The Fossil Fuel Speculators Who Hate Your Dog

An industry can't both crave the higher prices that come with geopolitical shocks and care about the species and ecosystems harmed by war. Or the people, of course.

Everyone at The Energy Mix works right up close every day with the human, community, and ecosystem impacts of climate change, and with the flagrant disregard and denial those impacts receive from the fossil fuel industries and their apologists.

But it was the story about the Ukrainian dogs that almost broke me.

It first crossed my desk a couple of weeks ago, when the New York Times reported on a December, 2025 paper in the journal Evolutionary Applications. It found that exposure to the reflexive brutality of war “had, in a short period, transformed dogs that were formerly pets into the kind of dogs found in more wild environments,” the Times writes.

“From the beginning of the war, we saw a very sad situation with pets in Ukraine,” said lead author Mariia Martsiv, a zoologist at the University of Lviv. “Some people took their pets with them, but some were simply left at train stations or left behind in the occupied territories.”

It’s a safe bet that no one is thinking of the dogs or humans of Ukraine, or the ecosystems and infrastructure they depend on, when they celebrate any threat of global conflict that drives up the price of oil, or sound the alarm when tensions ease and prices fall.

But, oh, do they celebrate. Every tiny shift in oil or gas prices, up or down, is greeted as urgent headline news by the speculators who spend their days trading the stuff.

Although it isn’t the only influence on global markets, “geopolitical instability increases [crude oil] prices by creating supply disruptions, market uncertainties, and transportation risks,” explains Taha Zaghdoudi, an economics researcher at the University of Tunisia’s Carthage High Commercial Studies Institute, in September, 2025 paper in the journal Energy Research Letters.

“Conflicts or sanctions in major oil-producing areas reduce supply, while threats to key routes like the Strait of Hormuz raise transport costs. Investors add a risk premium, causing speculative buying and price hikes. Stockpiling oil for potential shortages boosts demand, and currency fluctuations, especially a weaker U.S. dollar, make oil pricier for global buyers.”

Which is a more sanitized, data-driven way of reaching the conclusion that the arcane world of fossil fuel trading hates you, your dog, the ground you both walk on, and anything else that depends on a stable, steady, predictable life. The predatory investors who bet on higher oil prices are ultimately profiting off misery, whether they see it that way or not. If peace should break out, heaven forbid, they stand to lose their bet—which is code for them losing a lot of money.

The Dogs of Ukraine

I know why the Times post hit me so hard.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve come to dread what I call the “weather report”—the stories that any climate news organization has to tell and keep telling about the flooding and severe storms, wildfires and heatwaves, health crises and forced migration and everyday disruptions, that climate change inflicts on human populations and millions of other species around the world. And now, increasingly, the attribution studies that definitively connect the dots between cause and effect.

For decades, war has been recognized as both a leading source of climate pollution and a pretty much inevitable consequence of climate change, making it a top priority for Pentagon military planners until Donald Trump compelled them to replace that body of evidence with his own warped ideology. Wars for oil are also a massive subsidy for oil itself, with analysts putting the cost of America’s crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan as high as $4 to $6 trillion, more than $30 per barrel over a 20-year span.

The dogs of Ukraine forced me to see that knowledge through the eyes of a clever, furry, usually joyous pup, not quite yet a year old. Hamish wouldn’t be able to fathom what was going on around him and would have little chance of surviving in the carnage Vladimir Putin has created in Ukraine. Or, it has to be said, in the most extreme variants of the hostile takeover that Putin’s political protégé in the White House is trying very hard to engineer in Canada.

Dr. Ihor Dykyy, a zoologist at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, recalled serving as a volunteer with the Ukrainian Armed Forces for two years beginning in 2022. “Many stray dogs lived with us in the village of Zarichne,” where he and his fellow soldiers “fed all of them, gave them shelter, and provided medical care whenever possible,” he told the Times.

But there was only so much the caregivers could do in a war zone. The dogs “were terrified by the hostilities; some suffered from shell shock,” Dykyy said. “One small dog had a broken leg that hadn’t healed properly, leaving it with a permanent limp. Another was blind in one eye, having lost it in an explosion.”

It took only a “remarkably short period of time” for dogs on the front lines to “become more like wild dog species, such as wolves, coyotes, or dingoes,” the Times writes. Dogs with more of a “wild” phenotype—straight ears, straight tail, less white—were more likely to survive, Martsiv said. There were fewer old, sick, or injured dogs, and they were more likely to move in packs.

“The scientists did not want their findings interpreted as war-fueled accelerated evolution,” the Times stresses. “What’s really happening is that the conditions of war favour animals that have certain characteristics. For example, a dog with less body mass is less likely to trigger land mines and more able to hide in confined spaces, and presents a smaller target for shrapnel.”

But that isn’t a perspective that makes it into the conversation when traders are either crowing or panicking about the price of oil.

Misery Makes Money

Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. For decades, at even the slightest hint of geopolitical disruption, the reaction from oil markets has been quick, sharp, and predictable. Most recently:

• In December, with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine appearing to progress, Bloomberg News reported that “peace talk jitters”—just pause on those words!—were driving down prices. “A peace deal, if followed by the elimination of sanctions on Russian oil over its invasion of Ukraine, could unleash supply from the world’s third-largest producer,” the news agency explained in an earlier post, at a time when “oil markets are already staring down expectations for a surplus” that would suppress prices.

• When war threatens to break out in the Middle East, oil prices typically rise, as they briefly did earlier this month when the U.S. advised caution navigating the Strait of Hormuz, a key delivery route and chokepoint for about one-third of the world’s oil. Through the earlier part of this month, prices rose and fell day by day, as traders tried to distill some form of logic or predictability from a transactional, likely clinically demented dictator calling the shots from the Washington.

• Late last week, oil prices jumped 4% after that demented dictator warned that “bad things will happen” if Iran doesn’t accept a deal with the U.S. to avert military strikes.

The price swings aren’t as sharp now as they were in decades past, with a global oversupply of oil and gas now beginning to take hold. “Geopolitical tensions may add some support to oil prices,” Bloomberg wrote unironically in December. But “growing consensus about supplies exceeding demand next year has pushed crude toward the lower end of a band it has traded in since mid-October.”

But don’t hold your breath for any change in the logic, ethics, or lack thereof underlying the global oil trade. The unstated, bottom-line assumption is still that misery makes money for investors who can accurately predict an outbreak of war—the more horrific and disruptive the better—and get their hands on some oil before prices spike.

It’s no mistake that “no blood for oil” was one of the enduring slogans from America’s wars in Iraq. Or that the “fully-burdened cost of transportation” was one of the most nerdy yet provocative and telling calculations in the aftermath.

In 2017, The Energy Mix reported that U.S. military veteran Joseph Kopser was drawing “a direct line from the 2.9 billion gallons of gasoline American drivers [were idling] away in congestion each year to the U.S. service members who ‘were paying for that oil with their blood and lives’.”

The friends and colleagues assigned to protect Iraqi oil fields, refineries, depots, and pipelines “were escorting fuel conveys through some of the most hostile territory in the country, in what came to be known as one of the most dangerous assignments of the war, full of roadside IEDs,” he wrote. “Back in the States, I saw millions of dollars’ worth of fuel being wasted by inefficient generators and vehicles—the very fuel we were there to protect.”

Kopser’s experience pointed to some powerful common ground between the activists and other citizens protesting the Iraq wars and the veterans who survived it—all of which would likely have drawn a blank stare from the profiteers who spent the same months and years watching the price of the commodity.

Investments That Build Community

Now we’re in a moment when Putin’s aggression and Trump’s acquiescence are pulling Canada and Europe into a very large, very fast military buildup. Canada’s newly-released defence industrial strategy is being pitched as an effort to safeguard the country’s sovereignty in a “volatile and dangerous” world, while adding 125,000 jobs to an economy on the front lines of Trump’s tariff wars.

It’s hard to argue against a serious collective defence when two of the world’s most powerful dictators, in particular, are being crystal clear about their plans to blow up international cooperation and seize whatever territory they can. It may not be the fight most of us wanted or expected to face in 2026, but it won’t get better if we look away.

But the existential threat that many of us did expect to be fighting was climate change, and that one isn’t going away, either. If this is the way it’s going to be, it’ll be even more important to focus our available resources on building community, resilience, and mutual aid networks—on nation-building projects that actually build the nation(s) (very much including Indigenous nations), rather than driving us apart.

One emerging piece of the puzzle is the concept of “dual-use infrastructure”, the idea “that you want to build something to defend your country, but at the same time you’re building something civilians can use as well, like roads or ports,” Policy Options explained last May. Canada is confronting a $294-billion infrastructure gap, and the Canadian Climate Institute warned earlier this month that climate impacts are accelerating that challenge and its costs.

So the logic of dual-use would go something like this: If you’re upgrading that bridge to bear the weight of a column of tanks, be sure to include all the refurbishments it’ll need to safely carry civilian traffic for the next 30, 50, or 80 years. And while you’re at it, please add 0.5% or 0.05% to your budget to include bike and walking paths, for the vast majority of the time when there will be no tanks or other military vehicles in the vicinity.

But none of this reduces the urgent need for investments that speed up the shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, boost affordability, support local jobs and economies, and rebuild trust—and for bonus points, undercut the speculators who’ve been banking on high oil prices. Last September, the more than 250 mayors and city councillors who make up the #ElbowsUp for Climate coalition called on the federal government to support a menu of “nation-building, not nation-burning” projects that included:

• A national clean energy grid;

• Building two million energy-efficient, non-market homes;

• Energy retrofits for low-income homes and multi-unit buildings;

• A national high-speed rail and intercity bus system;

• Implementation and funding for a “national resilience, response, and recovery strategy.”

Last week, the One Canadian Clean Economy Task Force issued a similar call to action that listed four priority areas for projects of national interest:

• A transmission line connecting Nova Scotia’s Wind West offshore wind project to manufacturing hubs in Ontario and Quebec;

• Battery materials refining in the Central Alberta corridor;

• A national electric charging network;

• Modular housing hubs in Ontario and British Columbia to “drive the construction of more affordable homes with Canadian construction materials.”

It’s all too little, too late for the dogs of Ukraine. But it’s a strategy that I’m pretty sure Mr. Hamish would approve of. 🐾

Cover photo:  Mr. Hamish does not approve/photo by Mitchell Beer