Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Post-carbon Governance
Are we headed toward a more autocratic or democratic future? There's no hard and fast answer; the
outcome may vary by region. However, recent history does offer some useful clues.
In his recent and important topic
Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
,
Timothy Mitchell argues that modern democracy owes a lot to coal. Not only did coal fuel the rail-
roads, which knitted large regions together, but striking coal miners were able to bring nations to a
standstill, so their demands for unions, pensions, and better working conditions played a significant
role in the creation of the modern welfare state. It was no mere whim that led Margaret Thatcher to
crush the coal industry in Britain; she saw its demise as the indispensable precondition to neoliber-
alism's triumph.
Coal was replaced, as a primary energy source, by oil. Mitchell suggests that oil offered indus-
trial countries a path to reducing internal political pressures. Its production relied less on working-
class miners and more upon university-trained geologists and engineers. Also, oil is traded globally,
so that its production is influenced more by geopolitics and less by local labor strikes. “[P]oliticians
saw the control of oil overseas as a means of weakening democratic forces at home,” according to
Mitchell, and so it is no accident that by the late 20th century the welfare state was in retreat and oil
wars in the Middle East had become almost routine. The problem of “excess democracy,” which re-
liance upon coal inevitably brought with it, has been successfully resolved, not surprisingly by still
more teams of university-trained experts—economists, public relations professionals, war planners,
political consultants, marketers, and pollsters. We have organized our political life around a new
organism—“the economy”—which is expected to grow in perpetuity, or, more practically, as long
as the supply of oil continues to increase.
Andrew Nikiforuk also explores the suppression of democratic urges under an energy regime
dominated by oil in his brilliant topic
The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude
. The energy
in oil effectively replaces human labor; as a result, each North American enjoys the services of
roughly 150 “energy slaves.” But, according to Nikiforuk, that means that burning oil makes us
slave masters—and slave masters all tend to mimic the same attitudes and behaviors, including con-
tempt, arrogance, and impunity. As power addicts, we become both less sociable and easier to ma-
nipulate.
In the early 21st century, carbon democracy is still ebbing, but so is the global oil regime
hatched in the late 20th century. Domestic US oil production based on hydraulic fracturing (“frack-
ing”) reduces the relative dominance of the Middle East petro-states, but to the advantage of Wall
Street—which supplies the creative financing for speculative and marginally profitable domestic
drilling. America's oil wars have largely failed to establish and maintain the kind of order in the
Middle East and Central Asia that was sought. High oil prices send dollars cascading toward en-
ergy producers but starve the economy as a whole, and this eventually reduces petroleum demand.
Governance systems appear to be incapable of solving or even seriously addressing looming fin-
ancial, environmental, and resource issues, and “democracy” persists primarily in a highly diluted
solution whose primary constituents are money, hype, and expert-driven opinion management.
In short, the 20th-century governance system is itself fracturing. So what comes next?
As the fracking boom unavoidably fails due to financial and geological constraints, a new en-
ergy regime will inevitably arise. It will almost surely be one mainly characterized by scarcity, but it
will also eventually be dominated by renewable energy sources—whether solar panels or firewood.
That effectively throws the door open to a range of governance possibilities. As mobility declines,
