Nature's Evil

PART 3

HISTORY OF ENERGY

Political economists argued about the relations between labour and capital, about consumption and accumulation, about property rights and the role of the state. They did not prepare us for the paradoxical effect of the resource economy – the vicious circle in which the state monopolises trade, regulates consumption and expands extraction. Ignoring economic theories, a resource-dependent state reinterprets the sphere of political action for its own benefit. What constitutes sovereign politics for this state goes well beyond disciplining its subjects and differentiating between friends and enemies. Its politics is about the relations between natural resources and human capital – shortage and surplus, exhaustion and renewal, nationalisation and sterilisation, geographical variability and platform shifts. Like a medieval king, such a country has two bodies, one corporeal and the other sacred: the first body is made up of its people, the second of commodities taken from nature. Merging and dividing these two bodies at will, the state develops its divine powers .