As well as seeking to dominate the world oil market, green issues are still playing an unacknowledged role in America’s strategic thinking, despite Trump calling global warming a ‘hoax’ and renewable energy a ‘scam’. Targets of the US administration, Canada and Greenland, are rich in minerals such as lithium that have a major role in green technology. China, US imperialism’s main rival, currently dominates lithium production. Its strategic importance was shown when the US was forced to back down in its tariff war when global supply chains were disrupted due to China’s ban on lithium exports.
Trump is desperate to reverse this situation. Mike Waltz, US national security advisor, spelt the message out: “This is about critical minerals, this is about natural resources. It’s oil and gas. It’s our national security. It’s critical minerals”.
The big corporations and multi-billionaires the American administration represents support Trump’s ambition to make US imperialism great again, but can see the methods used by an increasingly eccentric and unpredictable demagogue are shot through with dangerous contradictions for them.
US interest in Canada’s and Greenland’s minerals predates the present Trump administration. President Biden established the Minerals Security Partnership, which included Greenland and Canada, which was a response to China’s dominance of the sector. Trump’s mailed fist approach, part of his project to ‘make America great again’, has raised annexing both Canada and Greenland, although Greenland is currently in his cross-hairs. Both countries have significant oil and gas resources, but also large reserves of ‘rare earth’ minerals.
The huge potential is shown by the Tanbreez Project, a massive rare earth elements deposit in southern Greenland. It is one of the world’s largest – 28 million tonnes of rare earth oxides – and has been described as a potential game-changer in the fight to replace China’s dominance of the sector. A preliminary economic assessment in March 2025 valued Tanbreez alone at $3.04bn with a rate of return on profit of 180%.
The project is being developed by Critical Metals Corp, whose major shareholders include US investment banks Blackrock and Morgan Stanley. The deal comes as the UK, EU allies and Greenland are reportedly exploring a critical minerals partnership. Greenland’s foreign minister has signalled interest in expanding EU ties, highlighting the island’s mineral wealth as a key area for cooperation. This could help explain Trump’s urgency in pushing for a Greenland takeover and the open opposition to it by the European capitalist powers.
Of the 50 critical minerals listed by the US Geological Survey, the US imports 50-100% of 41 of them. At the same time, China refines 40-90% of the global supply of key elements. In particular, production of possibly the most important rare earth element, lithium. Among other green applications, lithium is used to make the batteries needed to make renewables work efficiently and to process the fuel for nuclear fusion reactors, a source of potentially near limitless clean energy, winning the race for which would give huge political dividends.
Although control of rare earth metals plays a central role in US calculations, Canada and Greenland also have large deposits of oil and gas that would be opened up for exploitation under Trump’s plan. An additional bonus for the US would be plentiful uranium deposits, used for nuclear weapons, that are often found close to rare earth elements. At the moment, there are only two mineral extraction fields operational in Greenland, but this would be potentially massively increased if the US took over, despoiling the Arctic environment and threatening the traditional habitats of the indigenous Inuit peoples.
It is a paradox that the US appears to be willing to go to such lengths, including potentially destroying NATO by annexing Greenland, to secure access to materials to tackle a problem, global warming, that President Trump says does not exist. It is doubly paradoxical that the US gives the reason for annexing Canada and Greenland as the strategic necessity to counter Russian and Chinese expansion into the Arctic region, an expansion cited by the US as made possible by the melting of polar ice opening up new shipping lanes. Of course, no mention is made that the disappearance of polar ice is caused by global warming.
Trump’s policy to take over the oil industry in Venezuela, which has the largest global reserves, and return it to nearer its 1970s peak output, was met with a lukewarm response by most representatives of US Big Oil according to press reports. Before Trump’s takeover, most of the US oil majors lobbied to stop Venezuelan oil reaching the domestic market, fearing they would be undermined. Incurring Trump’s wrath, the biggest firm, ExxonMobil, openly said they were not interested partly because the oil majors will be expected to pay the estimated $110 billion cost, over the ten years the project will take.
If fully implemented, Trump’s plan would very significantly push up the greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. Venezuelan oil is classed as heavy sour grade, with a tar-like consistency which needs energy intensive processes to extract when it is refined. Venezuela’s Orinoco field has the highest carbon intensity of any main oil region, 1,000 times higher, for example, than Norway’s Sverdrup field according to research commissioned by the Guardian.
An academic at the University of California calculates that if Venezuelan output reached less than half its 1970s peak this would produce an extra 550m tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas driving global warming. If output reached this level, it would represent the equivalent of nearly a decade of all European Union emissions. Such outcomes would kill any lingering hopes that global temperature rises could be limited to 1.5C, necessary to avoid even more serious weather events.
No oil industry executives are interested in fighting global warming, but they realise the project they are being pressured to invest in will require huge expenditures after Trump leaves office, which they fear could pose big political risks if a future administration had a greener agenda. For example, if the next election produced a sharp swing to the left, along the lines of Zohran Mamdani ’s victory as New York mayor, there would a possible threat to investments in Venezuelan oil. Even if mainstream Democrats won Big Oil could be threatened. President Obama presided over the fastest increase in oil production in history, based on shale oil extraction, so clearly the Democrats could not be relied on to turn against fossil fuels. However, a result of massively increasing Venezuelan oil output would be to force down oil prices, potentially making large parts of the US shale oil industry uneconomic, as happened after the oil price fell following the Covid pandemic. Even before the US takeover of Venezuelan oil, the shale oil firms were prominent in opposing imports from the single remaining US major operating there, Chevron.
The USA’s battle for supremacy over China in the resources war, a war it is currently losing, has led to the present tactics of the Trump wing of US imperialism. In all the barrage of publicity, the potential damage to the environment has hardly been mentioned by any of the governments concerned, pro- or anti-Trump. The environmental damage could be huge and emphasises again the urgent need to remove the fate of the world from the hands of a dysfunctional international capitalist system.
Pete Dickenson