Trillbilly Worker's Party - Year Zero 2: Black Gold Fever (w/ special guest Timothy Mitchell)

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

Welcome to the second installation of the Trillbilly Workers Party's Year Zero series, where we try to unravel some of the biggest political-economic questions of our day, and learn some things along the way. For this one we're joined by Timothy Mitchell, author of the Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011, Verso Books)who talks to us about how oil became central to the restructuring of the global economy after WW2, and then became central to the unraveling of that economy during the late 1960s and early 70s. We also look at what the future of energy politics might look like in the years to come. If you'd like to support us on Patreon, please do so at www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Thank you for watching! Welcome, everybody, to another edition of Year Zero, Another edition of Year Zero, the Trillbillies miniseries about political economy, history, and all those other fun things you can bring up at your socially distanced barbecues and Zoom conference calls to make people think that you're smart and well-read. Today, we're going to be joined by Timothy Mitchell, author of a book called Carbon Democracy, to talk about oil. And there's a few things going on in the world right now that I think make this episode relevant. As I speak, there are wildfires spreading all throughout the American West. The Gulf Coast is being slammed by one hurricane after the next. Humanity and its fossil fuel-driven economy has wiped out 60% of the world's animal population since 1970. I mean, obviously, the through line here is climate change,

of which oil has played a massive part. But the story of oil isn't simple or one-dimensional. In fact, you can understand a lot about how our current economy works and about how the global economy was restructured after World War II through the lens of oil and energy politics. So Tim is going to walk us through how the coal and steam-based economy of the 19th and early 20th centuries offered workers opportunities for political contestation. He's going to tell us about how the transition to an oil-based economy offered governments and capitalists a way to fight back against those workers. And he's going to tell us about how the oil economy altered the composition of the working class itself

throughout the 20th century. We're also going to be talking about how oil was central to the pivot to a different kind of economy in the 1960s and 70s that we now refer to as neoliberalism, that lovely word we all know and love. And we're going to be talking about what the future of energy politics might offer for workers, leftists, environmentalists, I mean pretty much anybody concerned about making the world a better place. But just before we begin, I'd like to remind you all that you can go and support the Trillbillies at www.patreon.com slash trillbillyworkersparty, where for the price of just $5, you'll find an episode every Sunday

to help keep you sane and to help us keep producing content like this for free. So without further ado, let's hear from Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy and professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. So this week on the show, we've got Timothy Mitchell, professor at Columbia University, the author of a book called Carbon Democracy, among many other things. Tim, how are you doing today? Good.

Great, thanks. Nice to be here. Yeah, thanks for agreeing to do this. I think when I first set this up with you, I told you that one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you is because I grew up in an oil region in southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. And I really felt like your book kind of revealed a lot to me about how oil economies work, but really more generally how fossil fuel economies work.

Of course, now I live in another extractive region. I live in eastern Kentucky, which is mostly a coal region. And so when I first moved here, I was noticing all kinds of similarities and differences and wondering, like, why is there more of an ingrained union culture in the coal regions as opposed to the oil regions? And those things really didn't click with me until I read your book and started thinking about the nature of the resource itself. You know, what is pulled out of the ground, how it is done, how it's distributed, transported, and the kind of politics that can give rise to.

So, I know that your book mostly focuses on the Middle East and Latin America a little bit. But I think it still contained a lot of, you know, revelations about how I can understand my world. So I thought it could do the same for other people. So I think that, like, since we've kind of got that out of the way, I think I want to, like, zoom out. I've been doing this project that ever since the pandemic started, I've been trying to help myself and help others understand what's going on. This will be the second installation in a series. The first installation was about Irigi, Giovanni Irigi. I wanted to do this because this helps us understand what is going on, I feel like, because you can't understand how the neoliberal

economy was constructed without understanding oil. So, you know, before all this pandemic began and the economic chaos, things weren't even really looking good for oil even then. And then, of course, the pandemic started and global oil demand collapsed. So I thought that like maybe we could talk about some recent politics and then we can go from there back through the sort of history and everything. So as I mentioned to you, you know, as everybody knows, I think in April of this year, the price of oil went below zero dollars a barrel. I believe it kind of settled at one point around negative forty dollars, which I think is pretty insane and unprecedented, I think literally, right?

And so I know I'm sort of simplifying things here, but you know, I think the vast majority of people, they see something like that and they're like, you know, how do I even make sense of that? What does that even mean? So, you know, in a sort of succinct way, yeah, can you tell us what it means for the price of oil to go negative? And more importantly, why that happened? Well, for the price to be negative, it means that people who have oil, instead of being

able to sell someone, sell that oil to someone for a price for $40 a barrel or $50 a barrel, they actually found themselves having to pay people to take it off their hands. And so the minus $40 or minus $38, whatever it was, was the amount they were having to pay for people to take the oil from them. Why did that happen? Well, part of the story, oil from them. Why did that happen? Well, part of the story, obviously, is the one you mentioned, the COVID-19 pandemic, the glut of suddenly vast amounts of oil at a moment when caused by the drop in demand. But for it actually to go negative, some funny things had to happen. First of all, there's an oil market of oil producers and oil traders who have oil and sell it as they produce it. And there's a price of that oil that's sold at the time of production.

But there's another whole market built on top of that, which is the market in oil futures. Traders, speculators who trade contracts for future oil. And that exists in other commodities as well. It didn't exist in oil until roughly the 1980s. It has certain benefits to the producers because they can sell those contracts for oil they know they're going to be producing in six months' time or two months' time and get a price in advance and sort of hedge against fluctuations in the market. But of course, at the same time, it becomes this opportunity for speculators, investors, traders to make money out of the ups and downs, because you can bet both

ways on what's going to happen to the price. And it was those people who got caught holding oil that they had to pay people to take off their hands. So it wasn't actually the oil producers themselves, and it wasn't even those who buy the oil because they're going to refine it and distribute it and so on. It was the speculators. And interestingly, as I said, there's been a futures market since roughly the mid-1980s. But the people who were caught holding this oil were not professional oil traders, the people who buy and sell oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange. About 10, 15 years ago, there came a new way to trade oil. You could trade it the way you exchange shares on the stock market. So rather than being on a commodities exchange, you could go

into the stock market because financial firms, one particular financial firm, set up a fund where ordinary retail investors could buy and sell shares in this fund that earned oil. And it was those people who ended up, so they weren't even professional oil traders. They were retail investors who got caught. And that's why you suddenly, and they got caught because, you know, they weren't the professional oil traders and they actually own 25 percent of of the oil futures on the market that were coming due that month. And so, you know, the larger story from that is that, yes, there was an unprecedented collapse in demand for oil because of covid. of COVID. But there was also a story of finance and financial speculation and the emergence of this method of selling ordinary investors shares in oil. And they were the people who suddenly found themselves with large amounts of oil that they had to. They bought the futures contract, but the futures contract came due and they suddenly had to take physical possession of the oil.

They couldn't do that. They were just retail investors. Well, you mentioned that prior to, I think you said the early 1980s, there wasn't futures oiled in trade on that market. Why is that? Does it have something to do with the sort of way that oil has traditionally been extracted and distributed and sold? Yes. So one of the things about oil and the whole history of oil going back 150 years since the beginnings of the oil industry is that oil is abundant. It comes out of the ground in enormous quantities, but it's found in relatively few places around the world. And many

of those places are in the US and of course, also in the Middle East and parts of Latin America, Africa, and so on. Because it isn't found in many places, it became possible early on for a small number of producers to take control of all the key production sites. And, of course, that's the story going back to John Rockefeller, Standard Oil, and the rise of his monopoly. Standard Oil is what's today ExxonMobil, and a handful of other companies, Shell, BP, and so on. Chevron, as it would be known today. Those companies managed in the late 19th, early 20th century to take control of oil pretty much everywhere that it was produced, at least outside what became the Soviet Union. And that meant you didn't need an

oil market because all oil was around the world, was in the control of these large companies. And they not only control production, but they control distribution and they control marketing. And so the price was set internally by those companies, either with their own subsidiaries or with long-term contracts by those they sold it onto. So you didn't need any kind of oil market someplace where futures were exchanged or even actual oil was exchanged until that system was broken up somewhere in the 1970s. That's why you didn't have these kinds of issues back then. You didn't have a futures market in oil.

One of the things about your book is that it is always essentially dispelling conventional narratives and accounts, right? We have this standardized account of how a thing is, for example, the OPEC oil shock, and that gets reported by the US media, and then everybody sort of metabolizes it and goes on with their day. One of the things that you talk about is how the conventional story of the OPEC oil shock of the 70s that you just sort of mentioned didn't have so much to do with the price of the oil itself. It had more to do with simply the tax that the oil, the OPEC producing countries were wanting to put on that oil. So maybe because, you know, I sort of mentioned this, you know, maybe for the uninitiated, can you maybe talk about OPEC and how it is related both to what's going on right now and its sort of history? Yeah. So OPEC was founded in 1960, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and a few other smaller producers.

Iraq was one of the other original founders. They actually modeled themselves on the way oil producers had organized in the U.S., which, of course, is where the oil industry had grown up. And what the oil ministers of these countries discovered was that in the U.S. there was a whole system of organized price fixing for oil. And it was actually run by a body that still is influential today, which is the Texas Railroad Commission. Oil was mostly moved by rail, and the Railroad Commission set the prices at which oil could be traded. And they set it at a high enough price to ensure a profit to those producers, especially as they risked being undercut by cheaper oil

arriving from elsewhere. And these, as producer countries elsewhere develop their oil production, they saw how the Americans did it. And they said, well, that's a good system. You don't allow the market to set the price of oil because it will go down to the lowest bidder. You form a club of the producers or some arrangement, some organizational producers. OPEC OPERATOR The cartel.

MARK BLYTH And you set the price. So that's what OPEC wanted to do. It wanted to arrange collectively a better deal. They couldn't actually directly set the price because, as I just mentioned, the price was set by the international oil companies who actually controlled the production. So those countries that formed OPEC, some in the Middle East and then Venezuela, had an arrangement where the private American and British oil companies produced the oil and they taxed or some combination of royalty

and tax to the government of the producer countries. And so what they wanted those countries was actually to increase that tax. They said we want to we want a different tax rate because so much of the profit is going to the companies. We can't tell what that profit is because there's no actual market where you can see prices. So they began demanding a higher share of that money. The oil companies were very clever because they set that tax by using a benchmark price. And whatever the benchmark price was, was the way that tax was calculated.

The benchmark didn't correspond to any actual prices at which oil changed hands, but it became a dispute over this benchmark. So to consumers and the media in the West, this was presented as a fight over a price, a benchmark price. It was actually not a demand for a higher price for oil. It was a demand that more of the profits from the oil go to the countries whose oil it was. But it was seen in the West as an attempt by greedy producer countries to increase the price of oil. So that was the sort of first misunderstanding about OPEC and what became known as the oil crisis of 1973-74. It wasn't an attempt to raise prices. It was an attempt to increase the share of that oil and come to the producer countries. By portraying it as an attempt to

increase prices, it became much easier for those oil companies to then avoid suffering an impairment to their profits by saying, well, the producers are demanding a higher price, we have to pass that price on to the consumers. And so that's what ultimately happened. The consumer price quadrupled so that the tax rate charged by the producer countries could increase. But in the West, that was understood as somehow some price increase forced by oil producing states rather than a battle over the distribution of the shares of the profits. So like if you're trying to understand why the price of, again, the price of oil went

below zero, you've also, you've got that financial aspect of it, but you, at the same time, you've also got these larger sort larger geopolitical occurrences, developments. One of the things that you hear about is that the price of oil went below zero is because Saudi Arabia and Russia were engaged in some sort of production quota battle. They flooded the market with oil. Is there any truth to that? Or what is the story there? How does it relate to this? Yes. So OPEC is famous for that political series of events in the 1970s, but continued to exist and continued to represent the interests of those key producer countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, Latin America and Africa. It sort of came back to life in an important way over the last decade when, first of all, the price of oil went way up after 2006.

And as a consequence of that, the production of oil in the U.S. was able to increase dramatically. Right. Because with the much higher price of oil, you know, oil that had been trading $20 a barrel, $30 a barrel was suddenly trading at over $100 a barrel. It became possible to produce oil in West Texas and elsewhere that you mentioned, so-called tight oil, sometimes called shale oil, from formations that normally it was not economic to produce oil from. So there was this enormous surge in the production of oil, provoked by this increase in the price.

The trouble was that as the price began to settle down again, that production of oil was not profitable. And the Saudis seem to have realized that they could actually increase their own share of oil and the share of the Russians with whom they worked on this if they just brought the price down a bit. It was one thing when oil was priced at $60 or $70 a barrel, but if it came down below $50, it was thought that the American oil would not be profitable, and they could put those producers out of business. So that was essentially what was happening. Over the last several years, the Russians got together with OPEC, a grouping that became known as OPEC Plus, OPEC Plus Russia. And they agreed to pump more oil in order to flood the market and bring the price down and attempt to create problems for these very high cost producers of tight oil, of fracked oil in the U.S. and regain their own share of production.

So, I mean, you could say in some ways that their ability to do this now and their ability to do this in the 70s does represent a form of what you call sabotage, right? I mean, it's not one-to-one. I mean, they're not completely disrupting flows and extraction, but they are able to wield their power to control the distribution of oil worldwide. And there's something about the nature of oil itself that lends itself to that ability to, as you say in the book, sort of wage sabotage on your competitors or on, you know, the Western imperial powers or whatever. Could you talk a little bit about how this compares? I guess maybe I'm dialing too hard into recent history.

Maybe if we go back to the sort of 19th century and we talk about coal production, that to me is the best way to sort of go into this, to talk about the sort of history of sabotage and to talk about coal production and how that gave form or gave rise to forms of political contestation. And yes, so talk a little bit about that.

Talk a little bit about how coal production relates to that. Well, I think it's useful to go back because the term sabotage has a very interesting history. Nowadays, we associate it with sort of acts of violence to blow up some vital installation of some sort. But that's not how it was originally used. It came into use a little bit before the First World War, but then because of the war term was the ability to disrupt some sort of complex technical process by some relatively minor intervention in it that made it impossible for the technical process to happen. And it was a word that became very important for understanding how political power itself worked in the industrialized world. Question, who actually had the power of sabotage,

the power of interrupting industrial processes in order to make some demand? And you can think of history right through the industrial period as a sort of shifting battle over who's going to have the power of sabotage. Is the power of sabotage going to be in the hands of workers, or is it going to be in the hands of business? And you can see different times when each side has this ability to sabotage a process in order to make demands. It's easier to see when it was in the hands of workers. And so in the book Carbon Democracy, I talk about this by going back before the history of oil to the history of coal, because I wanted to understand the difference between coal as a dominant source of energy and oil as a major source of energy.

Because at the time I was writing the book and researching it, there was a lot of talk about how oil seems to be very bad for democracy. Countries that produce a lot of oil seem to be very undemocratic. Why is that? What is it about having some abundant source of some critical material that seems to impede the emergence of democratic politics? And I thought it'd be useful to think about that by going back to the 19th century in coal, because you had a parallel in the emergence of an extraordinarily abundant source of energy, particularly coal in Britain and other parts of northern Europe. energy, particularly coal in Britain and other parts of Northern Europe. I mean, coal in Britain in the 19th century was like oil in Saudi Arabia in the 20th century. Enormous amounts of energy produced in a very concentrated location. And unlike the story we tell ourselves about oil and democracy, the story about coal and democracy was very difficult.

It seemed that coal had actually made possible the emergence of mass democracy in Britain and in other places. A very close correlation between being a major coal producer and becoming not just a sort of liberal constitutional state that existed for longer, but a state based on a form of mass social democracy. And that sort of general understanding is, well, with coal, you get industry. With industry, you get large cities. With large cities, you get mass organization. But I didn't think that was looking closely enough at what it was that created this association with coal and democracy and that made it possible for working populations to make the kinds of demands that led to the emergence of forms of social democracy.

And what I argued in the book was that the thing about coal is that as a country like Britain became dependent on one single source of energy and a source of energy available abundantly, but in very few locations in the coal mining regions of the country, the producers, the companies that controlled that source became vulnerable to minor acts of disruption by those who produced and moved the energy. So the history of democratic politics in Britain and elsewhere was this history of what came to be known as the general strike. The general strike didn't mean the whole country going on strike. It meant these critical interruptions to the supply of energy for the first time in history. Railways, dock workers, coal miners, right? Coal miners, the people at the critical sort of choke point of the movement of energy for the first time in history. Railways, dock workers, coal miners, right? Coal miners, the people at the critical sort of choke point of the movement of energy.

And they used what they actually called, and they took this new term, and they said, we can actually sabotage. We can actually, in a very positive sense, they saw it. We have these political demands for improved working conditions, the right to unionize, demands for improved working conditions, the right to unionize, the right to strike, the right to have a broader set of social democratic protections. And if people won't listen, this is our power of sabotage. Out of that, you get the emergence of modern social democratic states, either directly because those general strikes between coal workers and railway workers and dock workers made those demands, or indirectly because the fear of the power that was in the hands of these people who could organize sabotage at insurance against accidents and illness, retirement, you know, state retirement pensions.

All that was owed to the kind of pressure that was suddenly available. So things that working people have wanted for decades, if not centuries, very quickly came about once you had this vulnerability to sabotage that Cole created. Yeah. This account, I think, is very important because it shows essentially workers at the time looking around, looking at their circumstances, and essentially analyzing, at that time it wasn't called the economy as an object, but they were examining political economy. And I don't know if you've ever read this book, but a few months ago, I don't know why I read this book, but I read Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

Are you familiar with it? Yeah, no, I haven't read it. It's a very bizarre book about a capitalist who falls in love with like a sort of idealist young woman. Regardless, I thought it was very interesting because it was written in the 1850s and it takes place in the industrialized north of Great Britain. And a lot of the workers, I know it's a fictionalized account, but a lot of the workers are pretty sort of well-versed in what they call political economy. They refer to it as political economy.

Yeah. And I thought that that was very fascinating. And maybe we can get to this in a minute because 70 years later or so, the economy becomes this very technical sort of expertise-driven thing. And the account that you show says that workers at that time, it wasn't as mystified maybe as it became to be 100 years later. They looked around and they identified these choke points and they used them to their advantage to, yeah, make political claims, make political contestations. And so I want to talk about what oil offered the people in power, governments, capitalists, etc., as a way to fight back against that. Like, one of the things you talk about that I think is so fascinating is Winston Churchill,

when he was first Lord of the Admiralty. He wanted to transition the Royal Navy's fuel source from coal to oil. And I think he even explicitly said it was because he wanted to, I can't remember his exact quote, but it was essentially, you know, these coal miners in wells, they're, you know, they're going on strike. We have to be able to cripple their ability to go on strike. Like what are some of the advantages that oil would offer to governments at that time to fight back against those sort of political claims being made by the coal steam based economy workers? Well, the first thing you've got with oil is you've got a second source of energy. You've got an alternative. has had was that this was the sole source of energy or almost the only source of energy for industry, for electricity, for all the new industrial world that came into being in the

later 19th century. So just having a second choice made a difference. So, for example, with Winston Churchill and the decision to convert the Navy from coal to oil, it's always just explained as some sort of military decision about the superior technical qualities of oil-fired rather than coal-fired steam turbines. There were efficiency arguments, but what you find in Churchill's own writings is that he was just as obsessed with the fact that a navy dependent on coal was dependent on coal workers, and particularly coal workers of South Wales, who produced all the very high-quality coal that was used by the navy. And therefore, they could go on strike and make these demands for better conditions and wages and so on.

So even though Britain had no oil and had the world's most abundant supplies of coal, or had had up to that point, this decision to make yourself more dependent on oil than coal was motivated in part by wanting to end this power of strike that the coal workers had. Now, he did that at a time when Iran, where the British had begun to find oil in the early 20th century, was also a place with strikes and, in fact, with the constitutional revolution going on. But the difference was it was much easier to defeat that constitutional revolution because, among other things, it wasn't backed by this kind of energy politics

that Britain's sort of constitutional transformation into a social democratic state in the same period had driving it. Why with oil? So as Iran became an oil producer and other countries in the Middle East, why couldn't oil workers do with oil what coal workers had done with coal in the case of Britain? And that was one of the interesting questions I wanted to think about in the book, because you'd think that there's a similar kind of thing of a sort of becoming dependent on an abundant source of energy with restricted locations. Well, first of all, you could. And in fact, there were wave after wave of strikes in the oil industry in the Middle East across the middle decades of the 20th century, from the 1920s and 30s through to the 1950s and 1960s.

And even into the 1970s. And they played a key role in the sort of mobilizing of political forces in the region. Oil strikes in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s, where people were calling for a constitution for political rights, the rights of unions, similar things in Iraq, again in Iran in the 1930s and the 50s and so on. But oil was different. First of all, it sort of came second, and therefore it wasn't being used to create a local industrial apparatus of wealth production. The oil was going to the places that had already industrialized using coal. So there was this enormous sort of distance opened up between the places where it was produced and the places where it was used.

So the workers, whereas in Britain, you could get that tight coordination between mine workers and dock workers and the railroad workers who moved it. In the Middle East, you were separated all these enormous distances from where you produce the oil to where it was consumed. And the other thing is that—sorry? By pipelines, right? And then also, oil is a liquid, so it moves in pipelines. And you can sabotage pipelines, but they're much harder to interrupt because they're quickly repaired than rare, where you can really stop the movement of trains through forms of strike. So the fact that it's a liquid, that it moves in pipelines, when it's then transferred from pipelines into tankers, the tankers can take different routes.

They're harder to interrupt. take different routes. They're harder to interrupt. All kinds of aspects of the very physical production of oil made it harder for workers to sort of form these alliances that could sabotage effectively the supply of energy. It's not that they didn't try, and it's not that there weren't consequences of that in some ways, but it couldn't have the force that had happened earlier in the case of coal. The other thing that happened with oil, I mentioned before, how production came to be monopolized by a handful of companies, the Standard Oil or ExxonMobil and Shell and BP and a few others. So what happened with the case of oil is that, if you like, the power of

sabotage ended up in other hands. It didn't end up in the hands of the workers, as had been the predominant case with coal. It ended up in the hands of these enormous firms who themselves had an exercise, this ability to sabotage or interrupt the flow of oil. Because what they would do is not say, oh, there's lots of oil, let's produce it and make sure everybody's got all the oil they need. They would say, well, let's produce only so much so that we can charge this extraordinarily high price for the stuff. Because in the Middle East in particular, it comes out of the ground very, very easily. It's very, very cheap to produce, but we could sell it at this much, much higher price set by the people who produce it in Texas.

So as long as you can have that power of sabotage, that power of interrupting supply, you could use it not as workers to increase the benefits flowing to workers, but rather as business firms to increase the benefits, that is to say the profits, flowing into the hands of those firms. So sabotage didn't go away. It just, in the case of oil, ended up in the hands of corporations rather than in the hands of organized workers. Would you say that this is an accurate sort of framing? You know,

you could say no. I mean, you could say that it's too simplistic. But the way that I kind of look at this is that it's a class struggle, right? You've got the workers using fossil fuel politics, in their case, coal, the localized use of coal and distribution. You know, you use coal not very far from the coal face. And, you know, on that side, the proletariat using it on that side. And then, you know, capital and governments. On the other side, looking at the situation and saying, how do we fight back against this? One of the ways that we can fight back against this is through a transition from using mainly coal and steam power to using oil.

I mean, thinking about it in those terms, would you say that that's a correct sort of characterization of it? I think, you know, that's one element that goes into the history of energy that unfolds. And you mentioned the case of Winston Churchill and deciding in part that moving the Navy to the use of oil is to weaken the power of coal workers. And you actually see a very similar story after the Second World War in the U.S. 1948, 49, this enormous wave of strikes, biggest wave of strikes ever in U.S. history that bring the trains to a halt. Truman actually

moves to have the U.S. Army taking over the country, the running of the country's railroad system. And one of the responses of that actually in the U.S. is to sort of force through the transition from coal to oil as the major source of energy in the railroad system in the U.S. So you can find particular points where that decision is made, and it's made for those very specific reasons of trying to weaken the power of organized labor and constantly finding in oil an energy source that is harder for workers themselves to sabotage the flow of for the reasons we talked about. So you can see that at different points.

I'm not sure you can see a sort of grand strategic picture for world economy as a whole, but you don't have to because if it's being made in these individual cases, then it has the cumulative effect anyway. Well, so you write about how the sort of transition oil was not only beneficial for challenging those political claims

of the workers, but, and I think this is, for me, maybe the most fascinating part of the book, how it came to be the sort of centerpiece of how the global economy was restructured following World War II. So, you know, a lot of people know about Bretton Woods, and they know about the Marshall plant and all this. But I don't know, could you maybe just give us a rundown of what the sort of post-war Bretton Woods system was and how oil came to be built into it? So after the Second World War, as international financial and trade relations are being rebuilt, there has to be some new basis for the international financial order.

It was understood that the collapse of economies before the war and the rise of fascism in particular happened in a significant part because of the collapse of the international financial order, the system of relations among different currencies around the world and different, not just financial but national production system, that sort of guaranteed the value of everybody's national currency. You needed some system.

The old system had been based on the gold standard. Everybody keeps a reserve of gold in their banks and then they issue paper currency based on and tied to the value of that gold. That wasn't that it all collapsed. So after the war, a new system is put in place, essentially tied to the value of the US dollar. The US has become by far the dominant both manufacturing and also financial power in the world. It also has a huge amount of the reserves of the world's gold. And it starts, it agrees to tie the value of the dollar to gold reserves that it has.

And every other country agrees to peg the value of its own currency to a fixed number of dollars. And that's the way in which the relations between different sort of national currency systems and ultimately international trade and the pricing and balancing of flows of international trade all come to be based on the U.S. dollar and U.S. reserves of gold. That's Bretton Woods. And it lasts from 1944 when it's established in conference in the resort of Bretton Woods, where it gets its name from, until it all begins to collapse in the late 60s, early 70s. And there's a variety of reasons for that which we can go into. That history is fairly well known. What I wanted to do was to sort of add to that a number of ways in which the flow of oil and the abundance of oil is important to that story. Oil was then and continues to be by far the largest commodity in world trade. And so any attempt to come up with a financial system that is going to organize the pricing of trade

and the relative value of currencies is, among other things, something to be engineered out of the actual flow of oil. You can come up with all the agreements you want, but you've got to tie that to who controls the production of oil and how oil is priced because of the dominant role of oil. So that was part of the story I was trying to tell. But I was also linking it, and you alluded to this part of the argument earlier, to the fact that in this same period, you have the emergence of the idea of the economy. Everybody thinks that dates back to the 19th century or to ancient Greeks or something. But

one of the things I've argued in this book and in other writings is that it was only really in this period between the 1940s onwards, that we all came to think that we have this thing called the economy and economists began to talk about it. And I think that we have this thing called the economy and economists began to talk about it. And I think that's wrapped up in the same story of what that post-war financial order was and again to oil. Yeah. I mean, you write that I think before the 19, maybe 20s, 30s, 40s, no one referred to the economy. And like I was mentioning a minute ago, you know, reading North and South, nobody refers to the economy. They're talking about political economy. And it was kind of more, you know, and you can pick up on this reading Marx too,

it was more understood as a process rather than an object. Exactly. Yeah. You didn't put a the on the beginning. Economy was a word in the 19th century. Its original meaning, as in words, similar words like economize, had to do with prudence and the prudent use of scarce resources or the management or government of resources in a way that sort of benefited the public interest. So economy referred to that management or to those processes that had to be managed. And when you used a word like political economy, you weren't talking about the politics of the economy. You were talking about the economy, that is to say, the prudent management of the polity of the political order as a whole, based as that

would be in questions of wealth, but also population of public health of all kinds of things. So that's what economy referred to in the 19th century, and even into the early 20th century. But then somewhere in the interwar period in the 20s and 30s, this other meaning begins to emerge. And you can trace it in the writings of key economists of that period, people like John Maynard Keynes and others, where they're both looking for a word, but they're looking for a way of trying to make sense of new kinds of ways in

which government is attempting to manage a whole set of processes around finance, employment, industry, and so on. And the word that emerges for this object that they're trying to manage and control is the economy. So they add the definite article, the, to the word economy and start saying, well, we actually have this distinct object that we're in charge of managing called the economy. And the role of government is sort of reconceived away from broader notions of sort of welfare and well-being that might include many aspects of human well-being to the management of the relations that make up this thing called the economy. That's part of the change. The other thing is that, and part of what makes it possible to imagine this totality

as something that can be managed, is that you can actually simplify it right down to a few numbers. So you can start measuring and counting this thing called, that in those days was called something like national income. Today we call it GDP, gross domestic product. You can take all the different exchanges and relations of employment and purchase and so on, and you can boil them all down to one number. And of course, statistically, that's an incredibly both complex thing to do, but also a vast work of simplification, because you can't actually measure every financial exchange

happening over an entire country over months or years. But if you sort of sample according to new statistical methods and make assumptions and take averages, you can actually come up with a number and say, well, this is actually the sum total of everything produced. So on the one hand, you've built this vast thing statistically called the economy that you can sort of measure and manage. But on the other hand, you've actually built it by making it something very, very small. You've just reduced it to a few numbers. So that's the kind of process I was trying to understand beginning in the interwar period, but really sort of consolidated after the war.

Before the 1940s, when you said the economy, people didn't understand what you meant. You had to specify. And it was only in the 50s and 60s that it comes to take the sort of everyday obvious sense we grant it today. And that had in turn a relationship to oil, which, again, has many aspects. But one that's fairly easy to grasp is that what was significant about the economy was not just the sort of simplification of a vast world into a few numbers, but you could calculate those numbers in such a way that every year they grow. And you come up with this idea of the world as a world that is sort of defined around

an idea of growth. Not necessarily, you know, material increase in objects, not population, which used to be the main thing people thought of growing, not even cities, which might have grown before, but just growth, growth in the abstract. And I think oil is very important to that, because this abundance of cheap energy makes it possible to sort of think and act in those terms in ways that are quite novel in the middle decades of the 20th century. So the book tries to tie together a story about oil with a story about how we came to

believe that the sort of fundamental object of our collective life is this thing called the economy. Yeah, I think this is really the most important part, and maybe this is kind of what I'm trying to get at by examining this section of the book. You had written about how earlier in the 19th century there were economists like William Stanley Jevons, I think is his name, who were looking at if coal was exhaustible or not,

how much longer you could continue to mine coal and still be able to continue economic growth. Well, oil offered a way for them, not just oil, but the creation of the economy as this system of everyday transactions, numbers, as you said earlier, boiling down all these statistics to GDP. have oil prices continuously drop without pressing upon the limitations of the physical environment. And so I think that that is the key part here. It's the limitless growth aspect of the creation of this object known as the economy. And to take it even one step further, you write about, and maybe this is maybe what we could talk about in the next section, a few decades later you had the creation of a new object called the environment. And the process for creating that was paradoxically, oil companies were very heavily involved in that process. And oil companies were very heavily involved in that process. I wanted to talk about the 1960s because one of the things I found fascinating was the creation of the shipping container, for example.

You had this new working class of the 1960s. How did the switch to oil transform the working class throughout the middle of the 20th century? Well, it depends a little bit on which part of the world you're looking at. So talked about Western Europe, particularly sort of Northwest Europe and the critical importance of coal miners and coal mining and their alliances with others who move this key energy resource. And of course, that political alliance gets weaker and weaker. And the power of the general strike, which as I've explained, is this critical intervention by a few key workers, weakens and weakens and weakens across those countries. There's similar stories in other places that have been very dependent on coal. But in general, there is a weakening of the kinds of rights and abilities and political powers that organized workers have managed to gain, thanks in particular to the dependence on coal. And so in a way you can sort of think of the transition from a completely coal-based system of production to one that is equally, if not more dependent on oil, as the original kind

of industrial outsourcing. Because we think of outsourcing as jobs moving to Mexico or moving to China or whatever. But the first big outsourcing of jobs was jobs moving to Iran and jobs moving to China or whatever. But, you know, the first big outsourcing of jobs was jobs moving to Iran and jobs moving to Saudi Arabia or jobs moving to Venezuela or Mexico because you outsourced energy production long before you outsourced industrial production. That was already, you know, the energy production was happening much earlier with a consequent weakening of those political forces that had gained their strength from dependence on that energy.

Of course, that's going to be followed up, and the story of the shipping container is an important part of it, by the ability then to outsource not just oil production in particular, but later manufacturing. oil production in particular, but later manufacturing. Once you have those forms of intermodal transport where you can put things in a big metal box at the factory and it can stay in the same box until it gets to the warehouse at the point of distribution, you can move not just, as it were, you can make manufactured goods almost as liquid as oil,

just as easily to ship from place to place, thanks to the shipping container. So there's important history there of the shipping container. But the larger story, again, as we know, is that outsourcing of manufacturing and the And the use of that to drive down wages in other industrialized countries and to weaken labor unions and so on. You've got the entire story since the late 60s, 1970s of that weakening of labor unions and of manufacturing bases across much of the industrialized world, which, again, is in part a history of energy as well. Well, so I think that brings us up to the 1960s and 70s. I mean, you wrote about how the creation of this oil-centered Bretton Woods system in the 1940s created this disjuncture that kind of completely exploded in the late 60s and

early 70s. So, you know, we understand that now as what we call maybe the neoliberal turn, a turn to more neoliberal politics. But your book talks about how central the energy crisis and the oil shock was to that transition process. and the oil shock was to that transition process. So maybe talk about why this event, and you can even talk, if you want, about how the energy crisis itself was kind of a manufactured thing by the oil industry.

But can you talk about how it was all crucial to setting up the pivot to neoliberal politics? And maybe even a further question might be, how can our modern energy politics explain the rolling back of rights that were won in the era of coal and a steam-based economy? Yeah, again, it's a complicated story with many parts. So just, you know, I think just the business of trying to bring these different parts together and tell them as an interconnected story rather than separate stories of the history of coal or the history of labor unions or the history of neoliberalism as an ideology or the history of energy in the environment and trying to find these connections between them is what the book is trying to do. But of course, that does make it a little difficult to pull them all together in a conversation like this.

So, and we haven't even touched on another big part of it, which is the arms industry and how that connected to oil and oil profits and how to recirculate those forms of finance. So we could even get onto that later. But to stick with the oil crisis and then the rise of neoliberalism. So there's a battle going on between the oil producer states, particularly in the Middle East, and the oil companies where the oil producer states want a greater share of the profits. That's portrayed in the West as a demand for a price increase, whereas in fact it was a demand for a different rate of taxation of profits. demand for a different rate of taxation of profits. In a way, the oil companies are sort of looking for a crisis so that all this can be seen as something outside of their hands and to be blamed on others. And that opportunity that the crisis is building over a number of years,

but the opportunity really comes in 1973 with the October 73 Arab-Israeli war. These are two completely separate things that happen to have one or two actors in common, like Saudi Arabia. But OPEC is one organization, and that's been making its demands over prices. And then the war is another thing that doesn't involve many of the members of OPEC, and that OPEC isn't directly involved in, but separately in that war. Essentially, the Saudis say to the US, stop blocking a solution to the Palestine question, or we will impose an embargo on oil. The US refuses to listen to that, and Saudi Arabia, and in particular, leads the imposition of an embargo on supplies of oil to the U.S.

It actually has no significant effect on supplies of oil to the U.S. because there's no significant cut in oil production anywhere, partly because other oil producers actually increase oil production. Iraq criticizes the Saudis of actually doing all this in a way that lets the oil companies off the hook and refuses to join the boycott and increases production. But anyway, it sort of appears as a great crisis and it's announced as a crisis in the U.S. and there's a run on the gas stations and the price of oil goes up because suddenly gas stations run out of oil and you get this crisis. And it allows, it makes it possible to quadruple the price of oil and to blame the whole thing on these avaricious Arab states that want to demand so much money for their oil. So the story is

completely misunderstood, but it's very convenient that this transformation in the oil price can happen in a way where the oil companies take none of the blame. What it enables them to do is two things. They know they're going to have to give in and pay this higher tax rate. tax rate. They actually know something much worse is on its way, which is that the Arab states and other producer states are actually going to take control of the oil production themselves directly. And so what the oil companies want to do is open up oil production in other parts of the world, West Africa, Alaska, the North Sea, and so on. And they can't do that at prevailing rates at which oil is sold. But by having this quadrupling of the price, it becomes economic to produce oil in the North Sea and

Alaska and places like that. So it works out pretty well. It means that as they lose control of oil fields in the Middle East, they gain control of completely new areas of oil production in places like Nigeria and the North Sea and Alaska. So that's one part of the story that I try and give a slightly different history of in the book. How does that all relate to the history of neoliberalism? There's one fairly simple thing, which is that the oil companies suddenly find themselves awash in vast additional profits. And one of the things they spend a little bit of their additional profits on is the funding of these new things in Washington called think tanks.

And that'd always be one or two little organizations that like to sort of push right wing policy views on things. But that was not a big part of intellectual or political life before the 1970s, suddenly you have organizations in Washington and a little bit elsewhere in New York that are enormously well-funded, with oil money being by far the biggest source of money, begin promoting an entirely different view of how political financial relations should be organized, very different from the post-war, much more sort of welfare-based, social democratic-based kinds of settlements where workers as well as owners of business were all meant to benefit.

Instead, we can't afford that anymore. We've got to tighten our belts because the price of oil has gone up so much. And that belt tightening, that paying of a price is going to be borne by workers and not by the owners of companies or the owners of capital. And I think the rise of those think tanks sort of pushing this neoliberal view is a very important element in all that. There are other elements as well. You know, one could talk, again, one could resume the story about Bretton Woods and the transformation of the financial system. You know, another way of thinking about transformations over that period is around a sort of issue of financialization, which could be related to the same set of transformations.

Yeah, I mean, I think that you kind of make it explicit at one point that at this time, the oil companies, they just simply needed new means of generating income increases. One of those was opening up new markets, for example, selling arms, quite literally. And they did this under the pretense of this idea that we didn't explore in the last segment, but I should have, the imperative for security and the rise of talking about securing oil as a way of, you know, creating sort of geopolitical alliances, because this obviously took place in the context of the Cold War. And so selling arms was a very useful means of both laundering this idea of securing access to oil and also returning dollars back to America. So, you know, that was one way. And then, you know,

quite literally, another way was for, and oil companies eventually started arguing for this, for abandoning the Bretton Woods system entirely. I guess we didn't quite really go through point by point how this occurred. But I think the important part is that oil companies were central to the process of abandoning and dismantling Bretton Woods. Yeah. I mean, the oil companies, I mean, I said at the beginning when we were talking about futures markets, oil is significant because it's a major source of energy. major source of energy, but oil is equally significant because it's a major source of profits because it can be sold at many multiples of the cost of producing it. Right.

It's always sold at the price that corresponds to wherever is the most expensive place to produce it in the world. And that sort of sets the marginal price. And then everybody else ups their price to that same level. But everybody else is still producing it at a fraction of that price. And that enormous difference between the cost of production and the amount you can sell it for means that oil, you know, we think of it as this strategic thing that we need for transportation and industry and so on. But it's this strategic thing for making extraordinary high levels of corporate profits.

And the oil companies, until the rise of IT, were by far the biggest corporations and the biggest sources of profits and completely separate from their role in supplying a source of energy, although the two are interconnected. So, of course, that also means that they have a very close relationship to large banks. And each of the major oil companies actually sort of had a bank that it was either originally tied to the founding of or that it worked closely with and so on. And as you say, one of the things that happens with the shift in the way oil is priced and controlled in the beginning of the late 60s and through the 70s is that as a result of

those crises, the producer states, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others, are ending up with enormous income themselves. And they don't quite know not only what to do with that because there's far more money coming in than they can spend. And one of the things they're encouraged to do is to spend it all on arms. So part of the book tries to look at that history of arms and then the doctrines of security that are sort of manufactured around this as if there was some threat to this system of oil production from the Soviet Union or somewhere,

which is entirely manufactured and bogus. The only threat the Soviet Union represents through all this is it might somehow find a way to export its own oil to the West and threaten this system of sort of monopoly and control. So the banks become involved in this and then the arms manufacturers and most, you know, very large number of the largest American manufacturing corporations become or have been arms manufacturers. So they get tied into this. So that's another part of the story that the book

attempts to tie into this sort of rethinking. And, you know, don't take for granted the notion of, you know, security and a threat to oil and how this is, you know, something very vulnerable to some military threat from elsewhere. The threat was to this extraordinary system of profits and this extraordinary system of bank-created finance that was tied in with those profits and so on, and that's what was vulnerable. And that's what had to then be reinforced by the creation of think tanks and the funding of experts who would reproduce this language about security and vulnerability

and how the very future of the West is made vulnerable by what might happen politically in the Middle East. Right. I mean, I should have mentioned this at the top of the show, but just this week, I mean, it's really shocking or jarring, maybe, to listen to this history and then to fast forward to the current day. I mean, obviously, the modern, the current oil companies are extremely profitable still. But just this week, I don't know if you saw this, but Exxon was kicked off the Dow Jones. Jones, which, I mean, you know, before the pandemic started, I think maybe in January or February, there was this report released. I think it was by the government of Finland. Did you see this about how it was?

I think it was the Geological Survey of Finland. It was part of their Ministry of Economic Affairs. But essentially, the gist of it was that oil is becoming uneconomical to exploit and that it could derail the global financial system. I mean, it's fascinating to, like I said, it's almost jarring to go from the world that we were just describing to the one now that seems to demonstrate that while oil is obviously very profitable for the people that produce it, it is becoming increasingly expensive to produce it.

What accounts for that? I mean, and what might that spell for the future? I mean, obviously, there's still plenty of oil out there, but why is it becoming more expensive to produce? I think maybe an even more important question is, why is the oil industry so laden down with debt? Well, it's a big question, and there's many different aspects of it. When we think of the oil industry, we think, first of all, of the huge multinational firms that historically have controlled so much of it, ExxonMobil

and Chevron and Shell and BP and Total and France and so on. They face a problem, which is that they are constantly interested in finding new sources of oil. But the new sources of oil, they've mostly been known about for a long time, but they haven't been exploited because they're places where it's more and more difficult and more and more expensive to produce it. it. So it's deep offshore or it's in the Arctic or it's this tight oil that has to be produced by fracking, which is not so much expensive as it were geologically. But the trouble is the well only produces for a year or two and then there's very little oil flow. So unlike traditional oil wells that might flow for 10, 20, 50 years. So the oil they can find is mostly very, very expensive oil. At the same time, the Saudis, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Russians are

still the biggest other oil producers are still producing from traditional wells that are much, much cheaper to produce from. So there's not necessarily an overall shortage of oil. There's a shortage of oil from which you can make very large profits. And that's one of the things that's facing the oil companies. And one of the ways you see that, not so much among those big firms, but the smaller firms that were created or expanded by developing the fracking of oil in the U.S., is that that industry as a whole, the tight oil industry, has still never made a profit.

Individual firms have made a profit. Firms that speculated successfully in land and sold on the leases to others made a profit, firms that speculated successfully in land and sold on the leases to others made a profit. But as a whole, the capital that has been sunk into producing this boom in American oil supply has actually been a loss. So it's actually hard as an industry as a whole to make money once oil becomes that much more difficult to produce. The other problem, of course, is the climate catastrophe and the switch away from oil, which as oil becomes more expensive to produce and as the oil begins to, the price continues

to creep up again from $40 to $ 50 and maybe $60 a barrel, it becomes more and more economical to switch to other sources of energy, particularly as that is driven by the policies of governments in industrialized countries everywhere other than the U.S. that is pushing very hard to decarbonize the world economy within 30 years. So as it were, the oil companies are being pushed from both sides by this difficulty of finding cheap oil and the move away from dependence on oil, particularly for transportation and for heating. So that's the kind of bind they find themselves in.

You can see the results of that with the European oil companies. They've mostly, more and more of them are announcing a transformation into not being oil companies anymore. Differing degrees. The Italians, the French, BP and so on, they don't want to abandon oil because they still make big, good profits, but they're announcing they're becoming energy companies and they're going to buy wind farms and things like that. The American companies, much less so. They seem much more wedded to oil, partly because the political situation is different in the U.S. Yeah, it seems that this notion of energy independence is still very prominent in American politics.

I mean, it's been seared into our minds in many ways in the same way that anti-communism has. You know, so I'm from southeast New Mexico, but that is the Permian Basin. Yeah. And every few years they discover a new shell play. And, you know, I think just in December of last year, they discovered a new one and it was massive. Trump made a big announcement of it. And then three, four months later, you've got a complete bust. People unemployed.

You can walk around town and see, you know, banks essentially, you know, coming to take assets and stuff like that. You know, so I mean, it's a process that is very real, but it is so sort of disorienting to hear on one hand, like we've got more oil than we know what to do with. And then on the other hand, like, well, we can't make any money doing it. So, yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, they're two sides of the same coin because they're, and part of the reason you get this oscillation between sort of abundance and fortunes being made and then crisis and people either going out of business if their companies or you know the thousands and thousands who lose their jobs and that's because as it were we're sort of working on this edge where it's hard to find cheap oil. You can only find, and therefore, oil supply becomes restricted and the price starts to go up. That makes much more expensive oil financially viable to produce. It's produced and you get something like the fracking boom.

But then of course there's too much and the price collapses. And if that coincides with either financial collapse as in 2007 or with one introduced by a global pandemic, that complicates the situation as well, on top of the move away from oil being pushed by the climate emergency. And, you know, it's an interesting thing about the climate emergency because the climate emergency, of course, is asking us to think about now, but much more so to think about where we'll be in 20 years and 30 years' time. And, you know, the thing about the business world and about profit-making is that it always seems to be so focused on the present, in where profits are going to come from now and not thinking about and not worrying about a generation from now when, you know, on the way we're heading now,

we'll be dealing with, you know, a climate emergency that threatens the very possibility of the kinds of lives we have. So there seems to be a sort of disjuncture between the very short-sighted nature of businesses like oil companies and the long-term thinking needed by things like the climate emergency. But actually, I think that's where the point of vulnerability comes. Because while it's true that a business wants profits this year and not in 30 years' time, and is sort of in that sense short-sighted. They also exist mostly to sell shares to shareholders. And the value of the share for the shareholder is actually only partially based on this year's profits. It's actually an expectation of future profits over the next five, ten years.

profits over the next five, 10 years. And that's actually where I think oil companies in particular are vulnerable to political pressure. And I think some of the most useful political organizing against oil companies has begun to look at, okay, let's actually read their annual reports, or let's actually read their filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission and say, what are those filings and what are those reports actually based on in terms of carrying on business as usual, then you can begin to expose that and show how absurd the assumption is that we'll still be as dependent on oil 10 years from now and 20 years from now as we are today. And you can open up in a certain way that point of, that very specific almost sort of technical point of vulnerability

in a way that sort of parallels what we were talking about before about sort of looking for where the vulnerable point is in some complex operation. I think it is actually in the way in which the climate emergency is forcing us to calculate where things will be 10 and 20 years from now in a way that never used to be the case. Well, I mean, I think it's very important to think about because it's entirely likely that we are entering into a period of extreme global turbulence, especially if we are transitioning away from this specific fossil fuel. You know, I think that your book shows, I mean, among many things, it shows that in those moments of transition, there are, as you were saying, there are vulnerabilities that can be exploited and that can be used for political claims and contestations of our own. And I think that, you know, it depends on what day of the week. Some days I feel very

optimistic. Some days I feel very pessimistic that that may not be happening anytime soon. But, you know, we don't have a whole lot of time left. So, but I kind of just wanted to maybe get your thoughts on, this is purely conjecture and speculative, but like, let's say that capitalism does survive a transition from one fossil fuel to whatever's coming next. We want to call them renewables or whatever. Um, what, what would you tell future, uh, environmentalists, leftist uh workers etc for um what would you tell them about how energy politics can create space for political development for political liberation um and so on well it's difficult when one is sort of talking about this horizon of 10 or 20 years to sort of point to specific things you know to do or not to to do or to look for or not to look for.

I mean, I think the first thing I would say is to understand just how important energy has been to the history of democratic politics, of left politics, of creating forms of social welfare that have been fundamental to the improvement of collective life for many, many millions of people in the course of the 20th century. That, yes, that came out of social movements and it came out of political parties and labor movements and so on. But the vulnerability of large industrial economies to the question of where their energy comes from and how their energy is produced and who controls that, that flow of energy has been absolutely critical to the ability to have those achievements or not. over the next two, three decades going through an extraordinary energy transition, then thinking about how sources of energy are going to be controlled is really thinking about the future of democratic politics in a fundamental way. So it's not that I can sort of say, well, as long as you sort of build that kind of energy system,

you'll have that kind of politics because there's too many factors. infrastructures, the route of a pipeline, the whole thing. These are not just, you know, they may be environmental concerns, but they are also and fundamentally democratic concerns. They're concerns about having a form of politics in which voices get heard that otherwise nobody in power has to listen to. So that's the sort of, for me, was the most general lesson I learned from writing a book about the history of oil politics and energy politics, that there's so much that's connected in there in the question of energy. And that doesn't mean, oh, once we have renewables as the largest source of energy, there'll be no problem anymore because there's many ways to organize the ownership and control

of wind farms, of transmission systems, and so on. But that's where I think a lot of the politics lies in thinking about where a political system is vulnerable to forms of democratic accountability. Well, Tim, I think that pretty much covers it for me. I mean, I've really enjoyed talking to you, picking your brain. I'm sorry I've been a little all over the place, but it's a complicated story. And I think that if we're talking about transitioning away from oil, we're talking about a massive refiguring of the global financial system.

And when you think about that, then you have to ask, well, how did it get that way? How did oil get to be so tightly interwoven into how the global economic system is structured? And I think that it's important to ask that question because the only way we're going to be able to move past it and create a new world is to understand how the old one was built and how we can take it apart. is to understand how the old one was built and how we can take it apart. And this is one of the reasons why I like your book so much, because it helps us understand how things got to be the way that they are. And so, you know, if I could just encourage everybody to go buy it.

It's called Carbon Democracy. It's from Verso Books, from our good pals over at the Verso Loft in New York but yeah is there anything else you'd like to close out on Tim? No I think I've really enjoyed the conversation I'm working on a new book that

is going to take on some of these stories it'll be out probably in a year or two that is going to take on some of these stories. It'll be out probably in a year or two. That's going to push forward some of these questions, particularly about finance and the relationship between finance and this strange thing called the business firm that has come to sort of govern the way our economic and social lives are run. So I'm still thinking about all these questions, and there will be another volume down the road.

That's great to hear. Well, hopefully by then we'll still be going on as a podcast and we can have you on to talk about it again. I look forward to it. I'm going out on that oil field. Tell me it's a payday over there. I'm going out on the oil field. Tell me it's a payday over there.

Gonna carry my cards and my dice. And I ain't gonna play nothing fair. Gonna carry my old Winchester, my.38 Special II. Gonna carry my old Winchester, my.38 Special II. My 30 ain't special too. Because I don't know what may happen. I may have some shooting to do. I'll play it willy-nilly.

I may carry a bottle of whiskey with me because now I feel.