Mitchell, Timothy. "Carbon Democracy." Economy and Society, Vol.38, No.3 (2009): 399-432.

Mitchell, Timothy. "Carbon Democracy." Economy and Society, Vol.38, No.3 (2009): 399-432.

• It is often claimed that oil deposits are associated with a lack of democracy, often due to the 'resource curse' or the use of oil to create a rentier state. These oil resources are seen as given states the money required to either buy off or repress their citizens and retain authoritarian modes of government (400).
• These accounts of oil retarding democratization in the Middle East are based on an assumption that democracy is essentially the same everywhere and across countries, meaning that Middle Eastern democracy can be caused by recreating certain conditions and identifying other factors, like oil deposits, are the causes of authoritarianism (400).
• These accounts also fail to note that oil does not spontaneously generate revenue, but that turning oil into money requires a process of production and distribution that involves global factors and international actors. The political effects of oil do not, therefore, originate in regions with high oil deposits nor are confined to those regions (400-401).
• Prior to the early 19th Century, nearly all energy used to support human civilization came from either solar energy or plant matter using that solar energy. Around the turn of the 19th Century, coal started to be used as a major form of energy. The transition from wood to coal allowed the concentration of humans in large cities, which would have otherwise consumed much more energy that could be produced by burning available wood supplies (401-402).
• Industrialization, based on the use of coal, created its own structural demands for additional raw materials and greater food supplies, to support a growing and increasingly non-agricultural population. This was partially expressed through deforestation, which freed up farmland by getting rid of forest no longer needed for energy. It also created the dynamics for slavery and colonialism, which forced colonized people and slaves into agricultural work while allowing colonizers to focus on urban manufacturing (402).
• The use of coal, and later oil, is thus connected to the development of democracies in the 19th Century because it allowed the concentration of larger segments of the population in cities focused on manufaction, which was seen as a important factor in allowing the growth of democracy (403).
• Industrial urban centers were either directly next to the centers of coal production or connected to those sites of production by narrow railways and canals. This meant that workers employed in coal production or transport could exercise enormous power and translate this into political demands, as they often did through strikes (403-404).
• The power of coal miners, railway workers, and canal workers was frequently generated through strikes, which were usually much more effective and common than those of other workers. These coal supplies and their transport networks became recognized as increasingly important over time (404-406).
• Fear of the power exercised by organized coal miners and railway workers, and their ability to stop the entire industrial economy, led business interests in the industrialized world to concede to the creation of welfare states to hopeless address working class concerns and cool the militancy of labor (406).
• The militancy of coal miners was still seen as a threat following the Second World War. The USA deliberately tried to weaken the coal miners by switching Europe from a coal-based to an oil-based economy by constructing a massive pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Europe. The USA deverted large amounts of steel meant for the Marshall Plan to the Middle East for this purpose (406).
• Oil is much less labor intensive to produce than coal and workers can be more easily observed. Additionally, transport through pipelines or along roads is more difficult to shut down than transport via railways or canals. Oil is also less dense than coal, making it much easier to transport over oceans; as shown by the majority of oil travelling my sea, while only a tiny minority of coal ever did. So while oil workers do have power, it is much less power than coal workers did (407).
• The power of transport workers to organize was cut by this switch from railways and canals to oceanborne transport for oil. Under international law, trading ships can operate under a 'flag of convenience', meaning they could choose what labor jurisdiction to operate under, effectively subverting powerful national labor movements (407). The flexibility of ocean travel also meant that local strikes had less effect (408).
• The ability to trade oil internationally meant that this market was subject to much more competition than coal had been. This meant that national labor movements had much less leverage because if agreements about production existed, they were set at the international level (408).
• The end of the dominance of coal production, and its replacement with oil, meant that economies were no longer dependent upon coal reserves (416).
• Coal miners prior to mechanization had a large amount of autonomy in their work, as they were usually isolated from other miners in small chambers and exercised an independent judgement about what direction to next mine in. Miners were loath to give up this autonomy in favor of mechanization or directed work, making them more militant (404).
• During and after the Second World War, the USA set up a number of agreements and mechanisms to regulate the production and sale of oil. Limits on the availability of oil were capped by agreements to limit production, which the USA sometimes paid allies to do, as was the case of loans to the Saudis in 1943 to not produce more oil (409).
• American oil companies also sought to keep demand high relative to supply by encouraging high public consumption of oil through wasteful technologies and oil-intensive lifestyles (409). The author does not explain how they managed to do this; doubt this claim
• There were plans made at the 1944 Bretton-Woods conference to regulate the production of oil through caps on production and set prices, to be called the International Petroleum Commission. A treaty between Britain and the USA was agreed to, but it was killed in the US Senate due to pressure from American oil producers (414).
• The concentration of oil production in a certain set of infrastructure in the Middle East led local labor movements to concentrate on that infrastructure. This was demonstrated during a series of protests and strikes, usually crushed by force or military threats, in Iraq and Palestine during the late 1930s and 1940s (410-411).
• Oil companies exerted a major influence on the politics of the Middle East during its early independence. For example, a pipeline from Saudi Arabia was planned to pass through Syria and Lebanon rather than Palestine because of past labor militancy there. Oil companies had also planned coups due to disputes over oil and labor rights, as the CIA did in Syria in 1949 (411-412).
• The influence of oil companies has been particularly visable in the pressure they managed to wield around labor law in Middle Eastern countries. They pressured or helped overthow governments with strong labor laws, gained exemptions from ordinary labor laws, and helped government repress labor activists (412).
• The stability in the production and pricing of oil was essential to American post-war economic plans, and President Roosevelt made an agreement with King Ibn Saud that the Saudis and other Middle Eastern government would obey American production quotas in exchange for political support from the USA against any future challenges, especially from the labor movement (415).
• The author claims that much of American political action in the Middle East from the 1940s to the 1960s was the result of oil interests. This includes the 1949 Syrian coup, the removal of Kamal Junblat in Lebanon, the 1953 coup in Iran, and the 1963 coup in Iraq (411-413). Doubt this claim, there a huge number of other explanations for these events, especially in the context of the Cold War. The author provides no evidence that the US overthrew these government because of oil interests.
• Oil was seen as an important tool by the USA to facilitate the destruction of the British pound's international influence and its replacement as the global currency by the US dollar. Pipelines were planned to deliberately run outside of the British sterling area to undermine the usage of the pound (413). 
• In the aftermath of WWII, the USA dominated the world's gold reserves, so instead of reverting to the gold standard, the global economic system had only the US dollar convertable to gold. Control over oil production and distribution, as over 2/3 of global oil was produced in the USA and foreign sources were usually controlled by American companies, meant that the US dollar was needed to buy oil, cementing the role of the dollar in international markets (414).
• During the 1940s and 1950s, oil was by far the largest internationally-traded commodity, so the currency of the oil trade had a huge effect on the what currency was most used globally (415).
• Being the dominant international currency meant that the USA forced all other countries to conduct trade in dollars, forcing them to hold dollar reserves for this purpose. Since US dollars inflated in value relative to other currencies during this period, this essentially imposed a tax on all foreign countries (415). This is a deep misinterpretation of the power of the issuer of the international key currency. The US didn't tax others by forcing them to hold US dollars during this period, because although the US dollar experienced inflation, its value increased or plateaued relative to European currencies. If anything, holding US dollars generated a relative increase in value compared to holding European currencies. 
• Due to the importance of coal and the militancy of coal miners on domestic politics, the economic thought of the 19th Century and early 20th Century focused on the financial issues raised by labor issues, namely exercising democratic control on the economy through the state (416).
• With the creation of neoliberal economics, originally at a conference in the USA in 1938 but expanding in influence only in Britain in the 1950s, measurement of the economy was redefined in terms of measuring financial transactions. The GDP of a country could grow without regard to actual improvement in infrastructure or manufacturing because it represented only money (417-418).
• Unlike the measurements of economy used in the 19th Century, GDP did not account for physical resources. This was because the seemingly infinite amounts of oil available at a cheap price meant that economists did not have to think in terms of essential physical resources in the way they did about coal (418).
• Following the abandonment of gold convertability by the USA in 1971 -- a result of increased circulation of US dollars that far exceeded American gold reserves and pushed the dollar's value down relative to other currencies -- oil companies began discussing oil as a finite resource again (419). The causality of this event is not explained. It is meant to have something to do with fears of US withdrawal, but these claims are neither clear nor substantiated. 
• In the 1970s, Iraq began to develop an oil production capacity independent of Western companies. When they protested, Iraq seized and nationalized oil production. The USA tried to punish Iraq, and deter other Arab states from following their example, by engineering a massive increase in the price of oil (419). Very unclear how this punishes Iraq at all, since normally an increase in the price of oil is a good thing.
•  The rise in oil prices had a number of benefits for oil companies, making them more profitable and allowing for profitable production in high-cost areas of Alaska. However, it had a major downside in making oil less competitive relative to other sources of enermy, especially nuclear power (419-420).
• Oil companies figured out how to turn petroleum into a range of other products, giving them a more diverse variety of markets and allowing for additional profits from other parts of oil unused in the refinement process (420). This stable economic base also made oil companies extremely resiliant and political powerful (420-421).
• The trade in US dollars between the USA and the Middle East facilitated a huge arms trade, with much of the doubling of American arms exports between 1967 and 1975 being due to increased sales to the Middle East. The system worked great for the USA, which overthrew governments and created conflicts in the Middle East, generating a need for arms, which Middle Eastern states bought with the dollars they earned selling oil (421). This is a load of horseshit. The factors for a growth in arms trade during this period relate to the Cold War, not oil; especially since the author doesn't say why this only started in the late 1960s and not beforehand. The US had so so so many reasons for being involved in conflicts in the Middle East that weren't to generate arms sales, and that argument could also be used anywhere -- why didn't the USA destabilize everywhere to create demand for arms? Huh? What a dumb shitass thing to think and write. 

A good piece during discussions on coal, but the author's deep misunderstanding of economics and finance means that the second half on oil is gibberish. The article argues that the physical infrastructure of a coal-powered economy created the societal preconditions for a powerful labor movement, mass democracy, and the welfare state in ways that an oil-powered economy does not. It instead suggests that the oil-powered economy has created a relationship where the USA supports violent authoritarianism in the Middle East because doing so secures oil supplies needed for the modern economy. It muddies up this last point with a lot of tripe about how all US foreign policy had to do with oil. The parts of finance are also really confusing because the author clearly does not understand the international currency regime. Also, disappointed that the 1973 oil shock and OPEC are never mentioned, since they would be REALLY IMPORTANT to the topic.