Climate Corner: Fossil fuels, war and home

Jan 24, 2026

Jean Ambrose

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

I write this column not as a historian or a policy expert, but as someone who lives in a region that has been asked, again and again, to give more than it can. Each morning, when I look out from the ridges where I live in the Mid-Ohio Valley, I am reminded that the places we love are never abstract. They hold our bodies, our memories, our dead. We are part of them, and they are part of us. And they carry the marks of the choices we make about energy.

When I watch what is unfolding in Venezuela, I do not see a distant crisis, but a familiar pattern. Deep beneath Venezuela lie immense oil reserves, and for decades that oil has been treated as that nation’s destiny. Instead of bringing security, it has brought instability, foreign interference, poisoned land, and deep human suffering. Oil promised abundance; it delivered scarcity. Families now face shortages of food and medicine, while rivers and wetlands bear the residue of spills and neglect.

Fossil fuels do not simply power our lives; they reorder them. Where oil and gas dominate, power concentrates. Decisions move farther away from ordinary people. Violence becomes normalized–sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly. In Venezuela, when oil prices collapsed and political pressure tightened, the social fabric tore. Those with the least power paid the highest price.

History tells me this is not new. In Iran, oil once raised hopes of self-determination. In 1953, when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh sought to reclaim Iran’s oil for its own people, the response from abroad — particularly the United Kingdom, aided by the United States — was swift and devastating. A democratic government was overthrown. Authoritarian rule followed. That wound has never fully healed. Oil again proved itself not a gift, but a trigger for long-lasting conflict.

The United Kingdom’s own rise was fueled first by coal, then by oil. Industrial wealth was built alongside exhausted miners, polluted cities, and colonies stripped of resources. Oil became essential to maintaining global power, binding Britain to faraway lands and conflicts that still shape our world today. Energy did not simply light homes; it lit the fuse of empire.

The great global wars of the 20th Century were, at their core, energy wars. World War I marked the moment when oil became essential to military power. In World War II, entire campaigns turned on access to fuel — Germany’s push toward the Caucasus oil fields, Japan’s expansion into Southeast Asia, and the Allies’ relentless targeting of refineries and supply lines. The oil embargo imposed by the United States and its allies on Japan in 1941, cutting off access to vital fuel supplies, led directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Energy scarcity pushed nations toward catastrophic violence. Millions died, in part because oil had become something nations were willing to kill for.

When I think about these histories, I cannot separate them from home. The Mid-Ohio Valley has lived its own version of this story. Coal, oil, and gas arrived with promises of prosperity and security. For some, those promises were briefly real. For many others, they ended in black lung, contaminated water, fractured hillsides, and towns hollowed out once the profits moved on. We were never bombed, but we have lived through slow violence–the kind that settles into lungs and streams and does not leave when the companies do.

Wars fueled by fossil energy are not always fought with guns. Some are fought quietly, over generations. They are wars against health, against land, against the possibility that our children might inherit something whole. Venezuela’s crisis makes visible what is often hidden: when an economy is built on extraction at any cost, suffering follows–through coups, sanctions, displacement, or environmental collapse.

From Venezuela’s oil fields to Iran’s broken democracy, from British imperial power to the oil embargo that helped lead to Pearl Harbor, and down to the creeks and communities where I live, the pattern is the same. The colonial mindset that treated land and people as resources to be controlled has never fully disappeared. Today it is reborn through sanctions, resource grabs, and energy politics that once again decide whose lives are expendable.

A wounded land can only carry so much. I still choose joy in this place — watching birds at the feeder, noticing the light shift on the hills — but that joy carries responsibility. If we want fewer wars, fewer sacrifices of people and places, we must choose energy systems rooted in care rather than conquest.

Sustainable energy fundamentally changes the story because it breaks the link between power and scarcity. Sunlight, wind, and moving water are not finite prizes to be seized or controlled by force; they are widely distributed and locally available. When communities generate energy where they live, the incentive to dominate distant lands and fuel supplies retreats. By decentralizing energy production, sustainable systems weaken the concentration of power that has so often fueled conflict, replacing competition with cooperation and resilience.

Venezuela’s crisis should be read as a warning, not an anomaly. As communities in the Mid-Ohio Valley weigh injection wells, methane hubs, and expanded extraction, we are also choosing what kind of stability we want — and for whom. A just and lasting peace, whether globally or locally, depends on breaking the cycle that links fossil fuels to concentrated power, environmental harm, and conflict, and investing instead in energy systems that sustain people, place, and peace.

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Jean Ambrose is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, a mother, grandmother, bird watcher, and gardener.