Global Warming and Carbon Democracy Paper Carbon & Politics First: This current event is chosen and can be understood better by looking at the past. Write

Global Warming and Carbon Democracy Paper Carbon & Politics

First: This current event is chosen and can be understood better by looking at the past. Write a succinct argument about the event’s/controversy’s connections to history. This is called the “lede.” The argument should be that global warming does exist.

Climate Strike Sept 20: Trump’s war on climate change science is literally killing us

Second: provide at least 3 concrete historical examples drawn from the following references. One example from each reference. You must Create Footnotes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/07/the_global_warming_hoax_how_soon_we_forget.html
(This one is attached)
Prothero, Donald R. “How We Know Global Warming Is Real and Human Caused.” Skeptic (Altadena, CA) 17, no. 2 (2012): 14–22,64

(This one is attached)
Timothy Mitchell (2009) Carbon democracy, Economy and Society, 38:3,399-432, DOI: 10.1080/03085140903020598
https://www.thenation.com/article/capitalism-vs-climate/

Third: return to your argument and to the contemporary event/controversy in question in your conclusion.

The length of the assignment is 450-650 words and Don’t forget to add Footnotes.

Please provide me with plagiarism report.

Only use the 4 indicated references.

Do not use external references. Economy and Society
ISSN: 0308-5147 (Print) 1469-5766 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/reso20
Carbon democracy
Timothy Mitchell
To cite this article: Timothy Mitchell (2009) Carbon democracy, Economy and Society, 38:3,
399-432, DOI: 10.1080/03085140903020598
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140903020598
Published online: 17 Aug 2009.
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Economy and Society Volume 38 Number 3 August 2009: 399432
Carbon democracy
Timothy Mitchell
Abstract
States that depend upon oil revenues appear to be less democratic than other states.
Yet oil presents a much larger problem for democracy: faced with the threats of oil
depletion and catastrophic climate change, the democratic machineries that emerged
to govern the age of carbon energy seem to be unable to address the processes that
may end it. This article explores these multiple dimensions of carbon democracy, by
examining the intersecting histories of coal, oil and democracy in the twentieth
century. Following closely the methods by which fossil fuels were produced,
distributed and converted into other forms of socio-technical organization, financial
circulation and political power, the article traces ways in which the concentration and
control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down;
how connections were engineered in the post-war period between the flow of oil and
the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to
depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy
and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the
relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy and
violence were transformed in the 196774 oildollar Middle East crises.
Keywords: democracy; oil; coal; Middle East.
Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of twentieth-century democracy
and its limits. To understand the limits, I propose to explore what made the
emergence of a certain kind of democratic politics possible, the kind I will call
carbon democracy. Before turning to the past, however, let me mention some of
the contemporary limits I have in mind.
In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, one of those limits was
widely discussed. A distinctive feature of the Middle East, many said, is the
region’s lack of democracy. In several of the scholarly accounts, the lack has
Timothy Mitchell, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and the
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street,
New York, NY 10027, USA. E-mail: tm2421@columbia.edu
Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140903020598
400
Economy and Society
something to do with oil. Countries that depend upon petroleum resources for
a large part of their earnings from exports tend to be less democratic.1
However, most of those who write about the question of the ‘rentier state’ or
the ‘oil curse’, as the problem is known, have little to say about the nature of oil
and how it is produced, distributed and used.2 They merely discuss the oil
rents, the income that accrues after the petroleum is converted into
government revenue.3 So the reasons proposed for the anti-democratic
properties of oil that it gives government the resources to relieve social
pressures, buy political support or repress dissent have little to do with the
ways oil is extracted, processed, shipped and consumed, the forms of agency
and control these processes involve or the powers of oil as a concentrated
source of energy.
Ignoring the properties of oil itself reflects an underlying conception of
democracy. This is the conception shared by the American democracy expert
who addressed a local council in southern Iraq: ‘Welcome to your new
democracy,’ he said. ‘I have met you before. I have met you in Cambodia.
I have met you in Russia. I have met you in Nigeria.’ At which point, we are told,
two members of the council walked out (Stewart, 2006, p. 280). It is to see
democracy as fundamentally the same everywhere, defined by universal
principles that are to be reproduced in every successful instance of democratization, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself. If it fails, as it
seems to in oil states, the reason must be that some universal element is missing
or malfunctioning.
Failing to follow the oil itself, accounts of the oil curse diagnose it as a
malady located within only one set of nodes of the networks through which oil
flows and is converted into energy, profits and political power in the
decision-making organs of individual producer states. Its aetiology involves
isolating the symptoms found in producer states that are not found in non-oil
states. But what if democracies have not been carbon copies, but carbon-based?
Are they tied in specific ways to the history of carbon fuels? Can we follow the
carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the problem afflicting oil-producing
states to other limits of carbon democracy?
The leading industrialized countries are also oil states. Without the energy
they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not
exist. Their citizens have developed ways of eating, travelling, housing
themselves and consuming other goods and services that require very large
amounts of energy from oil and other fossil fuels. These ways of life are not
sustainable, and they now face the twin crises that will end them: although
calculating reserves of fossil fuels is a political process involving rival calculative
techniques, there is substantial evidence that those reserves are running out;4
and in the process of using them up we have taken carbon that was previously
stored underground and placed it in the atmosphere, where it is causing
increases in global temperatures that may lead to catastrophic climate change
(IPCC, 2007).5 A larger limit that oil represents for democracy is that the
Timothy Mitchell: Carbon democracy
401
political machinery that emerged to govern the age of fossil fuels may be
incapable of addressing the events that will end it.
To follow the carbon does not mean substituting a materialist account for the
idealist schemes of the democracy experts, or tracing political outcomes back to
the forms of energy that determine them as though the powers of carbon were
transmitted unchanged from the oil well or coalface to the hands of those who
control the state. The carbon itself must be transformed, beginning with the
work done by those who bring it out of the ground. The transformations
involve establishing connections and building alliances connections and
alliances that do not respect any divide between material and ideal, economic
and political, natural and social, human and non-human or violence and
representation. The connections make it possible to translate one set of
resources and powers into another. Understanding the relations between fossil
fuels and democracy requires tracing how these connections are built, the
vulnerabilities and opportunities they create and the narrow points of passage
where control is particularly effective.6 Political possibilities were opened up or
narrowed down by different ways of organizing the flow and concentration of
energy, and these possibilities were enhanced or limited by arrangements of
people, finance, expertise and violence that were assembled in relationship to
the distribution and control of energy.
Buried sunshine
Like mass democracy, fossil fuels are a relatively recent phenomenon. The
histories of the two kinds of forces have been connected in several ways. This
article traces four sets of connections, the first two concerned with coal and the
rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
second two with oil and organizing limits to democratic politics in the midtwentieth century.
The first connection is that fossil fuel allowed the reorganization of energy
systems that made possible, in conjunction with other changes, the novel forms
of collective life out of which late-nineteenth-century mass politics developed.
Until 200 years ago, the energy needed to sustain human existence came
almost entirely from renewable sources, which obtain their force from the sun.
Solar energy was converted into grain and other crops to provide fuel for
humans, into grasslands to raise animals for labour and further human fuel,
into woodlands to provide firewood and into wind and water power to drive
transportation and machinery (Sieferle, 2001).
For most of the world, the capture of solar radiation in replenishable forms
continued to be the main source of energy until perhaps the mid-twentieth
century.7 From around 1800, however, these renewable sources were steadily
replaced with highly concentrated stores of buried solar energy, the deposits of
carbon laid down 150 to 350 million years ago when the decay of peat-bog
forests and of marine organisms in particular oxygen-deficient environments
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converted biomass into the relatively rare but extraordinarily potent deposits of
coal and oil.8
The earth’s stock of this ‘capital bequeathed to mankind by other living
beings’, as Sartre (1977, p. 154) once described it, will be exhausted in a
remarkably short period most of it, by some calculations, in the 100 years
between 1950 and 2050 (Aleklett & Campbell, 2003; Deffeyes, 2005).9 To give
an idea of the concentration of energy we will be exhausting, compared to the
plant-based and other forms of captured solar energy that preceded the
hydrocarbon age: a single litre of petrol used today needed about twenty-five
metric tons of ancient marine life as precursor material, and organic matter the
equivalent of the earth’s entire production of plant and animal life for 400 years
was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn in a single year (1997 figures
from Dukes, 2003; Haberl, 2006).
Compared to these concentrated hydrocarbon stores, solar radiation is
a weak form of energy. However, it is very widely distributed. Historically its
use encouraged relatively dispersed forms of human settlement along rivers,
close to pastureland and within reach of large reserves of land set aside as
woods to provide fuel. The switch to coal over the last two centuries enabled
the concentration of populations in cities, in part because it freed urban
populations from the need for adjacent pastures and woods. In Great Britain,
the substitution of wood by coal created a quantity of energy that would have
required forests many times the size of existing wooded areas if energy had still
depended on solar radiation. By the 1820s, coal ‘freed’, as it were, an area of
land equivalent to the total surface area of the country. By the 1840s, coal was
providing energy that to obtain from timber would have required forests
covering twice the country’s area, double that amount by the 1860s and double
again by the 1890s (Sieferle, 2001; Pomeranz, 2000). Thanks to coal, Great
Britain, the United States, Germany and other coal-producing regions could
be catapulted into a new ‘energetic metabolism’, based on cities and large-scale
manufacturing.10
We associate industrialization with the growth of cities, but it was equally an
agrarian phenomenon and a colonial one. Production on a mass scale required
access to large new territories for growing crops, both to supply the food on
which the growth of cities and manufacturing depended and to produce
industrial raw materials, especially cotton. By freeing land previously reserved
as woodland for the supply of fuel, fossil energy contributed to this agrarian
transformation. As Pomeranz (2000) argues, the switch to coal in north-west
Europe interacted with another land-releasing factor, the acquisition of colonial
territories. Colonies in the New World provided the land to grow industrial
crops. They also generated a direct and indirect demand for European
manufacturing, by creating populations of enslaved Africans who were
prevented from producing for their own needs. Europe now controlled surplus
land that could be used to produce agricultural goods in quantities that,
together with arrangements of the slave plantation, allowed the development of
coal-based mass production, centred in cities.
Timothy Mitchell: Carbon democracy
403
This relationship between coal, colonization and industrialization points to
the first set of connections between fossil fuels and democracy. Limited forms
of representative government had developed in parts of Europe and its settler
colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the 1870s, however,
the emergence of mass political movements and organized political parties
shaped the period that Eric Hobsbawm calls both ‘the age of democratization’
and ‘the age of empire’.11 The mobilization of new political forces depended
upon the concentration of population in cities and in manufacturing, enabled
in part by the control of colonized territories and enslaved labour forces, but
equally associated with the forms of mass collective life made possible by
organizing the flow of unprecedented concentrations of non-renewable stores
of carbon.
Controlling carbon channels
Fossil fuels are connected with the mass democracy of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in a second way. Large stores of high-quality coal were
discovered and developed in relatively few sites: central and northern England,
South Wales, the Ruhr Valley, Upper Silesia and Appalachia.12 Most of the
world’s industrial regions grew above or adjacent to supplies of coal (Pollard,
1981; Rodgers, 1998, p. 45). However, coal was so concentrated in carbon
content that it became cost-effective to transport energy overland or on
waterways in much greater quantities than timber or other renewable fuel
supplies. In Britain, the first Canal Acts were passed to dig waterways for the
movement of coal (Jevons, 1865, pp. 878). The development of steam
transport, whose original function was to serve coal-mining and which in turn
was fuelled by coal, facilitated this movement. Large urban and industrial
populations could now accumulate at sites that were no longer adjacent to
sources of energy. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrialized regions
had built networks that moved concentrated carbon stores from the underground coal face to the surface, to railways, to ports, to cities and to sites of
manufacturing and electrical power generation.
Great quantities of energy now flowed along very narrow channels. Large
numbers of workers had to be concentrated at the main junctions of these
channels. Their position and concentration gave them, at certain moments,
a new kind of political power. The power derived not just from the organizations they formed, the ideas they began to share or the political alliances they
built, but from the extraordinary concentrations of carbon energy whose flow
they could now slow, disrupt or cut off.
Coal-miners played a leading role in contesting labour regimes and the powers
of employers in the labour activism and political mobilization of the 1880s
onwards. Between 1881 and 1905, coal-miners in the United States went on
strike at a rate about three times the average for workers in all major industries,
and double the rate of the next highest industry, tobacco manufacturing.
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Coal-mining strikes also lasted much longer than strikes in other industries.13
The same pattern existed in Europe. Podobnik (2006) has documented the wave
of industrial action that swept across the world’s coal-mining regions in the later
nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and again after the First World
War.14
The militancy of the miners can be attributed in part to the fact that moving
carbon stores from the coal seam to the surface created unusually autonomous
places and methods of work. The old argument that mining communities
enjoyed a special isolation compared to other industrial workers, making their
militancy ‘a kind of colonial revolt against far-removed authority’, misrepresents this autonomy (Kerr & Siegel, 1934, p. 192). More recent accounts stress
the diversity of mining communities and the complexity of their political
engagements with other groups, with mine-owners and with state authorities
(Church, Outram & Smith, 1991; Fagge, 1996; Harrison, 1978). As Goodrich
had argued, ‘the miner’s freedom’ was a product not of the geographical
isolation of coal mining regions from political authority but of ‘the very
geography of the working places inside a mine’ (1925, p. 19). In the traditional
room-and-pillar method of mining, a pair of miners worked a section of the coal
seam, leaving pillars or walls of coal in place between their own chamber and
adjacent chambers to support the roof. They usually made their own decisions
about where to cut and how much rock to leave in place to prevent cave-ins
(Podobnik, 2006, pp. 825). Before the widespread mechanization of mining,
Goodrich wrote, ‘the miner’s freedom from supervision is at the opposite
extreme from the carefully ordered and regimented work of the modern
machine-feeder’ (1925, p. 14).15
The militancy that formed in these workplaces was typically an effort to
defend this autonomy against the threats of mechanization or against the
pressure to accept more dangerous work practices, longer working hours or
lower rates of pay. Strikes were effective, not because of mining’s colonial
isolation, but on the contrary because of the flows of carbon that connected
chambers beneath the ground to every factory, office, home or means of
transportation that depended on steam or electric power.
The power of the miner-led strikes appeared unprecedented. In Germany,
a wave of coal-mining strikes in early 1889 and again in December of that year
shocked the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, into abandoning Bismarck’s hard-line
social policy and supporting a programme of labour reforms (Canning, 1996,
pp. 1303). The Kaiser convened an international conference in March 1890
that called for international standards to govern labour in coal-mining,
together with limits on the employment of women and children. By a ‘curious
and significant coincidence’, as the New York Times reported, on the same day
the conference opened in Berlin, ‘by far the biggest strike in the history of
organized labour’ was launched by the coal-miners of England and Wales. The
number of men, women and children on strike reached ‘the bewildering figure
of 260,000’. With the great manufacturing enterprises of the north about to
Timothy Mitchell: Carbon democracy
405
run out of coal, the press reported, ‘the possibilities of a gigantic and ruinous
labor conflict open before us’.16
Large coal strikes could trigger wider mobilizations, as with the violent strike
that followed the Courrières colliery disaster of 1906 in northern France, which
helped provoke a general strike that paralysed Paris.17 The commonest pattern,
however, was for strikes to spread through the interconnected industries of
coal-mining, railways, dock workers and shipping.18 By the turn of the
twentieth century, the vulnerability of these connections made the general strike
a new kind of weapon.
A generation earlier, in 1873, Engels had rejected the idea of a general strike
as a political instrument, likening it to ineffectual plans for the ‘holy month’,
a nationwide suspension of work, that the Chartist movement had preached in
the 1840s (Engels, 1939 [1873]). Workers lacked the resources and organization
to carry out a general …
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