Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, from 1940 to 1945. His second term as prime minister was 1951-1955. Of aristocratic heritage, Churchill joined the British Army in 1895 as a soldier and gained fame as a war correspondent and writer for chronicling his campaigns. During World War I, Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty and pressured the Royal Navy to switch from coal-energy to oil-energy. Coal production was one of the main industries of working-class Great Britain, and the transition threatened the rights and livelihoods of coal workers throughout the UK. This in part led to the coal strike of 1912, in which the Miners Federation of Great Britain sought to secure a minimum wage. As Prime Minister during WWII, Churchill led the British in the Allied war effort against the fascists, helping to secure a victory for global democracy. He won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his historical and biographical writing. Churchill is one of the most influential figures of the 20th century.

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (1883-1946) was an English economist whose theories fundamentally changed the way governments structure their economies. He was one of the first to shift the thinking of economists from concern around finite resources to the belief in the infinite circulation of money. He also believed that free-market economies could grow without limit. His book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) took the lessons of the Great Depression to craft new economic and monetary policies that governments could use to prevent future economic crises. Most capitalist economies adopted Keynes’s theories after the Depression, but the oil crisis of 1973-1974 made his economic approach less popular. At that point, Anglo-American oil producers believed that the market, rather than the government, should regulate economic policies. Most of their solutions increased profits for oil companies at the expense of the rights of workers and the environment. After the Great Recession of 2007-08, Keynes’s theories of a government-regulated economy became popular again in the United States and Great Britain.

Abd al-Karim Qasim Muhammad Bakr al-Fadhli al-Zubaidi (1914-1963) was an Iraqi Army brigadier who led a group of nationalist Army officers in overthrowing the British-backed monarchical government in what became known as the 14 July Revolution in 1958. He ruled as prime minister until his execution in 1963 by firing squad in the Ramadan Revolution. Qasim was one of the leaders in the Middle East who attempted to take power away from foreign oil companies. In 1958, he ordered the British- and US-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) to sell a 20% ownership stake in the company to the Iraqi government and hire Iraqi personnel in addition to a list of demands that would place more power over the oil industry in local hands. When IPC refused, Qasim issued a law (Public Law 80) that effectively took away the company’s rights to the land on which the oil was produced. Qasim was one of the Middle Eastern leaders who was instrumental in creating OPEC.

Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994) was the 37th President of the United States from 1969 to 1974. Before becoming president, Nixon was a Republican representative and senator from California and was vice president from 1953-1961. As president, he established diplomatic relations with China in 1972, ended US involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and ended the draft. He presided over the South’s desegregation of schools and established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He also helped conclude the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. Nixon wanted to create a Department of Energy and Natural Resources, an idea that Congress repeatedly rejected. He eventually set up a National Energy Office in the White House. His Middle Eastern policy consisted of the Nixon Doctrine, which increased the sale of arms to the Middle East, mainly in Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia as an alternative to direct US involvement in regional conflicts. President Nixon was impeached after the Watergate scandal, in which members of the Nixon administration tried to sabotage the Democratic Party. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, making his vice president, Gerald Ford, the new president. A month later, Ford granted Nixon a full pardon.