Donald Trump Faces Four Looming Flashpoints

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Jan 18, 2017 North Korea, the South China Sea, the Baltic Sea region and the Middle East are primed to explode early in his presidency. Dig deeper ( 14 Min. Read )

Donald Trump’s Energy Nostalgia and the Path to Hell

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Dec 19, 2016 If Trump’s energy policies all are enacted, many fossil fuel companies will be annihilated, thanks to the rock-bottom fuel prices produced by a colossal oversupply of oil, coal and natural gas. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )

Whose Finger on the Nuclear Button?

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Nov 7, 2016 As the U.S. prepares to elect a new president, the threshold at which some party to a non-nuclear conflict may choose to employ atomic weapons appears to be at its lowest in decades. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )

Will Trumpism, Brexit and Geopolitical Exceptionalism Sink the Planet?

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Sep 21, 2016 The fate of the planet rests on the willingness of each signatory nation to the Paris climate accord to abide by its obligation, however sour or bellicose its relations with other signatories may be. Dig deeper ( 10 Min. Read )

Hooked on Fossil Fuels Forever

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Jul 15, 2016 Whatever the advances of renewable energy, projections suggest fossil fuels will continue to dominate the global landscape for decades to come, accelerating the pace of global warming and ensuring the intensification of climate-change catastrophes. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )

The Desperate Plight of Petrostates

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch May 26, 2016 Once so wealthy from oil sales that they could finance wars, megaprojects, and domestic social peace simultaneously, Russia, Saudi Arabia and others are now beset by internal strife or are on the brink of collapse as oil prices remain at ruinously low levels. Dig deeper ( 12 Min. Read )

Goodbye to the Old Oil Order

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch May 2, 2016 Replacing the petroleum-fueled world we’ve known for decades is an anemic, possibly even declining, demand that is likely to force suppliers to fight over a diminishing market. Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )

Energy Wars of Attrition: The Irony of Oil Abundance

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Mar 11, 2016 The oil attrition wars may not lead us into a future of North American triumphalism or even to a more modest Saudi version of the same but into a strange new world in which an unlimited capacity to produce oil meets an increasingly crippled capitalist system without the capacity to absorb it. Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )

A New World of Renewable Energy Beckons

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Dec 14, 2015 2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries, the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era has come into sight. Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )

Why the Paris Climate Summit Will Be a Peace Conference

By Michael T. Klare / TomDispatch Nov 4, 2015 A failure to cap carbon emissions will bring on not just climate shocks, but also worldwide instability, insurrection and warfare. In this sense, the COP-21 in Paris in November should be considered perhaps the most significant peace convocation in history. Dig deeper ( 9 Min. Read )

Climate Change Tipping Points and the Question of Civilizational Survival

By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch Oct 9, 2015 We urgently need to view climate change not as a slow, linear process to which we can adapt safely over time, but as a nonlinear set of events involving dramatic and irreversible changes to the global ecosphere. Dig deeper ( 10 Min. Read )

Why an Oil Glut May Lead to a New World of Energy

By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch Aug 14, 2015 While most oil-company executives continue to insist that a turnaround is sure to occur in the near future, some analysts are beginning to wonder if oil's diminished profitability doesn’t actually signal a fundamental transformation of the industry. Dig deeper ( 11 Min. Read )