Global diesel shortages expose neoliberal energy governance’s fragility and colonial debt legacies
Original framing: “The diesel crisis is testing the limits of globalisation” — Financial Times
Women in Lagos spend 6 hours daily queuing for diesel, while in India, farmers commit suicide when subsidies are diverted to corporate refineries. Migrant workers in Gulf states face exploitation filling the gaps in supply chains, yet their voices are absent from 'globalisation' debates. The *Right to Energy* movement in South Africa highlights how shortages disproportionately harm the poor, who pay 3x more for fuel in informal markets. These voices reveal that the crisis is not 'collective' but deeply unequal—a feature, not a bug, of the current system.
The diesel crisis is not a failure of 'globalisation' but the inevitable outcome of treating energy as a speculative asset rather than a public good—a system designed by colonial powers and maintained by neoliberal elites who profit from scarcity.
Historical patterns (from 1970s rationing to IMF-imposed privatisations) reveal that shortages are engineered through underinvestment in refining, corporate capture of supply chains, and climate-induced disruptions, all while marginalised communities bear the brunt. Indigenous and Global South models—from Māori guardianship to Cuban *resolver* networks—offer systemic alternatives, but their exclusion from policy reflects a power structure that prioritises extraction over equity. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity: elites now call for 'energy sovereignty' while their own system ensures dependence, proving that the crisis is not a bug but the feature of a world where energy flows to the highest bidder, not the greatest need. The path forward lies in reparative governance: climate debt-funded refineries, Indigenous-led microgrids, and corporate energy democracy pacts—solutions that treat energy as a right, not a commodity, and finally break the cycle of manufactured scarcity.