Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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It would be easy to for many to say that Mitchell was talking about the Western world, and Britain’s unique position makes it the exception, not the rule.

Although you wouldn’t know it for the torrent of obfuscation and denial that is only now, finally, clearing, the science of climate change – that is, the global warming caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – is quite straightforward, and any number of books explain it very well (try Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, from 1989) . Mitchell argues that carbon democracy in the West has been based on the assumption that unlimited oil will produce endless economic growth, and he concludes that this model cannot survive the exhaustion of these fuels and associated climate change. From the earliest negotiations with the Ottoman Empire to dealing with Saddam Hussein, efforts to limit production of oil from Iraq have never ended.American and Soviet weapon sales helped keep it there, as did Saudi Arabia's co-opting of Islamist movements. In fact, many oil companies sought to prevent the development of oil in the Middle East out of fear of foreign competition.

Although a lot of his argument focuses on oil in the Middle East, I think his argument is strongest in its first portion, where he shows how the methods of coal mining in England - with independent teams of miners working in pairs hauling coal to a rail infrastructure with just a few "choke points" in the caes of a strike - created conditions that helped lead to 20th century labor organization and with it, the modern form of democracy. Even for oil producers, the shift to an increasingly globalized market was not necessarily a positive development, at least initially. To cop a phrase from Marx, rather than turning economics upside down, Mitchell sets economics on its feet.The examples here would be importance of colonialism, slave trade and plantation economy as the economic base of early capitalist economy, the contemporary existence of millions of people in slums across the world, in high density urban environments which are neither determined nor benefiting from carbon energy flows, the lack of discussion of coal mining and other resource mining outside the west and explanation why that did not lead to emergence of mass working class democracy like it did in the West. Because oil could be transported easily, petroleum companies were much more vulnerable to foreign competition. Making Gross National Product (now GDP) the sole measure of prosperity changed politics and redefined what could and could not be discussed in the public sphere.