A system addicted to oil: review of Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism
Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism starts with a simple graph, showing the increase in global emissions from the industrial revolution to today. As most of us know, that line steadily goes up from the moment the mass burning of fossil fuels begins in the nineteenth century. However, the graph is not a straight line but more of a hockey stick. From the middle of the 1950s, global emissions rise rapidly. In fact, three-quarters of global emissions were produced between 1950 and today. Why?
The simple reason is oil. Ever since World War Two, oil has been crucial to the world economy. Some of the world’s largest companies are oil companies. And the industry is growing despite the supposed renewable transition—according to the International Energy Agency, oil still makes up 30 percent of the world’s energy supply.
Through a global history of the oil industry, Hanieh shows why oil is so central to modern capitalism, and argues there is no hope of meaningfully reducing emissions and averting the climate crisis without dislodging oil from this central position.
Oil is first and foremost a relatively cheap source of energy. It is the most efficient fuel source for the trucks, airplanes and ships that transport commodities around the world. But the industry produces much more than energy. The refining of crude oil produces by-products that are used to make materials including plastics, synthetic fibres and fertilisers. According to Hanieh, “it is almost impossible to identify an area of life that has not been radically transformed by the presence of petrochemicals”. Corporations in manufacturing, textiles and agriculture all profit from the cheap synthetic raw materials that are produced from oil.
This means that in trying to stop the fossil fuel industry, we are up against not just the corporations that directly profit from it (and the scale of the largest oil companies is truly staggering), but also the broader system that depends on oil. Many in the climate movement still subscribe to the idea that the fossil fuel lobby is solely responsible for the continued expansion of fossil fuels. Hanieh shows us that it is in the interest of a wide array of businesses to keep the oil flowing.
Hanieh builds on the work of previous Marxists to show a convergence between the natural properties of fossil fuels and the unique way that capitalism organises production. Coal displaced other forms of energy such as wood burning and water mills because it was portable and energy-dense. This portability empowered capitalists to set up their factories wherever it was most profitable, particularly where there were large numbers of poor and desperate people who could be readily exploited. Coal could also be commodified in a way that running water or wind could not.
Oil’s rise to dominance was based on a similar convergence between its unique properties and the logic of capitalism. In particular, the rise of oil was entwined with the rise of the US as an economic and military power.
War and militarism propelled oil to the centre of capitalist production. World War One was instrumental in consolidating oil’s supremacy over coal. New weapons of war (tanks, diesel ships and planes) could all be fuelled only by oil. This in turn reinforced US economic and political hegemony, on the back of its huge domestic oil industry. World War Two accelerated this, with the US military devising new ways to produce synthetic materials from petrochemicals. To this day, the US military remains the world’s single biggest emitter.
If oil has fuelled wars, it has also been the object of them. Control over oil and the supply of it was at the centre of imperialist competition and conflict throughout the twentieth century. From World War Two to the Iraq War, empires have fought for control over this black gold. Hanieh details how the major US oil companies rigged oil prices to net themselves super-profits from Middle Eastern oil. The entrance into the game of the state-run oil companies of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Russia and China, has only entrenched the importance of control over Middle Eastern oil.
Hanieh makes clear, though, that oil has never replaced coal, but rather complemented it. So, while it was primarily coal that powered the factories of the Industrial Revolution and the steamships of the British Empire, its displacement by oil has not reduced coal consumption. Indeed, since the beginning of the “oil age”, coal consumption has quadrupled.
This is relevant to assessing the expansion of renewable energy as a solution to the climate crisis. Advocates of green capitalism argue that increasing investment in renewables means a move away from fossil fuels. Yet even if renewables were to surpass oil and coal, they would not replace these fossil fuels. They might slow down their expansion, but they will not replace them. That is why the largest oil companies are happy to increase their investments simultaneously in renewables and in traditional fossil fuels.
The last chapter of the book refutes other greenwashing “solutions” to the climate crisis. Hanieh details the lies and creative accounting behind schemes such as carbon capture and storage, electric vehicles and green hydrogen. In the case of green hydrogen—where electricity is used to split water molecules—the overall emissions are greater than just burning coal or oil unless all the energy used is renewable. So even in the best-case scenario, the industry has no net environmental benefit.
Taken all together, these are strong arguments for why capitalism cannot break its addiction to oil. Hanieh makes clear that the barriers to a rapid phasing out of oil and other fossil fuels are purely social. It is the relentless need by a small minority to accumulate greater and greater wealth that is propelling us towards environmental catastrophe.
That is why Hanieh ends the book with a call for “eco-socialism”. While a new word for socialism is not really necessary, the concrete measures he proposes are sound: dismantle the oil companies, abolish other wasteful industries, demilitarise. He argues we need to take “political and economic power away from the market” and put it under democratic control. Hanieh doesn’t tackle the thorny question of how this might be achieved, but he compellingly shows that the goal of anyone serious about preventing environmental destruction must be to get rid of capitalism. For this reason, Crude Capitalism is a vital book for both climate activists and socialists. Accessible but detailed, it is a guide for understanding the world around us, which is necessary if we are to effectively change it.
Crude Capitalism is published by Verso Books.
