Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

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Second, the author gave an interesting talk in early 2012 at George Washington University about his ideas that can be found online, for people who want a preview of the book. The truth is that no one really knows how much oil is left, because each oil company and oil-producing country closely guards its data.

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) .Oil created a denatured political life the central object of which—the economy—appeared capable of infinite growth. As a result, though their basic epistemological perspectives are quite divergent, both Mitchell in this book and Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism provide important narratives about the individuals and groups that support, represent and seek to underpin corporate exploitation. Mitchell described how this partnership was based on the idea that weapons, like oil, could seemingly never be used up. S. - foreign policy in the Middle East and the tensions between economic theory and oligopolic realities of hydrocarbon exploitation. Because Western states no longer needed to rely on extraction from their own limited deposits and workforce, they were granted with a lot greater flexibility.

To cop a phrase from Marx, rather than turning economics upside down, Mitchell sets economics on its feet. Oil, by comparison, eliminated various choke points and vulnerabilities from the coal-based energy system by removing the number of hands on the supply chain, thereby shifting political power from the middle class to oil firms. Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality.Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy.