Nature's Evil

1   Coronil, The Magical State ; Ross, The Oil Curse ; Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii ; Di Muzio, Carbon Capitalism ; Badia-Miró et al., Natural Resources and Economic Growth ; Mitchell, Carbon Democracy ; Bridge and Le Billon, Oil ; Kallis and Sager, ‘Oil and the economy’. 2   Mitchell, Carbon Democracy ; Bridge and Le Billon, Oil ; Backus and Crucini, Oil Prices and the Terms of Trade ; Kallis and Sager, ‘Oil and the economy’. 3   Claes and Garavini, Handbook of OPEC and the Global Energy Order . 4   Frank, Oil Empire ; Hughes, Energy without Conscience . 5   Brady, Ida Tarbell . 6   Fursenko, Neftianye voijny . 7   McKay, ‘Baku oil and Transcaucasian pipelines’; Barry, Material Politics ; Blau and Rupnik, Baku . 8   Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers . 9   Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent . 10  Gokay, ‘The battle for Baku’; Suny, The Baku Commune . 11  Odom and Salmond, Treasures into Tractors ; Heymann, ‘Oil in Soviet-Western relations in the interwar years’. 12  Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers . 13  Aseev, ‘Pesnia o nefti’. 14 Slavkina, Rossiiskaia dobycha . 15  Etkind et al., ‘Ukrainian labour and Siberian oil in the late Soviet Empire’. 16 Mitchell, Carbon Democracy . 17  Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies . 18  Coronil, The Magical State . 19  Ross, ‘Does oil hinder democracy?’; Ross, The Oil Curse . 20  Herb, ‘No representation without taxation?’. 21  Bornhorst et al., ‘Natural resource endowments and the domestic revenue effort’. 22 Gaidar, Gibel’ imperii . 23  Ross, The Oil Curse . 24  Perks and Schulz, ‘Gender in oil, gas and mining’; Daggett, ‘Petro-masculinity’; Etkind, ‘Petromacho, or mechanisms of de-modernization in a resource state’. 25 Schmitt, Political Theology . 26  Ross, The Oil Curse . 27  Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation , p. 26. 28  Hayek, ‘A commodity reserve currency’; Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods ; Mitchell, Carbon Democracy . 29  Keynes, Collected Writings , Vol. 21, p. 27. 30  Wong, ‘The untold story behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-year U.S. debt secret’. 31  McNally, Crude Volatility ; Clayton, Market Madness ; Schneider-Mayerson, ‘From politics to prophecy’. 32  Spenser, New Economics of Oil . 33  Freud, ‘Character and anal eroticism’. 34  Etkind and Minakov, ‘Post-Soviet transit and demodernization’. 35  Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune ; Etkind, ‘Putin’s Russia: an exemplary case of hyper-extractive state’; Rogers, The Depths of Russia . 36  Pokrovskij, Russkaia istorija s drevnejshikh vremen . 37  Gaddy and Ickes, ‘Russia’s dependence on resources’. 38  Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace , in Collected Writings , Vol. 2, p. 15. 39  Novokmet et al., From Soviets to Oligarchs . 40  Russel, ‘Socioeconomic inequality in Russia’. 41  Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace , Vol. 2, p. 11. 42  Rawls, A Theory of Justice . 43 Milanović, Global Inequality . 44 Wenar, Blood Oil .

Conclusion: Leviathan or Gaia

Steam and electricity liberated productive labour from its age-old dependence on a particular fixed spot that provided energy – a stable, a waterwheel or a windmill. This new-found liberty led to an unprecedented growth in industry and trade, in the consumption of resources and in the pollution of the environment. 1 Thanks to fossil fuel, production has ‘slipped the bonds of surly earth’. But extraction is still chained to those spots where natural resources and human labour meet. More and more of us carry around our daily toil in portable gadgets as we work from home or roam round our cities. But we are still dependent on a Gilgamesh who has occupied a cedar forest on the hill.