We tend to associate oil and crisis with high prices and scarcity. Yet when prices plummet — as they have over the last few months — it creates a different kind of problem for oil producers. As this shock reverberates through the state coffers of Russia and Venezuela, and the oil fields of Texas and North Dakota, how might the Left respond?

Certain provinces of the Left are no doubt befuddled by the development, long confident that humans were exhausting the earth’s oil supply. From Michael Klare to John Bellamy Foster, many during the 2000s also assumed peak oil and scarcity underpinned American imperialist adventures in Iraq and beyond. In this view, powerful corporations and states collude to secure access to dwindling oil reserves and the attendant money and power. The insatiable drive to extract more oil, in other words, is the primary concern.

But as the radical left collective Retort observed a decade ago: “The history of twentieth-century oil is not the history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace — for the industry and the oil states — of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut.” The problem right now — for oil producers and those of us concerned with climate change — is that there is too much oil.