Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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Mitchell asserted that as the United States came to grips with the rise in foreign carbon energy sources, U. Oil was attractive from the beginning - including Churchill's decision to replace coal with oil in the British Navy - because it was more easily controlled from above and less threatened from below. Mitchell outlines how he doesn’t think that’s so in the afterword, in a way that is consistent with his initial argument and believable. The strategy has been to limit oil supplies from rival countries, and to keep friendly oil producers spending their money on American-made weapons.

Our modern conception of “the economy” is built upon what once appeared to be an infinite quantity of oil. S. oil companies convinced the government to grant Saudi Arabia Lend-Lease loans to compensate them for not producing oil. Mitchell is a Foucauldian complement to David Harvey's Marxism, in that both offer coherent sets of specifics (Aramco, Eisenhower and others for Mitchell; Lewis Powell and others for Harvey; and the right-wing think tanks for both) in support of their arguments.While economics had focused on the allocation of scarce resources, the expansion of oil supplies and other natural resources created an expectation and need for endless economic growth that could be managed centrally. Reclassification of oil sources has followed the platueau of extraction since 2005, but most of the oldest and biggest oil fields, making up around half of conventional oil production, are all in decline, 5% or more, every year.

Not that it’s necessarily a drawback to the argumentative quality of the book, but just that it can get quite hard to read at times. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Mitchell claims this “economy,” backed not by finite resources but by conceivably infinite oil reserves, eroded democracy as oThere is no doubt that coal and steam engines fundamentally changed the British world, creating conditions for the first Industrial Revolution, but to suggest that it is this development that accounts for the rise of the working class ignores all the foundation laid by earlier generations. Mitchell draws the book to a close by stating that his concern for our collective human future lies not in the exhaustion of oil resources but in the potential failure of this fragile socio-political system that has emerged from the age of oil and the planetary effects of carelessly polluting our world. iv) Abundance of oil/energy in the 20th century helped shape a new economics of material limitlessness and infinite growth. I’m not knowledgeable enough about Arabian history, politics or economics, to attempt much in the way of a critique of this account, dense as it is with facts, ideas and references. Just a couple of generations later, of course, the infinite supply of oil has proven to be mythical.