Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

[Dave Monroe]

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


How oil undermines democracy, and our ability to address the
environmental crisis.

Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries
producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous
inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that
no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective
dependence on oil. It 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.

Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a
radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of
energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became
vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the
mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant
energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to
reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of
oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize
political life around the management of something now called “the
economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the
West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.

In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic
politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military
rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere
appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age
of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the
carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.

In making the production of energy the central force shaping the
democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the
politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the
Middle East in our common world.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1020-carbon-democracy

Colonising Egypt
Timothy Mitchell (Author)

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520075689