Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

From the beginning of Carbon Democracy, Mitchell details how Western (or industrialized) countries and fossil fuel companies are complicit in global subjugation and violence. The mining and transportation of coal created the first urban and industrial centers. These centers still needed food and raw materials, “such as cotton, sugar, rubber and gold” (85). Mitchell notes that trade could not supply Europeans with these items for two reasons. First, rural populations “typically preferred to use their land and labour to produce materials largely for their own needs, making only a small surplus available for export” (16). Second, once a place in the world invented a new technology, this technology was adopted elsewhere.

Coal-based energy did not follow this pattern because it “was both more difficult to emulate and more dependent on not being imitated” (17). Concentrations of large reserves of coal and iron occurred only in a few places around the world. The exponential increase in energy due to coal also gave Europeans a head start compared to other regions. Europeans also had an incentive to ensure that these other regions did not come to rely on coal since they needed these regions to produce their food and other industrial raw materials.