Donald Trump has summed up his new administration’s approach to oil and gas in three words: “Drill, baby, drill.”
Even as Republicans—including Trump’s own pick for energy secretary—acknowledge climate change is happening, no red-blooded American will let a little thing like “looming global catastrophe” get in the way of our God-given right to suck the earth dry.
In our new issue, Jared Olson lays out how extractive industry in Mexico is driving displacement and forced disappearances through a mix of criminal and military violence. “Resisting the mine is an easy way to get yourself killed or run out of town,” he writes. David Schurman Wallace explains the repression such a protest might face in the United States, where sabotaging any kind of energy infrastructure might quickly be labeled “terrorism.” But as Zachariah Webb and Kyle Paoletta discuss, our planet’s natural resources are finite—the Southwest, land of seemingly limitless growth, is running out of water.
Meanwhile, Jennifer C. Berkshire writes on the education hucksters (past and present) squandering the potential of America’s youth. And in an excerpt from his new book, Erik Baker describes the woo-woo capitalists who made a quick buck off the New Age movement.
“Since the earliest days of public schools, there have been charlatans peddling quick fixes, promising to teach poor children for cheap, curing the nation’s poverty.”
“The promise of countercultural entrepreneurship was that through right livelihood and force of will it was possible to transcend the antinomies of work and leisure.”
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