Well, certainly not on purpose! He almost certainly thinks he is advancing the agenda of nominally US-based multinational oil companies. But by limiting the supply of oil and gas world wide, he has at least temporarily brought about the peak oil scenario that seemed to be fashionable a decade or two ago, and then mostly forgotten as it looked like new fossil fuel discoveries and exploitation technologies, along with non-fossil-fuel technologies, might outstrip any hard limit in the (economically viable) geologic supply.

But now we get to find out what an actual hard limit on supply looks like. It won’t be permanent – we can speculate months to years. But electrification technology was already a snowball rolling downhill in Asia, and this will just accelerate the takeover of electric vehicles, even if effective propaganda is hiding this from the U.S. public. Governments like Thailand’s are making rational policy choices such as incentivizing trade-in of internal combustion engines for electric. The economic incentive to do this is there, and has been slowed down until now only by infrastructure lock-in and path dependence. Even if this disruption is measured in months or years, the technology will continue to progress even in that time, and rational governments will realize this shut-down situation can happen again in the future and that they can mitigate the risk. So thank you to the one-man wrecking ball who has made all this short-term pain (i.e., horrible suffering and death for many, many human beings which I don’t mean to make light of) and long-term gain possible! (Now, you could say, and I admit, that with electrification coal will be substituted for oil and gas in the near to medium term, and this is not a win for the environment. I actually don’t know if it is a net win or loss, when you consider the greater efficiency of electrification over mobile internal combustion engines. But the incentives still favor renewables longer-term, and the incentives get stronger and stronger as renewables continue to get cheaper while coal as far as I know does not.)

A coalition of the willing implementing an international carbon tax is still a theoretical possibility. Here is one article on what that could look like. It is hard for me to imagine politically, but let’s say a group of large non-oil-producing economies, led for example by China, India, and the Asian Development Bank, decided they were going to do this and impose equivalent border-adjustment taxes (legal under the WTO I think not that this seems to matter any more) on all trading partners not doing it.

An international plan for sustainable development

International cooperation on climate and taxation remains inadequate to deliver decarbonisation, reduce poverty, and finance sustainable development at the required scale. We propose a Sustainable Union among willing countries, combining carbon pricing, new taxes on wealth, polluting fuels, financial transactions, and corporate income, with international revenue-sharing and conditional cooperation mechanisms. Most revenues would remain with participating governments for domestic spending, while a defined share would be pooled internationally. Specifically, participating countries would contribute 1% of gross national income (GNI) to a common pool redistributed in proportion to population, generating net transfers from richer to poorer countries. Meanwhile, the remainder of the revenue would increase domestic fiscal space by on average 2.2% of GNI. Although politically ambitious, such a framework might be credible, as governments are already advancing related forms of voluntary cooperation, and survey evidence indicates that it would be supported by majorities worldwide.