Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Fossil fuels—crude oil, coal, and natural gases—are naturally occurring, high carbon substances which release energy upon combustion. They are created through the decomposition, compression, and heating of dead organisms in the earth’s crust. This process takes millions of years, effectively making them a “non-renewable” energy source. Fossil fuels are a crucial part of global capitalism, trade, currency systems, labor struggles, transportation, infrastructure, colonialism, state geopolitical strategies, war, pollution, and climate change. In 2018, fossil fuels made up roughly 82% of fuel consumption globally.
Coal was capitalism’s “first” fossil fuel, propelling the industrial revolution in eighteenth-century Britain. It had long been used for domestic purposes and manufacturing that required heating, but, as Andreas Malm explains, “For coal to be universalised as a fuel for all sorts of commodity production, it had to be turned into a source of mechanical energy – and, more precisely, of rotary motion” (Malm 2013, 18). Scholars have often thought the steam engine became popular because it was an effective substitute for hydropower during periods of water scarcity. However, in a critical analysis of “fossil capital,” Malm argues that the shift from riverside mills to coal powered steam engines in northern England was not due to scarcity or cost, rather it was a purposeful maneuver by industrialists:
In steam-engine manuals, essays on the factory system, testimonies from manufacturers and other contemporary sources, this is the single most salient motive: steam was a ticket to the town, where bountiful supplies of labour waited. The steam engine did not open up new stores of badly needed energy so much as it gave access to exploitable labour. (33)
Energy could now come from anywhere, and manufacturing regions sprung up on top of coal fields in places like Western Pennsylvania, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Southern Wales, and Silesia. Coal transformed daily life, relations between city and country, and the agrarian countryside itself. Water power actually remained cheaper until 1870, at which point steam engines had long predominated energy production, proving that fossil fuels were a crucial part of the control of labor (31). Malm also suggests that fossil fuels facilitate the creation of value:
Valorisation proceeds through combustion. Fossil capital, in other words, is self-expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels into CO2…One could think of this as the biophysical shadow of Marx’s general formula of capital, coming to the forefront only in the times of unexpected biospheric dusk. (52)
The fossil fuel cycle appears as an epiphenomenon; fossil fuels are one of nature’s free gifts added to the commodity without a second thought—that is, until nature comes fighting back in the form of climate change (“biospheric dusk”). Malm concludes that fossil fuels are best understood as a social relation: they don’t become fuel on their own, nor do they “satisfy subsistence needs. Rather, fossil fuels necessitate commodity production and waged or forced labour as components of their very existence” (17).
Despite the implications of these theories, coal’s role in the history of capitalism is not completely characterized by exploitation and dispossession. Timothy Mitchell has notably theorized the relationship between fossil fuels, political power, and democracy, noting “the ability of organised workers to assemble a political machine out of the networks and nodal points of a coal-based energy system had shaped the kinds of mass politics that emerged, or threatened to emerge the first half of the twentieth century” (Mitchell 2013, 42). However, these nodal points in the “fossil fuel network”—the factory floor, railroads, docks, etc.—were greatly altered with the emergence of oil. Mitchell explains:
From the 1920s onwards, about 60 to 80 percent of world oil production was exported. So much oil was moved across oceans that, by 1970, oil accounted for 60 per cent of seaborne cargo worldwide. Compared to carrying coal by rail, moving oil by sea eliminated the labour of coal heavers and stokers, and thus the power of organised workers to withdraw their labour from a critical point in the energy system. Transoceanic shipping operated beyond the territorial spaces governed by the labour regulations and other democratic rights won in the era of widespread coal and railway strikes. (37-38)
Western powers turned to oil and its smooth transportation as a way to manage democratic politics. Colonial powers and oil companies also purposefully delayed extracting oil from the Middle East (namely in what is now Iran and Iraq), in order to control its price and keep friendly authoritarian regimes in charge.
While coal is still used today (China produces much of it), in the twentieth century the world’s predominant fossil fuel became oil. In his massive history of oil and its politics, The Prize (1991), Daniel Yergin highlights three themes which underlie the story of oil: the expansion of capitalism, oil’s role in national geopolitical strategies, and the emergence of a “hydrocarbon society” (Yergin 2009, xv-xvi). For example, oil changed the nature of the corporation and production at the turn of the century. Standard Oil became one of the first multinational corporations, controlling all aspects of production and processing. Oil also changed the face of war: in the First World War, factories were able to mass produce weapons and ammunition, and merely a quarter of a century after the development of the internal combustion engine, tanks and planes entered the battlefield. Control of oil was a major strategic objective in WWII—Hitler’s drive to oil fields in the Caucasus set the stage for some of the deadliest battles in history.
In the postwar years, energy consumption rose dramatically across the globe. According to Yergin, “Total world energy consumption more than tripled between 1949 and 1972. Yet that growth paled beside the rise in oil demand, which in the same years increased more than five and a half times over” (523). In the US, demand for oil grew with the economy, and as a response to massive labor strikes in the country’s coalfields. Moreover, demand grew with “the transformation of America into an automotive culture” and “the emergence and proliferation of a temple dedicated to the new fuel and the new way of life—the drive-in gasoline station” (192). Oil also facilitated “the industrialisation of agriculture” and “the rise of synthetic materials” during this period (Mitchell, 140-141). While Russia had dominated oil production at the start of the century, and the USSR and Saudi Arabia would lead production by the 1980s, the US was the world’s largest producer in the middle of the century. Panitch and Gindin explain that after WWII, the US
assumed responsibility for overseeing the international oil companies’ control of [oil in the Middle East, and]… the source of European oil supplies was shifted, so that by 1950, 85 percent of Europe’s oil was coming from the Middle East. This preserved American oil for American needs… the nature of postwar economic growth in both the US and Europe led to an explosion of demand for oil. A mobile suburban car culture; the expansion of trucking for mass production and distribution; the growth of commercial aviation; new industries in chemicals, plastics, and fertilizer—all this required more oil, cheap oil, and above all secure oil… The relationship between the American state and US oil companies in this process thus already epitomized “globalization”: US companies producing for markets abroad. (Panitch and Gindin 2012, 103)
The US was therefore not just seeking to control oil for its own consumption but to balance power in international relations during the Cold War. Consequently, fossil fuels became more closely tied to finance. At Bretton Woods, there was a broad consensus that “postwar financial stability, and thus the future of democracy, depended on managing the storage and exchange of key commodities. Increasingly the movement of just one commodity, petroleum, provided the mechanism that stabilised, or threatened to disrupt, the democratic order” (Mitchell, 112). After other currencies were pegged to the dollar, dollars began to outpace gold reserves due to rapidly expanding, fossil fuel driven global trade. However, the value of the dollar survived because “countries had to use the American currency to purchase the essential materials that formed the bulk of international trade, above all oil” (Mitchell, 111). Oil provided the basis for faith in ever expanding growth, and thus underpinned the “economy” as a distinct, recognizable entity.
Fossil fuels also became tied up with movements for self-determination in the global south. On the one hand, the first half of the century had proved that “oil equals power” (Yergin, 212). Yergin explains that on the other hand, “now more than the economics of the marketplace had to be factored into the equation. If oil was power, it was also a symbol of sovereignty. That inevitably meant a collision between the objectives of oil companies and the interests of nation-states, a clash that was to become a lasting characteristic of international politics” (212). Out of this climate of self-determination (not to be confused with democratization), the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded in 1960. OPEC is an international organization of states seeking a united front in policy-making, reducing competition, and setting global oil prices. OPEC countries do not produce most of the world’s oil, but they collectively control a high proportion of its reserves.
In response to American support for Israel during the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, OPEC’s Arab countries raised production taxes and launched an oil-embargo against the US, inducing a price shock. OPEC countries grew wealthy “sitting on petrodollars. OPEC countries were able to send out loans to whoever wanted them, developing countries couldn’t help themselves” (Hobsbawm 474). Furthermore, Yergin explains that “the price shock of 1973 was the rise of a new line of work–oil price forecasting. Before 1973, it had not really been necessary. Price changes had been measured in cents, not dollars, and for many years prices were more-or-less flat. After 1973, however, forecasting blossomed’” (653). This crisis, perhaps what should have been a warning against reliance on fossil fuels, had no effect on consumption. Eric Hobsbawm argues that the events of 1973 (we can also add the 1979 oil shock following the Iranian Revolution) prove that, in a free market society, the effect of multiplying energy costs twelve-to fifteen fold in six years, is not to diminish energy use but to make it more efficient, while encouraging massive investment in new and environmentally dubious sources of irreplaceable fossil fuel. These changes would lower the price again and encourage more wasteful use (570).
Consumer demand for fossil fuels has remained high since the 1970s. However, despite it waning from the public discourse by the end of the century (Yergin, 765), oil returned to the center stage of world politics following 9/11 and wide suspicions that the US invasion of Iraq was ultimately about oil. Above all, fossil fuels are more relevant than ever because of a widespread understanding that climate change is accelerating. Fossil fuels are the physical cause of our crisis, or as Malm shows us, they might rather be considered the social cause (see above). Fossil fuels have long been criticized for pollution—smog, oil spills, and ocean acidification. However, the carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere has raised global temperatures about 2.12 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution, leading to melting ice caps and warming and rising oceans. In conclusion, the eminently political nature of fossil fuels, as well as the nexus between oil and the state that has been described here, continue to be relevant in the context of climate change. In the US, for example, in the wake of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, many states passed critical infrastructure bills, effectively criminalizing protests against oil pipelines and hydraulic fracking sites. There is little doubt that we could “cut global emissions by 7.6 Percent every year for the next decade to meet the 1.5°C Paris target”; to say that oil states/companies will let the collective mobilization necessary for a just transition happen is quite another proposition.
(see Bretton Woods, Crisis, Geopolitics, Extractivism, Nature)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“ALEC’s Attacks on People of Color, Civic Engagement, and Dissent.” ALECAttacks. Center for Constitutional Rights, 2019.
https://www.alecattacks.org/alec-attacks-civic-engagement-and-dissent.
“Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know?” NASA. NASA, May 10, 2021. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996.
Malm, Andreas. “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry.” Historical Materialism21, no. 1 (2013): 15–68. https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-12341279.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2013.
Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso, 2013.
“World Energy Balances 2020: Overview.” iea.org. International Energy Agency, 2020. https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/23f096ab-5872-4eb0-91c4-418625c2c9d7/World_Energy_Balances_Overview_2020_edition.pdf.
Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. London: Simon & Schuster, 2009.