Mineral Economies

Question 1

Thomas Jefferson

Answer 1

• Republican worldview - civic virtue, denial of luxuries and independent citizenship. The small, self-sufficient farmer was the paragon of virtue. Urban factories would lead to the development of a subservient working class; hence any industrial production should be situated in pastoral rural settings along streams.

Question 2

Josiah White

Answer 2

• Josiah White - “The steam engines spread all over England are said to perform many times over the labor of the entire population of that country. The coal for those engines comes on their canals . . . Canals are the foundation of their wealth.”

Question 3

Mackenzie King, 1918

Answer 3

• Political economist working for Rockefeller to deal with strikes.
• “What might§ not happen, in America or in England, if upon a few days’ or weeks’ notice, the coal mines were suddenly to shut down, and the railways to stop running!… Here is power which, once exercised, would paralyse the… nation more effectively than any blockade in time of war”
• Becomes PM of Canada, implements a welfare state regime.

Question 4

Lewis Mumford

Answer 4

“The effect of introducing liquid fuel… was to emancipate a race of galley slaves, the stokers”

Question 5

James Forrestal, 1948

Answer 5

‘Unless we had access to Middle East oil, American motorcar companies would have to design a four-cylinder motorcar sometime within the next five years’.

Question 6

William D’Arcy

Answer 6

• 1901 - Purchased from the Shah of Persia an agreement that, so long as he proceeded with exploration, the government would allow no other company to build a pipeline to carry oil to the country’s southern shore. This blocked the construction of a Russian pipeline to the Persian Gulf.
• 1903 - outputting 25bpd. (v low, not profitable)

Question 7

Winston Churchill

Answer 7

• Commenting on the deployment of Air Power in Iraq; claiming it would create ’an independent Native State friendly to Great Britain, favourable to her commercial interests, and costing hardly any burden upon the Exchequer’.

Question 8

Henry Morganthau

Answer 8

The new monetary system would ’limit the control which certain private bankers have in the past exercised over international finance’ and drive ‘the usurious money lenders from the temple of international finance.’

Question 9

Josef Hecker

Answer 9

• 1817 - encountered the issues of transport. Secured a contract from the magistrate of Prague for 3000 tonnes of oil at 340 florins per metric tonne. Transportation problems, leaky barrels and transportation costs of 2/3rds that of the price of oil forced him to breach his contract. Others in later years attempted to emulate: with 20 oil pits dug in Borystaw by 1835.

Question 10

MacGarvey

Answer 10

• Canadian oil specialist (1860s), moved to Galicia in 1882; bringing Canadian drilling techniques by 1884. This allowed access to previously unheard-of depths and unimaginable speed. Instead of 20 centimetres, drillers could reach 24 metres in 24 hours, and reached depths of over 1,000 meters, well over the previous limit of 150m.
• Alongside drilling, MacGarvey obtained exploration rights, as well as refineries and factories to repair drills, engines etc. Also produced barrels, storage containers, setup pipelines and stored petroleum for competitors at a high cost.

Question 11

President Diaz of Mexico

Answer 11

In a bid to encourage capitalism in Mexico, Diaz permitted the transfer of the rainforest from the natives to the oilmen through the land laws of the 19th century.

Question 12

Calvin Coolidge

Answer 12

Developing aircraft indicate that our national defence must be supplemented, if not dominated, by aviation. It is even probable that the supremacy of nations may be determined by the possession of available petroleum and its products’ - National Security ethos.

Question 13

Enrico Mattei

Answer 13

New contract to replace 50:50 arrangement, and would add local representation equalling number and power of Western representatives. Iran would receive 50% of gross profits via tax, then 50:50 division of company net profit -> 75% of profits to Iranians. Additionally, ENI would pay costs of exploration; only after discovery would National Iranian Oil Company pay half of costs.

In one blow, Mattei destroyed the system on which the Seven Sisters rested; and offered an organic method to dominate the M.E. 7 days after signing a contract with Iran in 1957, Mattei signed an analogous contract with Libya.

Question 14

Carbon Democracy

Answer 14

• Democracy is conceived as having universal principles.
• Industrialisation transformed agriculture. New demands from cities and urban environments put disproportionate strain on agricultural lands.
• Coal-based mass production was dependent on the ability of colonies to provide surplus land and labour to serve the metropole.
• 19th c. Leading economies situated near high-volume coal reserves (Central and Northern England, South Wales, Ruhr, Upper Silesia, Appalachia). Resources relied on canal networks to transport.
• Channels of energy concentrated power with miners. In US, resulted in 3x more strikes than average. (Did the worker truly know the power of coal?)
• 1889 - Kaiser Wilhelm II concedes on social reform policy despite Bismarckian hardline; also called for international conference (1890) to develop international solution to governance of strikes.
• 1906 - Rosa Luxembourg - argued that workers now had the capacity to incapacitate through the means of a General Strike.
• 1920s - Triple alliance of mine workers, dockers and railwaymen - however broken by Government - GS 1926.
• Oil-related industrial action: Baku (1905); Venezuela (1922/1936); Mexico (1937); Iran (1945-6)
• 1920 - 60-80% of oil was exported. Coal -> mainly domestic -> too expensive to ship.
• Oil transport was flexible - did not necessarily have defined flows (ships would go to a waypoint to receive further instruction). This also denigrated the power of workers.
• TNCs sought new mechanisms to limit the production and distribution of energy - like quotas, price control, limitation of discovery in the ME. TN oil corporations by the 1950s had discovered tools to regulate abundance and scarcity.
• Post-WWII, techniques to transform carbon energy abundance to scarcity:‘National Security’: WWII gave US companies opportunity to wind down production in Arab countries.
• Ibn Saud demanded funds for lost revenues - US responds with lend-lease to make nation not produce oil.
• Encouragement of consumptive culture dependent on ‘extraordinary quantities of energy’.
• V6 engines were replaced with V8 engines as the dream of the middle-class family.
• At the same time, Europeans had perfected four-cylinder cars (Morris Minor, Beetle), and even two-cylinder (Citroen 2CV) and one-cylinder vehicles (Isetta 250)
• American lifestyle, and political arrangements in the ME, helped oil companies to ensure that oil companies kept supply scarce.
• New points of vulnerability: oil wells, pipelines, refineries, railways, docks and shipping lanes in the ME.
• Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company - initially supposed to terminate at Haifa, however in 1946 diverted to Sidon - passing through Southern Syria - fear of Palestine and Zionists.
• Loss of Gold Standard devastating for Europe. Power now dependent on flows of oil. America possessed 80% of world’s gold, due to European need to send gold bullion to the US for arms and oil.
• 1945 - US = 2/3 oil production.
• ERP - $432.5 million to purchase US vehicles. Encouraged building of roads.

Question 15

Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement

Answer 15

• Established an International Petroleum Commission to allocate production quotas and manage prices, much as the International Monetary Fund, created at Bretton Woods, would allocate borrowing quotas and manage the value of currencies.
• Killed by Senate. Preferred existing arrangement: Texas Railroad Commission and local regulators in US to set production quotas and prices to international scheme.

Question 16

Saudi Arabia

Answer 16

• US signed an agreement with King Ibn Saud which exchanged production and marketing of oil for Washington’s support in suppressing militancy. Marshall Plan funded Europe to postpone reconstruction of coalfields + purchase oil supplied from the M.E. But purchased in USD.
• 1955 - British Report - ‘the international ramifications of the oil industry (including its tanker operations) are so large and complex as almost to constitute oil as a currency itself.
• “These seigniorage privileges enabled Washington to extract a tax from every other country in the world, keeping its economy prosperous and thus its democracy popular.”

Question 17

National Income / GNP

Answer 17

• Measure not of accumulation of wealth but of the speed and frequency with which paper money changed hands. Could growth without problem of physical or territorial limits. Oil contributed to new conception of economy:
• Oil declined continuously in price. 1970-> 1/3 of 1920 price. Although consumption increased, cost of energy did not represent limit to growth.
• Due to ease of shipping, oil could be treated as inexhaustible. Cost did not include calculation of reserve depletion. Nor did it account for damage from depletion of energy resources.
• Oil wells and pipelines of M.E. + Political arrangements made possible the idea of Keynesian democracy.
• Paradigm reorganised in 1967-74. Companies began to treat oil as finite. Precipitated by rise of Ba’th in Iraq - developed first non-west oil company.
• West decision to starve region of capital by cutting production in Iraq led to nationalisation of assets.
• Doubling/ tripling costs of oil allowed US to explore opportunity for oil in Alaska - previously too expensive.

Question 18

Royal Dutch/Shell - Venezuela

Answer 18

1914 - General Gomez requests that the refinery is built offshore, on Curacao. Wanted money from oil but not unionisation.

Question 19

US President’s Science Advisory Committee 1965

Answer 19

Humankind has been ‘unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment’. Burning fossil fuels led to injection of CO2 - increased atmospheric CO2 by 25% by 2000.

Question 20

Coal

Answer 20

• Britain - 1820: freed an area of woodland equiv. To surface area of country. Doubled every 20yrs.
• 1912 - Britain exported 1/3 of its coal (accounting for 2/3 of coal export globally). 90% of this went to mainland Europe. Too heavy and bulky to affordably ship; unlike oil.
• Sabotage: Emile Pouget - Le Sabotage - within a year adopted in English to refer to slowdown, work-to-rule and other means of preventing the normal functioning of a critical function.
• ‘With two pennies worth of a certain substance, used in the right way, we can make a locomotive unable to work!’ - French Railwaymen’s union, 1895. One person stopping 3mW of energy is a substantial disruption.
• Solution - industrial democracy - encourage people to join company unions - more direct access to negotiation but banned from joining nationwide unions.
• Post-WWII, national oil strike precipitated the death of company unions in the US, but saw the introduction of productivity as the new science of industrial management.

Question 21

Oil

Answer 21

• With the exception of Russia, no country in 19th c Europe used oil for mechanical power. Typically used for Kerosene lighting, or industrial lubrication.
• Galicia - 1890s - Steam-powered percussion drilling replaced hand-dug wells - accessing deeper layers of oil-bearing rock causing a surge in production. Increased supply threatened large firms controlling European market: Standard Oil and Deutsche Bank
• Baku - 12sq. Mi. In Azerbaijan. Produced 50% world’s oil for brief period. Unrest culminated in 1905 Revolution -> first ‘General Strike’. Oil in Baku more closely represented coal in Europe - Russia lacked coal reserves equiv. To Europeans. 2/3rds of funding came from Britain.
  
  • Russian imperial government responded with Black Hundreds - ultranationalist counter-revolutionary forces which targeted the ethnic diversity in oil fields to cause pogrom.
• Persia - Rights from D’Arcy went to APOC. Development was challenged by flank attack - Deutsche Bank & Shell began digging in Mesopotamia. Also found no market for oil. Persian crude contained sulphur - noxious, not suitable for lighting. Only useful for mechanical purposes, but few used. Forced company to go bankrupt. D’Arcy offered extremely cheap long-term contract which Churchill called a ‘gift from fairyland’. Admiralty purchased 51% of shares. Went through White Paper to avoid scrutiny.
  
  • Churchill saw this as a means to destroy coal miner power in S.Wales. S.Wales produced steam coal, which combined the high calorific value of Anthracite with rapid combustion - only source of fuel for battleships.
  • Churchill drove the change from coal to oil-powered ships. Oil ships could go twice the distance with smaller boilers using oil.
• US - Main global exported in 1880s - Pennsylvania. Standard Oil controlled refineries and pipelines: could dominate sales of Kerosene globally.
• M.E.: Traditional narrative: heroic, enthusiastic men discover oil. Petroleum companies seen as strong enough to monopolise flow. Mitchell Narrative: Corporations drove expansion, companies needs financial and military support to succeed.
• WWI: Industrialised warfare confirmed the importance of petroleum as a fuel for transportation rather than illumination. After the war, this presented the large oil companies with a problem. On the one hand, they could now use the risk of a future war to argue, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had begun to claim, that their efforts to control the global supply of oil were important not for their own profits but for the security of the imperial state.
  
  • The translation of democracy into self-determination enabled the survival of European control, including the control of oil. At the same time, in adopting the principle of self-determination, the imperial powers appeared to be acting with a new idealism.
  • Seemed unlikely Britain would keep Mesopotamia and other occupied states. It remained for four decades. Post-WWII, oil firms controlled M.E. Until 1970s.

Question 22

Dual Mandate

Answer 22

• Mandate Commission comment - European powers claimed a mandate to civilise the native population and to rule the native population in the interests of civilisation. MITCHELL reads ‘interests of civilisation’ as interests of oil co.
• European nations did not want the cost of full colonisation. Instead, leveraged the tools of despotic rule - cheap imperial battalions from India, levying of Iraqi armed force, deployment of air power.
• Second Treaty at San Remo, 1920 - FR + GB to share oil resources of Mosul. Justified through the (unratified) concession agreement with the Ottoman Empire inn 1914 held by the London-based Turkish Petroleum Company.
• Standard Oil broke up the agreement through targeted threats and inciting Iraqi revolt against the British. Standard Oil also stood accused of corroborating with Ataturk to pressure Britain out of market. (Loose)
• Iraq, under Faisal, refused to recognise British Mandate rule.
• By 1922, Cox was already referring to the mandate as ‘out-of-date’. The government amended its mandate from 20 yrs to 4.
• Took several years to decide how to divide Turkish Petrol Company (now Iraq Petrol Company) between parties.
  
  • Red Line Agreement - Major oil companies finalised their shares of Iraq’s oil and extended the consortium’s arrangements for impeding the development of oil to the rest of the M.E., by not agreeing to develop production elsewhere without full consent of all.

Question 23

Palestine - Mitchell

Answer 23

MITCHELL contends that Europe supported Zionism as a means of creating a European settler population through whom it might retain a territorial hold to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Question 24

Bretton Woods

Answer 24

• 1944 - Sets up IMF, International Bank (World Bank)
  
  • Essentially replaced existing financial system with one based on the movement of oil. Gold had encouraged the growth of large private banks which profited from speculation in the value of national currencies. Bretton Woods reforms eliminated the power of bankers to speculate.
  • Gold could no longer work as all gold had been sent to US during WWII. US possessed 80% of world gold reserves. US fixed the value of the dollar at $35/ ounce, with only dollars being convertible. Their own currencies would be tied to the dollar, and thus the American gold monopoly.

Question 25

Routes of Power

Answer 25

• Landscape had to be reorientated to suit energy regime. Canals, pipelines and wires privileged certain people over others. Large swathes of the mid-Atlantic were not served by transport networks - put at economic disadvantage to urban brethren.
• Pollution - although black soot was a sign of progress, there was awareness that coal damaged the landscape, oil contaminated water supplies, pipelines leaked and exploded, and canals would flood fields. These factors limited hunger for mineral energy sources.
• Smith, Malthus, Ricardo: 3 factors of production - land, capital and labour. Subject to law of diminishing returns. Diminishing marginal returns would lead society to a stationary state: the finite supply of land acted as a negative feedback loop that limited the total production of goods and services.
• Behavioural shift - Mineral energy regime transformed the nature of limits. As long as humans accessed more stocks, growth could continue indefinitely. Short term, fuel was infinite. Consumption can be expanded without zero-sum game.
• 1930 - mid-Atlantic dominated by cities and industrial sector was most rapidly growing - eclipsing agriculture and commerce. People could now travel at rapid speeds in settlements of over one million. The required reorientation of how people live, work and play.
• Pennsylvania - 3/4s of world anthracite stock in less than 500sq. Mi. Anthracite is difficult to ignite but burns hotter and cleaner than other fuels. Locations: Lehigh, Schuylkill and Wyoming valleys -> poorly connected to urban centres.
• Transport - moving via wagons expensive. Cost more to transport eighty miles over mainland than to import from Britain. Water viable delivery tool - saves energy. Lehigh river -> better than overland, but unreliable in natural state. Result -> Canals, emulating England.
• Transformation of Lehigh took 30 years.
• Due to the abundance of wood, “poor American farmers could boast of burning bigger fires than could most European nobles.”
• Federal government had little input in the development of transport technologies in the 19th century.
• Scale of production drove price of Lehigh coal down:
• $8.40 in 1820
• $6.50 in 1830 - cheaper than bituminous coal or firewood
• Still required specialised tech - most burners could not withstand the heat which Anthracite could reach.
• By 1860, Philadelphia consumed 500,000 to 600,000 tonnes of Anthracite per annum: half of city consumption.
• Mining Anthracite also saw the expansion of the steam engine. Positive feedback loop.
• 1860 - 1.5million tonnes of coal went to the iron industry.
• LIMITS
• Muscle power still required to extract coal from underground.
• 3 tonnes of anthracite could allow a boat to pull 400 tonnes over 60 miles.

Question 26

Oil - Drake

Answer 26

• Edward Drake -> first person to strike oil.
• Kerosene offered promises of work beyond daylight hours, through efficient and bright artificial lighting
• In Baku, Mesopotamia and Pennsylvania, oil naturally rose to the surface. Amerindians used as medicine.
• Production: 1858-> dozens of b.p.a (barrels per annum); 1862 -> 3 million b.p.a.
• A reliance on organic energy sources for transport presented a powerful constraint to the expansion of the oil industry.
• 1865 -> most oil transported by railcar. Competition between tankers significant.
• Rockefeller -> consolidated control of production, refinement and distribution of oil. Essentially, controlled the flow of oil.
• Van Syckel’s 1865 invention of short-distance oil pipelines allowed oilmen to reach the conclusion that, rather than negotiating with labourers and sharing industry profits, labourers could be replaced with technology.
• Light fractions of oil were simply burned off in 1860s - such as gasoline. Seen as too volatile; and abundance did not encourage efficiency.
• Kerosene was part of the ‘democratisation of light’ in the 19th century.
• Petroleum was a double edged sword in application within industry: high quality lubricants made machines safer, but also sped up the rate at which these machines would work.

Question 27

Electrification

Answer 27

• Electrification - one of history’s most consequential energy transitions. Not immediately convenient however - requires significant investment in infrastructure.
• The combination of prominent financiers and engineers was not sufficient to transform the falling water of the Susquehanna River into a profitable commodity.
• As a commodity, aluminium was extremely expensive prior to electrolysis.
• Landscapes of intensification are characterised by synergistic feedback loops. Hollywood Dam - large quantities of surplus energy - drove the producers to stimulate demand among consumers - which eventually led to demand outstripping supply.
• Henry Ford’s River Rouge Valley - believed that adequate artificial lighting was essential to a productive workforce. Factory consumed as much energy as a mid-size city.
• The building of Holtwood Dam marked a radical transformation in the human history of the Susquehanna River.
• Giant Power: Giant Power reflected a growing belief that electricity had transformative potential. As Pinchot put it: “[Giant Power] is a plan by which most of the drudgery of human life can be taken from the shoulders of men and women who toil, and replaced by the power of electricity.”
• Superpower and Giant Power proposed interconnections that integrated all utilities, not simply pairings of financial convenience.
• Growth in electricity consumption between 1900 and 1930 increased 20-fold.

Question 28

Galicia

Answer 28

• 1900 - the potential of the M.E. Was not known. Mexico and Venezuela were the main producers of oil. Galicia was the third-largest producer in 1909 - @ 2.2m tonnes of crude (5% of world production).
• Oil became part of a narrative of national revival, independence, autonomy and patriotism. Vertical integration of oil is almost essential to be profitable.
• Prior to finding oil wealth, Galicia was not ‘blessed by nature’ - experiencing multiple crop failures. The overwhelming composition of the land was however agricultural.
• Modern accounts of Galicia refer to it as ‘Galician hell’ or ‘Galician Sodom’ - accounting fro the malnutrition and illiteracy of the region
• Contemporary accounts - “eastern European Pennsylvania,” “ Galician El Dorado,” “ Austrian Siberia,” and “Galician California.
• Oil was supposed to be the salvation of Galicia. Oil wealth however failed to bring lasting improvements to the nation.
• 1880s - fields enter maturation and rapid growth. After peaking in 1909, Galician oil underwent a precipitous decline.
• During the years of overabundance, no one had thought to improve the lines of transportation that could move oil from Galicia, where it served little purpose, to the naval base on the Adriatic, where it was desperately needed.
• The land of Galicia was rich but people poor - due to mismanagement and imperial exploitation.
• The value of petrol was not known until much after its discovery. Resultantly, the proper legal framework to manage to the oil was not in place.
• Oil was readily occurring in Galicia - rising to the surface. Typically, it was impoverished Jews who tended to benefit most from surface oil - skimming. Early uses: medical and lubrication.
• Imperial government felt that a policy towards fuel management was not needed.
• Real boost in oil demand came in 1853 with the invention of a new lamp which would burn oil odourlessly and safely.
• Despite domestic enthusiasm in potential and limitless capacity, big business avoided investment.
• Oil investment in Galicia came from foreign powers - growing concern that Galicians did not control their own resource.
• The tension over foreign investment led to debates on whether Galician oil was good for the empire, good for Galicia or good for business.
• Oil production in Galicia was manned by exploited peasants, whose plight received condemnation from civil servants and social critics throughout the empire.
• 1892: “If perhaps in one regard an improvement [in work conditions) begins to appear, then it would be only insofar as one is able to find individual workers who slowly become conscious that they can complain about the occurrence of abuses.”
• Too many companies too concerned with their own immediate gain were working with tools too efficient and productive to unearth as much oil as they could, flooding the market (as well as local rivers) and causing a price collapse that threatened the livelihood of all. In a conference called to discuss the “crisis in the mineral oil industry” in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce in November 1910, the empire’s leading oil experts (including Galician producers and Viennese refiners) met to discuss its causes and remedies. They did not blame nature for this crisis: they knew very well that its causes lay with their own practices (or at least those of their selfish neighbours).
• First, new technologies made it possible to rea§ch oil at previously unreachable depths and record speeds. Second, the increasing number of companies involved stymied attempts to organize producers in a cartel with effectively enforced price controls.
• Unlike the U.S. oil industry, which was controlled by a Standard Oil monopoly, and the Russian industry, where Nobel and the Rothschilds had a firm grip on production, refining, marketing, and export, neither monopolies nor cartels could be successfully established in Galicia. The Galician refining branch was hardly more organized than that of production. In 1910, there were forty-nine petroleum refineries in Galicia, sixteen of which produced less than one hundred tons of refined petroleum a year and thirteen of which produced over one thousand tons of refined petroleum a yearly.
• Foreign interest had led to an increase in the number of companies speculating in oil, companies that, when they did get lucky, could not be convinced to limit their own production for the general benefit of all.
• Producers found it difficult to store oil from deeper reservoirs - resulting in scars to the landscape.
• 1902 - Boryslaw fire - continues for three months.
• 1908 - Oil City - struck by lightning, burst into flames. Became tourist attraction.
• Strikes: poorly timed to be successful. In an era in which overflowing storage tanks led to forced sales and plummeting prices, major producers actually found that an occasional strike could be used to their advantage. Thus there was no real need to bend to worker demands-at least not for the large companies with reservoirs that could hold the oil they could not contain within their wells. This belief was put to the test by the first major oil workers’ strike, which took place in the summer of 1904.
• Austrian empire was reliant on British coal for warships. Wanted to convert to petroleum to reduce dependency. Found the cost of transporting the fuel from Galicia to Trieste was too expensive. Government refused to build a railway to transport fuel, as thought war would be short. Costly mistake.
• A lack of manpower, of water, and of fuel to run the various engines meant that the three hundred-odd wells that were in operation could not be run regularly. Boryslaw’s annual production dropped to 48,380 tons in 1917.
• Resulted in riots for fuel.
• At same time, expansion into submarine warfare doubled demands on oil. Demands exceeded 5000 tonnes/ month. Austria and Romania could only produce 2000 tonnes/ month.
• Forced army to convert back to steam, water-power or electricity “ without consideration for the cost.”
• 1909-11 - production dropped by 58%. Some of this was government induced - artificially raised prices by increasing private and public consumption + using military to suppress workers.
• Since 1910, oil production had periodically fallen, then risen again-from 1921 to 1925 as much as 10 percent giving industry experts cause to believe as late as 1928 that “ the decline in production is thus not yet an unhesitating and hopeless decrease.”
• Not that oil ran out, but was not accessible.
• Hitler’s awareness of German dependency on oil led to experiments to create synthetic oil.

Question 29

Mexico

Answer 29

• Mexican Revolution in 1910 - magnified tensions within industry. Revolution ended in 1920.
• According to geologist DeGolyer, 252 wells had been drilled in the Huasteca by December 31, 1912. The number had grown to 637 by 1915, and to no less than 6,029 throughout Mexico by June 1936.
• The company solution to cleaning oil spillages was simply to set it alight - ‘burning dead oil’. Petroleum spills were numerous and voluminous. Cerro Azul No. 4, for example, the well heaved oil for nine days, causing a gargantuan spill.
• 3 major instances of oil pollution in the Gulf before 1940.
• 1. 1910 - Potrero de Llano no.4 - cascade related an oil slick one hundred miles in length in the Gulf of Mexico.
• 2. Chronic spillage from Puerto Lobos port.
• 3. Sinking of fully loaded tanker San Dunstano, October 1929.
• Seaboard covered in oil for decades - untold ecological damage.
• First oil discovery - ‘Dos Bocas’ - caught fire and burned for 57 days. Estimated 100,000 bpd lost.
• Human loss of life - trying to put out fire
• River: temperature raised to 70DegC. Zooplankton consumed hydrocarbons, resulting in oil entering the food change + causing metabolic damage. Sulphur also lowered the acidity of the water along the shores, devestating pH dependent aquatic life.
• Inflow of workers into Tampico and Huasteca - to serve European demand - saw unprecedented economic expansion. ‘The boom’ was in full swing by 1915. The Golden Lane became extremely wealthy, resulting in new social pursuits - 24/7 bars, theatre, cabaret, imported whiskey, gold, brothels. Also hosted new tech - cars, planes and silent films.
• 1916 - revolutionary syndicalists tapped into nascent nationalism to reaffirm class consciousness and oppose capitalism.
• The politicisation of defiant oil workers resulted in over two dozen walkouts between 1915 and early 1921
• By 1919, workers were totally on the defensive. The red-baiting that started in the United States the year before crossed the southern border in January. An alarmed “special correspondent” from Mexico City “warned” readers that Tampico was “the cradle of bolshevism” in the country. He wrote that red posters announcing the forthcoming newspaper El Bolsheviki were plastered across Tampico walls, while workers awaited the first edition “eagerly.”

Question 30

Power to the People

Answer 30

• 2000 - Britain consumed 6,500x more artificial light than in 1800.
• 1500-1800: little growth in energy consumption; some drop-off in 16th and 18th centuries.
• 1800-1970: Explosion in energy use, except in war and interwar period.
• 1970-2008: Stabilisation in energy consumption per capita.
• First Industrial Rev
• Coal was the basis of the industrial rev. - Permitting transition from organic economy.
• WWI - 4/5 energy from coal. 90% of energy growth in 1820-1910 - from coal.
• Coal - available in ‘punctiform’ manner - small, concentrated supplies.
• Intro of coal did not mean the abandonment of other types of energy - food, water and wind used to unprecedented heights.
• New regime was capital intensive. Individual labourers had little room to expand energy consumption
• Second and Third Industrial Rev
• 1870-2000: Energy consumption up sevenfold.
• Until 1900, oil served <1% of European energy needs.
• WWI - oil share goes to 10%. Most conspicuous breakthrough occurs PW.
• Lethargy in changing to oil was due to sunk costs in facilities to use coal.
• Coal - main provider of energy until 1950 in USA.
• First Industrial Rev - Macro-invasion: steam engine. Second-Industrial Rev: Internal Combustion Engine: meso-innovation.
• Many fewer workers were needed on the oil fields, and they were not working as experts underground like the coalminers, but rather on the surface, where they were easier to supervise and manage. This gave the workers less power in relation to the owners and managers.
• Workers, being smaller and more international, were less able to organise effectively to extract social concessions.
• North Sea gas was discovered in 1910s by UK and Dutch - not important until dash for gas.
• Nuclear power stations are fuelled by a particular type of uranium - 235U. Only 0.7% of the world’s uranium is 235U. Others, like 238U, need to be turned into plutonium before being used.
• Nuclear Energy Agency- 200 years of uranium left.
• Thorium - transmuted to 233U - could provide a solution, but still needs further development.
• Diversification in energy market from 1960, and particularly in 1970s. Wind, geothermal, solar.
• 2008 - back at the same carbon to energy ratio as in 1860s.
• 1870s saw rise of internal combustion engine (ICE bloc) and electricity.
• Flaws with early combustion engines: difficult to start, could not climb hills. Engine shake caused damage to the car.
• 1890 - 4HP engine weighed 1 tonne - 250kg per 1hp. With pneumatic tires -> 40hp - 7kg per hp.
• Electric cars invented in 1842, but were limited by distance. ICE took prominence with 1895 Paris-Bordeaux race.
• 15 million model Ts produced between 1908 and 1927 - first ‘affordable’ (loose) car.
• Transformers - facilitated wider transmission of electricity - permitted transportation of energy at high voltage reducing energy loss. Electrification was widespread among the Western states by 1930s.
• Phases of electricity: one - substitute for lighting and cooking. Two - market widening as prices fell and infrastructure matured. A further phase occurred with the microelectronic revolution in the 1970s, which saw the rise of the semiconductor.
• Rate of development - the space required for 2,300 semiconductors in 1971 would provide 35 million semiconductors by 1993.

Question 31

Consuming Power

Answer 31

• 1700 - US pop. 2x every 25 years.
• Replacement of iron by steel for agricultural work increased US productivity in terms of muscle power. Removing Amerindians provided access to energy locked in forests and streams.
• The American industrial transformation was based on muscle and water power.
• During 1800s, power of water supply became increasingly evident.
• Coal-driven industry was to prove a central factor in the industrialisation of the midwest, which had far less accessible water power than New England, New York, or Pennsylvania. There were few rapidly falling streams, and the huge Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri rivers were difficult to dam but ideal for shipping coal.
• The idealised world that Americans wanted to build with steam power was made visible at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, which attracted almost 10 million people-more than any international exposition in Europe.
• Monopoly or oligopoly was also common in technologically complex industries. Andrew Carnegie consolidated most of the steel industry in one corporation. Other entrepreneurs integrated the electrical industry, which grew from a few telegraph supply firms in 1 870 to a $200 million industry in 1900. The fifteen sizeable electrical corporations that had emerged by 1885, under the leadership of inventor-entrepreneurs such as Thomas Edison and Elihu Thomson, by 1892 were merged into just two companies: General Electric and Westinghouse.
• Workers, recognising the dangers monopoly posed, sought to unify their muscle power and their skills in large organisations that cut across work divisions-most notably the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869 by nine tailors. In 1886, after the Knights won a railway strike against Jay Gould, their membership reached 700,000.
• The subdivision of labor was described as early as 1776 in Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations. At Ford, however, this idea was carried much further than anywhere else before. Managers carefully timed each job so that it could be subdivided into many small operations of nearly equal duration. A worker’s job was reduced to repetition of a precise task that often lasted considerably less than a minute.
• The high-energy society was increasingly a white-collar world. Few people got their hands dirty, and muscle power had all but disappeared. Just as high-energy farming eliminated most of the farmers, high-energy manufacturing ended many industrial jobs. Computer-guided machine tools became important in production in the 1950s, performing jobs such as welding car bodies faster and more accurately than human beings could.
• There was a n unmistakable emphasis o n progress, on subduing nature, and on using energy to achieve both. Sheer power was on display in NASA’s Space Park, where visitors could see Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, a lunar excursion vehicle, an X-15 rocket-powered airplane, and, towering over the whole ensemble, full-size Thor-Delta, Atlas, and Titan 11 rockets.
• GE Progessland pavilion emphasised “ progress through electric power” and “the wonders of atomic energy.” The first was illustrated by a series of playlets starring Disney “ audio-animatronic” figures, who showed how the American house had been transformed since the nineteenth century. GE’s Medallion City was a “ real all-electric city,” and its “ Mammoth Sky-Dome Spectacular” used the “biggest projection screen in the world” to depict “ the epic struggle of men to control Nature’s energy.”
• 1970 -
• Prior to the crisis, evident US could not keep supply up with demand. Low prices had meant the no. Of US drilling rigs had declined steadily since 1955, hitting a nadir in 1970.
• Worldwide, oil industry running at 100% capacity.
• Industry Week carried a long feature story on the energy-supply problem, declaring: “For decades the US has ignored its utility bills. We have had a national energy policy: keep it cheap. We implemented that policy through regulatory distortion of free-market relationships. “
• Southern California Edison sent out thousands of copies of a 20-page booklet, titled The Energy Crisis, advocating nuclear power as the “ solution.” In 1973 five national trade associations, representing gas, oil, electricity, coal, and atomic power, drafted a joint statement warning that “the energy problem is continuing to worsen” and that “the vast majority of Americans do not yet realise there is a problem.”
• 1972 - oil prices began to climb as a result of shortages and price hikes imposed by OPEC.
• The embargo was imposed on the United States in retaliation for its having helped Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The major oil companies reallocated supplies from other sources, but shortages were widespread, gasoline lines long, and prices high.
• In response, Nixon announced a $10 billion “ Project Independence,” a research and development program modelled on the production of synthetic rubber during World War II.
• Ford, like Nixon, failed to rethink demand and focused almost entirely on supply. He too refused to lift the price controls on interstate shipment of natural gas that had been imposed in the 1950s. Ford wanted “ 200 major nuclear power plants, 250 major new coal mines, 150 major coal-fired power plants, 30 major new oil refineries, 20 major new synthetic fuel plants, the drilling of many thousands of new oil wells, the insulation of 1 8 million homes, and construction of millions of new automobiles and trucks that use much less fuel.”
• Another energy shock came in 1 979, during the Carter presidency, when Iran cut off its oil. This fourth stage made the public more angry and bitter. The economy suffered through simultaneous inflation and stagnation, which normally do not occur together.
• In the fifth stage, which came during the first term of Ronald Reagan, OPEC proved unable to keep some of its members from overproducing. New oil fields were being developed in Alaska, in the North Sea, and in Southeast Asia, and proven reserves began to rise. Prices dropped. In retrospect, most Americans came to believe that the crisis had been brought on by the willful actions of oil sheiks and Iranian revolutionaries. The hostage episode at the end of the Carter administration seemed final proof that the United States had fanatical enemies a broad who were responsible for its domestic woes.
• Throughout the 1970s Americans increased their energy use. For example, electricity consumption increased by 50 percent. This was down from the 100 percent growth of the 1960s, but still a remarkable rise for a people convinced they were suffering cutbacks.
• At the end of the decade the average car was being driven 12 percent less and 6 miles per hour slower and getting 15 miles per gallon instead of 13.
• But the number of cars had shot up during the decade, and both the consumption of gasoline and the total number of miles driven increased 20 percent. Between 1969 (just before the crisis) and 1983 (just after), the number of miles driven by the average American household rose 29 percent. There were 39 percent more shopping trips, and the distance travelled on these trips increased by 20 percent. People were driving further because they wanted to shop at the enormous enclosed malls that were spreading across the nation, while downtown areas withered. They were driving more because new houses were being built further out in the country.
• In 1973, before the crisis, public discourse was mostly focused on three other matters: ecology, the Vietnam War, and the Watergate affair.
• American automobile manufacturers went even further: they blatantly ignored the energy crisis. The energy crisis caught them technologically unprepared, and with advertising campaigns that had no resonance in the suddenly changed economic environment. In the 1973 model year, of course, they could do nothing about their products’ fuel economy. Locking gas caps were suddenly a popular option, yet as late as December 1973 most auto advertisements stressed beauty, price, and big engines and were silent on the energy crisis.
• By the 1990s the energy crisis had been largely forgotten. Ubiquitous energy had been translated into unending needs.

Question 32

The Age of Oil

Answer 32

• Ancient utility: waterproofing ships, hydraulics, asphalt for roads.
• Remerged in 1850s for Kerosene lighting.
• 1880s - Rockefeller controlled 90% of US refineries and pipelines, owned the vast majority of tank cars for road and rail transport.
• Able to achieve monopolistic control through Trusts
• Rockefeller and his associates had to establish one or more companies in each state where Standard Oil had industrial activities. Eventually, the major shareholders of those companies had to transfer their shares to a Board of Trustees based in New York; the latter calculated the value of each individual share package against the overall value of the Group’s companies’ shares, and then assigned each shareholder a proportional quantity of trustee certificates.
• Rockefeller held the controlling stake of the Standard Trust - at 27%. With the shares of his brothers, this rose to 40%.
• Faced international competition in 1880s from Russia - Rothschild and Nobel.
• 1890 - rise of Royal Dutch to challenge Standard Oil hegemony, which had discovered oil in Eastern Sumatra.
• 1890 - US - whereas Standard Oil hegemony lay with production in Western Penn., centre of production was gravitating towards southwest, towards Texas.
• Spindletop - Texas - largest discovery of oil. The Spindletop gusher blew for nine days at a rate estimated at 100,000 barrels (16,000 m3) of oil per day. Unfortunately, wildcatters assaulted the new El Dorado, torturing it by drilling too many holes too fast, such that the oilfield’s internal pressure was quickly exhausted. By the end of 1902, Spindletop was incapable of producing oil; until new techniques saw a revival in 1925.
• 1911- Standard Oil broken up into 30 independent companies. Milestone in the history of the antitrust movement and cemented the association in the mind of the global public between the oil industry and everything that was sinister and secretive in modern industrial society.
• From Standard Oil came Exxon, Mobil. Chevron, Amoco.
• Monopoly and oligopoly are guiding forces in oil industrial behaviour.
• 1900 - 200 byproducts of crude had entered daily use.
• 1882 - Electric bulb - challenged kerosene predominance; thankfully ICE kept oil hopes alive.
• 1920s- Ford held 50% of world market share; 60% in US. GM absorbed Ford’s market share by offering diversification - different colours, accessories and options (Radio).

Question 33

Britain and Oil

Answer 33

• Britain had a monopoly on hard smokeless coal used for maritime endeavours. Moving to oil meant sacrificing self-sufficiency.
• Knox D’Arcy concession agreement: £40,000 + 16% of net profits, and four gold shillings per tonne of oil sold.
• D’ Arcy’s venture was also absolved from paying any kind of tax to the Persian authorities, including income tax. This milestone agreement would become the model for all subsequent oil concessions in the Middle East for five decades.
• 1914 Churchill launched his ultimate assault, proposing the acquisition of a 51 percent stake in BP for 2.2 million pounds. On June 17, 1914, the British parliament approved Churchill’s proposal by 254 votes to 18.
• This complex architecture rendered BP an oxymoron, notably a state-controlled enterprise with a private soul and mission.
• France imitated the British example – Raymond Poincaré conceived and promoted the establishment of a national oil company funded by private capital. Led to the birth of Compagnie Francaise de Petroles (CFP) – today, Total.
• Italy – 1927 – Mussolini govt established Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli (AGIP-now incorporated into Eni).
• WWI saw the emergence of Naphtha, gasoline and diesel as leading fuels for moving people, armies, airplanes and naval fleets throughout the world.
• Senate inquiry begun in 1916 suddenly shook its sense of certainty about the future of oil.
• In its final report, the Senate stated that most of the American oilfields had already passed their peak production, were in a phase of rapid depletion and were likely to be exhausted within twenty-five years according to the most optimistic view.
• It was not the first time such alarms had been sounded, but the authority of the institution making the charge gave it rock-solid credibility and assured its worldwide dissemination. A flurry of additional gloomy predictions followed, and in 1919 even the head of the prestigious U.S. Geological Survey delivered his no-exit verdict: American oil would run out in nine years!
• Everything conspired against optimism. Worldwide consumption of oil products had risen by 50 percent between 1914 and 1918, just when war damages and the Bolshevik Revolution were constraining oil supply from Russia, which was finally curtailed by the revolutionary government’s 1919 decision to nationalise the whole industry.
• As concern with the supposed end of oil grew, President Calvin Coolidge established the Federal Oil Conservation Board in 1924, a decision he explicitly justified by linking future oil needs with national security, as Churchill had done ten years earlier.
• Partition plan was confirmed in the San Remo Conference (1920). In this, Britain installed an important clause – stipulating “any company developing oil in Mesopotamia should be under permanent British control”. A concession was made to France, who was granted a stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC).
• TPC was dominated by BP (50%), Shell (22.5%) and Deutsche Bank (22.5%)
• Plan derailed by revolts throughout Mesopotamia
• After several years of confrontation, in 1928 an agreement was finally reached. BP, Shell, Total, and the American predecessors of ExxonMobil combined, became equal partners of Turkish Petroleum Company (later renamed Iraq Petroleum Company), each one with a 23.75 percent stake in the company.
• The father of the Iraqi oil saga, Calouste Gulbenkian, succeeded in retaining its 5 percent stake, and also convinced his partners to include in the venture’s bylaw a clause committing each of them not to initiate without the others’ consent any individual oil operation in countries of a large portion of the Middle East, spanning from current Turkey to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain (but excluding Kuwait, Iran, and Egypt). For making clear what the concerned area was Gulbenkian himself took a map and delimited the area in red ink, thereby leaving to history his anticompetitive device as the “ Red Line Agreement.
• The case of Iraq marked the beginning of a rush that would place seven major Western oil companies-later to be known as the “Seven Sisters” ‘’ -in control of all Middle Eastern petroleum by the early 1930s.

Question 34

What advancements were made in oil?

Answer 34

• 1900 - techniques rudimentary - little geological kn.
• Refining techniques poor - less than 50% of barrel of crude used.
• Science + oil = innovation. Anticline theory - revealed natural gas, oil and water trapped together in subsurface porous rock
• Nearly 70% of all oil discoveries - anticline formations.
• Stratigraphy- subsurface analysis.
• Second recovery (pumping natural gas into reservoir)
• Seismic prospecting: using depth charges to map the subsurface based on reflected energy waves
• Thermal cracking - 1913 - breaking long-chain hydrocarbons into short-chain. This saw gasoline retrieved from crude rise from 19% to 39% between 1900 and 1929.

Question 35

Detail relations with Israel

Answer 35

• The leaders of America’s postwar foreign policy all strongly opposed the birth of a Jewish state within the boundaries of British-ruled Palestine. Key figures like Secretary of State George Marshall, Secretary of Defence James Forrestal, George Kennan, the head of the State Department’s newly created policy planning staff and the architect of the Doctrine of Containment, the Chiefs of Staff, and even the newly created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) believed that the only American priority in the Middle East should be the special relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil producers, that required America to reject Jewish demands on Palestine.
• America’s Middle East policy was thus born out of a contradiction, and evolved for decades without resolution. Moreover, the traditionally unstable region became involved in the tensions of the Cold War, fuelling America’s obsession with a perceived Soviet design to penetrate the area and control its oil by exploiting the opportunities offered by Arab nationalism. Yet it was not an Arab country, but Iran, to first test the postwar oil order in the Middle East.

Question 36

Detail situation with Iran

Answer 36

• 1949 - A group of members of the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) led by Mossadegh proposed to nationalise BP’s assets and operations in Iran.
• All those who assisted Iran in producing and exporting oil, as well as those who bought Iranian oil, would be considered accessories to a crime punishable under international law. Western oil companies formed a common front with BP and took part in the “oil blockade,” which worked well. Iran’s crude production dived from 650,000 barrels per day in 1950 to 20,000 bpd in 1 953, while oil export revenues dropped from over 400 million dollars in 1950 to less than 2 million in the period from July 1951 to August 1953. As a result, the country lurched toward economic collapse.
• The British government never really considered any option other than showing the Iranians who the boss was, a hard-line position dictated by the hawkish foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, who also tried to support a covert operation to bring down Mossadegh.
• British, with CIA support, sponsored Operation Ajax - to removed Mossadegh from power via coup d’etat.
• A dictatorial regime replaced the democratic one- tragic mistake for US FP – tarnished credibility as anti-colonialist country. Britain impacted most – lost absolute control of Iranian oil.

Question 37

Detail facts about the Golden Age

Answer 37

• 1948-1973 - global oil consumption increased by sixfold. (1948 - 9.3m bpd, 1973 - 56m bpd)
• US - consumption 3x. Elsewhere - 11x.
• 53m -> 250m cars between 1950 and 1973.
• 1960 - Venezuela, Saudi, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait -> OPEC.
• After OPEC, Iraqi oil nationalised.
• Nasser - pointed out the potency of the oil weapon.
• 1958 - UAR formed - attempt at united Arab nation between Syria and Egypt.

Question 38

What is the Organic Regime?

Answer 38

• work is synonymous with personal labour - muscle power. Even in flour watermill, muscle still needed to unload and hoist grain. JONES - represents Malthusian world of direct linkages between land, population and production.

Question 39

What is the photosynthetic economy?

Answer 39

Prior to 1800, the needs of humans were met by renewable, organic sources. By 1997, 400 years worth of biomatter would be required to service the global economy.

Question 40

Describe Mitchell’s version of Democracy

Answer 40

Can refer to ways of making effective claims for a more just and egalitarian common world. Or it can refer to a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world.

Question 41

What is an energy-type switch?

Answer 41

The transition from one main supplier of energy to another.

Question 42

Tim Mitchell

• What does Mitchell critique?
• How are new avenues of power revealed?
• What is important about mass democracy?
• What could be said of Middle Eastern refineries?
• What is the nature of coal supply?
• What does the producer seek to avoid?
• Why did Britain remain in Iraq?
• What did oil companies want?
• What did Britain use in Iraq?

Answer 42

• Critiques the ‘oil curse’ of the ‘rentier state’ - petrodollars do not account for how the production, distribution or utility of oil account for changes to the nature of authority in Gulf states.
• Looking at flow/ distribution and concentration of energy, new pathways of power are revealed.
• Age of mass democracy aligns with the consumption of non-renewables.
• Although the oilfields, pumping stations, pipelines and refineries of the Middle East became sites of intense political struggle, they did not offer those involved the same powers to paralyse energy systems and build a more democratic order.
• Transition from wood to coal required: steam power and iron.
• Whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an electricity network, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns.
• In both the coal and the oil industries, producers always sought to avoid competition. Competing with rival firms over prices or market share destroyed profits and threatened a company with ruin. Oil companies faced a much larger difficulty in avoiding competition. With the advent of the bulk oil tanker in the 1890s, it was no longer enough to control production and distribution in only one region. Solution -> Sabotage, based on methods used in coal age.
• By connecting human combat to much greater stores of energy, machines created new powers of action, greatly extending the physical limits of human and animal power.
• Argues that Britain remained in Iraq for four decades post-WWI due to oil.
• Oil companies wanted to slow development of oil industry to under the development of egalitarian political claims.
• After the First World War, Britain had turned the doctrine of self-determination into a means for manufacturing a weakened but cost-effective mechanism of indirect rule in Iraq, securing for the handful of major international oil companies control of the region’s oil.

Question 43

Christopher Jones

• What was important in energy transitions?
• How can we understand dependence?
• What happened to the Mid-Atlantic population?
• What was oil?
• What did Jones conclude?

Answer 43

• Transport was critical to energy transitions. Anthracite coal in eastern Pennsylvania and oil in western were removed from where most people lived.
• Dependence can be understood as technological, economic and behavioural.
• Slowly and unevenly, Mid-Atlantic residents came to depend upon a mineral regime. Although theoretically capable of abandoning dependence at any time, the costs associated would have become greater over time. 1820 - would have hardly noticed lack of Anthracite. 1930 - Abandoning coal and oil would have destroyed regional foundations.
• Oil was the epitome of monopoly control - but from the viewpoint of consumers, the low price of kerosene led to a democratisation of fuel.
• Findings: Supply drives demand. Energy transitions are overlapping and reinforcing, and create unequal geographies. Transport systems matter. Energy transitions reconfigure social power as well as mechanical power, and are shaped by public and private actors.

Question 44

Allison Frank

• What was the scale of the Austrian empire’s oil production?
• What could be said of overproduction?
• What did officials in Poland attempt to do?

Answer 44

• The Austrian Empire’s oil industry-once the third largest in the world-is now preserved only in archives and historical documents.
• Overproduction was very much a result of human decisions. For decades, oilmen’s challenge had been the deciphering of mysterious natural laws governing the creation and concealment of oil deposits.
• Officials in Poland, 1923, attempted to revive interest in Galician oil. Rather than look at the markers of decline, they relied upon spurious predictions. A Polish geologist, for example, contested that 160 million tonnes of oil remained, and only 30 million had been extracted thus far. Perceived ubiquity was the problem in the 1930s.

Question 45

Myrna Santiago

• What is lacking from Mexican history?
• What are the three shifts in Mexico?
• What did the local Haecendados seek?
• What was characteristic of the nature of technology?

Answer 45

• Importance of oil to Mexican history is well acknowledged but lacks an environmental approach. The extraction of oil led to the creation of an ‘ecology of oil’. This resulted in shifts to three fields: shift in local land tenure patterns; changes in local land use; transformations in local social structures and composition.
• Land Tenure: Communal and private land ownership coexisted peacefully in Huasteca. This was disrupted by oil companies which marginalised the existing population and transformed the rainforest into an oil field.
• Local land use: transitioned from existing ecological regimes to industrial landscapes.
• Local social structures: Transforming the environment was an arduous and physical task. Companies subjugated local populations to facilitate. Local Hacendado elite fought back, and workers organised into militant unions however.
• Argues that when the local Haecendados failed to enjoy the profits of oil experienced by foreign oilmen, they attempted to extract more money from the corporations, c.1908. Esp. After the explosion San Diego de la Mar - when contract renegotiations occurred.
• If the oil industry was one of the worst global polluters of the twentieth century, the Huasteca was certainly the first tropical site of contamination. Water and land were subject to the fallout from oil exploitation.
• Masculine technology – the drill – released “the flow” “imprisoned” by nature. Uncontrolled wells, then, were not nature exploding in men’s faces, but rather male technology coaxing the flirtatious Dame to dispense her wares.

Question 46

Astrid Kander

Answer 46

• Energy redistributes political power; but greater availability did not translate to greater democracy.
• Relies on more reliable data for pre-fossil fuel era, and developed a consistent methodology for quantifying the economic consumption of energy that can be used for cross-country comparisons.
• The story of energy use in Europe over the “ long twentieth century” is one of initial carbonisation, when coal use rose to its peak in the main mining countries and diffused beyond those as a consequence of the transport revolution based on steam engines; and later, a decarbonisation, when coal gave way to more oil, electricity, and natural gas.
• Suggests the ICE block was important in securing the role of oil in western economies. Electricity was similarly locked in for lighting and cooking, which led to wider market expansion. ICT emerged properly in the 1970s.

Question 47

David Nye

Answer 47

• Commentator on US energy consumption throughout the period 1700 to 2000. Suggests that energy dependency was ingrained into a high-consumption mode of living prevalent during that period.

Question 48

Parra

What are the phases in oil production in Parra’s opinion?

Answer 48

• Up to 1970, the system was mostly beneficial. It allowed the rapid and orderly development of the world petroleum industry at prices higher than they needed to be, but were not excessive. Self-destructive in the long run.
• 2nd Period - 1971-1986 - difficult to judge. Shocks of 1973 and 79-81 were so because of abruptness
• 3rd Period - 1982-86 - ‘wrenching adjustment’. Scrapping surplus tankers, scrapping refineries, upgrading others, came at great expense; but industry awoke to new, healthier, competitive and more cost-conscious world.

Question 49

Pomeranz

Answer 49

Switch to coal in NW Europe also interacted with land-releasing feature: colonial expansion.

Question 50

Podobnik

Answer 50

• Industrial unrest throughout the early 19th century: traditionally, militancy is read in terms of special isolation of workers - pseudo-colonial revolt against removed authority. MITCHELL contests. Suggests miners realised the power of the connection of coal to every factory, office, home and means of transportation.