Oh, Oh, Welcome everybody to another edition of Year Zero,

The Tribilly's miniseries about political economy, history,

and all those other fun things you can bring up at your socially

distance barbecues and Zoom conference calls to make people think that

you're smart and well read. Today we're going to be joined by Timothy Mitchell,

author of a book called Carbon Democracy, to talk about oil.

And there's a few things going on in the world right now that I think make this episode relevant.

As I speak, there are wildfires spreading all throughout the American West.

The Gulf Coast is being slammed by one hurricane after the next.

Humanity and its fossil fuel driven economy has wiped out 60% of the world's animal population since 1970.

I mean obviously the throughline here is climate change of which oil has played a massive part but the story of oil

isn't simple or one-dimensional in fact you can understand a lot about how our

current economy works and about how the global economy was

restructured after World War II through the lens of oil and energy politics. So Tim is going to walk us through how the coal and steam-based

economy of the 19th and early 20th centuries offered workers opportunities for political contestation.

He's going to tell us about how the transition to an oil-based economy offered governments and capitalists a way to fight back against those

workers and he's going to tell us about how the oil economy altered the composition

of the working class itself throughout the 20th century.

We're also going to be talking about how oil was central to the pivot to a different kind of economy in the 1960s and 70s that we now refer to as

neoliberalism that lovely word we all know and love and we're gonna be talking

about what the future of energy politics might offer for workers,

leftist, environmentalists, I mean pretty much anybody concerned about making the world a better place.

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