This weekend there was a lot of war movies on cable tv and the Virginia War Memorial had lot of visitors. It is noteworthy that at this point in his second term, President Trump’s administration has attacked 7 different countries and is threatening more. And right now, the global economy is starting to feel ill effects of rising gasoline prices- a result of U.S./Israel’s war against Iran.
(Speaking of Israel, instead of doing more to investigate, expose, and account for what may be the largest and most successful sexual blackmail operation in history, CBS News is now editorializing about how Iran is propagandizing the Epstein files. The reality is that the whole world deserves to know the truth, extent, and ramification. Don’t let the corporate media gaslight you.)
In the midst of all this turmoil, NextEra Energy and (Oregon Hill’s neighbor) Dominion Energy announced a $67 billion all-stock merger to create the world’s largest regulated electric utility, serving about 10 million customers across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Driven by surging AI and data center power demands, the transaction requires extensive state and federal regulatory approval and is expected to close in 12 to 18 months. The combined company will operate under the NextEra Energy name and trade under the symbol NEE on the New York Stock Exchange. It will have dual headquarters in Juno Beach, Florida, and Richmond, Virginia, as well as Dominion Energy South Carolina’s existing operational headquarters in Cayce, South Carolina. Dominion Energy’s utility companies will continue to operate as Dominion Energy Virginia, Dominion Energy North Carolina, and Dominion Energy South Carolina.
The local media focused on what this merger might mean for Richmond. Dominion employs 5,433 people in the Richmond area according to the most recent statistics. A press release said that Dominion’s local charity work will continue, and Dominion will commit an extra $10 million a year to its charitable efforts for five years after the deal closes within its current operating footprint. Center Stage theater patrons breathe a sigh of relief.
State media also took stock of things. Earlier this month, Dominion asked Virginia’s state government for permission to finance an expected $21.79 monthly jump in the average consumer bill next year. Keep in mind that Virginia remains one of only four states that allow unlimited corporate campaign contributions. NextEra, with a history in Florida, is known for a lot of political subterfuge tied to its corporate spending. Cardinal News opined, “This moment is bigger than a merger. It is about whether Virginia’s energy future will be governed by public accountability or unchecked monopoly power.”
Despite all the speculation, this giant utility merger should be seen within an even larger question about our political/energy future. Writer Jonathan Watts did a good job of framing this question in a recent piece, “The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly”, in the British Guardian newspaper.
History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order. We are now in the midst of one such transition as the epoch of petrol, predominantly produced in the United States, Russia and Gulf states, starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China. But the outcome remains contested, and the process could be ugly. The new energy order is winning the economic and technological battle – wind turbines and solar panels were already producing record-cheap electricity even before the Iran war pushed up the costs of gas and oil-fired power plants. But the old petro-interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock.
As a result, democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.
Of course, there’s much more in the piece about how the world arrived at this moment, but Watts, in the end, further delineates a dichotomy:
On one side are the vast majority of the world’s people, all of nature, 99.9% of climate scientists and the fastest-growing, greatest-job-creating chunk of the global economy: the clean energy sector.
On the other is Trump and the primary producers and users of fossil fuels, who need enormous taxpayer subsidies to stay profitable and ever greater violence to quell public unease and global opposition. The latter controls the US state – including the military and ICE – and is allied with much of the money of Silicon Valley’s power-thirsty datacentre companies. (The US and its tech oligarchs may be hoping that AI can replace energy as the country’s source of global power – but China is keeping apace on that front, too.)
Will this fossil fuel fascism, that billionaire-backed campaign to crush a green transition by any means necessary, hold back the tide of clean energy autonomy? It cannot be ruled out. The closest thing the world has to a planetary spokesperson recently warned of the dark forces threatening the future of all life on Earth: “Some fossil fuel interests remain hellbent on slowing progress, spreading disinformation, pretending the transition is unrealistic or unaffordable,” Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said last month. “Let’s tell it like it is; the world’s addiction to fossil fuels is one of the greatest threats to global stability and prosperity.”
So as this Memorial Day comes to an end, this editorial asks whose side you, dear reader, are on? That of growing and concentrated corporatism (aka fossil fuel fascism), or distributed, (small d) democratic, renewable energy?
