This opinion piece was originally published on Climate & Capital Media. Republished by permission.

There has been a lot of speculation this week that there is some great strategy being played out by the US’ oil-igarchy. Something about America taking control of Syria first to stop transcontinental railroads shipping Iranian oil to China, then Venezuela for the heavy crude on the Gulf Coast to be refined by Americans. Now Iran to block that non-dollar-denominated market as a way to say that there is a grand plan in this great game of history and so send other countries back to our debt.

This theory is, I think, an attempt to rationalize the irrational bloodlust of an old man who has lost his way or was misled by another criminal leader. But let’s take it on face value and then apply some simple thinking to it in the form of a standard debate. Below I rebut what has been said to me by people looking for crutches in this time of hospitals and schools being bombed with American munitions.

The thesis is internally coherent—but built on a crumbling foundation

The argument is impressive. The sequencing—Europe victimized by Russia, and now dependent on the US, which then takes out Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Qatar — is real. The Hormuz disruption is real. But the entire edifice rests on one assumption that is demonstrably false—that oil and gas will remain the central currency of geopolitical power through the second quarter of the 21st century. Here’s why:

1. You’re seizing control of a peaking asset

The frame is US energy dominance as a multi-decade lock-in. But data from energy think tank Ember shows fossil fuel demand has already peaked across every major sector:

• ⁠ ⁠Industrial energy demand peaked in 2014
• ⁠ ⁠Buildings energy demand peaked in 2018
• ⁠ ⁠Road transport fuel demand peaked in 2019
• ⁠ ⁠Electricity generation fuel demand peaked in 2025

This isn’t projection—it’s already happened. The grand strategy is designed to control a commodity whose demand curve has already turned. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of seizing control of the global fax machine market in 2005.

2. The “no alternative” premise is false for 92% of the world

The rant’s most critical claim is that Europe and Asian allies are locked into US LNG with nowhere left to pivot. This ignores the physics of the planet:

• ⁠ ⁠92% of countries have renewable potential over 10 times their current energy demand.
• ⁠ ⁠75% of the world’s population lives in countries that are net fossil fuel importers—these are the exact nations with the strongest economic incentive to exit the system the thesis describes.
• ⁠ ⁠Solar infrastructure, once installed, cannot be blockaded, sanctioned, or priced at $100/barrel. You cannot embargo the sun.

The LNG lock-in thesis requires long-term contracts and regasification terminals. They exist. But the competing pathway—solar, storage, and electrification—has been falling in cost by ~20% per year and now beats new gas on price in most markets. Nations facing energy weapon coercion don’t sit there. They accelerate the exit.

3. Technologies get cheaper. Commodities don’t.

The rant celebrates US energy dominance via a commodity. Here’s the structural problem:

• ⁠ ⁠Solar has fallen 99.6% in price since 1980, following a predictable technology learning curve.
• ⁠ ⁠Oil in real terms in 2025 costs roughly what it did in 1900—125 years of “development” and no cost improvement.
• ⁠ ⁠Fossil fuels fight a constant battle against depletion — they are inherently inflationary.
• ⁠ ⁠Electrotech follows Wright’s Law—it is inherently deflationary.

Every year the US tries to sustain a petro/LNG-dollar system, the alternative gets cheaper. The “lock-in” window is not decades long—it’s measured in years before solar + storage undercuts new LNG infrastructure on pure economics, without any geopolitical motivation required.

4. The AI/data centre argument is inverted

Some claim the US is degrading China’s ability to power AI data centres by choking LNG supply. This assumes AI compute runs on gas. It increasingly doesn’t—and AI itself accelerates the transition away from that assumption.

Per Ember’s report The Electrotech Revolution: for every 1 unit of energy AI consumes, it saves 6 units through efficiency gains — via grid optimization, smart EV charging, predictive maintenance for renewables, and automated permitting. AI is not the problem for the new energy system. It’s the brain of it.

More critically: the cheapest electricity being built at scale globally is solar + storage, not gas-fired power. Nations deploying electrotech fastest (China, India, parts of South and Southeast Asia) are building cost-advantaged AI compute infrastructure on cheap renewable electricity — not LNG. The rant assumes cutting off LNG cuts off compute. In reality, it accelerates electrotech deployment.

5. China is not the trapped party—it’s building the successor system

The rant frames China as the trapped victim of the Malacca Dilemma, dependent on seaborne LNG that US naval power controls. Hu Jintau coined the term in 2003—they haven’t been sitting on it. This claim misses what China has actually done:

• ⁠ ⁠China manufactures 80%+ of global solar panels and 70%+ of global batteries.
• ⁠ ⁠China drove 95% of net global fossil fuel demand growth from 2018–2024—but its own demand is now peaking and dipping.
• ⁠ ⁠China’s EV exports surged from 3.36 million units in 2020 to nearly 30 million by 2024, overtaking Germany and Japan combined

50% of China’s new vehicles are electric. 

China’s response to fossil fuel vulnerability has been to aggressively colonize the supply chain of the system that replaces fossil fuels. Blocking LNG doesn’t cripple China’s AI ambitions if it’s simultaneously building the world’s largest electrotech manufacturing complex. The rant describes a trap China has been systematically building its way out of for a decade.

6. The great leapfrog means the “captive market” won’t stay captive

The thesis assumes emerging markets remain LNG-dependent because they lack alternatives. The data says otherwise:

• ⁠ ⁠Two-thirds of emerging markets have already leapfrogged the US in solar as a share of electricity generation (15% vs the US’s 6%).
• ⁠ ⁠Nepal: 75% EV sales share. Vietnam: 30%. The US sits at approximately 10%.
• ⁠ ⁠Emerging economies are not following the West’s carbon-intensive development path — they’re skipping directly to cheaper, faster-to-deploy electrotech.

The nations that proponents of US oil dominance expect to be captive buyers of our LNG are the ones moving fastest to exit fossil fuel dependency entirely. Not because of climate policy — because electrotech is now the economically superior choice.

7. When growth stops, capital flees—and it’s about to

The rant assumes fossil fuel capital markets will remain investable throughout this supposed era of dominance. They won’t. We’ve already seen the template:

The US coal industry peaked in 2014. What followed was rapid valuation collapse as capital fled a declining asset class. The same cycle is coming for oil and gas, and it doesn’t require a full energy transition to trigger. It only requires the market pricing in expected peak demand.

High-cost producers — North American shale, deepwater, oil sands — are pushed into unprofitability by even small drops in demand from EV adoption and efficiency gains. A strategy of energy empire built on LNG is building on an asset class entering the “uncertainty” phase before capital flight. The architecture of dominance will become a stranded asset liability.

The Bottom Line

The grand strategy described in various places is real as a description of moves being made. But it confuses tactical control of a declining asset for strategic dominance of the century.

The British genuinely did control global coal shipping routes into the early 20th century. It was real power. It became irrelevant as the world moved to oil. Churchill famously made the Royal Navy move to oil. Instead, the US is attempting to seize the global fossil fuel spigot at the exact moment the world is building the infrastructure to turn it off permanently—driven not by moral obligation or climate policy, but by physics, economics, and the self-interest of the 75% of humanity that would rather own their energy than rent it from someone with a navy.

The electrotech revolution is not a future scenario. Solar and wind are on the steepest part of the S-curve right now. Fossil fuel demand has peaked in every major sector. The new energy system is decentralized, deflationary, and—critically—unblockable once installed.

The question for the second quarter of the 21st century is not who controls the oil spigot. It’s who builds the electrotech infrastructure fastest. On that scoreboard, the US is losing—and the grand strategy described in the rant does nothing to change that.