When Did the Petro-State Become Cool Again?

Did I miss something? When did the petro-state become a cool way to run a nation again? There was a brief shining moment when the world decided that petro-states were a bad idea; that organizing an entire economy around drilling, mining, and resource exploitation was kind of a dumb thing to do.

But now, Australia's new prime minister Tony Abbott has risen to power in part by promising to open up the nation's oil industry, stop taxing carbon, and open up a vast swath of protected World Heritage site for mining. The oil and coal industry loves him—but lots of others are skeptical. There are already signs that many Australians are deeply uncomfortable with his oil-veined drive to mine. For example, the climate change commission he immediately shut down upon taking office has already reemerged as a nonprofit, fully funded by donations from outraged members of the public.

That's just Australia. The most full-throated advocate for modern day petro-teering has got to be Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada. Our northerly neighbors, once known for their social progressivism, good manners, and a diverse economy, has been transformed under the conservative Harper administration into a modern day petro-state.

To him, the tar sands are all, and Harper will seemingly risk any political gambit to ensure that the vast, virgin forest-obliterating pit mine nestled in Alberta is a pillar of Canada's economy. He's stomping over long-held laws and pushing through reforms to fast-track the pipeline infrastructure, and he's impervious to criticism from the indigenous people, environmentalists, and non-petro crazed citizens that stand in his way.

The emphasis Harper has placed on developing the tar sands project (i.e. razing to the ground and turning once-pristine forest into a steaming hellscape that's visible from space) genuinely concerns moderate and liberal Canadians, who worry his oily cheerleading is taking Canada in the wrong direction, infecting its democracy with American-style lobbying and doing irrevocable environmental damage.

Then, of course, there's the good old US of A—George W. Bush brought back a little of that Texas oilman flair to the nation's highest office, and even if Obama lacks his swagger, he's more or less continued the legacy of resource extraction. Bush famously opened a lot of once-protected public lands to drilling, but Obama has in fact ushered in more drilling (and less conservation) that his predecessor.

Obama himself touts his record on drilling proudly, in yet another vain effort to get conservatives to see him as the "all of the above" energy moderate that he is. On the campaign trail last year, Obama said that "under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. That's a fact. That is a fact."

And it is. The US is on track to again become the world's largest oil producer by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. "… you have my word that we will keep drilling everywhere we can," Obama said, and so he has.

So, what gives here? The US has always has an oily streak through its politics, but watching nations like Australia and Canada double down on our Republican's most fossil fueled rhetoric is disconcerting. It hints at a reemergent level of comfort with unabashed resource extraction that's particularly alarming at a moment when the climate crisis is better understood and more pressing than ever. And yet petro-state politics is still not only viable but dominant in countries many believed to hold fairly progressive legacies.

What's strangest of all, maybe, is that typically, we've observed petro-states with high-falutin' derision (often with undertones of racism tossed in for good measure). Petro-states are either artifacts from a Wild West-ier past or modern day unenlightened backwaters; nations with bad human rights records, little to no democracy, and rampant social strife. There's a reason the term "oil curse" exists in the first place, after all.

But democracy or no, the petro-state has proved persistent. Harper, Abbott, and Obama all see no problem playing petro-state politics in their respective arenas, and in fact, they're often rewarded for it, whether with campaign contributions or votes, particularly from older constituents.

Either large swaths of the public haven't connected petro-statism to endemic cronyism, environmental degradation, and global warming pollution, or the promise of decent-paying jobs still trumps all of the above. Even in the era of climate change, the oil curse still hangs over our heads.