Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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Mitchell describes the fossil-fuel era as a “strange episode” in history, and one that continues to give rise to strange behaviour, namely “ways of living and thinking that treat nature as an infinite resource”. Mitchells conception of how oil itself maintained the post war currency system is something I had never heard of before. Mitchell claims this “economy,” backed not by finite resources but by conceivably infinite oil reserves, eroded democracy as oil firms and imperialist powers mechanized the idea of “the market” to their ends. The United States also restricted available energy by cultivating a culture of high carbon energy consumption.

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies.Mitchell begins the book by contrasting the qualities of coal and oil and the infrastructure required to extract, transport, and use each carbon-based fuel.

Mitchell argued that the fight to dominate this resource did more to shape the twentieth century than almost any other factor, and that the United States, as well as other Western countries, twisted the idea of democracy to fit their demands for oil. The bulk of the book is concerned with the Middle East but it's mostly discussed as an area where the western governments and corporation compete, where Western ideas play out, it barely ever appears as the subject on it's own. He began his argument with the nineteenth century in Britain and the importance of coal to the rise of working-class demands for political rights before moving to an analysis of the development of the oil industry in the Middle East and the uncertain future the industry faces today. He discussed his new book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, describing how oil dependency shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.

However, as industrialized states gradually shifted from a reliance on coal to a reliance on oil, so shifted the state’s power dynamics. Less racist authors tended to gravitate to the “resource curse,” the idea that oil wealth slows down development and invites foreign intervention. Just a couple of generations later, of course, the infinite supply of oil has proven to be mythical.