Fossil fuels and authoritarianism
I’ve just finished reading Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun. It’s a good read; I’ve written my notes on it, which will be published in my January reading page at the end of the month. But I find the following passage particularly telling and appropriate to the moment. Drawing on Samuel Miller McDonald’s book Progress (2024), McKibben notes that the share of American wealth held by the richest 1% of Americans increased from 8.5% in 1800 to 50% in 1900. Further, McDonald writes, this increase was “partly thanks to fossil fuels, which could be easily concentrated, controlled, and transformed into liquid capital by a small management class. … Because fossil fuels themselves are easy to concentrate, they often yield authoritarian outcomes. … [A petrostate is] fifty percent more likely to be authoritarian and only a quarter as likely to transition to democratic government than a state without petroleum as a major economic base” (p. 181).
I was already frustrated, dismayed, and angered by Trump’s doing everything in his power (and some things not in his legitimate power) to destroy efforts to leave fossil fuels behind; reading about this research intensifies all three of those emotions.
