The Trump administration’s extraordinary, illegal attack on Venezuela was always about oil, and now the whole world knows that Mr. Trump lied all along about his real interest in Venezuela. This was not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, but was about increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on—oil.

As such, this seems a good time to reexamine our nation’s destructive addiction to oil.

The first step in recovering from addiction is to tell the truth—admit the addiction, acknowledge its consequences. Yet this is something we still seem unwilling to do with our addiction to oil. Addicts would rather stay high than confront their addiction and commit to recovery.

The truth about oil is that while there are benefits—jobs, energy, government revenue, etc.—there are also enormous long-term risks, impacts and costs. And while government and industry extol the benefits of oil, they remain unwilling to tell the truth about its costs or to aggressively pursue sustainable alternatives.

Some costs are obvious. Oil spills, such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez in Alaska and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, are easily recognizable disasters that attract widespread public condemnation. Many oil-producing areas of the world, such as the Niger Delta, the Caspian Sea, Siberia and the Amazon, continue to suffer from decades of chronic oil spills.

Indeed, the age of oil is ending, but the hard-core oil addicts in government and industry remain unwilling to concede the fact or to embrace a sustainable energy future. Clearly, a lot of damage can and will occur in the waning years of oil.

But the true cost of oil goes far beyond the obvious damage from spills. More gradual, less visible costs of oil include ecological habitat degradation from exploration, production and pipelines; health costs from breathing polluted air; urban sprawl, traffic congestion and deadly accidents in all major cities; and seemingly endless wars fought to secure oil supplies, costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

Climate change from carbon emissions is incurring enormous present and future costs—storm damage, drought, wildfires, lost agricultural productivity, infrastructure damage, climate refugees, disease, forest decline, marine ecosystem collapse, species extinction and lost ecosystem services—already exceeding $1 trillion a year.

Wherever it is produced, there arises a "sociopolitical toxicity" of oil—a significant distortion of economic, social and political systems. Rather than the prosperity promised, oil discoveries around the world often become more curse than blessing, causing social dysfunction, assimilation of indigenous cultures, inflation, decline in traditional exports, corruption, crime and unsustainable growth.

In oil-producing regions of the world—including the US and the states of Alaska, Louisiana, Texas, and North Dakota—governments are "captured" and controlled by oil interests ensuring policies to limit regulation, lower taxation, and to favor increased oil production and demand over development of sustainable low-carbon alternatives. In Alaska, 50 years of oil has distorted and corrupted many elements of government and society, including the state university system and the media.

The addictive power of oil was recognized as early as 1939, when Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz joked: "Do you know what they will find when they reach Mars? They will find Americans out there in the desert hunting for oil."

Former Venezuelan oil minister Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, a founder of OPEC and once a true believer in the promise of oil, thought differently after he saw the corruption, greed, waste, debt, and decay it caused, and came to call oil "the devil's excrement."

Today, the world uses more than 100 million barrels of oil a day, with the US alone accounting for over 20 million barrels per day. We have already pumped and burned over one trillion barrels, and there may be another trillion barrels of recoverable "conventional" oil left, along with several trillion barrels in unconventional reserves such as tar sands and oil shale formations.

But if we want anything resembling a sustainable future, we simply have to leave most of this oil buried right where it is in the ground and seabed, as the global atmosphere and biosphere cannot handle much more additional carbon without becoming dangerously unstable.........

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