The story of oil is not just about energy. It is about power, liberation, betrayal, and the haunting weight of promises deferred. To understand the future of the climate emergency, we have to revisit a time when nations once colonised imagined freedom not just in political terms, but in the ownership of their resources.
It is 1955, Bandung, Indonesia. Leaders of newly independent nations gather—Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nehru of India, Zhou Enlai of China. They are not only demanding sovereignty from foreign empires; they are sketching a new world order. Oil, as it turned out, would become the currency of this dream. Whoever controlled oil controlled not only their economy but also their destiny. And yet, like every dream, it came at a cost.
Decolonisation was not a neat process. For many nations, political independence was quickly shadowed by the deep structures of economic dependency. Western oil giants still ran the rigs, dictated prices, and drained wealth. The fight for oil sovereignty became the fight for true independence. In the Middle East, leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal and pushed for oil control, sparking confrontations that reshaped global alliances. By the 1960s and 70s, OPEC emerged, not just as a cartel but as a political symbol of collective resistance. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Algeria—states long written off as pawns—suddenly became players capable of shaking markets in Washington, London, and Paris.
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But here lies the paradox. What began as liberation through oil also deepened a trap. Nationalisation brought pride, revenue, and bargaining power, but it also tethered economies to the very resource that fuels today’s climate emergency. The wealth that oil promised often entrenched authoritarianism, corruption, and dependency on a volatile global market. In places like Nigeria, the Niger Delta became both the engine of independence and the graveyard of ecological ruin. In the Middle East, oil money built gleaming cities while deepening inequalities. Liberation from colonial powers did not mean liberation from the global order of extraction—it simply shifted the face of the master. Today, as the world confronts climate collapse, the echoes of that history ring louder. The very nations that fought hardest to reclaim oil are now among the most vulnerable to rising seas, desertification, and economic collapse tied to fossil fuel decline. The successes of decolonisation remind us that sovereignty matters, but its limits remind us that freedom without sustainability becomes a mirage. Oil gave these nations power, but it also locked them into a system that is now burning the planet.
This is where the climate crisis must be understood not just as an environmental problem but as a historical one. The roots of carbon dependency lie in colonial structures of extraction, in global hierarchies that dictated who produces, who consumes, and who suffers. To move forward, we cannot pretend the past does not exist. The struggle for climate justice is inseparable from the struggle for economic justice and decolonisation in its truest form.
And so, the future lies in a reckoning. The same courage that Bandung leaders showed in defying empires must now be rekindled in defying fossil dependency. The new independence will not be won with pipelines and refineries, but with wind, sun, and innovation grounded in justice. It will not be about simply replacing oil with renewables, but about dismantling the structures of dependency and exploitation that oil made possible. This is not an easy story. It is a reminder that liberation is never complete, that history always whispers into the present. Oil was both a weapon and a wound. Decolonisation promised freedom but delivered complexities we are still untangling. And in the face of the climate emergency, the question returns with urgency: how do we imagine independence now? Perhaps, as the fires burn hotter and the floods rise higher, the answer lies not in turning away from the painful story of oil, but in confronting it fully. Only then can we write a future that is not just free, but sustainable.
