COLUMN: The World Runs on Energy, Whether We Like It or Not

War, oil, and history leads back to Cuba NY

A OPINION By Clayton “Tiger” Hulin

Americans keep saying something lately that I understand, but I’m not sure we’ve fully thought through.

“I didn’t vote for this war.”
“I didn’t vote for this conflict.”
“I didn’t vote for any of this.”

But didn’t you?
Didn’t I?
Didn’t we vote for lower oil prices?

Didn’t we vote for lower food prices?
Didn’t we vote for a strong economy, cheap shipping, full grocery stores, and the lights staying on?

You might say, “I didn’t vote for the guy in office right now. How can you hold me responsible?”

That’s a fair question. But let me ask another one.

Is there a president yet who hasn’t taken us into some form of war, who hasn’t lost American lives, who hasn’t sent troops somewhere? If there has been one in the last fifty years, I’d honestly like someone to point them out.

This isn’t about one president. This isn’t about one party. This is about the reality that the world runs on energy, and energy has always been tied to power, money, and sometimes war.

I suppose I do see some method in the president’s madness. Don’t take that as an endorsement of war. Never. I am always on the side of humanity. Whether it’s a school full of little girls being bombed somewhere in the world, or soldiers who are somebody else’s children being sent into the desert and not coming home, I have no stomach for it.

War is a failure of human beings to solve problems any other way. It always has been.

But it would also be a failure of honesty to pretend that war and energy and money and power have nothing to do with each other. They always have.

The old way of getting oil is not the new way of getting oil, and the old way of fighting wars is not the new way of fighting wars either. If you follow the oil, the shipping lanes, the pipelines, and the power plants, you begin to see that the world is not nearly as random as it sometimes looks on the evening news.

If you look at history, every major leap forward for civilization has come when a new form of energy met a new form of technology.

Coal and steam created the Industrial Revolution.
Oil and gasoline created the age of the automobile and the airplane.
Electricity created the modern city.
Nuclear power created a kind of world war that never happened because it was too dangerous to fight.

And now electricity and artificial intelligence may be about to create something new again.

If that is true, then the question we should be asking is not just who has the most oil, but who has the most power plants, who has the most electricity, who has the most computer chips, and who can keep them running when the world gets unstable.

Artificial intelligence is not just an idea. It is not just software. It is physical.

It lives in buildings full of servers. Those servers consume enormous amounts of electricity. They require cooling, rare earth minerals, computer chips, and a stable power grid.

In other words, artificial intelligence is as much an energy story as it is a technology story.

And when you start looking at the world through that lens, some things begin to look different.

Oil fields matter, but so do natural gas fields.
Pipelines matter, but so do undersea data cables.
Aircraft carriers matter, but so do semiconductor factories.
The Strait of Hormuz matters, but so does the electrical grid.

The old way of getting oil is not the new way of getting oil. And the old way of fighting wars is not the new way of fighting wars either.

The new wars are fought with drones, missiles, cyberattacks, sanctions, and control of supply chains. They are fought over refineries, pipelines, shipping lanes, rare earth minerals, and computer chips. They are fought over the things that keep the lights on and the machines running.

Like it or not, this may not just be a fight for oil. It may be a fight over who has the energy and the technology to shape the next fifty years, not just for us, but for our children and the generations that follow.

And now, the moment has a name.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer brought the question forward, forcing the Senate to go on record. Not in speeches. Not in press releases. In votes.

Most Republicans chose to allow the president’s war powers to stand, effectively supporting the continuation of military action without a new declaration from Congress. A small number broke ranks. One Democrat went the other way. It wasn’t unanimous. But it was close enough to matter.

In New York’s own delegation, Republicans largely aligned with that position, tying themselves, whether they intended to or not, to a moment that voters are only just beginning to process.

And with midterm elections approaching, there is a growing belief that this vote may not stay in Washington. That it may follow them home.

Maybe it will.

But if it does, it won’t be because one party suddenly discovered war. It will be because the consequences of what we all quietly demand, cheap energy, stable markets, full shelves, have finally come into focus again.

That does not mean anyone should cheer for war.

War is a tragedy measured in funerals and broken families.

But history has never been shaped only by what we wished the world was. It has been shaped by energy, technology, and the people who understood how those two things together change everything.

So maybe the question is not whether we like the world that is forming.

Maybe the question is whether we understand it.

Because the countries that understand the moment they are living in usually help build what comes next.

And the ones that do not usually end up living in the world the others built.

We pray for peace, but when war and pestilence walk the earth, perhaps it’s time we ask whether we’ve mistaken comfort for innocence… and demand for consequence.

Sidebar: Where the Oil Age Really Began

Long before Texas oil fields, long before Saudi Arabia, long before tankers crossed oceans and pipelines crossed continents, there was a quiet spring in the woods near Cuba, New York where oil rose naturally to the surface of the water.

The Seneca people knew about it long before Europeans arrived. They collected the oil by laying blankets on the water, letting the oil soak into the cloth, then wringing it into kettles. They used it for medicine. They used it for fuel. They traded it. To them, it was a resource, a gift from the earth that had practical uses in everyday life.

In 1627, a French missionary wrote about seeing this spring. It was the first recorded mention of oil in North America. Two hundred years before the Pennsylvania oil boom. Two hundred years before Standard Oil. Two hundred years before the modern world began to run on petroleum.

Think about that for a moment.

The story that would eventually power cars, airplanes, tanks, highways, suburbs, plastics, and the modern global economy began as a strange black film on the surface of a quiet spring in Allegany County.

At the time, no one could have imagined what that black liquid would become.

They were looking at the beginning of a new era, and they did not know it yet.

It is possible that we are standing at the edge of another change like that now.

Not just oil this time, but electricity, computing, and artificial intelligence.

History suggests that when energy changes, everything else changes with it.

Clay “Tiger” Hulin writes from Cattaraugus County on a variety of subjects for the Sun. You can reach him anytime, claymation_88@yahoo.com