The takeover in Venezuela brings under US control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Trump, Washington saw Venezuelan energy bolstering hostile countries, especially oil-import-dependent China. For now, the Venezuela coup deprives the Middle Kingdom of upwards of 800,000 daily barrels, while taking away a valuable customer as well as an intelligence asset for the Russians and their Islamist allies.

This naked neo-imperialism could prove beneficial, not least for the hard-pressed Venezuelans. American supermajors like Chevron are also natural beneficiaries, with huge resources being placed to modernize the country’s shambolic energy industry and thus to restore its once proud relative prosperity.

The larger point is that successful economies either have fossil fuels or need easy access to them. Gas reserves, and the revenues they generate, grant places the Persian Gulf monarchies far more influence than populous Arab states like Egypt, which lack oil and gas. Russia has been able to underwrite its invasion of eastern Ukraine and withstand severe Western sanctions thanks to its hydrocarbon reserves. China and India look to secure imports of the same wherever they can, especially at bargain prices. Core European powers like Britain, France, and Germany, meanwhile, could punch far above their weight if they would but tap their own plentiful supplies of shale gas, but their governments refuse to do so owing to irrational green phobias about hydraulic fracturing.

Beyond Europe, however, the recognition of fossil fuels as a key element of geopolitics puts a stopper on decades of green campaigns designed to instill fear of emissions and promote wishful thinking about how to reduce them. In academia and the media, dissenters from the narrative, even academics who accepted anthropogenic climate change, are hounded if they fail to submit to the green papacy’s encyclicals.

But the green doomerism has failed to meet the reality test. We now know that predictions of climate crises, some of which date back to the 1970s, have turned out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong. For example, both ABC and NBC boldly predicted in 2008 that New York would be under water by 2015; last time I visited my familial home town, however, it seemed very much on dry land. Extinction rates, often blamed on climate change, have slowed, with even the polar bears continuing to thrive in somewhat warmed temperatures.

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A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fishbeck tracked apocalyptic predictions dating from the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century, 61% of the forecasts of planetary collapse have come and gone (and the planet is still here, chugging along). Even the committed climate sirens at Nature journal have been forced to retract a study that claimed the world economy would contract due to climate change.

The collapse of the worst-case scenario goes hand-in-hand with the continued strength of fossil fuels, which remain the dominant source of energy; even coal is ascendant. Despite billions spent by Western taxpayers to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use is 30 times bigger than wind and solar combined, as the energy analyst Robert Bryce notes; in the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar, but 13,000 from fossil fuels.     

Fossil-fuel energy remains “the blood” that wins economic battles, including the drive to build data centers for artificial intelligence. For a while, China was catching all the upside from the fossil-fuel resurgence by going on a coal-plant building spree (this, even as the People’s Republic invested heavily in green technologies). Meanwhile, the West, including the United States under President Joe Biden, hamstrung itself.

Americans and Europeans suffered. Living standards in the de-industrializing West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe, especially, has endured a decade of stagnation. Americans laboring under the joint rule of green capital and green government likewise suffered.

In my adopted home state of California, electricity rates have surged a staggering 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. Once a major oil producer, the Golden State now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign sources in South America and Saudi Arabia.

High energy prices most hurt those in California’s less temperate, heavily Latino interior. The crisis has driven an erosion of industrial jobs; since 1990, one-third of California’s manufacturing jobs — 1.3 million of them — have disappeared. The disparate class impacts have been confirmed recently in a study by the California Air Resources Board, which projects that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

If they stick to the climate agenda, the only way places like Europe and California can get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China put off for at least another decade — is by squelching future growth. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes that such policies would have  catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West. But China’s leaders won’t sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost.

But America under President Trump is pulling in another, better direction. And even some Democrats are going along in recognition of geopolitical reality. In the United States, Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have all but abandoned use of the Green New Deal, even amid their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump. “Today,” notes longtime Democratic policy expert Will Marshall, “the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality.” Among Democrats in Congress, mentions of the once-hyped program have fallen to a bare handful, down from more than 1,000 citations in 2020.

Only 6% of Americans rank climate as a top concern, a sliver of those who see inflation as their major problem. As these concerns have faded, even ultra-green California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been begging refiners to stay in the state.   

The prospects for greens are even worse in the developing world. In Africa — the only continent whose population is growing strongly; also now home to five of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies — governments generally recoil from adopting net-zero ideologies. Leaders choose to ignore the scolding of Greta Thunberg and the green nonprofits. Instead, they prioritize bringing electricity to the roughly 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa who do not have it now.  

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Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, for example, has warned that the climate policies favored by Western nonprofits and aid agencies could precipitate a continent-wide energy crisis. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, launched a scathing attack on European climate policies in November 2022, declaring it “morally bankrupt” for Europe to use African fossil fuels while denying Africa the same right. Museveni accused Western nations of imposing “one rule for them and another rule for us”, while expecting Africa to sacrifice development for climate goals Europe has failed to meet.

“The climate-industrial complex,” as Bjorn Lonborg has put it, is, well, running out of energy. Even before the return of Trump, many green companies, despite subsidies, were failing, the product of high costs and poor delivery. 

Yet it is far too early to proclaim the permanent demise of the climatistas. They remain deeply entrenched in the universities and the mainstream media and are busy grifting in the massive nonprofit sector. A generation of children who have already been schooled in climate-change science, however exaggerated, may help them resurge. Also, those who have invested in “renewables” will be interested in recouping their losses under Trump.

Rather than ruin the basis of our prosperity and hopes for the developing world, humanity needs to adapt, much as our species has done during previous, and often more dramatic, climactic changes. In the coming years, the world must muddle through reducing emissions through practical steps like adopting natural gas over coal and restoring nuclear power.  Trump’s successors may not fully embrace these realities. But for the immediate future, at least, fossil fuels are back, for better or worse, shaping history much as they have for the past century.  

Unlike most Congolese musicians, who sing for politicians who pay their bills, he wanted to put out his own message, about independence. In his studio, in a suburb of the sprawling city, he had a giant mural of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister after it became independent in 1960. Alex grew up under the flamboyant despot Mobutu Sese Seko and got into rap music by listening to cassette tapes that he persuaded richer kids to bring back from America. And he became one of the nation’s megastars. Whenever I visited Kinshasa, during my time as an Africa correspondent, I would invariably look in on him. As well as being a rapper, he was a shrewd analyst of Congolese politics.

Today, Lexxus Legal is not just a musician, but also a politician, of sorts. Last time I spoke to him, he had just returned from a press conference with Martin Fayulu, who won the Congolese presidential election in 2019 then had it stolen from him. Mr Fayulu has continued to organise demonstrations to protest the election result. And Lexxus has been there with him, calling on young people to get onto the streets. He says his primary interest is still music — he has not stood for election at any point. But he explains why he feels compelled to get involved in politics. “We artists are impacted by the economic situation, which makes it impossible to feed a family. We are impacted by the crisis in health. We are impacted by the insecurity, in the east of the country,” he told me. “So to speak for artists, it is also to speak for a large part of the population.”

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It’s not an unusual idea. In Uganda’s recent presidential election the main rival to ageing despot Yoweri Museveni was Bobi Wine, a rapper from the streets of Kampala. Mr Wine is a journalists’ dream. He likes to wear red berets, and styles himself as a rapper revolutionary, taking on the M7 machine (as Museveni is known in the Uganda press). He drives a Cadillac, with “Ghetto” on the number plate. But he is also “softly spoken, articulate and deadly earnest” behind the bling. And two weeks ago he may well have won the most votes in East Africa’s third biggest economy.

Across Africa, rappers are turning to politics. In Senegal, around a decade ago, a troupe of rappers known as “Y’en a Marre” (“Fed Up”) took on the president, Abdoulaye Wade, and helped contribute to his defeat in an election in which he sought an unconstitutional third term. Then, in 2012, Youssou N’Dour, a pioneer of Senegalese dance music, tried to stand for president. His candidacy was disqualified, but he later became the minister of tourism. In nearby Burkina Faso, in 2016, another rapper known as “Smockey” was at the forefront of protests that overturned the 2015 coup. Three years later, in Sudan, yet another rapper named Ayman Maw returned from America to his homeland to perform for the protesters massing against the rule of Omar al-Bashir.

Covering African politics is often a fairly depressing affair. Inspirational politicians are rare. The continent still looks back to those of the past — Lumumba or Thomas Sankara, both of whom met sticky ends at the hands of Belgium and France — because the current crop is so poor. Most Africans have grown up in countries run by middle-aged or elderly men who wear suits and fly around in private jets. Since the 1990s at least, the model for African leadership has been Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, a despot who is a compelling speaker at World Economic Forum conferences. Mr Kagame is brutal but effective at least. Many African countries put up with leaders like Mr Museveni, or worse Paul Biya, the 87-year-old in charge of Cameroon, who spends much of the year in the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva. The new president of Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, is another suit who rose to the top helped by his reputation as a calm and safe option in the eyes of foreign diplomats (in contrast to the hyperactive Mr Fayulu).

People like Bobi Wine — or indeed Lexxus — have been welcomed enthusiastically, partly because they offer something new. They aren’t an absolute break with tradition, though. There has always been a link between music and politics in Africa. In Congo, “Independence Cha Cha” was a hit in 1960, when Belgium withdrew. Later the brilliant rumba band TPOK Jazz produced songs such as “Candidat Na Biso Mobutu” (our candidate, Mobutu). In Kenyan politics, no self-respecting figure fights an election without a band singing about how great he (or she) is. Yet the surge of musicians working in opposition to incumbents is different.

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What it represents is the growing importance of a young, urban electorate. In pretty much every country south of the Sahara except for South Africa, close to half the population is made up of children under the age of 18. And almost all these nations, with a few exceptions, have been urbanising fast. Under colonialism, Kinshasa and Lagos were backwater outposts of empires with metropolises in Europe. Now they are megacities in their own right. These young Africans are more globalised in outlook than ever, not least thanks to the mobile phone — which is used not only for sending money and WhatsApp messages but also for listening to music. They are also frustrated. In most of the continent, formal jobs remain scarce.

Before the rise of the internet, African leaders had control of the state media. On Congolese state TV, Mobutu’s face used to rise like the sun before the news bulletins. Nowadays, the internet means that musicians have far more control in broadcasting their message. Bobi Wine might have succeeded in turning his fan base to politics and organising them without the internet, but it would have been harder. That is why Mr Museveni forced Uganda’s telecoms companies to cut access to social media in the run-up to the election two weeks ago. If he had not, the evidence that he stole the election, such as videos of ballot boxes being stuffed, would have spread like wildfire. So too would have Mr Wine’s calls to protest.

Of course, not every politician adopting the stylings of ghetto rap is quite so eloquent as Mr Wine or Lexxus Legal. Kenya has Mike Sonko, until recently the governor or Nairobi, who owns a fleet of gold-plated Mercedes Benz and likes to dress in tracksuits with huge amounts of jewellery. He claims to be fighting the Kenyan “deep state”, but as a governor, he was probably no better than the old leaders with their Learjets. Last year, a brilliant Kenyan documentary called Softie told the story of Boniface Mwangi, an anti-corruption campaigner who stood for election in Nairobi in 2017. In the end, he lost — to Charles Njagua Kanyi, a dance musician better known as “Jaguar”. The Right Honourable Jaguar, as he now styles himself, has one major achievement as a politician: getting arrested for inciting violence against migrants.

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Yet despite that, the rise of the rapper politician gives reason for hope. In places like Kenya, for the most part politicians rise to power because of corruption, not despite it. People vote for leaders they usually know full well are crooks, because they hope that at least if they get a president or an MP from their ethnic group, they’ll give jobs or stolen money to some of their kinfolk. Musicians may have money, but as Lexxus points out, they generally do not earn it by looting the state. They may come across as populists, but populism is not necessarily worse than the current political systems, which reward loyalty to corrupt leaders.

Indeed, the best reason to think rappers might offer an improvement in the quality of African leadership is that their appeal often goes beyond their ethnic or religious group. Rap music in Africa, as in the rest of the world, tends to be about hustling, escaping street life and making money. That resonates in cities where most of the population live in slums, working informal jobs for little pay. It unifies people who may speak different languages or worship different religions. Bobi Wine’s hits include songs like “Ghetto”, in which he sings that “we come to express exactly what’s on the poor man’s mind.” Lexxus Legal’s include “Chez Nous”, in which he sings about being trapped between poorly-paid work in Congo and the risk of trying to make it to Europe, only to die along the way and be washed up on a beach.

Lexxus says that it is not enough to campaign against the government — you must also have a platform for government yourself. Despite his own enormous personality, he’d like elections to be about policy, not about personality. Bobi Wine offers some of that. His manifesto denounced Uganda’s immense income inequality. He promised reforms that would go against the grain of a patrimonial system of government, such as reducing the size of Uganda’s parliament.

Bobi Wine promises revolution, but Mr Museveni came to power at the front of a literal revolution. He will not easily give it up. Uganda is yet to have a peaceful transfer of power in its post-independence history. Congo has only had one, in 2019 — but it was not to the politician who won the most support on the street. For the moment, power in much of Africa still seems to be about money, and the support of men with guns. But the rise of the rappers hints that things are changing.

Now Uganda is desperate for a fresh start. Once described by Winston Churchill as “a garden of sunshine and deadly nightshade”, the country’s hopes and optimism at independence curdled under the cruel regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. So Museveni found fertile ground when he spoke at his inauguration in January 1986 about the need for “fundamental change” and how sovereign power must lie with the people rather than parasitic elites. “We have had one group getting rid of another one, only for it to turn out to be worse than the group it displaced,” he said.

The new president embraced market reforms, sparking a surge in growth and fall in poverty rates, then wrote a book asking What is Africa’s Problem? He answered his own riddle by saying “the problem of Africa in general and Uganda in particular is not the people but leaders who want to overstay in power”. He took this message to neighbours such as Kenya, where he smiled impishly and repeated his incendiary suggestion in front of Daniel arap Moi to the joy of crowds frustrated by their own thuggish and thieving president. Yet at least Moi had the sense to stand down after 24 years of catastrophic rule, transforming himself into an elder statesman.

Today, Museveni is 76 years old, still on his gilded throne and resisting removal. His east African country is suffering under the rigid grip of his ruthless cronies as they milk the state coffers, desperately trying to whip up support with spurious claims of foreigners and homosexuals threatening society. His savage security forces beat, torture and kill his foes. And as he seeks a sixth term in office at today’s election, having bribed his supporters in parliament to overturn age and term limits, this president stands before his people as a symbol of the corrosive leadership issue that he so accurately diagnosed at the start of his rule.

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This time the main rival is not his former doctor, who challenged him at the last presidential election in 2016, but another rebellious younger man who symbolises a pent-up desire for change, freedom and real democracy. Bobi Wine, the self-styled ghetto president who was just four years old when Museveni took office, is a pop star who has shown immense bravery in face of assassination attempts, beatings, detention, harassment and slaughter of supporters. He campaigns in a bulletproof vest, wears a helmet and fears for his family, who have been sent abroad for safety. He offers little more than a new start for Uganda, travelling light on policy. But that is more than enough for many citizens in a country with mass youth unemployment and a median age of 17.

Wine, 38, was born Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu and grew up in a sprawling slum. He is an unlikely figure to be threatening such a wily political operator as Museveni as he attempts to leverage pop stardom into power. His mother, a nurse, warned him not to enter politics after her husband, a vet, was forced into exile under Obote. Instead, he went into music, picking his stage name in homage to Bob Marley and the idea that — like a good vintage — he grows better with age. He became a big star with a fusion of dancehall reggae, hip hop and a local Afrobeat style. Seven years ago he was banned from Britain over homophobic lyrics, although has since recanted and reportedly won over many in Uganda’s LGBT community.

Gradually his songs became more socially conscious and his passion for politics grew, seeing the chance to provide a voice for the impoverished masses being let down by their elderly leaders. Wine told Rolling Stone that the 2016 election was a turning point when he saw other singers paid to perform a song in praise of Museveni, but he rejected a substantial offer of cash and decided to take on the regime. “I realised nobody’s going to save us. We have to do it on our own. I knew it’d be much more effective if I didn’t only explain, I demonstrated. So I decided to run for office,” he told the magazine. “And, man, it opened a huge can of worms.”

So he shaved off his dreadlocks, donned sharp suits and became an MP in 2017 by a landslide, arguing that he was providing a voice for younger generations at the helm of the People Power Movement. “Our weapons are our words and our ideas, not arms of destruction and violence,” he said — yet the response has been brutal. Wine has been arrested repeatedly, badly tortured, stopped from performing and seen his driver shot dead as a warning to back down. Latterly, Covid has been used as an excuse to block rallies. The risks of challenging Museveni are clear: Kizza Besigye, the physician who stood against Museveni in previous elections, was charged with rape, treason, jailed and forced into temporary exile. Others simply disappear. “Why did such a prized revolutionary decide to become one of the world’s most despised dictators?” asked Wine in a BBC interview.

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Wine is not the first African pop star to run for president; Youssou N’Dour tried to win power in Senegal nine years ago before ending up as culture minister. Yet this struggle still has huge significance with a campaign cheered on beyond Uganda’s borders. “To me, he represents the spirit of Africa’s future,” said Wole Soyinka, the Nobel-winning playwright and a former political prisoner in Nigeria. Like many others, this grand old man of letters sees the contest as a crucial moment for Africa. Wine represents those younger generations who comprise the bulk of citizens in a rapidly-changing continent who are being failed by self-serving older leaders, frustrated by sluggish development and infuriated by grotesque corruption.

No doubt Museveni will rig the ballot again if needed. But as Ugandan voters go to the polls, Wine’s friends fear for his life. One just texted me to tell how the firm that installed the candidate’s home security system and guarded the house in Kampala for the past 12 years had suddenly turned up uninvited to remove it. Election observers from Europe and the United States are being denied access. Social media has been blocked, the internet slowed down. Troops are out in force in the urban areas that provide bedrock of his support. A tense country is steeled for this electoral struggle of cultures and generations, a clash between the impoverished streets and wealthy elites, a contest between those seeking change and those fearing more instability in a nation scarred by past turbulence. “It feels as though the country is at war,” said one prominent human rights lawyer.

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Yet Wine presents a challenge also to the complacency of nations such as Britain and the US, which proclaim democracy while ignoring blatant human rights abuses, pandering to elites and pouring aid into their bulging pockets. Museveni has played this game skilfully as he exploited conflict, refugees and the “War on terror” to keep funds flowing from naive paymasters abroad. “I’ve been working as a public health consultant on and off in Uganda for 20 years, a period when development agencies such as the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development spent $20 billion on aid projects in the country,” wrote Professor Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books, explaining how she “looked on with dismay as the budgets of many of these projects were looted, elections were rigged, and innocent people who tried to draw attention to this were intimidated or worse”.

Such practises entrench inequality and stymie development — yet Britain’s aid agency in the past held up Uganda as proof that their policies promote democracy. Meanwhile Museveni’s forces have aided the bloodstained regime of his former spy chief Paul Kagame in Rwanda and pillaged the Democratic Republic of Congo with devastating consequences. He bought a private jet and was found to have ordered six Russian fighter aircraft at twice the market rate without parliamentary approval. Three years ago, I carried out an investigation in Uganda reaching into the highest levels of government that exposed rampant corruption, theft of aid, manipulation of statistics and sexual abuse of refugees. A United Nations review later confirmed dodgy land deals, lack of invoicing, overpayments, expense fiddles and untraceable workers.

Small wonder that polls show such fervent desire in the African nations still trapped under autocrats for fairer elections and greater freedoms. Whatever the result, Wine deserves great praise for his courage in drawing attention to the fierce desire for change among younger generations who deserve more from their venal leaders and festering regimes. “The people of Africa, the people of Uganda, are entitled to democratic government. It is not a favour from any government,” said Museveni in his inaugural speech all those years ago. “The government should not be the master, but the servant of the people.” Such fine words. How sad he ended up one of those ossified old men desperately clinging to power that he so despised.