Home > Work > Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil QUOTES

Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil QUOTES

1 " ...fossil fuels are forms of energy in which great quantities of space and time, as it were, have been compressed into a concentrated form. One way of envisioning this compression is to consider that a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material, or that organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn today in a single year. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

2 " In introducing technical innovations, or using energy in novel ways, or developing alternative sources of power, we are not subjecting ‘society’ to some new external influence, or conversely using social forces to alter an external reality called ‘nature’. We are reorganising socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point.


These entanglements, however, are not recognised in our theories of collective life, which continue to divide the world according to the conventional divisions between fields of specialist knowledge. There is a natural world studied by the various branches of natural science, and a social world analysed by the social sciences. Debates about human-induced climate change, the depletion of non-renewable resources, or any other question, create political uncertainty not so much because they reach the limits of technical and scientific knowledge, but because of the way they breach this conventional distinction between society and nature. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

3 " As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...]

The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

4 " After working as an industrial relations consultant to Rockefeller and other firms, Mackenzie King returned to politics in Canada, where he served as prime minister for twenty-two years, opposed attempts to introduce New Deal–style protections for workers, and became the architect of the country’s welfare state. As workers in industrialised regions fought for a more egalitarian life, the democracy they began to achieve was always liable to slip from providing a means of making effective egalitarian claims to offering a means of regulating populations through the provision of their welfare. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

5 " The term ‘democracy’ can have two kinds of meaning. It can refer to ways of making effective claims for a more just and egalitarian common world. Or it can refer to a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world. Such limits are formed by acknowledging certain areas as matters of public concern subject to popular decision while establishing other fields to be administered under alternative methods of control. For example, governmental practice can demarcate a private sphere governed by rules of property, a natural world governed by laws of nature, or markets governed by principles of economics. Democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private (such as the level of wages paid by employers), as belonging to nature (such as the exhaustion of natural resources or the composition of gases in the atmosphere), or as ruled by laws of the market (such as financial speculation). In the mid-twentieth century, this ‘logic of distribution’ began to designate a large new field of government whose rules set limits to alternative political claims: the field that became known as ‘the economy’. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

6 " ...the Nixon administration also blocked the efforts of the UN and the Arab states, and at times even its own State Department, to settle the Palestine question, helping to maintain the forms of instability and conflict on which American ‘security’ policy would now increasingly depend. In Kurdistan, the other conflict keeping Arab states ‘pinned down’, Washington was unable to prevent Iraq from reaching a settlement with the Kurds in 1970, but responded to this threat of stability in the Gulf two years later by agreeing with Israel and Iran to reopen the conflict with renewed military support to one of the Kurdish factions. The aim was not to enable the Kurds to win political rights, according to a later Congressional investigation, but simply to ‘continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country [Iraq]’.


The arms sales to Iran and their supporting doctrine played no important role in protecting the Gulf or defending American control of the region’s oil. In fact the major US oil companies lobbied against the increased supply of weapons to Iran and the doctrine used to justify them. They argued that political stability in the Gulf could be better secured by America ending its support for Israel’s occupation of Arab territories and allowing a settlement of the Palestine question. The Nixon administration had also initiated a large increase in the sale of arms to Israel, although weapons sent to Israel were paid for not with local oil revenues but by US taxpayers. Arming Iran, an ally of Israel, the companies argued, only worsened the one-sidedness of America’s Middle East policy. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

7 " It has become increasingly popular today to say that we live in an era of what Benjamin Barber has labelled ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’. The globalising powers of capitalism (‘McWorld’) are confronted with or resisted by the forces that Barber labels ‘Jihad’ – the variety of tribal particularisms and ‘narrowly conceived faiths’ opposed to the homogenising force of capital. Even those with a critical view of the growth of American empire and the expansion of what is erroneously termed the global market usually subscribe to this interpretation. In fact it is the critics who often argue that we need a better understanding of these local forms of resistance against the ‘universal’ force of the market.


The terms of this debate are quite misleading. We live in an age, to adapt Barber’s nomenclature, of ‘McJihad’. It is an age in which the mechanisms of what we call capitalism appear to operate, in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

8 " In the postwar period, democratic politics was transformed not only by the switch to oil, but by the development of two new methods of governing democracies, both made possible by the growing use of energy from oil. One of these was an arrangement for managing the value of money and limiting the power of financial speculation, which was said to have destroyed interwar democracy – a system built with the pipelines, oil agreements and oligarchies that organised the supply and pricing of oil. It was accompanied by the construction of the Cold War, which provided a framework for the policing of the postwar Middle East that replaced the need for mandates, trusteeships, development programmes and other scaffoldings for imperial power. The other new mode of governing democracies was the manufacture of ‘the economy’ – an object whose experts began to displace democratic debate and whose mechanisms set limits to egalitarian demands. "

― Timothy Mitchell , Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil