“If there's a problem of oil and democracy, we're part of it”: a conversation with Timothy Mitchell on the intricate relationship between energy and politics

In the second episode Carbon Critique podcast series, we talked to Timothy Mitchell, a political science Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, about his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, which came out over 10 years ago. It traces a revisionist history of 20th century by centering the analysis on the material basis of political power. He focuses on how political systems and political action are constrained and determined by the carbon energy that emerged since the 19th century, first with coal and then as it transitioned to oil. By emphasizing how carbon’s “socio-technical worlds” manifest themselves, Mitchell sheds light on where actual sites of power lie and what “political agency” is possible. This, in turn, helps us think on historically grounded modes of energy transition, resistance against the ubiquitous carbon rationality, and ways to re-imagine a post-carbon society.

Cecília Oliveira  (IASS)
Welcome Tim, thank you so much for accepting our invitation. We are very happy to have you here today in our podcast. To start this conversation I will pass on to my co-host, Alexandra Tost.

Alexandra Tost  (IASS)
Hello, Tim, very nice to have you here today in our podcast. So I'm going to start straight away with our first question. In one of your interviews, you mentioned that when you were a student, you were disillusioned with political science and started exploring history. Said's book Orientalism and Foucault's Discipline and Punish came out around that same time and exerted great influence on you. And you eventually wrote Colonizing Egypt, which became a classic. I would like to know, what is the through line connecting your graduate student years to writing this groundbreaking book and then leading to Carbon Democracy? What is the intellectual and personal trajectory that influenced your research engagements?

Timothy Mitchell  
Well thank you first of all for having me on the podcast. It's wonderful to have this opportunity to talk with you. It's hard to find a single line because part of what I did as I was moving through my student years and writing my dissertation, and on beyond that was I kept jumping sideways into a new field. So from post-colonial studies and the history of colonization in Egypt, into development studies and 20th century Egypt to the work on oil, the focus shifted continuously, and even some of the methods I was using. But I think if you want a line that connects them all, I think there was a continued interest first in politics and questions of political power, whatever I was studying and looking for ways to do that, as you say, outside the conventional forms of political science with its focus on state and government policy and interest groups and those kinds of things. And a very strong interest in the specific sites where political contestation can be organized, and where groups either find themselves subject to forms of domination or find ways of resisting that. So in the first book, partly under the influence of Foucault, and others, I was interested in the Army as a site of discipline and control as well as an instrument of that. I was interested in the building of cities, colonial cities, as a way of not just organizing space but constructing the forms of visibility of populations that were distinctive parts of modern colonial regimes. And when I moved on to development, whether studying at the level of a village or agricultural policy more generally, I was always interested in what was happening in very specific sites. Farms, even inside government policy, and on with Carbon Democracy and the history of of energy. Underlying that was the sense that, at each site you look at if you take the specifics of the site where politics is happening seriously, the particular materials, the particular layout of space, the particular human and non-human forces and energies at work, you get a much better understanding of the political process and opportunities for intervening in and interrupting political processes than if you just treat politics in more conventional ways as questions of policy and government. So there is a line even though I kept jumping.

Cecília Oliveira  (IASS)a  
My next question to you Tim is a little bit related to the methodology of Carbon Democracy. So your book Carbon Democracy is a milestone for our research on democracy and climate change here at IASS. And the beginning of the book already sets the tone. For me, it's a kind of invitation. At page two of your book, you use this provocative image of the American expert sent to Southern Iraq after the US invasion of 2003, sharing his conception of democracy in a workshop about capacity building. So he says: "welcome to your new democracy" while displaying a series of PowerPoint slides about the new administrative structure. And then he says: "I have met you before in Cambodia, Russia, Nigeria." For this kind of expert, you stress that the democratic policy is the same everywhere. The expert makes democracy an abstraction, something that moves place to place that he can carry in his suitcase: a carbon copy of itself. And then you go further: what if democracies are not a carbon copy, but carbon-based? In the end, leading industrialized countries are also oil states. So could you share with us what kind of political or methodological problem you try to include or call our attention to, the goal of your book on carbon democracy? What is this perspective twist, that democracy as oil can offer us?

Timothy Mitchell  
Thanks, yes, I was intrigued by that expert with his briefcase thinking that he could fly from country to country around the world and help local people introduce their democracy. So part of the problem there is, as I said that the idea of democracy is a carbon copy. And you just get the rules, right, and you replicate it in each country. And there's a certain set of legal or constitutional principles or there might be a certain set of ideas that you want in people's heads, you want them educated a certain way, enlightened a certain way. So part of the idea there that seems to make democracy very easy to transplant from place to place is that it's fundamentally just a set of ideas. It's a set of beliefs in principles of freedom, or whatever. And you've simply got to move those beliefs around the world and you'll get democracy. And I wanted to think about the history of democracy to move it away from questions of beliefs, or mindsets or cultures. And starting from the point that I think most people in most places of the world most of the time want to find ways to improve their their condition and avoid the worst forms of poverty or suffering. And you don't actually have to teach people to want that kind of improvement in their lives. It's much more a question of under what conditions do they have the ability to make their voices heard. And I was particularly interested in that in the case of oil countries, because as you say, when I was writing the book, it was in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, and there was a lot of talk about the problem of oil and democracy that seemed to somehow think that large amounts of oil was an impediment to developing this democratic mentality. The idea that formed the organizing principle of the book was that we could better understand that if we actually, first of all, thought about Western countries as oil states as well. They tend to be more the consumers than the producers of oil. So they're linked into the same problem of the challenge of creating more democratic lives. That doesn't only exist in Iraq, or the Gulf or other places with large amounts of oil, because elsewhere we're using the same sources of energy. And we're part of the same system that moves that energy from under the ground to the consumer. So if there's a problem of oil and democracy, we're part of it. It's not just something that afflicts people in producer states. But I also thought it was very interesting to actually go back and think of the history, not of oil and democracy, but to go back 100-150 years to an earlier period of coal and democracy. Because the funny thing was, if the problem for democracy was you had certain countries that were enormously dependent on a single source of energy, then why was it that when that single source of energy was coal, in the 19th century, you actually saw the rise of mass democracy. And I think the answer to that lay in, again, moving to this much more focused sort of site-specific understanding of politics. Trying to find the places where contestation can happen, can be organized, and the places where people are able to not just make demands, but make them in a way they have to be listened to. And I think coal, the history of coal, gives a good example of that from 150 years ago, because that dependence on a single source of energy in a variety of northern European countries was associated with the rise of mass democracy. Not just because people became urbanized and the sort of standard accounts given of why you get democracy, but for a very specific reason: they could shut down a country's energy system. Coal was moved along very limited routes on rail lines or on barges in rivers. And because it was confined to those decisive routes, if workers organized themselves at key points along those routes, starting in the coalface and then at the docks, and then at the electricity generating station, they could shut down a whole country's energy system. And that, I argued, was actually the source of mass democracy. And that seemed to me an interesting way to think about not only what happens when oil comes along, but also into the future.

Cecília Oliveira  (IASS)
Maybe related to that is a question that I was really waiting to bring to you. Because one thing that surprised me in your book is how you bring forward "sabotage" and this relationship with the workers. How sabotage has this potentiality of resistance and can disrupt, create, and make democracy. But you also bring forward the other side of sabotage as a "trap" when oil companies themselves use sabotage to undermine workers’ attempt to collective action. For example, general strikes. When you mention general strikes in your book and give us the genealogy of sabotage, it reminded me of Brazil in 1970. We had a general strike, the only general strike that we've had in our history. It was mostly influenced by European immigrants that were working in São Paulo in the factories and in commerce and who brought these ideas of how to dismantle the system. But then today, when we think of protests like the yellow vests or even the climate strike movement. My question to you is how to produce this potentiality of sabotage today with these kinds of protests and also with these "captures" that sometimes don't bring or don't give the room to dismantle systems?

Timothy Mitchell  
Thanks. Yes, I was fascinated by this history of sabotage, which was a term that started to be used in the late 19th, early 20th century, as you say, to refer to this extraordinary power of workers to interrupt energy systems. It then got taken up in a more military sense, because the First World War came along and people always now associate "sabotage" somehow with military operations. But that wasn't its original meaning. And then I was interested in the way you could think of the rise of oil, where for a variety of reasons workers found it more difficult to organize strikes and interruptions and other forms of sabotage. The power of sabotage actually shifted into the hands of large corporations, not because they necessarily wanted in the same way to interrupt supply. But actually, their profits depended very much, certainly for the first 70 years of the 20th century, on their ability to slow down the supply of oil, to direct it in certain ways and to manage the price in such a way to make extraordinary profits. And so you could actually think of corporations in a variety of times as carrying out various forms of sabotage. Even in the simple sense that you see today of large corporations buying up rivals in order to absorb them and shut them down, which happens in a whole set of industries, from tech to pharmaceuticals to all kinds of fields. So we could think of sabotage as that ability to interrupt flows and critical arrangements that moves at different times between those who are trying to use it for a set of sort of popular political demands, and those who are trying to use it on the side of increasing forms of private profit. Sabotage today? I think the first thing and I hope one of the useful things about my book Carbon Democracy is it just gives you this way of thinking historically about the way opportunities for sabotage shift. And as you also point out, there's forms of direct political action. Climate strike is an obvious one. The successful campaigns in the US, in particular, to interrupt the building of pipelines, the Keystone XL and others, which really replicate some of those older patterns of finding the critical point. Because it wasn't just one particular pipeline. That was the pipeline that was going to make it possible to develop, as you know, the Canadian tar sands, this even more-polluting form of oil production. And those resources could only be fully developed if there could be a pipeline to get it to markets in the US. So you find that point of vulnerability, you don't just sabotage any pipeline, you find the one where a critical difference can be made. I think one of the other ways that you see it happening with the climate movement these days is financial. Realizing that just as oil and fossil fuels depend on critical infrastructures like pipelines, they also, of course, depend on critical financial flows. And the opportunity is to, as it were, tamper with those financial flows. And the example I have in mind is a London-based organization Carbon Tracker, which simply goes into the financial reports of oil companies and makes it obvious that the projections they have about future oil production completely ignore the Paris Climate Accords, nevermind any more extensive. They're assuming business-as-usual, more or less. And of course, that's not just a bit of tech in an annual report or a filing to the stock exchange. That's actually the basis of a set of calculations on which the share price of the company depends. So what they've been able to do is find that point of vulnerability, just a point of calculation that if you project forward, at one level of future oil production and future levels of carbon consumption you get one share price, but if you actually factor in where things could be going politically, and we hope they're going politically, it completely changes the calculation of the share price. So it's an interest in those sort of technical places and sites, whether it's technical in the sense of infrastructure or technical in the sense of the financial techniques, and one can think of other examples, that one looks for points of political vulnerability. And you know, people were doing this even while I was writing this book. So I didn't invent that. But I think that thinking of the ways in which these different kinds of political action have something in common around that principle of sabotage is helpful.

Alexandra Tost  (IASS)t  
My next question is about sustainability, which today is one of the ruling concepts that combines the use of nature with development. It is closely related to the contemporary attempts of the United Nations to embrace new domains of governance, which is reflected in bodies such as the UN development or environmental programs, UNDP and UNEP. And also in the area of climate change, the UNFCCC with the COP meetings. The establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, in 2015 may be the main expression of these new investments on sustainability. Now, for countries such as Iraq being considered as anti-democratic, that saw international intervention supposedly in order to foster capacity building, could you imagine something similar happening to countries being considered as anti-sustainable? Or what is your take generally on planetary programs to surpass carbon democracies?

Timothy Mitchell  
Yes, with interventions, presumably, you'd have to rank countries by carbon use per capita. And so the first country to be invaded would be the United States. If you turn the same principle of thinking of sort of "failed states" that are unable to address problems being made the target of collective military intervention, I guess, it's an interesting way to think about the way in which those ideas were used in the past to justify military solutions. And if you think about them being used in other kinds of cases, it makes you realize how absurd that sort of militarized solution is. But of course, sustainable development is meant to be an alternative to that kind of crisis and crisis management. I think the Sustainable Development and the Millennium Development goals have to be placed in the long context of the history of development, stretching back all the way to the period after the Second World War and the birth of post-war development as a way of managing the relationship between the US and other countries of the North and the former colonized countries. Development became the way to think about how that relationship should be managed and how the extraordinary inequality between countries of the South and countries of the North could be addressed. One of the other themes in my book Carbon Democracy about that period, and also in the previous book I wrote, Rule of Experts, is about thinking more critically in long term about the way we've conceptualized development. One of the things I was interested in was the discovery that before the 1940s/1950s, nobody talked about an object called "the economy." And that this sort of focus on development after the Second World War actually coincided, not only in the South but also in the countries of the North, with a focus on this new way of calculating collective good by measuring something called the economy. The word itself was older, but the idea that there's an economy and you can measure it is something that was developed between the wars and then became standardized after the Second World War. And of course, if you were going to make the economy the object of politics and the way of understanding paths forward, it's a bit like what we were saying earlier about democracy. You imagine that every country has one of these things, and you can sort of measure it the same way in each place. And the way you measure it was by this new yardstick called GDP or Gross Domestic Product. And the entire industry of development organized itself for several decades over not just the economy and the measurement of GDP but the idea that the nature of that thing is to grow infinitely. So sort of built into development was something unsustainable, the concept of instant infinite growth from the beginning. The idea that you will address problems of global inequality just by getting everybody on this same treadmill called growth. And one can think of a number of problems with that entire set of ways of thinking about development. And these have been widely discussed for all the ways in which the economy was measured, growth was measured, that didn't actually account for costs that were not costed by the market: environmental destruction, ill health, all kinds of costs that couldn't be included in balancing the costs and benefits of this thing called growth. But the other thing that was very strange about growth and about development as a way of thinking is it was based on a sort of completely mythical set of ideas about how capitalism actually works. And that's probably too big a theme to go into in our discussion. It's actually the subject of my next book. So thinking about the way of understanding capitalism that came into being at the same time as development came into being is, I think, very important. So then when you get to the Sustainable Gevelopment Goals and the Millennium Development Goals, you've obviously tried to patch up this rather ugly thing called development and improve it with new kinds of measures that take account of basic issues of health and literacy and so on. But you're still stuck within this rubric of growth of what matters is development. And I think understanding that longer history of the term over the last 50/60/70 years, and how it's embedded in the way we imagine ourselves as having an economy and a particular set of techniques for measuring that, a certain conception of growth and what growth is and that's actually how capitalism works seems to me a very interesting set of questions to explore, which I didn't really touch on much in the Carbon Democracy book other than thinking about how we came to believe in the economy as the object that was at the center of our politics.

Alexandra Tost  (IASS)
When we talk about oil and fossil fuels, we think immediately of the Middle East. You traced how carbon energy determined the use but also the international relations of these territories in global politics. Now, to reach the implementation of the Paris Agreement, we have areas of the planet and ecosystems that are considered carbon sinks because of their physical relation to earth systems. In our case, we study the Amazon. But there are other projects researching, for example, the oceans or the atmosphere. Would the new attempt to govern carbon dioxide also imply the emergence of new relevant planetary territories as carbon energy has done?

Timothy Mitchell  
That's a very interesting question. And not one I've thought about directly. The one that I've perhaps followed a little bit is about the ocean. And you may have seen a couple of weeks ago, there was this attempt to float on the stock market. A company that is dedicated to mining the sea floor for minerals for use in building batteries, electric storage batteries. A company with with no proven technology, and in the absence of actual political rights to mine the sea floor. So I think there are new territories in the ocean, including the ocean floor. Not the water in the ocean as a carbon sink, but the the floor of the ocean as a new frontier where even more extraction could happen, I think is enormously important. And maybe we do need a more imaginative political language where we don't just say, "oh, yes, rain forests, and therefore that's a carbon sink" or "oceans, and therefore that's the resource," but we actually think collectively about the kinds of ways of governing or allowing people to govern those spaces as part of more global agendas, rather than simply being told by UN bodies or by climate conferences that certain futures have been set aside for different regions. And I think it brings it back to trying to think about politics more locally, not because only local politics matters, but because if you don't organize and engage locally, as I'm sure you've both talked about in your own work, then you're not going to be effective if you just do things through global treaties. Or the more problematic thing of just setting targets and assuming that the targets imply that politics is on track; the carbon counting approach to solving these problems.

Cecília Oliveira  (IASS)
Maybe to think together about this carbon counting, one curiosity that I have that I would love to ask you is how to study today this relationship between carbon democracy and the attempt to govern carbon dioxide flows. Because at the same time that we still have the continuity of carbon democracy, as you explore in your book, today the center of carbon governance is also all these new institutions, treaties, and diplomatic elements that are trying to govern carbon dioxide and establish these new systems or technologies of government. So what is your take? How could we then also twist the perspective and bring this concept of carbon democracy, or the methodological attempt to look at democracy in a different way, for the way that we study carbon governance today?

Timothy Mitchell  
One of the things that interested me and the story I told was actually the early history of the attempts to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide and uncovered this extraordinary history of the attempts to undermine the simple process of counting the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere. At a very intricate level of shutting down funding, moving somebody to a new position in a different office, imposing conditions that made it impossible to work, again and again from the 1950s through to the 1980s. So, you could see sabotage again at work at the level of funding for different kinds of research, and so on. And I think you see the same thing again. And we know we've seen the same thing in the Paris Climate Conference and in the upcoming one in the UK, where a lot of the sabotage, as it were, happens at the level of trying to determine not just overall goals, that's part of it, but also the entire business of calculating and counting and assigning quotas and that kind of thing. So there seems to me sort of a couple of levels of the problem. One is, first of all, the kind of politics that wants to proceed partly through endless delay. Through these long-term, decades-long targets; 2050/2060 targets measured simply in terms of carbon. What that opens up, the very fact of the sort of distance of targets, and the amount of delay involved and the uncertainty of forms of measurement and so on is it just creates opportunity after opportunity for sabotage. On the other hand, this sort of simplification. If it's just a matter of counting the amount of carbon, then of course that opens up all kinds of arguments about continued expansion of fossil fuel use, because down the road there will be ways to store and capture that carbon. So I think large numbers of people involved in the climate movement and questions of climate crisis are fully aware of this. And I think using terms like sabotage, using this close attention to the battle over calculability, measurements, what it is that's being measured, that's actually where a lot of the battle is being fought and the kind of approach that I and others have developed, me in that particular book, I think can be useful. But I really point to all the people who are doing this work, as it were, on the frontlines of contesting and looking for alternatives to the very sort of simple modes of counting carbon that are open to that kind of sabotage.

Cecília Oliveira  (IASS)
Changing up a little bit and going to one of the things we would love to bring to this conversation that is related to your book and also to our present is the case of Afghanistan. And when we think about the recent developments in Afghanistan, it is impossible to not relate to your chapter "McJihad" where you started describing the visit of the delegation of the Taliban government to Washington DC in 1997. At the moment they were conquering political influence over Afghanistan. So the goal of this situation that you described in your book at the opening of this chapter, the goal of this visit, was the construction of a pipeline by a Californian oil company from Central Asia through Afghanistan. Then a senior American diplomat said: "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco (that was this US oil company), pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." So how do you see the current status of Afghanistan and the unexpected turn of the US's influence that we see now in the news?

Timothy Mitchell  
It's interesting to go back more than almost 25 years to where things were back in the 90s. That chapter of the book, "McJihad," was bringing together the word jihad and the word McDonald's. It was a reference to a popular American text that had said the world faces the choice: it's either all going to be McDonald's, in other words it's going to be global capitalism, or it's going to be jihad. And those are the two forces at work. It's going to be this backward-looking Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand, or it's going to be the glories of global capitalism represented. So I coined the term McJihad to show these are not opposites. These are actually things that work together. And I actually use the example of the history of Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic state that had been a linchpin of the US empire in the Middle East and of the global oil system. So the idea that there was something incompatible with a future based on authoritarian modes of government that invoked a very conservative Islam, on the one hand, and capitalism on the other made no sense. And so one could have imagined the possibility that I alluded to in the opening of that chapter from the mid 90s where US oil interests would decide that perhaps the Taliban weren't so bad. Yes, they had very strict forms of Islamic law, but if we could work with them and build the type of pipeline we wanted, all would be fine. It didn't work out that way, as we know. And that had a lot to do of course with 9/11. But more specifically with the US decision to use that to launch this global war on terror in which there were going to be military solutions to these issues rather than the kinds of compromise marked by, say, the emergence of Saudi Arabia 50 or so years before. How that relates to the situation today? Well, of course, it's tragic because Afghanistan had to endure 20 years of warfare after that as the US and Britain and other allies attempted to impose a solution by force. And the net result of that, we know, was the resurgence of popularity of the Taliban because they seem to be the only force on the ground that was organized enough and effective enough to drive the Americans out which they succeeded in doing. The coming back to power of the Taliban is not something to celebrate. But it is important to understand that, not as some sort of resurgence of a primitive form of Islam, but the particular way that power politics has unfolded once you set up the situation as a war on terror, as the fight against jihadism everywhere and so on. And the other thing I was trying to do in that book was actually take that history back earlier to 20 years before the first coming to power, back to the 1970s, where you actually had very progressive forces in power in Afghanistan. And America became very concerned that Afghanistan might become a progressive country, might even seek support and ally itself with the Soviet Union, and decided to begin destabilizing it and backing, actually, jihadist forces. Not the Taliban, but other jihadist forces, to overthrow that very secular, very progressive form of government. Probably a little too revolutionary for many Afghans at the time, which was part of what was destabilizing. But the idea that Afghanistan was always women in burqas and jihadists? No, it actually went through quite an interesting revolutionary change beginning in the 50s and 60s, and resulting in a very different form of government in the 70s. So our very short histories are black and white, where we want to see this as jihadists and Taliban on the one hand, and people out to save democracy and/or install democracy is just much too simple to make sense of this. I don't think it was ever very much about pipelines even then, or now. I mean, obviously, there's always certain hydrocarbon companies interested in the possibilities of pipelines. But I don't think they were actually determining the outcome. I mean, nothing came of that meeting in the White House in 1997 between the Taliban and the US government.

Cecília Oliveira  (IASS) 
So Tim, to finish our conversation today, my last question that I would like to know a little bit more about is your current projects. You mentioned a book. So could you please share with us what your interests are? And what are the struggles or the new "sabotages" that you are looking at?

Timothy Mitchell  
After I finished the oil book, I became interested in a larger set of questions, really about how capitalism itself works and has worked and has developed over the course of the 20th century. And I wanted to put a couple of things at the center of that. One was this political form we've come to live with called "the corporation," the joint stock corporation that has become this extraordinarily powerful political institution across much of the world. What are the origins, how did they come to have the power they have, and so on. But I was also interested in kind of histories of finance (the financial crisis of 2008 was part of what I was thinking about) as I began writing this book. As well as the larger question so many people are facing of ever-increasing levels of debt. Of personal debt and household debt, which is an enormous problem in the US, in Britain and a number of other countries. And those two questions, the sort of power of corporations and problems of debt seem to be connected. And they connected around a history of credit, of how a whole world came into being over the last century and a half based on the power to create credit. Which I understand as a mode of capturing income from the future, it's a very simple idea. If you make someone a loan, and they have to pay you back. First of all, you're already capturing income from the future. But what really gets interesting to those who do this kind of thing is that then you can sell-on that loan to somebody else, which of course was part of the process that developed and was important to the financial crisis. So what you're buying and selling is claims on the future. And so what you're buying and selling is future livelihoods, because those claims on the future are the kinds of livelihoods people will have to live down the road to pay back those forms of credit and debt. And whether that's personal debt, whether that's mortgages that people use to buy housing, whether that's credit in the US for healthcare or university, all kinds of things that get people into debt. But the other way we get into debt is because this sort of master institution of the of the corporation, particularly in its sort of Anglo-American forms, is another way of sort of indebting the future. Because it's all based on the principle of shareholding. And what's a share? It's a claim on the future income. I mean, people think shares are how companies raise money. They're not. They're how they sell shares on future income. So in a variety of ways, across all sorts of areas of collective life, we've organized these astonishing devices for setting up claims on future income, and then ways to profit by selling those claims to others in various forms of financial and credit markets. And that seems to me to be an aspect of the way we live that hasn't been properly recognized, because we live by continually putting the future into debt and continually extracting that future and making it available to those who prosper from these arrangements in the present. And I think part of the reason we haven't seen how important this is, is because we sort of justify those arrangements under this term we were talking about before of growth, development. The reason we put the future into debt is because the future is going to be bigger, and there's going to be more of whatever it is we have. And that's why we take out loans and invest because everything is about growth. Once you start asking a whole set of questions about growth and how we measure it and how we justify it and supposedly benefit from it, then the kind of alibi with which we justify this imposition of burdens on the future sort of disappears. Because if either that thing we call growth is not beneficial, or actually is an artifact of forms of financial accounting and isn't, in some sense, even growth itself, then then this entire way we've organized collectively ourselves over the last several generations, loses its alibi or justification. So that's what the book's about.

Cecília Oliveira  
Well, we are already looking forward to it. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.

Info
The interview took place as part of the “carbon critique" podcast series. Here you can listen to the entire episode on SoundCloud.