Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell

Author:Timothy Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
ISBN: 9781844678969
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2011-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Sabotage

While operating as part of an international financial system, and as the energy that made it possible to imagine the limitless growth of ‘the economy’, oil was a fluid that petroleum workers in production fields in different parts of the world recovered from beneath the ground, stored in tanks, processed in treatment plants, pumped into pipelines, loaded onto tankers and transported across oceans. The drilling rigs, pumps, pipelines, refineries and distribution networks of the oil industry were not as vulnerable to stoppages or sabotage as the carbon energy networks of the coal age. Nevertheless, as the Middle East replaced Latin America as the world’s second-most-productive oil region after the United States, the possibilities for local disruption increased.1

Governments eventually came to power in Iraq, Algeria, Syria and Libya that were independent of British and French political influence, while the two American client states, Iran and Saudi Arabia, began attempting to loosen foreign control of their oil. These changes allowed local disputes and disruptions to be built into something more effective. Interrupting or reducing the supply of oil could become an instrument to be used for larger political purposes, aimed at altering the control of oil or changing other aspects of the political order in the Middle East. The construction of this instrument is usually described in terms of the emergence of a new political consciousness: the growth of a more assertive Arab nationalism. Equally important, however, were the practical forms of recalcitrance: the rerouting of oil supplies, the building of new refineries, and the acts of sabotage that made possible the first sustained challenge to the way Western oil companies managed the flow of oil.

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