The fossil fuel industry is the most powerful and destructive industry in the history of the world. Right now the fate of our planet hangs on our ability to defeat the political power of that industry. It is ready to do anything, including making alliances with pro-fascist forces to maintain its ability to make profits. Understanding the insidious ways it has worked to undermine democracy will be helpful for protecting democracy and challenging the destructive actions of this industry.Capitalism is the practice of putting profits at the center of how decisions are made about how to produce and distribute resources. Those with capital are able to shift social institutions to enable them to gain even more capital. Entities, such as corporations, come to be self-perpetuating agents whose only goal is profit making.Capitalism existed long before fossil fuels. But for over a century, fossil fuels, and fossil fuel-based corporations, have been at the heart of capitalism. Fossil fuels have made energy plentiful, which has led to the development of forms of industry and approaches to agriculture that use a lot of it. As we are seeing with the war on Iran, fossil fuels have become the life blood that keeps the global capitalist economy running. Fossil fuel-centered corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the world.Over time, and in many places, capitalism extracts profits, exploits labor, and despoils nature with very little force. It becomes a matter of course how the systems function. But the original forms of accumulation that allowed some companies to be enormously powerful, and to shape the regulatory world in which they operated, came from brutal expropriation. Capitalism began with slavery and colonialism and a willingness to do anything to make profits.As the fossil fuel industry increasingly resorts to attacks on democracy to maintain its ability to profit, an important part of protecting democracy is exposing one of the biggest and most determined players behind the current attacks.The fossil fuel industry has, from its beginning, supported violent overthrows and encouraged states to install authoritarian governments to ensure its ability to engage in extraction. Many of the places where fossil fuels are extracted have been controlled politically by brutal forces kept in power by so-called liberal democratic forces. We see this story in Mexico in 1911, in Iran in 1954, in Shell Oil’s despoliation of Ogoniland in Nigeria in the 1980s.Outside of those extraction zones, for many years, and in many places, the fossil fuel industry was compatible with liberal democracy. The US was able to have a liberal democratic government, and most countries in the world could as well, as long as those governments supported political and economic practices that allowed for the profitability of powerful industries. The markets constructed to facilitate capitalist processes can generally function fine in collaboration with governments that allow for high standards of living, social safety nets, and civil liberties, as long as those governments have kept processes in place that allow for the extraction of profits. As soon as any government gets in the way of that ability, the so-called liberal democratic order that dominates the global economic system has been prepared to overthrow those governments to put new ones in place that are willing to act in its interests.Retired General Wesley Clark has argued that US foreign policy has focused on keeping regimes in power that would support the continued use of the dollar as the currency used for trading oil—the petrodollar. By ensuring that regimes are in power that support the continued use of the petrodollar, the US is able to ensure that it has some control over the continued flow of the lifeblood of the global economic system.Capitalism is compatible with democracy as long as that form of democracy allows the economic world to be dominated and controlled by markets, which are constructed in ways that make them immune from accountability. The fossil fuel industry has functioned in alliance with a nominally democratic US, as long as the US government has also engaged in military action when it was needed to keep the oil, and profits, flowing. It is new that the fossil fuel industry has been aligned with fascism in the US and other Western countries.Fascism is a particular form of authoritarianism that grows when a capitalist elite worries that its power is going to be threatened by democratic forces. An authoritarian government is one that tries to control all aspects of society and close down dissent. It holds power closely in a small group and is not accountable to its people. Fascism is authoritarianism that runs on popular support.