Military spending in the US by regional mean rank

Ever since a quarter of a century ago when I read Trotskyist magazines arguing that if all military spending were scrapped and the rich properly taxed there would be far more than enough money to solve all the social problems facing the world today, I have taken an interest in US military spending, in part because I found a lot of information from a late-1970s textbook at Latrobe University.

A Six-Way Division of the US

Since reading the late James Löwen’s Sundown Towns, I have come to propose a six-way division of US states according to the map below:

A six-region map of the United States. An alternative divide of the two western regions is also possible, as well as splitting the into three or four; however, the four more easterly regions are relatively clear even for seven- and eight-way divisions

Comparing Regions’ Military Spending

In the following brief analysis, I hope to look at how these six regions compare in terms of military spending. My first experience with variation in US military spending by region occurred from reading R.W. DeGrasse’s Military Expansion, Economic Decline: Impact of Military Spending on United States Economic Performance as a Melbourne University student exploring the Latrobe library over two decades ago. DeGrasse developed a system of dividing US states slightly different from the conventional one, but one which I have come to see as the most logical available. However, the Southern and Western regions of DeGrasse are sufficiently varied that I have split them into two, as shown in the map above. Löwen’s work from a quarter-century after DeGrasse further supports such a division.

In the table below, I have assessed and compared the ranks of each state in defence spending from, firstly, the latest available state-by-state report (from 2024), and secondly, from DeGrasse’s 1981 work. Comparing DeGrasse’s work with the latest available can, of course, show continuities and changes in how states and regions compare.

US Military Spending By State and Region — 2024 and 1981

2024 Rank	State	1981 Rank
1	Virginia	4
2	Hawaii	3
3	Connecticut	5
4	District of Columbia	1
5	Alaska	2
6	Maryland	13
7	Kentucky	32
8	Alabama	22
9	Maine	23
10	Mississippi	7
11	New Mexico	9
12	Arizona	14
13	Oklahoma	17
14	Colorado	21
15	Texas	16
16	Utah	6
17	Rhode Island	29
18	Missouri	8
19	Massachusetts	15
20	Florida	24
21	South Carolina	19
22	Washington	12
23	Pennsylvania	44
24	Indiana	35
25	North Carolina	27
26	Georgia	18
27	Kansas	25
28	South Dakota	33
29	California	10
30	New Hampshire	20
31	Nevada	31
32	New York	37
33	Vermont	30
34	Wyoming	36
35	New Jersey	40
36	North Dakota	26
37	Michigan	48
38	Louisiana	11
39	Ohio	41
40	Nebraska	39
41	Montana	45
42	Illinois	50
43	Iowa	47
44	Wisconsin	46
45	Delaware	28
46	Idaho	42
47	Arkansas	34
48	Tennessee	38
49	West Virginia	49
50	Minnesota	43
51	Oregon	51
17.00	Southwest Average	13.40
18.63	Lowland (Plantation) South Average	16.50
21.33	Northeast Average	23.75
28.14	Upland (Nonplantation) South average	27.71
30.00	Northwest Average	28.16
39.86	Midwest Average	44.57

Results and Conclusion:

What the table shows is that:

1. with a few exceptions, the states of high and low relative military spending in 1981 and 2024 are the same:
1. seven of the ten states with lowest defence dependence are the same in both years
2. six of the ten states with highest defence dependence are the same in both years
2. military spending in the US is heavily concentrated in the lowland South and the Southwest, and to a lesser degree in the Northeast
3. almost no state in the Midwest (only Indiana in 2024) is outside the bottom third in defence spending
4. eight of twelve states in the Northwest are also consistently below average in military dependence
1. this is more significant than it looks before the four “defence dependent” states in the Northwest, alongside Kansas — the next most dependent in the region — form a periphery either:
1. substantially part of the Southwest at a local level (Colorado, Utah) or
2. peripheral to the Northwest region (Alaska, Washington)
2. we can perhaps then define a “core Northwest” consisting of Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota and Wyoming
1. states within this “core Northwest” are consistently and uniformly amongst the least defence-dependent in the United States
5. three of the seven states in the Upland South are also consistently amongst the least defence-dependent

In Sundown Towns, Löwen demonstrated that racial segregation has tended to be less in military towns than almost anywhere else in the United States. Löwen also showed that virtually the entire “core Northwest” has historically absolutely excluded blacks, with the exception of a small number of the largest cities. The Midwest was almost as rigid. Löwen’s observation stands in complete agreement with the observation that military spending is concentrated in the lowland South and Southwest, where blacks (and, often, other nonwhites) were valued as sources of labour rather than feared as competitors for land. In the Northeast, whilst blacks were not valued, they were feared less than in the Midwest, Northwest or upland South because land was less abundant.

The military — who saw and sees the value in cheap black labour as soldiers — preferred and prefers thus to locate in areas not virulently intolerant of blacks’ presence. Of course, these areas not intolerant of (or valuing) blacks’ presence are also strategically logical as they are closest to the US’ most dangerous foreign threats from the lower classes of Latin America, but the history noted by Löwen no doubt plays a comparable role.

Why the oil monarchies constitute capitalism’s inevitable “ endgame

The petromonarchies of the Persian Gulf are countries usually seen as strange, eccentric, unique, idiosyncratic or other similar words. Ever since I read Collins Gem: Basic Facts — Geography and various editions of The Guinness Book of Records I was aware they were extremely distinctive. Reading Gordon Robison’s 1996 Arab Gulf States gave me much more knowledge of these nations than could be garnered from either of previous book. Robison made these states seem more interesting than I had thought beforehand, although likely this is because I had not seen any reason to study them using the Grolier at Essendon Grammar Middle School.

The oil monarchies would always attract interest from me in subsequent years. Continuing alarm at Australia’s abysmal greenhouse gas emissions performance and the fact that Australia is fundamentally similar to the Gulf monarchies in being a high income resource-rich, low-latitude country, attracted attention at first. However, at this time I still assumed the petromonarchies as minor global players. Moreover, despite their reputation for extremely strict Islam — which Robison highlighted in his chapter on Saʽudi Arabia — I naïvely assumed the actual rulers of the petromonarchies were doing everything possible against al-Qaʽida. This belief was intensified by the one-eyed focus of Trotskyists upon Israel and the only slightly less one-eyed focus of the Right upon Iran, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It is true that in his early writings Robert Spencer would highlight the rigidity of Islam in Saʽudi Arabia, where non-Muslims cannot practice their religion at all, but by the middle 2010s Spencer was ignoring the Saʽudis.

When I read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, I wondered how writers like Hoppe viewed the petromonarchies. On the one hand, they clearly viewed monarchy as superior to democracy, yet they never so much as mentioned the Gulf States. I did, I must say, have the feeling that Hoppe and his ilk did admire these states, but out of fear that praising the Gulf States would either:

1. imply a sympathy to Islam that Hoppe obviously lacked, or
2. make for greater criticism from his Austrian School allies

The one thing that really made me slightly question the insignificance and plain strangeness of the oil monarchies was a small section of Chapter 9 of Kevin Williamson’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, where Williamson said that the Arab oil states were cases where the oil industry had taken over the state, as I knew the coal industry had in Australia. I knew from the obscene greenhouse gas emissions of Australia and the Gulf States how dangerous a country where the fossil fuel industry is the government had to be. Under this condition, the government makes its money from greenhouse gas emissions, with the result that it will be dogmatically opposed to emissions reductions no matter how urgent or costly for the rest of the world.

What I did know about the petromonarchies, with hindsight, ought to have been enough to question the practical ignorance of them by Israel-obsessed Left. Nevertheless, it was not until reading two articles — ‘McJihad’ by Timothy Mitchell and ‘Taxation, Non-Tax Revenue and Democracy’ by Wilson Prichard, Paola Salardi and Paul Segal — that I began to understand that absolute petromonarchies are not eccentric, strange societies who are purely products of Western imperialism but something far more dangerous and even sinister. Prichard, Salodi and Segal showed that, contrary to Hoppe’s impression of an extremely limited government under absolute monarchy, the Gulf petromonarchies actually have the world’s highest government revenue with absolutely no taxes on capital (a facet I was long aware of via The Guinness Book of Records).

What this made me realise was that:

1. the Gulf petromonarchies are in fact very wealthy states who earn their wealth exactly as anarcho-capitalist theory says “private states” must: by selling what they own [petroleum and natural gas]
2. petromonarchies are, as was noted as early as 1982 by William Powell in his Saudi Arabia and Its Royal Family, family businesses run more akin to (nonprofit) capitalist enterprises than to post-Communist Manifesto Western governments
3. petromonarchies constitute genuine imperialist powers who exploit the workers of many other countries with an abundance of labour.

The Levant and South Asia have become oppressed colonies of the petromonarchies: their primary source of private and even public revenue is remittances from the Gulf. So have, more recently, large portions of sub-Saharan Africa. The effects of this are profound. Because the Levantine and Asian workers are prohibited from organising collectively in any way whatsoever in their new home, they lose the ability to gain from globalisation that workers in labour-rich nations historically possessed. Petromonarchy aid also plays an important role keeping in place authoritarian rulers throughout the Arab world, and most likely also South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as noted by Killen Clarke in this year’s ‘The New Rentierism’. Global de-democratisation is very plausibly driven by petromonarchy power to a greater degree than even Clarke notes. As writers like Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page and Sheldon Wolin noted in the late 2000s and early 2010s, influence of mass preferences on government policy has totally disappeared, whereas decline of formal democratic institutions has been much smaller. Additionally, scholars note how inequality changed from decreasing to increasing at the precise time the 1973 oil crisis multiplied Gulf non-tax revenues (see here for a description of how the revenues multiplied).

Many academics have observed downward pressure on capital taxation, yet none discuss the possibility that the rise of the tax-free Gulf monarchies with vast rent revenues is what has pressured capital taxation downwards since 1973. The existence of states where wealth is totally untaxed and revenue is independent of high-tax states [older tax havens depended upon support from high-tax states] must make revenue generation via wealth taxation less feasible elsewhere. With their rigid bans on strikes and unions, the Gulf monarchies possess an absolute, uncompromised dictatorship of capital over labour, which creates pressure for policies more favourable to the extremely wealthy in the rest of the world. This lowering of taxes has created a vicious circle of debt in those states unable to gain large rent revenues, further increasing the geopolitical power of the petrostates, especially since the rulers invest heavily in lobbying for and gaining favourable policies from foreign governments. The most graphic illustration of this is the refusal of the US to target Saʽudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Although all but two of nineteen hijackers were from those nations and support for al-Qaʽida by Saʽudi princes suspected at the time and confirmed re all four of the wealthiest Gulf states since, weakening the petromonarchies was and is entirely unacceptable to the rich. It would lessen downward pressure on capital taxation and make it easier for the masses to demand higher rates thereof.

Ron Rogowski in his 1989 Commerce and Coalitions demonstrated that if a sector of society gains economically, it will want to translate its gains into politics. Because for almost two millennia (before 1900) gains of capital at the expense of labour always occurred during economic declines, Rogowski could not grasp what capital would do at the expense of labour under the economic situation prevailing since 1973 — one where capital gains at the expense of labour from globalisation. What we have seen capital do is eliminate the economic power of labour — absolutely essential for anything beyond nominal democracy — and in the past decade seek to transform the whole structure of politics to match a reality well established for three decades of a hegemony over labour. If social structure would match the observed economic hegemony of capital over labour as per Gilens, Page and Wolin, then:

1. workers would logically have zero rights vis-à-vis their bosses
2. academia and media would have zero freedom to oppose bosses’ absolute power
3. bosses would seek to justify their power in terms of natural law and religion
4. bosses would logically have absolute ownership of property
5. this property owned by bosses would be fully owned privately

These exact conditions describe the Gulf States:

1. as noted above, (almost entirely expatriate) workers have zero bargaining power vis-à-vis their (citizen) bosses
• contra Austrian School dogma, most expatriate workers in the Gulf lack the option to choose employment elsewhere — increasing global substitution of capital for labour severely limits options inside labour-rich nations
2. no independent media whatsoever exist
3. education is dictated by the requirements of the national and religious ideology of the royal families
4. ownership of property is restricted to citizens (bosses), with workers (noncitizens) completely excluded
5. as discussed earlier and presciently by Powell, the Gulf monarchies are private states completely owned by the royal families
• what is popularly called the “public sector” is not “public” at all, but is owned as family property
• the division of the Gulf economies are instead into:
1. a “state” or “nonprofit” sector directly owned by the state and employing primarily citizens
• this is conventionally called the “public” sector but given that the state is a family business, this is a misnomer
2. a “non-state”, for-profit sector in which extremely few citizens are employed except as bosses

These facts point towards the Gulf petromonarchies being the inevitable endgame of capitalism carried to the point wished by the global super-rich. Capitalists obviously would desire a society without taxes, unions, unrest from workers, or freedom to so much as argue for a system where bosses lack absolute power over workers. Being run as private corporations makes petromonarchies plainly much closer to a capitalist enterprise than even a nominally democratic parliamentary state could possibly be. It also means that the public has virtually no knowledge of how they operate: the archives of the Gulf States are almost entirely inaccessible and were never even analysed in Kian Byrne’s survey of Middle East archives. This secrecy, as has been discussed since Powell’s work on Saʽudi Arabia, is a large part of why almost nobody recognises why the purest form of capitalism would be necessarily a society akin to the tax-, union-, and strike-free oil monarchies, and without any freedom of speech or the press for the immense majority.

The desert city finally confirmed

Yet again, the Bureau of Meteorology is predicting heavy rainfall for Victoria without the smallest sign of it.

Although not quite as extreme as my previous prediction, the weather since I wrote a month ago is further proof of just how dire the situation is. The evidence from the past month-equivalent’s weather is, without question, that the situation is much worse than I thought last month.

Rainfall for the first sixteen days of October. What is amazing is how the driest areas are almost precisely those where climate models were expecting heavy rainfall! This is proof of the state of runaway climate change brought about by the inability to expropriate the oil sheikhs of the Gulf and coal barons of Australia. Under a just global economic system these super-polluters would have their wealth cut by ten to twelve orders of magnitude without the tiniest compensation!

Last evening, writing on Wikipedia, clouds were so dark I became really confident of some decent rain for the first time in many months.

Total rainfall so far this year, reflecting runaway climate change as a necessary result of failing to expropriate Australia’s coal barons and establish a genuine “boycott, divestment and sanctions” against the Gulf oil sheikhs that would weaken their geopolitical power 

However, as the night wore on with me extremely tired and unable to stay up, I went to bed, but the noisy blinds in my bedroom inhibited my sleep, which was extremely erratic. There were tiny traces of rain, but I was aware by the time I settled that there would not be any rainfall in Melbourne. This morning, I decided to get up earlier than I have in recent days, feeling I had had a reasonable sleep.

Later this morning, my undeniably incurable inability to react to the weather other than emotionally reared its ugly head. Pointing out that it is never going to rain again in Melbourne in a screaming voice, and hitting the kitchen bench with a clenched fist, constitute awful behaviours. Although I am frequently told I like it, I do not!. However, there is no possibility of:

1. it ever raining properly again in Melbourne to calm my anger, or
2. me developing a more measured response when it fails to rain
• I have frequently been told I simply “don’t want to” react in a measured way
• this is utter garbage
• the fact being that I simply cannot and never will be able to react to unfulfilled expectations of rain in a measured manner
• the fact is also that it is many orders of magnitude easier for others to get used to my screaming

The early afternoon saw an even more violent anger on my part about rain. Whilst my brother is willing to see it will rain less — and this has been observed — over the past month and a half it has rained probably one-sixth to one-eighth the amounts predicted when the Bureau of Meteorology made its spring forecast. It is almost definitive that, when above-average rainfall was confidently expected, Melbourne will record its driest spring this year. The city needs to receive more rain in less than half the time to equal the record low 67 millimetres from 1938. Given that predictions in August were for above-average rainfall, it is thus practically certain that Melbourne’s average annual rainfall from 2026 onwards will be substantially less than one-eighth of the historic average. Likely with increasing global warming it will be substantially less than such an already catastrophic decline. One-eighth is around 80 millimetres — corresponding to the record low Victoria annual rainfall of 75.9 millimetres. Given that we should expect less annual rainfall even than that, how low Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be from 2026 onwards is difficult to comprehend. Likely it will be substantially less than 50 millimetres — less than the record low annual rainfalls of Broken Hill or Tibooburra. With that, and similar declines in historically wetter areas, absent an extraordinary revival if class war by the workd's workers Victoria is faced with an ecological carastrophe whereby all native flora are left with unsuitable climates, and even nurseries and gardens cannot survive.

For capitalists, needless to say, a hot desert city is the best of all possible worlds. The hot climate provides the lowest subsistence minimum to pay workers, while the abundant land gives them the advantage in the class war, so capitalists can lower taxes and pressure them downwards elsewhere. They can and do drive capital out of cooler or wetter regions more favourable for the immense majority, and indeed stop labour moving out.

Channelling anger into initial measures with the ultimate goal of expropriating the polluters and ensuring every confiscated cent pays for remedies and compensation at zero cost to the sufferers stands infinitely easier and more likely than the two possibilities noted three paragraphs above. It is also really gross to say that catastrophic climate change is not as bad as having me scream and scream until it rains — which will be never.

Were education not clouded by capitalist dogma and the hegemony of the parasitic super-rich in funding, the facts and solutions re climate change could be understood much more accurately at much less cost at a much younger age. That capitalism is the cause of climate change is undeniably demonstrated by such documents as:

• ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’
• Environment, Capitalism and Socialism (in 1990!)
• The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World
• The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism
• ‘Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of “keeping politics out of it”’
• ‘Why only socialism can save us from climate catastrophe’

That genuine socialism — a society in which workers run production without bosses via instantly recallable workers’ councils and production is planned in the collective need — could potentially solve the climate catastrophe with an apparently miraculous rapidity is also virtually undeniable.

That the wealthy oil sheikhs and coal barons have an incomprehensible amount to lose is also undeniable. Indeed, the polluters who gain their wealth from runaway global warming would minimally need to be stripped of all bar one-billionth of their accumulated wealth to reduce that wealth to a level adequate to maintain a society in which mass interest groups actually have any influence upon government policy. Red Flag discussed this in their ‘The United States Is Not a Democracy’ from 2020. After the Kyōtō Protocol, BDS-type campaigns against the Gulf petromonarchies — globally the greatest per capita emitters yet permitted carte blanche emissions increases — were already overdue. However, the blindness of socialist groups obsessed with prewar conflicts with Zionism meant that only in 2015 did anyone even suggest BDS was deserved more by the oil monarchies than by Israel.

A repeat of Wiker from the opposite angle rather than a detailed critique — and a socialist’s book that never mentions “capitalism”

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York in Critique of Intelligent Design often seem to be rewriting Wiker from the opposite angle rather than looking more deeply

Two decades ago, the “intelligent design” movement became widely publicised following the court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which to the anger of its advocates, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (based in Harrisburg) declared that:

1. intelligent design was a form of creationism
2. the school board policy [of Dover Area School District of York County] violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

(The fact that Judge John Edward Jones III, who decided the case, was appointed by Bush junior and not a Democratic president, undoubtedly further angered intelligent design’s supporters).

Soon after Kitzmiller — of which I would have no knowledge for a long time afterwards — Regnery Publishing published the late Tom Bethell’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science and nine months afterwards Jonathan Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. At that time, I had no idea of socialist criticisms of intelligent design, for the inability of Trotskyists to explain September 11, 2001 satisfactorily had substantially turned me away from them. I was wholly aware of critisms by my mother of intelligent design, but they entirely failed to refute the arguments of Wells and Wiker.

In more recent years, intelligent design has faded from view as Republican-dominated courts have substantially permitted private education curricula teaching young Earth creationism, whose unacceptability drove intelligent design in the first place. However, it has become clear to me today why the far right dislikes Darwinism. It dislikes Darwinism because of its well-established connections with Marxian socialism. These connections established themselves whilst Marx and Darwin remained alive, and European working classes were developing a rigid anti-religion politics. As John Kautsky noted in his Social Democracy and the Aristocracy (review here) this politics was always much less intolerant of private capitalism than of Christian influence, because Christianity was viewed as the key obstacle to workers’ political rights. This accords with Orthodox apologist Vladimir Moss, who in ‘Must An Orthodox Christian Be A Monarchist’ (written a few years after Critique of Intelligent Design) showed that Christianity was uniformly viewed as absolutely incompatible with any form of democracy [though not incompatible or much less so with the Herrenvolk democracies of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia] from its foundation until the Great Depression. Eusebius of Caesarea famously developed a political theology for absolute monarchy, arguing that:

“just as there is one God ruling the cosmos, there should be one Emperor ruling the earth”

Yet, a large part of Critique of Intelligent Design focuses upon merely reversing the arguments of familiar Intelligent Design advocates, most especially Benjamin Wiker. For anybody familiar with Wiker’s Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, the book’s narrative is remarkably familiar. The exact same historical arc is used to reach an opposite conclusion, a fact which severely weaken’s Foster’s intended argument. It prevents the possibility of creationism being linked to capitalism or, more than very weakly, to the reactionary politics Foster, Cark and York attack inadequately. Remarkably for an ecosocialist like Frost, the book does not once mention “capitalism” or any related word! Plainly, although there is substiantial discussion of how social issue are linked to the divide between materialism and creationism, the book makes essentially no attempt to show how, if socialism is linked to materialism, then capitalism must logically be linked to creationism. As I noted discussing John Kautsky, there exist problems with doing this. These problems increased greatly beyond the rise of Nazism — a dictatorial political system with an ideology not linked to any form of creationism, but in which the state took over the traditional role of the Church itself as well as its own such role. This severely reduces its effectiveness as a critique of the present political order and its massive ecological and social problems, because as Critique of Intelligent Design reads there is no link between creationism and capitalism. Amy Gilligan’s 2012 review in International Socialist Review notes in this context that:

“A more thorough explanation of the reasons why many in the ruling class today continue to hold and promote creationist ideas would have been welcome.”

Gilligan grossly understates that issue. Eusebius and his contemporary, Saint Gregory the Theologian, did demonstrate creationism as entirely incompatible with mass political power. Creationism’s design-based cosmology requires social stability and a defined moral order which even an immense majority has no right to challenge. Today, Muslim nations like the Gulf monarchies and Erdoǧan’s Türkiye forbid teaching evolution to children with the undoubted goal of defending existing social hierarchies — whether feudal or capitalist or tribal — as divinely designed. This has allowed them to develop a more advanced form of capitalism than possible under a materialist cosmology because divine design constitutes an unrivalled means of defending the right of the extremely rich to accumulate unlimited wealth. The fact that Muslim theologian Hârun Yahya is known to have used Christian intelligent design materials in his writing proves that creationism is not merely a Christian institution. Creationism indeed predates monotheism and was used by the monarchs of Egypt and Sumer to justify their rule.

Further problems with Critique of Intelligent Design relate to its omission of working-class perspectives, especially of how working class gains depend upon defying the creationism used by the ruling classes to justify thier power. In 2009’s ‘The God Debates and the Materialist Interpretation of History’, Alex Saxton makes one extremely relevant point:

“Some [socialists] perhaps fear that to concur in a critique of religion might alienate religiously oriented resistance movements that seem to be shaping up again in other parts of the world.”

What Foster, Clark and York needed to do but did not (or could not) was study historical failures of religiously oriented resistance movements and thus demonstrate materialism’s significance for the lower classes. Silvia Federici in ‘All the World Needs a Jolt: Social Movements and Political Crisis in Medieval Europe’ from her 1986 Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation discusses the many religious movements that flourished as protest during the High Middle Ages, especially during the Black Death. Federici also studies workers’ movements at the end of that period, noting that Marx called the fifteenth century

“[the ]golden age of the European proletariat”

without ever analysing why efforts to fight against what she sees as a ruling class counterrevolution failed as completely as they did. The complete absence of a materialist cosmology is at the very least a potential factor. Further examples of the failure of religiously-oriented resistance movements completely overlooked within Critique of Intelligent Design occur in Ward Churchill and Michael Bryan’s 1984 Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. Although that book has a very limited focus and by its nature cannot critique religious resistance movements in, say, Palestine [e.g. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad] it does suggest that religiously oriented nonviolent resistance was inadequate for such successes as Indian independence (see also ‘Revolt in the Colonies’ by Neil Faulkner), civil rights, and the social struggles of late-twentieth century Latin America. The Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century — in which originally radical sects became extremely conservative “Old Order” churches — provides further evidence that genuine social reform is barred without a materialist cosmology.

All these problems make Critique of Intelligent Design not nearly the detailed critique it could (should) have been. More than that, the book entirely fails to link creationism to the most advanced forms of capitalism in the United States, Türkiye and especially the Gulf monarchies today, although such links stand undeniable. As such, the book is deeply flawed and misdirected even if it appears revealing at first sight.

“pet room Archie’s”!

Today, attempting to comment upon a recent post by Robert Spencer in Jihad Watch — one, in fact, where I was pleased that he was showing a small inclination to discuss something utterly pivotal to fighting jihad — I saw that I was having my writing corrected, amazingly I felt than and now, to

“pet room Archie’s”!

I laughed so hard at “pet room Archie’s” — a correction repeated twice — that I had to tell my mother and brother, and I still feel amazed.

The correct word I intended to type, of course, was “petromonarchies”. As the graph below from Google Ngram shows, the word “petromonarchies” has existed for almost half a century to describe the Persian Gulf states of Baḥrain, Kuwait, Qaṭar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, alongside the Bornean state of Brunei.

Use over time of the word “petromonarchies” and the phrases “oil monarchy” and “oil monarchies” according to Google Ngram. The singular “petromonarchy” was not found

The word “petromonarchies” has its first documented use (from Ms. magazine) in 1982. That ought to be enough for the web to recognise it, even if the graph above does show “petromonarchies” to have become a more frequently used word since the middle 2000s. “Pet Room Archie’s” sounds so artificial one wonders how it came about unless these were seen as the only possible words with the group of consonants p-t-r-m-r-ch-s.

What is amazing is not merely that “pet room Archie’s” is so funny, but how frivolous it seems. What a “pet room Archie” would be is not clear. What petromonarchies are is anything but frivolous. They are a massive problem for the planet and for the immense majority of the world’s population, because their ability to maintain huge revenue with zero taxes on capital:

1. produces a continuous downward pressure on capital taxation at a global scale
2. prevents the smallest possibility of reducing emissions to curtail climate change
1. this is because doing so would necessarily weaken the power of the petromonarchies
2. as implied by 1), weakening the petromonarchies would reduce or eliminate the downward pressure on capital taxation that has so enriched the world’s richest since the energy crisis
3. allows them to sponsor terrorism that has the effect of weakening the resistance of the world’s lower classes to the upward transfer of wealth made possible by their high revenues and zero taxes on capital

nth year when the desert city finally appears?

Today, despite recent forecasts that a negative IOD would lead to good rainfall over eastern Australia, Melbourne, at a mere 5.4 millimetres, is experiencing its driest September on record after another prediciton of rain overnight “high chance of showers” failed yet again to materialise. In fact, on present trends Melbourne is headed for its driest spring month on record, beating out October 1914 by 1.5 millimetres and November 1895 by 0.6 millimetres. Most likely, Melbourne, despite th forecast of Weatherzone, will see less rain still in October and November. Weatherzone, even said “rain” today but already the sky is clearing!

Despite this Weatherzone forces, no rain has fallen in Melbourne. This will almost certainly be Melbourne’s not merely driest September, but driest spring month and driest year ever — but much, much worse is to come

A fortnight ago, a prediction of 10 millimetres — possibly in fact 15 — of rainfall and heavy thunderstorms was followed up by just 0.6 millimetres of rainfall!

Rainfall for the first sixteen days of September 2025. Note the very dry conditions over the inland southeast, and wet conditions over a central band of NSW and southwestern Australia. Courtesy Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Despite the fact that quite good rainfall over the rapidly drying southwest of Australia has weakened my tendency towards violent temper outbursts over climate change and the three-decades overdue call for expropriation of the fossil fuel polluters to the final cent and immediate transfer of every last cent of their accumulated wealth to renewable energy and compensation for the costs of climate change, the contrast between BOM predictions and actual rainfall in Melbourne — and to a lesser extent the rest of Victoria and the settled parts of South Australia — is so great that something must be utterly wrong with their forecast modelling.

Total Victorian rainfall for the first sixteen days of September, 2025

What has been virtually continuous for most of August and the first half of September is a sustained block that has produced extreme rainfall over Sydney — 530 millimetres over 45 days — and good rainfall over the aridifying southwest of Western Australia. This is, it must be noted, utterly opposite to what Weatherzone is predicting in its analysis of the negative IOD. However, given that based on the late-2000s documentation of Diane J. Seidel, Fu Qiang, William J. Randel and Thomas J. Reichler it is known that the tropics have shifted at least six degrees poleward since 1964 — equivalent to Melbourne shifting to the latitude of Bourke or Coober Pedy— it is to be expected that higher-latitude anticyclonic systems would severely dry out southern Australia.

Given that with a normally wet negative IOD Victoria is experiencing record drought, it can be expected that when the IOD turns positive it will be far, far worse — if that be possible. Two years ago, Melbourne saw just 0.2 millimetres in the last three weeks of September. As we are seeing something equally dry under conditions predicted to be wet, it is virtually certain that — as I have been predicting for two decades and counting — Melbourne’s annual rainfall is headed for an extremely steep decline to levels comparable to historical totals in Australia’s driest deserts or probably even less. So far this year, Melbourne is 7 millimetres below its 1967 record low of 332 millimetres. It is virtually certain that Melbourne will not receive 7 millimetres for the rest of 2025, and will definitively exceedingly rarely — like one year out of twenty or thirty — receive 332 millimetres in a year again. Most years, Melbourne’s annual rainfall will be a tiny fraction of its former 1967 record low, and about what was received in northern South Australia back in 2019.

The extremely low annual rainfall for northern South Australia in 2019 is what will be received in most years from 2026 onwards. Since the late 2000s, it has been known that the tropical belt has shifted sufficiently to place Melbourne in the same zone as the driest areas on this map, and runaway global warming will from now on place Melbourne there without doubt

For the world’s rich capitalists, unfortunately, the hot desert is the best possible environment because it gives bosses the smallest possible subsistence wage to pay workers, as noted two decades ago by Branko Milanovic, Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Desert states can also typically out-earn states in less ecologically fragile regions, and thus avoid having to rely upon taxes, creating downward pressure on capital taxation at a global scale.

Without mass international worker struggle to globally

1. expropriate the super-polluters
• socialists have long demonstrated that the only just rate of capital taxation is 100 percent and the only just profit rate zero, for justice demands that workers keep every single cent of what they produce as wages 
2. trailing the corporate polluters under “workers’ courts”
1. these would undoubtedly find them guilty of theft for their entire accumulated wealth and profits
2. the corporate polluters would then be locked up or executed 
3. the entire loot [profit] corporate polluters have stolen from workers, other poor people and the environment as profits would be returned to the people and completely redirected to achieving zero emissions in the absolute minimum possible time
3. completely abolishing profit and private ownership

nothing can be done to limit damage from climate change, let alone to limit its extent. This has long been documented by countless journals and magazines from Red Flag to Socialism Today to Liberation News to Organization Theory. 

A book that rivals ‘Foot Ball’

Today, looking to correct a YouTube comment, I stumbled upon a book that at first was curious to me but when I open a small sample I realised immediately that I had stumbled upon a book as bad as R. Picken’s awful Foot Ball of many years ago.

Written by one Larry Robinson and originally published in 2020, the book is titled “The Myth of the Moderate Democrat: How the Party of Jacksonian Democracy transitioned to Marxist Statist Collectivism”. Its author claims to have been a political junkie for six decades before the publication of The Myth of the Moderate Democrat, and to be a pastor, evangelist and theologian possessing a Doctor of Divinity.

What Robinson said in the section of the book that was accessible is at first familiar Republican propaganda — that FDR governed with a Marxist ideology. Whilst there may have been Communist sympathisers in American government during the New Deal era, the reality is that the New Deal was a series of largely ineffective compromises involving many players not only within the United States. As Ron Rogowski in his Commerce and Coalitions and Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert in American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History demonstrate, the New Deal was a by-product of a series of revolutions and hyperinflations that affected Europe after post-World War I chaos whereby Europe’s working classes supported the Bolshevik Revolution but failed to spread it beyond the Russian Empire. The result of all these processes was a prolonged “deglobalisation” that lasted until the rise of the oil monarchies in the middle 1970s, while the result of deglobalisation in capital- and land-rich nations [North America, continental Oceania] was a pronounced, but historically unique reduction in income inequality. 

FDR was never a Marxist. In fact, as Thomas Paul Bonflglio noted in his 2012 The Psychopathology of American Capitalism, the New Deal was accompanied by a dismantling of the left-leaning parties of the first third of the century. Especially in the nonplantation South and some Western states settled therefrom [e.g. Nebraska], ballot laws became so rigid that formerly not insignificant “socialist” parties could never even access the ballot. As Bonfiglio noted, this placed American politics, especially after the war, in a unique position whereby “left” meant what most would consider right-wing, and anything remotely centrist was called “far left”, which has always made me laugh. Also, unlike the social liberalism of the European working classes, who supported legalisation of homosexuality in the 1920s or earlier, the New Deal was socially highly conservative, involving a uniquely strict “Motion Picture Production Code”. Following the collapse of the union base beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats did reverse themselves vis-à-vis the New Deal in order to stay viable. However, this made the 1990 to 2020 Democratic Party one of strong social liberalism combined with — by the standards of the rest of the world — strong economic conservatism. Today, demography and the desire of the global ruling classes to overcome the (high but insufficient) ceiling social liberalism places on corporate profits is, if the World Socialist Web Site’s [originally New York Times’] assessment of declining Democratic membership and registration be accurate, likely to make the Democratic Party less and less viable with time.

Robinson does not understand that Democrats completely abandoned collectivism after the 1980s, and their embrace of social liberalism in the 1960s is evidence they were abandoning it then. By the 1990s the difference between the parties became exclusively social rather than economic, because the hegemony of big business as donors absolutely excludes any party representing the bottom nine-tenth or more of America’s economic distribution. Demography, in this situation, defeats liberalism because the socially liberal tend to have extremely few if any children, which explains the present takeover of the radical right at a global level.

How public is a US “public university”?

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article that I subsequently had trouble recovering a second time on Google Scholar — despite its usefulness to me on Wikipedia. The article, titled ‘Ideological Voting Applied to the School Desegregation Cases in the Federal Courts of Appeals from the 1960s and 1970s’, is an interesting look at how circuit courts dealt with the questions arising after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed de jure segregation. Whilst the article’s results are mostly — though not all — familiar, it makes an interesting comment that is still remarkably familiar:

“i. Law School Education

There has been a common criticism by conservatives that the federal judiciary is comprised of liberal activists from elite Ivy League law schools. In the Fifth Circuit, justices serving in the 1960s and early 1970s attended several different law schools. Fifteen justices represent the Fifth Circuit... and only three of those judges attended Ivy League schools: John Cooper Godbold, Irving Goldberg, and Elbert Tuttle. Interestingly, these three judges do meet the common conservative argument noted above. All three judges held an impressive liberal voting record (eleven to one) on school desegregation panel”

At the same time, it has been a pertinent observation that since Charles Evans Whittaker in 1957, no jurist who obtained his or her law degree from a public law school has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States. [To be precise, the last twenty-six confirmed candidates, and last thirty nominees, all gained their legal education from private law schools]. Given my familiarity with arguments like those of Red Flag and Robert Ovetz, and the shift of US politics to the right since the 1966 midterm elections and the expansion of trade beginning slightly earlier, one should theoretically be unsurprised by the disappearance of public law school educations from SCOTUS. However, it is interesting that another article I have read — ‘Harvard and Yale Ascendant: The Legal Education of the Justices from Holmes to Kagan’ — notes how the Supreme Court has become completely dominated by Harvard and Yale graduates without noting the earlier disappearance of public law school educated jurists from the Court.

In its summary, ‘Ideological Voting Applied to the School Desegregation Cases in the Federal Courts of Appeals from the 1960s and 1970s’ did suggest as possibilities for further research:

“Other research possibilities would be comparing justices [judges] who attended public versus private law schools, or elite law schools versus other law schools (Ivy League schools are not the only elite schools).”

I did the first of these and found, to my surprise, that judges who attended public law schools were, by Pearson correlation coefficient, actually a little more conservative than those who attended private law schools, though the difference is almost certainly insignificant. Moreover, those attending elite law schools (the T14 plus Texas and UCLA) show the same result as for public law schools, while those attending nonelite private law schools (private law schools not belonging to the T14) are no more conservative than judges attending public or elite private law schools.

What may explain this result is that, throughout US history, the “public” sector has often been viewed as a coalition of private organisations rather than actually owned by the public as more modern theories would expect. This is most clearly seen in the debates over the nature of primary elections between 1921 and 1944, in which political parties were frequently viewed as private entities with the right to exclude people on any basis they wished. As Hans Hoppe noted in his Democracy: The God That Failed, this is exactly the opposite of modern democratic theory. This influence upon the “public” sector in the US is entirely consistent with the lack of abnormal liberalism in the voting of those judges educated at public law schools. In fact, even on the Supreme Court those judges educated at public law schools were not by any means uniformly more liberal than contemporaries from private law schools. For instance, three of the conservative “Four Horsemen” of the New Deal era — James Clark McReynolds, William Van Devanter and George Sutherland — were educated at public law schools, as was conservative Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

Counties expelling Blacks after ‘Brown v. Board of Education’

Reading the late James Löwen’s Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism reveals that, little-known to the casual historian, the vast majority of the rural North, essentially all the rural and even small-city West, and large parts of the nonplantation South completely excluded African-Americans. Some of this has been discussed on previous posts in this blog here, here and here; however, for this post my goal is to see how many counties had their black population expelled after Brown v. Board of Education. Löwen used that fact to show that racial attitudes in white rural America did not really change after 1940, although election statistics suggest that at least for a while opposition to the civil rights movement of that era was weak in the rural North and nonplantation South.

In my older post about attempting to correlate sundown status with long-term GOP voting in the nonplantation South and some parts of the Midwest, one does see at least one county — McCreary County in Kentucky— that definitely expelled its black population following Brown v. Board of Education. For this post I have looked at the nonplantation South — defined, as in older posts, as the seven states of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia — and examined:

1. all counties in the nonplantation South which had at least eleven blacks in 1930 but fewer than five black households in 1970
• a few counties in Kentucky and West Virginia discussed in earlier posts will not be covered as doing so would be repetitive
2. other counties in the nonplantation South which had fewer than 25 black households in 1970 and which show evidence of major declines after 1930
3. three counties in western Virginia — a state belonging mainly to the plantation South— where I have gathered via population figures strong evidence for the expulsion of blacks after Brown

I have assumed that if a county expelled its black population as a direct result of the Brown v. Board of Education decision:

1. it would show a very large fall in its black population between the 1950 and 1960 censuses
1. I have used a cut-off of 50 percent fall between 1950 and 1960 for any likely or possible case
2. I have also used a cut-off of at least 30 black residents in 1950 , and fewer than 50 in 1960, for a likely case
3. all assessments of likely expulsion of blacks after Brown are, however, influenced by my own discretion — although I have not examined precise details for any county

Counties Previously Undiscussed That May Have Expelled Blacks After Brown v. Board of Education:

County		1930	1940	1950	1960	1970 households	1950-1960 change
Benton	Arkansas	88	46	11	23	5	109.09%
Carroll	Arkansas	25	8	5	6	0	20.00%
Greene	Arkansas	22	71	26	14	5	-46.15%
Madison	Arkansas	16	15	2	3	0	50.00%
Montgomery	Arkansas	136	90	14	20	3	42.86%
Scott	Arkansas	13	454	70	2	0	-97.14%
Van Buren	Arkansas	121	137	50	95	17	90.00%
Bracken	Kentucky	222	222	129	63	20	-51.16%
Breathitt	Kentucky	203	128	79	49	5	-37.97%
Carlisle	Kentucky	294	218	104	84	19	-19.23%
Carter	Kentucky	53	48	29	11	5	-62.07%
Grant	Kentucky	184	143	77	59	15	-23.38%
Johnson	Kentucky	46	14	3	1	1	-66.67%
Lawrence	Kentucky	124	95	69	41	15	-40.58%
Livingston	Kentucky	350	224	111	78	18	-29.73%
Marshall	Kentucky	62	155	11	10	0	-9.09%
McLean	Kentucky	315	247	99	60	15	-39.39%
Menifee	Kentucky	34	24	19	11	3	-42.11%
Robertson	Kentucky	46	40	31	18	5	-41.94%
Trimble	Kentucky	27	22	12	3	0	-75.00%
Atchison	Missouri	16	1	3	3	3	0.00%
Benton	Missouri	106	97	31	22	2	-29.03%
Caldwell	Missouri	102	45	11	5	0	-54.55%
Clark	Missouri	23	26	11	8	0	-27.27%
Daviess	Missouri	110	90	55	30	4	-45.45%
DeKalb	Missouri	38	19	10	0	0	-100.00%
Grundy	Missouri	85	75	35	18	6	-48.57%
Holt	Missouri	36	31	9	2	0	-77.78%
Iron	Missouri	129	132	85	48	15	-43.53%
Knox	Missouri	94	66	27	18	3	-33.33%
Miller	Missouri	89	54	17	20	10	17.65%
Nodaway	Missouri	95	33	19	8	4	-57.89%
Osage	Missouri	74	61	21	14	0	-33.33%
Perry	Missouri	99	75	30	9	4	-70.00%
Saint Clair	Missouri	134	173	55	36	7	-34.55%
Sainte Genevieve	Missouri	342	205	142	70	17	-50.70%
Scotland	Missouri	17	8	3	4	0	33.33%
Sullivan	Missouri	26	17	8	2	0	-75.00%
Vernon	Missouri	76	49	27	15	3	-44.44%
Dewey	Oklahoma	22	5	12	0	0	-100.00%
Latimer	Oklahoma	385	235	166	120	20	-27.71%
Mayes	Oklahoma	531	356	153	105	18	-31.37%
Roger Mills	Oklahoma	95	16	11	1	0	-90.91%
Grundy	Tennessee	155	66	43	15	2	-65.12%
Jackson	Tennessee	234	210	103	34	4	-66.99%
Overton	Tennessee	136	116	83	77	14	-7.23%
Polk	Tennessee	152	83	76	28	0	-63.16%
Sequatchie	Tennessee	11	8	3	0	0	-100.00%
Van Buren	Tennessee	65	81	23	31	6	34.78%
Archer	Texas	19	16	16	19	3	18.75%
Bandera	Texas	11	3	15	19	3	26.67%
Callahan	Texas	38	20	7	2	0	-71.43%
Coke	Texas	66	38	5	4	0	-20.00%
Concho	Texas	82	27	10	3	0	-70.00%
Glasscock	Texas	14	20	11	13	3	18.18%
Mason	Texas	57	100	64	23	3	-64.06%
Carroll	Virginia	374	332	392	74	24	-81.12%
Dickenson	Virginia	302	548	319	149	22	-53.29%
Highland	Virginia	153	86	118	18	6	-84.75%
Tucker	West Virginia	77	68	46	20	2	-56.52%

Conclusion:

The census figures above suggest that no more than eight counties not discussed in earlier post are likely to have expelled their black populations as a direct result of Brown v. Board of Education.

One — Grundy County in Tennessee, historically home of the most militant unions anywhere in the South and also home of a famous school training civil rights activists — is documented in Sundown Towns.

Two others — Highland County in Virginia and Tucker County in West Virginia — were the “inspiration” for this survey inasmuch as Löwen did not discuss either in Sundown Towns, but my mapping of counties with few or no blacks in the 1970 and 2010 censuses clearly showed these as quite distinct, yet mapping from 1930 showed they previously had black populations. A fourth — Jackson County in Tennessee, which voted even for George McGovern — is documented on Löwen’s website at Tougaloo College, but not in Sundown Towns itself.

Most counties tabulated above either did not show the necessary decline in black population over time, or got rid of their black populations well before Brown. Löwen did note counties that got rid of their African–Americans during the 1930s, and several here — Roger Mills County in Oklahoma, Concho County in Texas, and Johnson County in Kentucky — appear very likely to have done so looking at the table, whilst some others in the table above could have banned new black residents during that decade.

On the whole, the number of expulsions of blacks as a direct result of Brown is not that large, although the table must understate the total. such expulsions do prove how little white attitudes had changed in a nonplantation South whose voting patterns remained dominated by Civil War party loyalties.

Super-Republican and super-polluters

I have been familiar for several years with the existence of “super-polluter” petrostates whose per capita extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions are hundred of times the global average. Economically, these “super-polluter” ruling classes who sell the fossil fuels profit from runaway ecological distraction caused by unlimited fossil fuel usages to an extent orders of magnitude larger than the average global ruling class. The wealth of these ruling classes, allows them to dictate policy globally to a very high degree — most especially to prevent demands for ecological justice and even for anything except carte blanche to emit however much greenhouse gases their rulers can profit from. The super-polluters of the Persian Gulf — Kuwait, Qaṭar and the UAE — are well documented by emissions figures. They become especially egregious if we debit zero emissions to expatriates and measure emissions per citizen, a perspective implied correct by Arun Saldanha’s ‘A Date with Destiny: Racial Capitalism and the Beginnings of the Anthropocene’. By such a calculation, Qaṭar’s per-citizen emissions are 450 times(!) the global average, and those of Kuwait and the UAE around seventy times.

The question of whether other super-polluters exists at a more local level has interested me recently. The fifty states of the United States provide a unique opportunity to examine this possibility, because I have long known of statewide breakdowns of fossil fuel production for coal, oil and natural gas, which can be used to approximate state-by state cumulative and present extraction-based greenhouse gas emissions.

Whilst it was too difficult for me to print all the figures, I have shown for each US state details of:

1. percentage of cumulative US extraction-based emissions
2. percentage of global cumulative extraction-based emissions
3. percent of current US population
4. percent of current US emissions
5. percent or ratio to total US extraction-based emissions per capita
1. I have used percent where the ratio is less than one, and ratio if it is greater
6. percent or ratio to global extraction-based emissions per capita

It might be noted that there are small extraction-based emissions from other sources which I did not calculate for lack of time and unavailability of data. (Extraction-based emissions are not zero for polities producing no fossil fuels currently or cumulatively, which includes a third of US states). Nevertheless, this table should be a clue as to which US state ruling classes are the biggest profiteers from global warming.

I have also shaded “red wall” states in red and “blue wall” states in blue to see how much US political divides relate to actual greenhouse gas emissions.

US Extraction-Based Emissions by State:

State	Percentage of US cumulative emissions	Percentage of global cumulative emissions	Percent of US population (2020s)	Percent of Present US emissions	Percent of or ratio to US per capita emissions	Percent of or ratio to global per capita emissions
Alabama	1.65%	0.36%	1.52%	0.63%	41.526%	1.356784592
Alaska	2.29%	0.50%	0.22%	1.63%	7.463	24.38419474
Arizona	0.31%	0.07%	2.23%	0.00%	0.012%	0.04%
Arkansas	0.46%	0.10%	0.91%	0.47%	51.978%	1.698253119
California	3.59%	0.78%	11.62%	1.08%	9.294%	30.36%
Colorado	2.02%	0.44%	1.76%	3.67%	2.089	6.824671159
Connecticut			1.08%
Delaware			0.31%
Florida	0.08%	0.02%	6.89%	0.01%	0.149%	0.49%
Georgia	0.01%	0.00%	3.29%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Hawaii			0.43%
Idaho	0.05%	0.01%	0.59%	0.00%	0.269%	0.88%
Illinois	4.83%	1.05%	3.74%	1.88%	50.252%	1.641858174
Indiana	1.95%	0.42%	2.04%	1.13%	55.179%	1.802853651
Iowa	0.00%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
Kansas	1.30%	0.28%	0.88%	0.37%	42.098%	1.375445865
Kentucky	6.69%	1.45%	1.35%	1.45%	1.071	3.500860065
Louisiana	5.64%	1.22%	1.35%	3.66%	2.700	8.821153759
Maine			0.41%
Maryland	0.29%	0.06%	1.85%	0.06%	3.498%	11.43%
Massachusetts			2.10%
Michigan	0.27%	0.06%	2.99%	0.11%	3.540%	11.57%
Minnesota			1.71%
Mississippi	0.44%	0.10%	0.87%	0.29%	16.721%	54.63%
Missouri	0.04%	0.01%	1.84%	0.00%	0.220%	0.72%
Montana	1.56%	0.34%	0.34%	1.54%	4.607	15.05241983
Nebraska	0.06%	0.01%	0.59%	0.01%	2.153%	7.03%
Nevada	0.01%	0.00%	0.96%	0.00%	0.184%	0.60%
New Hampshire			0.42%
New Jersey			2.80%
New Mexico	2.70%	0.59%	0.63%	7.13%	11.355	37.10152528
New York	0.02%	0.01%	5.85%	0.01%	0.194%	0.63%
North Carolina			3.25%
North Dakota	1.72%	0.37%	0.23%	5.23%	22.297	72.84921958
Ohio	3.05%	0.66%	3.50%	2.52%	72.055%	2.35423961
Oklahoma	3.52%	0.76%	1.21%	3.69%	3.057	9.987822025
Oregon	0.00%	0.00%	1.26%	0.20%	15.952%	52.12%
Pennsylvania	12.84%	2.78%	3.85%	9.41%	2.441	7.974852848
Rhode Island			0.33%
South Carolina			1.61%
South Dakota	0.01%	0.00%	0.27%	0.01%	2.777%	9.07%
Tennessee	0.46%	0.10%	2.13%	0.00%	0.219%	0.71%
Texas	16.23%	3.52%	9.22%	24.74%	2.683	8.767608641
Utah	1.15%	0.25%	1.03%	1.10%	1.070	3.495456591
Vermont			0.19%
Virginia	1.82%	0.40%	2.60%	0.61%	23.374%	76.37%
Washington	0.07%	0.02%	2.34%	0.00%	0.000%	0.00%
West Virginia	10.05%	2.18%	0.52%	6.81%	13.060	42.66954766
Wisconsin			1.76%
Wyoming	10.11%	2.19%	0.17%	13.47%	77.804	254.2074428
Federal offshore	2.71%	0.59%		7.08%

The table above shows a remarkable concentration of US greenhouse gas emissions, and a major political divide:

• Four states account for fifty percent of cumulative US greenhouse gas emissions
• Five states account for 61 percent of current US greenhouse gas emissions
• “Red Wall” states have 22 percent of the US population but produce 64 percent of emissions
• “Blue Wall” states have 34 percent of the population but produce only 9 percent of emissions
• as noted earlier, this figure is an understatement, but even so the “blue wall” states undoubtedly produce low emissions relative to population — lower than the global average

There is definite evidence of “super-polluter” states in Wyoming and perhaps North Dakota, West Virginia and New Mexico. Wyoming is a definite super-polluter, with per capita emissions 250 times the global average, half that of Qaṭar. It is the least populous US state yet the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter and third-largest cumulative emitter! North Dakota has per capita emissions comparable to Kuwait or the UAE, and West Virginia and New Mexico about half that. Excluding New Mexico, these have constituted Trump’s three best states in all his presidential campaigns, which is extremely telling. New Mexico is a complicated and very much sui generis state, which Trump did not win in any of his three campaigns and did not even trend Republican in 2024. It has a countercultural mountain culture akin to Colorado or New England in its highest lands, politically detached from the pollution-producing northwest and Plains regions. In the other three the political influence of fossil fuels is as hegemonic as in the Gulf oil monarchies, and this is also likely to be true in Texas and Oklahoma. Even more than with the Gulf states globally, the tax-free or low-tax policies of super-polluting US states limit the range of policies possible elsewhere in the country, as business relocation is easier.