Nicolas Maduro © Palácio do Planalto

Last Friday, I released my annual predictions episode of the podcast, and then over the weekend, Donald Trump sends special forces into Venezuela to arrest/kidnap President Nicolas Maduro (right) and then talks repeatedly about taking over the country’s huge oil reserves which he bizarrely claims to have been stolen from the US.

• First of all this dramatic event shows how impossible it is to predict anything.
• Secondly, normally such an event would cause contusions on the oil markets, but oil prices just continued their recent fall which pundits have pinned on a glut in production. Noticeably the price of gold did rise which is normally taken as a sign of nervousness in the markets.
• Thirdly, within hours of the news, some numbskull/bot/rage-baiter appeared on one of my social media timelines pronouncing this is the end of Net Zero (what, again?).

Fundamentally, the climate doesn’t care whether Venezuela’s oil is exploited by Maduro’s socialist regime or Trump’s capitalist economy. It’s all the same carbon, so my rage-baiter can sleep easy. However, there are some wider implications we can draw from the event.

Oil has always been the great disrupter of the rules-based international system that centrist Dads like me cling to in the vain hope it will stop us descending into Mad Max-style dystopia. Terrible regimes like those of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and, indeed, Venezuela are held afloat by the winning geological lottery ticket beneath their feet. But what if we stop buying it?

Every litre of fuel we burn is not only causing climate change but also propping up various global bad guys. If you buy an EV rather than a ICE car, then that’s about 50,000 litres you aren’t buying over its lifespan. Multiply that up by the global surge in EV sales along with the solar boom in the ‘sun belt’ and we are going to start seeing oil revenues fall dramatically. The markets are already betting their future on clean energy so this will accelerate as those investments start generating energy. Remember the old adage that change happens gradually then suddenly…

All a good thing? In the long term, yes, but in the short-medium term we are likely to see social and political turmoil across petrostates as their prime export collapses in value. There’s nothing like a collapsing economy to deliver chaos and, for all the talk of a ‘just transition’, I fear a lot of it is going to be rather brutal. That of course will not be the fault of clean energy and its proponents, but all of those who have allowed the world economy to be in hock to dictators for so long.