Oil, Power, and War by Matthieu Auzanneau

Author:Matthieu Auzanneau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

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a  Manufactured in the United States for the first time in 1935, by American chemist Wallace Carothers in DuPont’s laboratory, nylon was used during the war to manufacture parachutes. The Americans made an acronym out of it: “Now you lose, old Nippon.”

b  This idea connected with the hard sciences, in particular the reflections on thermodynamics by physicist Ilya Prigogine (see infra, chapter 30), and subsequently was developed by many unorthodox social science authors, including American anthropologist Joseph Tainter, who had studied the “spiral energy-complexity” concept discussed in chapter 2. We will return to this decisive point in chapters 29 and 30.

c  The United States became crude oil importers beginning in the 1920s.

d  In “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth” (1966), Boulding notably wrote: “The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the ‘spaceman’ economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system.”

e  From the American television series Mad Men, created by Matthew Weiner and produced by Warner Brothers (2007). Mad Men portrayed with panache the state of mind of white America at the beginning of the 1960s, through the history of a fictitious New York advertising agency.

f  In 1973, the French oil company Elf Aquitaine created a subsidiary that later became Sanofi, one of the largest pharmaceutical groups in the world.

g  The major critics of consumer society were far from adolescent: Consider the works of Jean Baudrillard (the inventor of the concept), as well as Guy Debord and, on the side of the early adopters of radical ecological politics, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Herbert Marcuse (Heidegger’s former assistant, the emblematic figure of France’s May 1968), and even the great mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck.

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