James Stout

This is a literary device, etc., etc.

You know, the choke point used to be coal mines and the railways on which coal was moved, right?

And one of the things that Timothy Mitchell argues is that a lot of the militancy of the 19th and 20th century labor movement...

is a direct product of the ways in which these coal miners were both extremely militant and also very easily able to shut down production in a line by mobilizing a force that was greater than their numbers.

A relatively small portion of hyper-belligent coal miners can shut down the rest of the economy because everyone else is relying on there being coal.

But oil has the opposite problem.

The problem with coal is that there's not enough of it.

So you have to constantly extract it.

The problem with oil is that there's too much of it.

If you shut down coal production, it's a nightmare for the companies that produce coal because they can't make any money because there's a fixed number of mines and it takes large-scale capital investment to get them out.

And it's also true that it's expensive to extract oil.

But the thing about oil is, again, there are too many refineries.

This is sort of why OPEC was formed.

If you shut down production, if you restrict the amount of oil that comes into the market, that's actually how you make money.

Versus if you shut down coal production, suddenly nobody's making any money versus oil, where it's like if you shut down oil production, usually it just means that like the oil companies make more money because the price of oil goes up.

And the specifics of why this is true, I would encourage people to go read Carbon Democracy.

I could spend another like two hours talking about the materiality of oil and why it specifically works like this differently.

But yeah, oil has the opposite problem of coal.

Like there's too much of it.

And so this goes to a point where Mitchell's talks about how in the early 1900s, companies are deliberately setting off oil strikes, right?