By Bob Weber

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Major Projects Office is now six months old, just a baby in government years. But those gathered around the newborn’s crib already have plenty of ideas on how they’d like the infant to grow up.

Some look for an umpire—a neutral agency that simply evaluates big proposals and advises cabinet. “I hope they want someone who’s there to call balls and strikes,” Andrew Leach, an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta, told The Energy Mix. He said the MPO’s role should be to advance such projects, but also to ensure proponents have covered the environmental and consultation bases.

“You want someone in the room that when a company comes in and says, ‘Our project’s just not moving forward,’ (asks) ‘Have you done the work right?’”   Others want something more activist, pushing projects that further decarbonization, such as linking interprovincial electricity grids. “It needs to be a ramp up for renewable energy projects,” said Mark Kalegha, energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Interconnectedness seems to be on their priority list and the MPO is able to help with the regulatory hurdles.”

A giant lab on regulatory reform would be welcome, say some. “What we’re hoping comes out of the Major Projects Office is learnings on how to accelerate reviews and processes without denuding them or making them any less stringent,” said Fernando Melo, public affairs director with the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA). “I’ve been out to many a project site where you ask, ‘How many permits are you filing?’ and the answer comes ‘Oh, five or ten’ … And I go, ‘One field.’”

Others expect it to serve an overall policy goal. “They’ve been focused on resources and infrastructure, in particular, trade facilitating infrastructure,” said University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe. “That, to me, really speaks to the priority on trade diversification that the government has laid out.”

And some will be grateful if the whole thing doesn’t just turn into another deadening layer of lobbyist-ridden government bureaucracy. “

It does signal to investors that (their proposal) won’t be one of those Canadian proposals that takes 12 years. That’s the generous side of it,” said Heather Exner-Pirot, senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. But she asks, if excessive regulation is the problem, why not just reduce regulation?

“They’ve listed all these regulations that the MPO can bypass—why don’t they work on fixing those if they can be bypassed safely?”

But all say that attempts to assess the MPO’s direction need context. The office is just one part of a policy package aiming to reduce Canada’s dependence on increasingly unreliable United States trade, boost the country’s economic self-reliance, and move its economy toward a low-carbon future—all at once.

“Just as important, if not more important than the major projects themselves, is the policy,” said Janetta McKenzie, oil and gas director at the Calgary-based Pembina Institute. She said industrial carbon pricing, methane regulations, clean electricity regulations, and federal investment tax credits are just as big an influence on where investment goes as anything the MPO does. “

If the goal is to build a future-proofed Canadian economy that is more resilient to ongoing geopolitical shocks and volatility, then the investment signals need to be strong,” McKenzie said.

The Signals So Far

The signals, so far, haven’t been encouraging for climate goals. The federal government has junked consumer carbon pricing, tossed oil sands emissions caps, and weakened EV sales mandates. Tough economic times have proved tough for environmental policy, too, said Leach.

“Once people became convinced, rightly or wrongly, that Canadian environmental policy was the source of all their woes, there wasn’t much ground there left for the PM. “Voters are very keen on environmental policy as long as it doesn’t cost them anything.”

For example, the memorandum of understanding now being finalized between Alberta and Ottawa includes a promise of industrial carbon pricing—but also support for a new pipeline, which a Pembina analysis concluded would increase Alberta’s carbon emissions even if that oil was “decarbonized” through capture and storage.

Leach said national security concerns may now support the project. “All our pipelines in the U.S. are subject to a presidential permit the president can revoke at any time at our expense,” he said. “It’s still a conversation that’s in a dark corner, so to speak, but it’s a conversation we should be having.”

A Pipeline Full of Obstacles

But any new line faces considerable obstacles.

There’s neither a route nor a proponent, and the increased production needed to fill one would require massive upstream investment.

The MOU signed between Alberta and the feds rules out public financing, but former Alberta energy minister Sonya Savage recently told a CBC podcast that without public support a private proponent is, at best, highly unlikely.

Still, there may be a financial case to be made, suggested Leach, pointing to 2010, when pipeline bottlenecks forced producers to discount Canadian oil. If that happened again, the discount would now be on roughly twice as much oil.

“This is the math that people miss,” he told The Mix. “Even if you said this (pipeline) would reduce the differential by a buck, that’s four million barrels a day, 365 days a year times 15 years. (The investment) doesn’t look terrible.” Price, he said, is far more important than sheer volume.

But Canada will likely need to reduce that discount and squeeze out every petrodollar it can, and sustain it over a longer haul that may not be realistic. Before the current war launched the price of oil, it was languishing around $60 a barrel, with most experts predicting further falls. That market is likely to eventually return once the U.S.-Iran conflict ends. When the missiles stop flying, so will the value of oil.

Diversified Trade Could Boost Climate Goals

But the Carney objective of diversifying Canada’s trading partners could also advance climate goals. The projects currently before the MPO suggest at least some emphasis on clean energy, with wind power and minerals critical to electrification in the mix.

There’s also a proposal to link electricity gids in northern British Columbia and the Yukon.Climate and energy transition advocates say that is exactly the sort of thing the MPO should be doing to move Canada towards electrons and away from molecules.

“The more we integrate provinces and (make them) able to call on each other’s resources, it’s going to be better,” said CanREA’s Melo. “Having more connectivity will help enable greater decarbonization of the grid.”

In fact, grid ties are probably the only electricity-related projects big enough to appear on the MPO’s “nation-building” agenda. Solar panels and wind farms are also regulated provincially, putting them outside the MPO’s purview.

“The barriers to renewable penetration of electricity generation are provincial policies,” said the University of Calgary’s Tombe.

Trade diversification could provide another decarbonization prod. Canada will have to meet the environmental standards of those it seeks to trade with. Europe, for example, implemented its carbon border adjustment program in January. The policy imposes a tariff on imports of carbon-intensive products such as steel, cement, and energy that don’t meet EU standards. Melo said if Canada wants to play in those markets, it will have to comply.

“With the Canadian government’s stated goal of 50% of exports reaching alternative markets— the European Union, Japan, and China, which everyone forgets has an industrial carbon price— there’ll be more and more demand that the goods they import have low-carbon attributes built in.”

Weighing the Consequences

It’s unlikely that Mark Carney, once the UN’s special envoy on climate action, has forgotten the need to reduce carbon emissions. But he’s a central banker, too, used to weighing consequences of action against each other.

“The end game is going to be overall policies on consumption and overall policies on production,” Leach said. This may mean a little water in the wine of carbon cuts. Rather than absolute targets—the meeting of which has failed dismally—Canada may instead focus on simply being better than our competitors, some analysts say.

“Sustainability includes financial sustainability,” said Exner-Pirot. “The goal is not to kill Canadian production, but to make it better. Trying to square the circle involves making Canadian products competitive on carbon intensity, aiming for the good rather than the perfect.”

The Carney government must now make tough choices in the face of a new world order different than the one we were told to expect, Tombe said. “Reality has just thrown a few curve balls at Canada.”

“I do not see the government having abandoned any consideration at all about climate objectives,” he added. “But it also keeps in mind other criteria like trade diversification, economic and productivity growth … (Government) could achieve a lot more if it was singularly focused on climate goals. But it is not. It is balancing lots of objectives.”

The MPO itself has offered few clues as to its direction and intent. Although CEO Dawn Farrell is a longtime fossil energy executive who shepherded the controversial Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, she has a non-partisan and even-handed reputation. Still, in testimony last fall before a Senate committee, she spoke approvingly of the carbon intensity of Canadian LNG. She also suggested a new oil pipeline to the west coast would have climate benefits, since much if that oil is used to make components for electric vehicles.

Some other senior staff bring past background in renewable energy and in reconciliation with Indigenous communities, but staffers have provided little information about where the office is going. Federal officials have told The Mix that Farrell maintains close contact with Carney and his senior staff, and that “all the major calls” will be made by the Prime Minister’s Office.

It’s early days for the MPO and the baby is barely walking. Where its first steps take it will be determined as much by the paths other policies have opened for it as its own inclinations.

But like any infant, observers broadly agree that it will take a while to mature. A $3.3-trillion economy does not turn around overnight.

“This process of diversifying trade, of boosting investment and growth, is going to be a multi-year, potentially multi-decade road that we’re on,” Tombe said. “We’re only at the very, very beginning. There’s so much left to do and so many unanswered questions still that need resolving.”

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By Philippe Le Billon

War is costly. The ongoing American-Israeli war on Iran is already reverberating through the global economy. For most people, including American citizens, it means higher fuel prices and greater economic uncertainty.

But for a narrower group of entities, war can also be extraordinarily profitable. Chief among them are segments of the United States oil and gas industry, which have already profited from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports.

Now, the escalation of hostilities between the U.S., Israel and Iran has once again rattled global energy markets. Fighting and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world’s most important oil shipping routes — have triggered what some have described as “the biggest oil disruption in history.”

Read more: What is the Strait of Hormuz, and why does its closure matter so much to the global economy?

By early March, oil prices had briefly surged to US$119 per barrel — roughly double their level at the end of 2025. Prices have since settled at near US$100 a barrel, though volatility remains.

The escalation illustrates a familiar pattern in the political economy of fossil fuels: public costs paired with private windfalls.

The shock to global energy markets

Three months ago, few analysts expected 2026 to be a particularly profitable year for fossil fuel producers. Global supply was expanding rapidly and U.S. gas prices were expected to fall below US$3 a gallon.

Production growth in the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Argentina was colliding with weaker demand growth and the ineffectiveness of sanctions on exports from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Many analysts warned of an emerging glut that could push prices downward. The International Energy Agency, for instance, projected a potential global oil surplus of nearly four million barrels per day in 2026.

That outlook changed abruptly following the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran and the country’s retaliatory attacks on energy infrastructure and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint that normally carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil and natural gas.

Even a partial disruption carries immediate consequences.

Though the strait has been a cornerstone of U.S. and world energy security for more than 60 years, the Donald Trump administration apparently underestimated the possibility that the Iranian regime would blockade it and pummel U.S.-allied countries in the region.

For consumers and most businesses, such price spikes function as a tax. Higher energy costs ripple through transport, food production, manufacturing and household budgets. American drivers feel the impact at the pump, while industries dependent on fuel or petrochemicals see their operating costs climb.

The hidden household costs of war

Estimates suggest that for every increase of US$10 per barrel, additional fuel costs amount to roughly US$560 per year per American household, including costs embedded in goods and services.

If prices remain at around US$86 instead of the expected US$51 forecast for 2026, the added burden could reach about US$2,000 per household annually.

These figures do not include the direct military expenditures, which were conservatively estimated at US$11 billion for the first week of strikes against Iran.

Even military spending of US$200 million per day (10 times less than the highest estimates at the current intensity) would amount to an additional cost of US$541 per household annually.

In short, a prolonged war combining high energy prices and sustained military expenditures would likely amount to between three to four per cent of the median U.S. household expenditure — roughly half of what many families spend annually on food or health care.

Lessons from recent wars

Recent history offers revealing precedents.

The costs of the Iraq War (2003 to 2011) for Americans has been estimated at about US$1.2-3 trillion in total long-term costs, equivalent to about US$16,700 to US$41,750 per household in current U.S. dollars. Yet the war did achieve the goal of reopening access to Iraqi oil fields for American oil companies.

More recently, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia cost an estimated one per cent of global GDP in 2022 and added 1.5 per cent to global inflation in 2022-23. Ukraine, of course, paid the largest price for the war, but direct impacts in Europe amounted to about 1 trillion euros.

Much of these costs ultimately translated into profits for oil and gas companies, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG) companies from the U.S. and producers in Australia and the Gulf states.

Profits on a single LNG shipment from the U.S. to Europe increased fivefold from about US$17 million to US$102 million.

A similar dynamic is now unfolding again.

Who really benefits from rising oil prices?

This time, with major Gulf states themselves exposed to the conflict, U.S. and other exporters less directly affected by the war may have even greater room to increase profits. American LNG companies could see windfalls approaching US$20 billion per month.

The main lesson is that petro-states, including Iran, Russia and the U.S., don’t hesitate to go to war partly because they believe oil revenues will bail them out, if not further enrich them.

In fact, in seeking to justify the attack on Iran and the continuation of the conflict, Trump argued that “the United States is the largest oil producer in the world, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”

This, of course, depends on who “we” refers to. The populations of most petro-states have paid dearly for the wars involving their countries, whether it’s been Angola, Chad, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Russia, Syria and now Iran.

The U.S. has fared much better economically, but the gains have been mostly for its companies, not its population. Higher oil and natural gas prices generate enormous revenues for U.S. oil producers and LNG exporters along the Gulf Coast as global gas markets tighten. Investors and shareholders in these sectors stand to gain from rising margins and market valuations.

American households, however, face the opposite effect. Fuel prices rise. Inflationary pressures intensify. Transport and heating costs increase.

The gains accruing to producers are therefore not only partially financed by the most import-dependent countries with the least strategic reserves but also by low-income households who are stuck in a carbon-intensive economy they can least afford to escape.

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By Naveena Sadasivam

For more than a decade, the clean energy economy has been on a steep growth trajectory. Companies have poured billions of dollars into battery manufacturing, solar and wind generation, and electric vehicle plants in the U.S., as solar costs fell sharply and EV sales surged. That momentum is set to continue surging in much of the world — but in the United States, it’s starting to stall.

According to a new report from the clean energy think tank E2, new investment in clean energy projects last year was dwarfed by a cascade of cancellations for projects already in progress. For every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.

“That’s pretty jarring considering how much progress we made in previous years,” said Michael Timberlake, a director of research and publications at E2. “The rest of the world is generally doubling down or transitioning further, and the U.S. is now becoming increasingly combative and antagonistic towards clean energy industries.”

Timberlake said the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy are the main driver of the slowdown. Companies began pulling back their investments shortly after the November 2024 election, when a victorious Trump telegraphed that he would promote fossil fuels over solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. For instance, TotalEnergies, the French oil-and-gas giant, paused development of two offshore wind projects in late November 2024, citing uncertainty after Trump’s election. The company has not restarted the projects since.

Trump followed through on those promises once in office: One of his first actions in office was to pause leasing and permitting for offshore wind. The freeze resulted in several wind developers indefinitely pausing or abandoning their projects while lawsuits trickled through the courts. (Federal judges have issued judgments in favour of the wind companies in recent months.) Trump’s administration also pulled billions of dollars in funding for a range of clean energy projects and cancelled or retooled Biden-era policies favourable to the industry, such as energy-efficiency measures, IRS tax guidance, and loans for a transmission line expected to carry solar and wind power.

Congress, at the behest of Trump, also passed the “One Big Beautiful Act” over the summer. In addition to sunsetting lucrative tax credits for renewable energy production, the law hammered the electric vehicle industry from multiple sides: It ended investment credits supporting the buildout of battery manufacturers, and simultaneously nixed the $7,500 tax credit available to American consumers who purchase EVs.

Timberlake cautioned against pinning clean energy’s disappointing year on any one policy. While the One Big Beautiful Act was the “biggest signifier” of the shift, “the overall policy and regulatory attack” is to blame for the glut of project cancellations, he said. “It’s not an environment that encourages more investment because no one knows what six months from now will look like.”

Electric vehicle and battery manufacturing have been hit the hardest over the past year. Each sector lost roughly $21 billion in investment over the past year, according to E2’s analysis, which includes some overlapping projects that serve both purposes. The industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs. These two industries likely lost the most investments because they had been growing the fastest in recent years, meaning they had more projects in the pipeline to cancel or downsize once President Trump was elected. The EV industry’s outlook, in particular, changed once Congress repealed consumer tax credits made available by former President Joe Biden. That, along with the general policy uncertainty, led to automakers revising their expectations for EV demand in the U.S. and reallocating their investments accordingly.

Some states were hit harder than others. In 2025 alone, Michigan lost 13 clean energy projects worth $8.1 billion — more than twice as many as any other state, due to its role as the capital of the U.S. auto industry. Illinois, Georgia, and New York also lost billions of dollars in investments.

Many automakers that scaled back electric vehicle plans last year redirected those investments rather than abandoning them outright. Ford, for example, had originally planned to build all-electric commercial vehicles at its $1.5 billion Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake. But after revising its EV ambitions, the company pivoted the facility toward gas-powered and hybrid vans. Because Ford did not scrap the plant altogether, Timberlake said, facilities like Avon Lake could still be retrofitted for electric vehicle production if market conditions and policy outlooks improve.

“The silver lining view is they’re hopefully maintaining those facilities so that when there is certainty, those factories will still be available for making EVs down the road,” said Timberlake.

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EIA’s analysis shows that about 22 per cent of light-duty vehicles sold in the United States in 2025 were electrified in some form — including hybrids, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) — up from 20 per cent in 2024. However, the growth trajectory was uneven: hybrid electric vehicles continued gaining market share, while battery electric and plug-in hybrid sales declined over the year.

The divergence reflects seismic changes in tax policy. Two major incentives — the New Clean Vehicle Credit and the Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit, each worth up to US $7,500 — expired on September 30, 2025 as part of broader tax changes enacted by Congress. The credits had long been a cornerstone of U.S. EV policy, lowering purchase costs for consumers and supporting demand.

Industry analysts widely anticipated a drop in EV sales once those incentives ended. A market expert quoted by Reuters in September said the impending tax credit expiration would likely cause a “short-term dip” in EV sales as buyers rushed to close deals before the deadline.

Indeed, EIA’s figures show that BEVs reached a record share of 12 per cent of U.S. light-duty vehicle sales in September 2025, just before the tax credits disappeared. Afterwards, BEV sales fell to less than 6 per cent in each of the remaining months of the year, marking the first annual decline in battery electric vehicle sales and share in the United States.

Policy shifts and market reactions

Industry reporting confirms a sharp hit to EV demand post-credit expiry. A Yahoo Finance analysis found that EV sales at U.S. dealerships plunged by as much as 74 per cent from peak weekly levels after the federal tax incentive ended, highlighting the role subsidies played in consumer buying decisions.

Automakers have felt the impact. According to The Wall Street Journal, Ford Motor Co. saw electric vehicle sales decline sharply in November 2025, with BEV units down 61 per cent year-over-year as demand softened following the credit’s expiration. At the same time, hybrid sales — which were not eligible for the tax credit — increased, reflecting shifting buyer behaviour.

General Motors has also reported financial strain, with roughly US $6 billion in charges tied to declining EV sales and the loss of policy incentives, according to Associated Press reporting. GM’s ambitious electrification plans have been disrupted by a combination of subsidy cuts and looser emissions standards.

Why hybrids are gaining ground

Unlike battery electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles do not plug into the grid and rely on internal combustion engines coupled with electric motors. They were never eligible for the 2025 federal tax credits, yet hybrids continued to gain share throughout the year, buoyed by fuel-efficiency advantages and growing consumer comfort with electrified drivetrains.

Analysts point to price and convenience as key drivers. With federal incentives gone and many EV sticker prices remaining high — the average new EV transaction price exceeded US $60,000 in 2025 — hybrids have become an attractive alternative for mainstream buyers not ready to pay a premium for all-electric range.

Broader industry context

The U.S. trend contrasts with global EV markets, where overall plug-in sales continued to grow in 2025. Benchmark data indicates that global EV sales rose roughly 20 per cent, led by strong growth in European and Chinese markets, even as U.S. EV sales lagged due to fading incentives and weaker policy support.

China in particular remains dominant: EVs accounted for a majority share of the country’s automotive market in 2025, matched with aggressive local incentives and production scale. Those conditions continue to drive China’s outsized footprint in global EV manufacturing and sales.

Future outlook

Looking ahead, industry watchers say the U.S. EV market may stabilize or rebound if states, automakers, or future federal policy introduce new incentives or regulatory support. However, the 2025 experience highlights how sensitive EV adoption remains to public policy and cost incentives — a lesson likely to shape debates on electrification strategy and climate goals in 2026 and beyond.

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By Jake Bittle

Since his presidency began last year, Donald Trump has embarked on an all-out campaign to destroy the nation’s nascent offshore wind industry. He has halted all wind lease sales in federal waters, issued stop-work orders for nearly-completed wind farms, and told oil industry executives that his “goal is to not let any windmills be built.” Last month, his Interior Department said it would terminate five major wind farms that are under construction in the north Atlantic Ocean, citing vague “national security” issues. These wind farms would together generate around 5.6 gigawatts of power, enough to supply around 4 million homes.

Trump’s actions have all but destroyed the U.S. offshore wind industry, which was already facing significant economic challenges during the Biden administration. While developers behind the terminated wind farms recently secured court orders allowing them to complete construction, other potential wind installations have been scrapped, and investors are retreating from offshore projects. Even as solar energy continued to grow at a rapid clip in 2025, wind saw virtually no growth in the United States.

That’s not just bad for the climate — it will also make it harder to keep the lights on in the U.S. northeast.  The nation’s densest region is counting on dozens of new wind farms to meet rising power demand; the stretch of coastal states from Maine to Virginia have collectively committed to buy more than 45 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2040, almost ten times more than the five nearly-complete projects will provide. The region does not have many other good options for filling the gap. Without wind, residents of states like Massachusetts and New York will pay more money for dirtier fuel. The energy future of these states now hinges on whether they can tempt offshore wind developers back to a market that the federal government has just spent a year destroying.

“The market is at less than zero confidence right now,” said Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, an independent organization that supports the buildout of the industry.

The country’s first crop of major offshore wind farms has been a generation in the making. Developers have been trying to sink steel turbines onto the ocean floor since the turn of the century, but their projects collapsed amid high costs and community opposition. It wasn’t until the Obama administration that the federal government laid the groundwork for wind leases in federal waters near Long Island, conducting landmark studies that identified ocean zones where wind is strongest and environmental risks are lowest. That attracted major renewable energy developers like the Danish firm Ørsted and the Norwegian company Equinor, who leased territory in the north Atlantic and sketched out billion-dollar wind farms.

Even before Trump, these projects were on shaky financial ground. Ørsted and its peers signed power contracts with states including New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts before the COVID-19 disruptions, but pandemic-driven shortages and the supply-chain chaos of Russia’s war on Ukraine drove up costs for construction materials like steel and copper. State governments also demanded developers put up more money for port improvements and onshore manufacturing jobs.

At the same time, developers encountered a wave of opposition from fishermen’s groups, conservative activists, and shoreline residents concerned about their ocean views. Prominent Republicans like U.S. Representative Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey championed these groups. The opposition filed several lawsuits that slowed down the permit process for a few major wind farms, with one suit even reaching the Supreme Court.

“These were new, first-of-a-kind-in-the-U.S. permits, and we were trying to improve the permitting process as we were going along,” said Elizabeth Klein, who led the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management under former President Biden. (Klein said that by the end of Biden’s term the average environmental permit review took between two and three years, much longer than the more established procedure for offshore oil and gas.)

After the 2024 election, Trump’s sudden assault on the industry destroyed what little investor confidence was left. Even though several companies still hold leases that give them the right to build wind farms in federal waters, the industry has frozen in place. Other than the handful of major wind farms that are suing Trump for permission to finish construction, there are no large-scale projects in the pipeline. This freeze stands in stark contrast to the fate of solar energy, where installed capacity grew by 27 percent in 2025.

“In order for someone to get a commercial gleam in their eye, you need alignment with the federal government, the state government, and the market,” said an energy consultant who has advised offshore wind developers. “That’s gone, and it makes projects literally impossible. There’s no beating around it.” (The consultant requested anonymity in order to speak frankly given federal government backlash against the wind industry.)

Though the Biden administration focused primarily on the north Atlantic, it also auctioned federal wind leases in places like South Carolina, Louisiana, and Oregon. Klein believes that those states may now turn away from offshore wind given the market turmoil — and also because they have increasing access to alternatives like solar and cheap natural gas.

The Northeast does not have the same luxury. It is too dense and too cloudy to allow for large-scale solar farms, and other baseload power sources like nuclear will be hard to site, given population density and local opposition.

“There’s no other energy source coming to save them,” said Klein.

The situation is most acute in New England. In a report analyzing decarbonization scenarios, the energy nonprofit Clean Air Task Force found that offshore wind would have to make up almost half of all power generation by 2050 for the region to fully decarbonize. But it’s not just that these states need offshore wind to ditch fossil fuels. Experts also say that, with federal support, wind could be both the easiest-to-build and the most reliable power source for New England. That’s in part because communities across the region have mobilized against new gas pipelines and power plants. Furthermore, the region’s winter power needs will increase as more homes switch away from heating oil and begin to use electric heat pumps instead. Offshore wind turbines also fare much better in cold weather than power plants fuelled by natural gas and oil.

“For all the difficulties, building [wind] and interconnecting is easier than almost anything else you would do,” said John Carlson, the senior Northeast regional policy manager at Clean Air Task Force, which co-produced the report on New England’s decarbonization. “At the end of the day, this has to happen. There isn’t another option.”

The first prerequisite to a revival of the industry would be a cooperative federal government. Given how long it takes to build a wind farm, many experts believe that some form of permitting reform will be necessary to tempt investors back into the market. Clean energy lobbyists and oil industry groups alike have endorsed bills that would prevent presidents from pulling already-approved permits, but Congress has yet to pass one. The most recent negotiations collapsed after Trump’s attempt to terminate the five major wind farms. (Beyond the five nearly-complete wind farms, there are several more projects that have obtained most or all of their federal permits, and their developers may just try to wait out the administration.)

But there are other constraints, one of which is money. Industry insiders say global firms like Ørsted and Equinor have little desire to make further investments in the U.S. market, though they’re still holding on to their federal leases in windy sections of the ocean. There may be smaller developers who may want to take the leases off their hands. Before the current crop of massive European-built wind farms, smaller American developers tried to build minor farms along New England’s coast. These projects collapsed amid local opposition, but it’s possible that American energy developers may now want to get back into the fray. (Both Ørsted and Equinor declined to comment on their future investment plans.)

The problem is that these smaller companies will have a harder time borrowing the billions of dollars it takes to build big wind farms, and they may need to charge more money for the electricity they produce. Experts say that state governments in the region will likely need to grease the wheels for investment by putting up taxpayer money rather than asking developers to bear all the costs.

“The ability for the state to de-risk the investment environment is enormously valuable in terms of making Maine an attractive state,” said Jeremy Payne, a lobbyist for the government affairs firm Cornerstone and the former director of Maine’s renewable energy trade association. Payne said that the state could attract investment by training wind workers or coordinating with neighboring states on transmission corridors for wind power cables, taking some of the work off the developer’s hands.

Infrastructure is also a key constraint. The first wind projects required states to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on port upgrades and onshore construction. Massachusetts has spent well over $100 million to upgrade the old whaling port of New Bedford so it can serve as a staging area for massive wind turbine blades that can stretch the length of a football field. New York built a similar wind staging area along the harbor in Brooklyn.

But this infrastructure is still not sufficient to support wind development on the scale that the region needs. The New Bedford port is just a quarter of the size of an offshore wind terminal under construction at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and it may be too narrow to accommodate some large vessels. Massachusetts is planning to build a second facility in Salem — but Trump canceled a $34 million grant for that project, and its future is now uncertain.

The states along the eastern seaboard must invest now in order to make it easier for future projects to get off the ground. That includes upgrading transmission infrastructure, investing in workforce training, and expanding ports to accommodate larger turbines.

“We understand that whatever we’re doing now, we’re doing for 2029 or maybe 2030,” said Bruce Carlisle, the managing director of offshore wind for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a quasi-state agency that supports the buildout of renewable energy. “We want to make sure we’re balancing state investment with realistic timelines.”

At the same time, Carlisle said states may not get all they originally wanted from wind projects. In the first go-round, states pushed developers to hire local workers for manufacturing and assembly, but Carlisle now says that the states may need to walk some of those requests back, because they will further raise costs for developers. Instead, states may need to let developers source labor and materials from Europe — which has built out far more offshore wind and therefore has a developed labor force and supply chains already — rather than demanding they build out a U.S. manufacturing base.

Given that President Trump has refused to issue new permits for offshore wind, it will likely be impossible for states like New Jersey and Massachusetts to achieve their current procurement targets on time. In the rest of the country, planned projects may never materialize. But offshore wind will still dominate the Northeast power grid in the long run, even if future projects are more expensive and require more state support. For all the blows the industry has taken, the region just doesn’t have good alternatives.

“I think it’s more a question of ‘when’ than ‘if,’” said Ohleth.

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By Fatih Birol, Executive Director

The post 7 certainties about energy for this age of uncertainty appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Mitchell Beer

On the heels of a new strategic partnership with China, and with Prime Minister Mark Carney planning a trip to India later this year, the plan to reduce Canada’s trade dependence on the United States is beginning to yield closer connections with the world’s first two electrostates.

As Trump threatened a 100% tariff against Canadian products in response to a deal with China that he initially praised, at least one Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer looked to be preparing for an expansion into Canada, while a federal official said Canada wanted to be the first country in North America to build an EV with Chinese know-how.

Meanwhile, just as China is receiving wide recognition as the world’s first electrostate, a small flurry of news and analysis had India rapidly emerging as the second, advancing farther and faster than China did when it had achieved the same degree of economic development.

‘Foreign Troubles’ for U.S. Automakers

In their strategic partnership announced Jan. 16, Canada agreed to sharply reduce tariffs on electric vehicle imports from China, while China offered up tariff relief for Canadian canola, peas, pork, and seafood. Canada will slash duties on up to 49,000 Chinese EVs per year, rising to 70,000 by 2031, to a “most-favoured-nation tariff rate” of 6.1%. Within five years, as well, more than half of those vehicles are meant to be affordable EVs with an import price of less than $35,000.

At the time, CBC said Ottawa would soon release a strategy to expand the auto sector and “leapfrog” the U.S., with “preferential access to foreign automakers that manufacture vehicles in Canada.”

Scarcely a week later, the New York Times reported that the U.S. industry’s “foreign troubles” now extend to Canada, after U.S. trade policy “devastated the Canadian auto industry and pushed the country to reach an agreement that will make it easier for Chinese companies to sell cars there.” That could make the Canada-China agreement “an ominous development for U.S. automakers that are already struggling to stay relevant outside North America,” the Times wrote.

“General Motors and Ford Motor—the two largest U.S.-based car manufacturers—have been steadily losing customers in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, as Chinese carmakers have gained ground,” the news story stated. “If they lose significant ground to Chinese companies in Canada, Mexico, and other countries where they once dominated, Ford and GM could gradually become niche manufacturers.”

“There’s a real danger that the market for U.S. carmakers is going to largely be the U.S., and only that part of the U.S. market that wants big SUVs and trucks,” Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, told Times auto industry reporter Jack Ewing.

“Historically, U.S. trade policy regarding automotive has been mirrored in Canada,” added George Washington University engineering professor John Helveston, in an interview with the South China Morning Post. But now, “Canada is realizing that the U.S. industry is perhaps not the only one to be tied to,” a measure of both the impact of Trump’s tariff wars and the wider decline of U.S. leadership.

In Canada, the partnership has analysts arguing that lower costs will help consumers, although concerns about supply chains, industrial strategy, environmental impacts, and “strategic dependence” have yet to be resolved.

“The quota is too small to translate into a cheap-car bonanza for Canadian car shoppers,” the Globe and Mail writes. “But it is likely to increase competition among automakers, in China and elsewhere, to make $35,000 EVs fit for the Canadian market.”

The first imports will likely come from western automakers with Chinese production lines, notably Chinese-owned Volvo, Buick, and Elon Musk’s Tesla, the Globe says. But “China’s own brands won’t take long to show up in Canada,” the news story states, citing Canadian Black Book senior manager Daniel Ross, and they’ll want to build their profile “by focusing on models that meet North American expectations in terms of features, style, and size.” That will put them in competition “with compact and subcompact SUV segments, which, together, currently make up about half of the Canadian market.”

Late last week, the Globe reported that China’s Chery Automobile Co. Ltd. was laying the groundwork for a Canadian sales network, with at least three auto industry veterans saying they’d been contacted by recruiters who indicated they were working for Chery. The company is also considering building cars in a UK plant owned by Jaguar Land Rover, the Financial Times writes.

The Globe also reports on the difficulties that Chinese manufacturer BYD ran into when it tried to set up manufacturing operations in Ontario a few years ago.

The Two Electrostates

The trade deal earlier this month is just one part of an economic diversification strategy that had Carney concluding deals with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar over the last month. With International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu now calling for closer trade ties between Canada and India, Carney is planning a visit as soon as March, Reuters reported in an exclusive this week, with indications of trade talks in Brazil and Australia later this year.

For a few years, China has been seen as the world’s first electrostate, with renewable energy and energy storage investments that far exceed the activity in any other country. Earlier this month, Carbon Brief talked to nearly a dozen leading experts in Chinese energy and climate policy to get a sense of what to expect in 2026—the year when the country will publish a set of five-year targets that “could boost—or moderate –the pace of its energy transition.”

For more than 18 months, analysis by Carbon Brief and others has shown China’s carbon dioxide emissions either flat or falling. This year, new non-binding emission targets and an expanded carbon market are expected to take effect, even as extreme weather increases the importance of climate adaptation “while also adding to the challenge of advancing clean energy.”

Already, though, renewable energy has already replaced natural gas as “the leading replacement for coal demand in China, with growth in solar and wind generation largely keeping emissions growth from China’s power sector flat,” Carbon Brief reports. Nikkei Asia says China installed three times more battery storage capacity than the U.S. in 2025.

Now India is “electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels per capita than China did when it was at similar levels of economic development,” Bloomberg says, citing analysis by the UK’s Ember energy think tank. “It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies, too.”

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi “is considering new plans that would double India’s coal power capacity by 2047, and the country’s oil consumption growth was set to outpace China’s last year,” Bloomberg writes. “But the South Asian economy’s coal and oil consumption per capita is a fraction of what China’s was at similar income levels. In absolute terms, India’s fossil fuel consumption is growing at slower rates than China’s today.”

No More Engine for Oil and Gas Growth

Energi Media publisher Markham Hislop says the Ember analysis has wider implications.

“It suggests that India, the country long assumed to be the last great engine of global oil and gas demand growth, may already be bending away from fossil fuels faster than China did at a comparable stage of development,” Hislop writes. “That version of India’s energy future undermines the strategic assumptions underpinning energy policy in exporting nations from the Middle East to North America, including Canada.”

The driving force behind that shift is “simple and structural,” he adds, citing Ember. “China had to pioneer modern electric technologies at scale. India does not. It is industrializing at a moment when solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles are abundant, cheap, and improving every year. India is not taking a fossil detour because it no longer makes economic sense to do so.”

Which in turn leads Hislop to the implications for fossil fuel exporters. “If India’s oil and gas demand really is nearing a peak, or never reaches the levels long assumed, the implications ripple outward.,” Hislop says. “For global markets. For geopolitics. And for countries like Canada that have built their long-term energy ambitions on the idea that someone, somewhere, will always need more hydrocarbons.”

In his Electrotech Revolution newsletter, Ember strategist and report co-author Kingsmill Bond cites faster solar deployment, much lower per capita coal use, rapid growth of electric vehicles, much lower oil demand in transport, and a “similar rapid electrification pathway” as factors that could make India’s “electrotech fast-track” more effective than China’s “fossil detour” en route to electrostate status.

“This energy path avoids deep fossil fuel dependency while positioning the country to supply electrotech to the world,” he writes, in what amounts to a “new path for emerging economies. India is showing other countries how to take a cheaper, faster, cleaner pathway to the electrotech future.”

The post China Deal, India Talks Connect Carney’s Trade Plans with World’s First 2 Electrostates appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

It took Donald Trump less than a week after his bombing raid in Venezuela to raise the ire of one major group of fossil industry donors, while threatening to freeze his country’s biggest publicly-traded oil company out of the production boom he thinks he can set in motion.

In the 10 days since the raid, Trump has claimed that Venezuela “will be turning over” 30 to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S., that he will personally control the revenue from selling that oil, and that the U.S. fossil industry will pile in to Venezuela to restore its decrepit, poorly-maintained production infrastructure.

But that isn’t sitting well with fracking executives in Texas—many of whom “bankrolled the president’s return to office”—who expect any increase in production to push global oil prices below the threshold where they can continue to operate, the Financial Times reports.

“Problems in Texas’s oil industry are mounting, as cheaper oil forces producers to idle rigs needed to keep production ticking higher,” the Times explains. So “Trump’s drive to open up Venezuela’s oil riches, potentially subsidizing investors, has further strained relations with oil executives in Texas, who have been angered by his dogged pursuit of ever-lower crude prices.”

In the 2024 general election in the U.S., the fossil fuel industry spent $219 million to elect the country’s next government, Yale Climate Connections reported afterwards, most of it on Republican campaigns. That was after Trump invited about 20 oil and gas executives to his Mar-a-Lago estate in April to present what one independent journalist called a “breathtakingly corrupt proposal: If they raised a billion dollars to help him retake the White House, he would roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office.”

Now some of those donors sound like they’re questioning the return on their investment.

“We’re talking about this administration screwing us over again,” one exec told the Times. “If the U.S. government starts providing guarantees to oil companies to produce or grow oil production in Venezuela I’m going to be… pissed.”

Some industry sources are angrily calling it a “betrayal” after Trump “flew to Texas multiple times in 2024 to tap deep-pocketed oil barons for cash,” the news story adds. Their problem is that “only the biggest [fossil] energy groups, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron,  and ConocoPhillips, have access to the tens of billions of dollars in capital, teams of lawyers, and security protection needed for a foray into Venezuelan oil. For smaller U.S. operators, a revitalized Venezuelan industry—if Trump can pull it off—means worsening the market glut,” with prices already below the US$60 per barrel that shale producers need to turn a profit.

“To me, the signal from the administration is: we’d rather spend our American money on propping up a Venezuelan oil business than supporting our current independent businesses,” said Trump donor Kirk Edwards, CEO of Odessa, Texas-based Latigo Petroleum.

“I think it’s an appropriate reaction by U.S. shale to be miffed,” added Pickering Energy Partners founder Dan Pickering. “Not just because Venezuelan production might go up but because the U.S. government, in theory, is going to subsidize that.”

On the surface, colossal fossil ExxonMobil may be miffed, as well, after Trump took umbrage at CEO Darren Woods’ assessment that his production plan would be “uninvestable”. After meeting with fossil CEOs Friday, Trump said Woods’ bad attitude might disqualify the company from any new business in Venezuela.

“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” he told reporters. “I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.”

Woods maintained that Venezuela would have to make “significant changes” before Exxon would consider investing there. “We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here and what is currently the state,” he said. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs, frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable.”

He also told Trump he was “confident” those changes “can be put in place,” the Times writes.

But Venezuela’s oilfields may not be the prize Exxon is after—or even the main motivation behind Trump’s takeover. Drilled Executive Editor Amy Westervelt recaps Exxon’s extensive investments in neighbouring Guyana and recalls Venezuela’s escalating threats against those operations before the U.S. removed President Nicolás Maduro from office.

Most of the other oil execs who met at the White House Friday “delivered optimistic messages to Trump about the prospect of reviving Venezuela’s oil sector,” the Times says. But at least one U.S. news site is reporting that industry insiders “are mocking the president behind his back, predicting companies will string him along to get on his ‘good side’ and never follow through” on their promises to invest.

“The big oil companies who move slowly, who have corporate boards are not interested,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Politico, in a sequence republished by RawStory. “I can tell you that independent oil companies and individuals, wildcatters, [our] phones are ringing off the hook. They want to get to Venezuela yesterday.”

But that only shows that “the most enthusiastic are among the least prepared and least sophisticated,” said one industry official. “Anyone with a degree of international sophistication is taking a more measured approach.”

The post U.S. Fossil Donors ‘Pissed’ at Trump, Mock Him Behind His Back, as Venezuela Plan Takes Shape appeared first on Thoughtful Journalism About Energy's Future.

By Jorge H. Sanchez-Perez

The American invasion of Venezuela — along with fresh threats to annex Greenland — provide the world with a unique opportunity to perform a post-mortem examination on what was once known as the international rules-based legal order.

This legal order was based on rules enshrined in the United Nations Charter of 1945. Its collapse creates uncertainty that requires careful consideration from all those interested in world peace.

Read more: Trump’s intervention in Venezuela: the 3 warnings for the world

First, however, it’s important to understand what legal orders are and how they can collapse.

Social rules come in different forms — some might be religious, some moral. But complex political communities tend to be ruled by another set of rules, legal ones.

Legal rules tend to be organized in what are commonly called legal orders, and these orders guide the actions of members of the political communities in their everyday lives. One goal of most legal orders is, usually, co-ordination among those who are part of a social group.

When we think about legal orders, we usually focus on the ones that are closer to our political communities, such as those connected to our cities, provinces and states. But there’s one legal order that tends to be ignored more often than not — the international legal order.

International law

One defining feature of international legal orders is that they are far removed from people within their own political communities, so negotiations to establish shared rules are usually carried out by representatives of large states or other powerful political entities.

Even though the international legal order feels isolated from everyday rules — like city laws telling us which side of the road to drive on — it shares the same basic features that make any system of co-ordination work.

One key feature is meeting the expectations of the people within a political community. For a legal order to last over time, it must do this. In other words, because legal orders are systems of co-ordination, they tend to endure as long as their rules are expected and accepted, even if those rules are unjust.

Although some people believe that a law must be just to count as law, that view is hard to sustain when we look at the past few hundred years of human history. Many periods offer clear examples of both domestic and international legal systems that upheld deeply unjust and morally troubling positions.

Yet it would be difficult to argue that there was no legal order in places like the Ottoman Empire or Nazi Germany. In both cases, genocide — among the gravest moral failures imaginable — occurred within functioning legal systems. This suggests that legal orders can persist even while enabling repeated immoral actions.

History also shows, however, that legal orders do collapse, and often more quickly and more frequently than many might expect.

The Ottoman Empire and Nazi Germany, for example, ceased to exist a long time ago. From a broader historical perspective, the legal order of the Roman Republic in the second century BCE no longer exists and bears little resemblance to the system governing modern Rome within Italy today.

Like the other legal orders mentioned, the post–Second World War order increasingly looks like a relic rather than a binding reality — a fact we must clearly recognize if we hope to save some of its positive features.

Fundamental rights

After the Second World War, one of the main agreements among most political communities around the world was that the previously held right to wage wars against other countries was no longer acceptable. Sovereignty consequently became one of the cornerstones of the international legal order.

This was enshrined in Articles 1 and 2 of the United Nations Charter. The logic was simple: as the charter’s preamble notes, repeated wars had brought immense suffering to people entitled to fundamental rights based on their dignity, worth and equality. As a result, this new order abolished the right of political communities to wage war for any reason.

In practice, however, this order rested on a watered-down version of that ideal. Even when sovereignty and human rights were violated via military action, the appearance of an aim to protect them had to be maintained. Powerful states could breach these principles so long as they preserved the illusion that they were attempting to uphold and safeguard sovereignty and rights.

This unspoken rule — that power could override law if the façade remained intact — underpinned the international legal order from 1945 to 2023.

As the world watched the assault on Gaza unfold — deemed a genocide by the United Nations — many western political communities that had helped build the post-war legal order abandoned even the pretense that sustained it.

Once the illusion of respect for sovereignty and human rights collapsed, the system lost a key element that had kept it functioning. This is why I’ve argued previously that the rules-based international order went to Gaza to die at the hands of those who created it.

Annexation made easy

Unlike U.S. President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, which was framed by American diplomats as defending human rights, Donald Trump’s invasion of Venezuela and the capture of Nicolás Maduro weren’t presented as respecting any lofty principles.

His actions were grounded on the views that the U.S. has a claim to Venezuela’s oil. The intervention was driven by economic interests and hearkened back to the the Monroe Doctrine, an 1823 U.S. policy that promoted American dominance of the Western Hemisphere.

The events in Venezuela suggest the post-1945 international legal order, which emphasized sovereignty and fundamental rights, has been replaced by one more like the pre-Second World War system, when nations could go to war for almost any reason.

Read more: Trump’s squeeze of Venezuela goes beyond Monroe Doctrine – in ideology, intent and scale, it’s unprecedented

Under the legal order now in place, Canada and Greenland could easily be the next targets of American annexation. Similarly, Taiwan could be annexed by China and Ukraine by Russia.

What the world is witnessing now is the international rules-based order being stripped of whatever value it once had. It is time to accept this reality if we are to build a better international order next time.

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With Jacob Blanc

The United States military recently carried out a covert operation to capture and then remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, transporting them from Caracas to New York. The pair is accused of narco-terrorism, conspiracy, drug trafficking and money laundering.

President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. will temporarily “run” Venezuela until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” can be ensured. Trump also announced Venezeula was handing over up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S. to be sold at “market price.”

Read more: A predawn op in Latin America? The US has been here before, but the seizure of Venezuela’s Maduro is still unprecedented

There’s nothing new about the American desire to put an end to the Maduro regime. In March 2020, during Trump’s first term, Maduro was indicted by the U.S. on narco-terrorism and cocaine trafficking charges. A reward of US$15 million was offered for his arrest. But the U.S. had been increasing pressure on Venezuela for months through both military and diplomatic tactics.

Nor is it the first time that the U.S. has intervened militarily in Latin America. It happened in Grenada and Panama in 1983 and in Honduras in 1988.

But an intervention of this magnitude in a large South American country is unprecedented. Jacob Blanc, a Latin American specialist and professor in the history department at McGill University, explains.

The Conversation Canada: Were you surprised by the American intervention in Caracas?

Jacob Blanc: Yes, I was, especially because of how audacious it was. There is a long history of American interventions in Latin America, but in the larger countries these have generally been carried out in a more subtle way. The United States has supported regime changes when they are perceived as pro-Communist or anti-American. But this case — a military intervention in the middle of the night at the presidential palace and the abduction of the leader of a modern country — is unusual. What’s more, Trump is not touching the political system. He is leaving the regime in place, with Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez as interim president. This is unprecedented.

TCC: What kind of relationship did the United States have with Venezuela?

J.B.: Venezuela is particularly important to Americans because it was the country where one of the first independence movements against the Spanish took place. This was where the colonial wars took root, and where [military and political leader] Simón Bolívar proposed unifying the South American hemisphere in a confederation. Bolivar’s plan did not succeed, but Venezuela was at the forefront of this movement. Then, in the 20th century, oil was discovered in several countries in northern South America, including Venezuela — which has the largest reserves in the world — and Colombia. The economy benefited, but this also created regional problems.

The region became more important to the Americans in the 1990s with the instability in the Middle East. With the rise to power of Hugo Chávez, [president from 1999 until his death], and his left-wing ideas, relations cooled. Chávez became the bête noire of the Americans, who accused him of corruption, among other things.

An oil embargo was imposed in 2019, which considerably weakened the oil sector. Under Hugo Chavez, the oil sector was already slowing down, mainly due to corruption. It will take years and a lot of money for the Americans to get it back on track, but the Americans themselves created part of the problem with the embargo.

TCC: How do other South American countries view this intervention?

J.B.: It depends on their ideology. Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, which are more left-wing, have denounced the intervention, but Argentina and Chile have supported it. In my opinion, this will accentuate the divide between the two ideologies present in South America, but this situation is not really new. For Cuba, the threat is real. But an American intervention on the island would be purely ideological, as the country has almost nothing to offer. It would be a trophy for Trump to show off.

TCC: Trump’s bellicose rhetoric against Colombia is surprising, given that the country is a democracy. How should we interpret this?

J.B.: Yes, it surprises me a little. But at the same time, it makes sense: the official justification for the intervention against Venezuela is the illegal entry of drugs into the United States. But Venezuela is a small player. Colombia, on the other hand, is a very large exporter. So if the justification is true, that makes it all the easier to do the same thing in Colombia.

TCC: What message is Trump sending to the rest of the world?

J.B.: Trump’s actions are reminiscent of what Putin is doing in Ukraine, and what Xi Jinping could do in Taiwan or other neighbouring countries. This jeopardizes the international rules that nations established after the Second World War, when they set up a system — which might be weak, but it’s still a system — to prevent wars.

Read more: Venezuela attack, Greenland threats and Gaza assault mark the collapse of international legal order

TCC: What does the future hold for Venezuela?

J.B.: It will all depend on the type of administration Trump supports. For now, he is not changing the regime or the system and says he wants to manage it from a distance, through various incentives. I believe the Trump administration is crossing its fingers and hoping that the new presidency will not implode due to internal factions. We can expect infighting within the current government, as well as with the military.

Many want power. Donald Trump wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to make the operation look like a victory without any risks or costs; without sending soldiers who could lose their lives. But nothing is less certain. And if chaos spreads in the region, particularly in Colombia, it will be Trump’s fault. He has taken a very, very risky gamble.

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