of the "green growth" doctrine. (Green-growthers, ignoring Stein's Law, claim that technological "innovation" will ensure that economies can continue to grow indefinitely.) In that debate, degrowth finally seems to be getting a leg up. A 2023 survey of nearly 800 climate-policy researchers found that almost three-quarters of them favored degrowth or no growth over green growth.
And here's the reality the rest of us need to take in: societies could indeed achieve a distinctly better quality of life because of (not in spite of) degrowth, since full-scale restraints on the endless extraction and consumption of fossil fuels could force them to ensure that their limited resources would be used to satisfy basic human needs instead of being wasted on yet more increasing profits for the already wealthy few.
The growth-addled political and economic forces pushing us toward ecological doom are many and formidable indeed. And that makes it ever more important that people in rich, overconsuming countries like ours come to realize how important it is that we stand up to the forces of ecocide, while developing a more realistic vision of the better world that awaits us once we've jumped off the growth-by-carbonization bandwagon.
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