Below is an excerpt from Cleveland Solar Cooperative's January 2026 Newsletter written by our Energy Democracy Organizer Craig Ickler
2026 is off to tumultuous start. In the early hours of January 3rd, the President of Venezuela was kidnapped by US special forces. This was a brazen act and widely seen as illegal under both international and domestic laws. It resulted in the deaths of dozens of Venezuelans. While multiple and conflicting reasons have been given as to why this happened, it's clear that control of Venezuelan oil is central to these attacks. In fact, within a week, the Trump Administration invited two dozen oil and gas executives to the White House to discuss how they were going exploit Venezuela's oil reserves, with President Trump insisting that, "[t]he plan is for them to spend, meaning our giant oil companies will be spending at least $100 billion of their money, not the government's money. They don't need government money, but they need government protection and need government security that when they spend all this money, it's going to be there. So they get their money back and make a very nice return. The plan is for them to spend at least $100 billion to rebuild the capacity and the infrastructure necessary."
Regardless of whether or not this "plan" will work - even the invited oil executives were skeptical - it's indicative of the extractive logic of an economic system based on fossil fuels. An economic system that sees our lives, our land, and our labor as forfeit, if we happen to live near something the rich and powerful want for next quarter's balance sheet. It's a system that cannot and could never justify it's existence, especially now that solar and wind are cheaper and easier to deploy. Despite repeated attacks on wind and solar by the Trump Administration, 92% of the new power capacity in the US was from renewables last year.
Our cooperative, and others like us across the country, are using this shift in technology to build the people power necessary to turn this economic system on its head. We can build a distributed and decentralized energy system that puts people over profits. When our co-op completes Ohio's first community-owned solar array this year, we will be keeping dollars out of the pockets of bad actors like FirstEnergy and Exxon Mobil. That money will come back to us and to our cooperative, so we can continue the fight for an energy system where community control is the norm and reckless invasions for resources are impossible.