James Stout

that a blockage in one part of the system isn't supposed to be that bad because the system isn't designed in a way where, you know, there's like one railway from one place to another and you have to move all of your goods along this one railway and you can only get it from like one buyer who produces a thing, who produces another thing, who produces another thing.

You're supposed to be able to get it from like a broad distributed system.

network of people and if one node of the network goes out you're supposed to be able to pivot to another one and this is the way that the economics of oil works right there are a shit ton of different oil producers and in theory you're supposed to be able to pivot around between different oil wells in a way that's different from for example the way that coal worked

Right.

With coal and a lot of this I'm sourcing from Timothy Mitchell's book, Carbon Democracy, which is very, very good.

You know, with coal, right, you're usually not moving it by ship, which is this is like another thing that we're going to get to in a second.

But with coal, it's very easy.

The way that coal is mined and the way that you have to move it.

Right.

It goes from one place to another, to another, to another in a line.

Right.

And if one part of that process shuts down, there isn't, like, another coal thing you can get your coal from, right?

You're just fucked.

Like, there's not, like, another mine that feeds into your factory.

This is sort of the way that coal production worked in sort of the 18 and early 1900s.

Oil works in basically the opposite way, right?

Where there's just, like, a shit ton of things, and because you're mostly moving it by water and to some extent by pipeline, the way the production process works

works and the way that it's sort of easier to move and just like the way that it flows means that it's harder to block off the entire supply of oil in the same way that it was actually kind of easy to just like completely stop a huge swath of the economy by just blocking off their access to coal.

And Capital has long realized the danger of choke points.

This is called foreshadowing.