The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics

In what seemed like a cruel twist of irony, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank on Earth Day 2010 after exploding two days earlier, on April 20. The rig and blowout preventer was owned by Transocean and leased by BP, the largest oil and gas producer in the United States.⁴ The spill was the largest accidental oil spill in history. In the aftermath of the spill, locals set up a sign in Belle Chasse, a fishing village in southern Louisiana, that read: “Damn BP! God Bless America!” As the sign indicated, the consensus was that BP was to blame, and in more senses than one it was. But as the finger of blame pointed in the direction of the oil mogul, one might have felt uneasy with how quickly and easily the United States, the largest oil-consuming nation in the world, blamed the foreign oil company. It all seemed too straightforward, too unified, and too uncontroversial for what was such a politically divisive situation. What did this supposedly uncontentious finger of blame conceal from view? The short answer: the violence of oil capitalism. I use the term oil capitalism purposefully to highlight the confluence of unregulated free markets, militarism, and environmental degradation.

The politics and management of oil resources and revenues at the center of global oil operations is well documented, as is the complicated connection between violence and oil.⁵ Disturbing images of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploding and the aftermath of oil plumes, tar balls, toxic sludge, and wildlife drenched in molasses-thick oil were widely disseminated throughout mainstream media. The mobile rig was situated approximately forty-one miles from the Louisiana coast, and it burst into flames when methane moved up the drilling column, killing eleven platform workers and injuring seventeen more. When two days later the rig sank, oil from the broken wellhead gushed uncontrollably into the ocean. In response, the U.S. public was outraged by what they witnessed. Yet the same public is far less damning of the oil industry and government when faced with other oil-related images of cars in traffic jams or smog on the horizon. It feels no outrage as it consumes the largest amount of oil in the world and relies on oil imports in order to do so. And its anger was indeed short-lived. Within a year, the U.S. public was once again supporting energy exploratory initiatives even if they were made at the expense of environmental concerns. So why is it that the images of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sparked such a vacuous public outcry? It seemed more as if public outrage obfuscated the real source of violence endemic to fossil fuel production and dependency.

The October 2010 issue of National Geographic featured images of bottlenose dolphins sliding through the oiled-slicked waters of Chandeleur Sound, Louisiana; a dead turtle stranded in a reddish brown bed of sludge in Barataria Bay; and workers’ bodies smudged brown as they bagged oil throughout the Louisiana wetlands. For the three-month period following the spill, the New York Times regularly showed updates, such as images of the Deepwater Horizon rig collapsing amidst an orange glow of raging fire and aerial views of the oil-drenched waters of the Gulf of Mexico. CBS News presented its viewers with footage of wildlife and clean-up workers dripping in oil. The English newspaper Telegraph displayed images of oil encroaching on shoreline communities, and the Guardian showed pictures of oil slicks producing rainbow patterns over the surface of the ocean. Reuters documented workers dressed in protection suits collecting oil-absorbent, water-repellent booms soaked with oil and the spill surrounding the marshland south of Venice, Louisiana. And similar images appeared in the global media. This provocative visual landscape interrupted everyday life the world over, especially in the United States.

The immediate political fallout of the spill was the retraction by forty-fourth U.S. president Barack Obama of his plans to end a moratorium on oil exploration that he had only recently publicly announced (March 2010).⁶ Prior to the Deepwater Horizon spill, the president had been preparing to move ahead with a contentious plan to open the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the northern coast of Alaska to offshore drilling for oil and gas. Like his presidential predecessors, Obama considered oil a strategic resource. He hoped the policy would win him much needed political support for his energy and climate bill, produce revenue from selling offshore leases, and reduce the U.S. dependence on oil imports. The catastrophic spill in the gulf changed all that, and in May 2010 the president announced a six-month moratorium on deep-water (more than five hundred feet) oil and gas drilling. A political domino effect was in play as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (I) proposed legislation prohibiting offshore exploration and drilling throughout the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as well as a large part of the gulf and that fuel-mileage standards for automobiles be increased to fifty miles per gallon.

On the ground, U.S. public opinion toward energy exploration and environmental protection dramatically changed direction. A May 24–25, 2010, USA Today/Gallup Poll reported that Americans had started to prioritize the environment over the development of energy supplies. The report summarized its findings thus: “In March, by 50% to 43%, Americans said it was more important to develop U.S. energy supplies than to protect the environment, continuing a trend in the direction of energy production seen since 2007. Now, the majority favor[s] environmental protection, by 55% to 39%—the second-largest percentage (behind the 58% in 2007) favoring the environment in the 10-year history of the question.”⁷

As emotive imagery of the Deepwater Horizon event flooded the global media for eighty-eight days, the public watched the irruptive and unpredictable forces of material life in violent confrontation with human hubris. The shock brought on by the apocalyptic visual landscape defied interpretation. Indeed, for a brief moment, no matter how widely the event was reported, it could not be easily inscribed with meaning. The images were so relentless and the situation documented so uncompromising that public debate over the future of the world’s energy and over humanity’s unwavering dependence on fossil fuels was sparked. Media coverage of the event prompted momentary wrinkles to form on the face of climate change discourse in large part because the U.S. public could no longer look the other way. The everyday denial that allows people to continue with business as usual, the Freudian disavowal of “I know, but … ,” was no longer effective.

One explanation for the sharp change in U.S. opinion comes from cultural anomaly theory. The shock of ecological disaster plays a transformative role in society, for it represents “an anomaly in the institutional order”—an anomaly that signals the “fundamental challenge” “to actors’ identities within an existing institutional order.”⁸ Cultural anomalies redefine social problems by focusing public attention on a specific issue. The approach adopted by cultural anomalists is intriguing, for they suggest that an otherwise incomprehensible situation (that is, the basis of a shock) is able to “represent” an interruption at an institutional level. But isn’t a trauma traumatic because it defies representation? That is the whole point of going to therapy to deal with trauma. In therapy, cure comes from narrating the sequence of events that make up the history of a trauma, and in so doing the shockwaves trauma produces are supposed to be neutralized. The premise of trauma therapy is basically that the violence of shock induced by trauma can be successfully defused when it enters language and is reconstructed within a symbolic field.⁹

Perhaps the anomaly that ecological disaster images present comes from the way in which they cannot be rendered meaningful. Where the politics of such shocks lie has less to do with what they represent and more to do with the manner in which they defy representation. In fact, I argue that it is when the incomprehensibility of a shock is represented that it becomes coherent and its affective power is depoliticized. In other words, I would like to depersonalize cultural anomaly theory. Where cultural anomaly theory wonders why the “linkage of the spill with other problems and issues in the oil industry by institutional entrepreneurs has so far failed,”¹⁰ I would add that it is too easy to focus on the failure of institutional entrepreneurs and that we need to take a hard-nosed look at how we facilitate this failure. Environmentalist Bill McKibben aptly explained for U.S. News & World Report, “This is one of the moments when we’re offered an opportunity to really see what’s going on in the world…. Even if that oil made it safely to shore and got burned in the gas tanks of our cars, it would be an environmental catastrophe.”¹¹ In other words, those of us who live high-oil-consuming lifestyles need to stop pointing the finger of blame in the other direction and start pointing it toward ourselves.

And in terms of what slipped through the cracks of signification, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill presented the disruptive brutality of material life, thereby posing an outside to thought.¹² The incomprehensibility of this outside occupies an important formal position. In its alterity, it poses a dramatically different situation to the one we currently find ourselves in. William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling write in Blowout in the Gulf:

The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon provides, in the most vivid form that any of us would ever want not to see, not just a tragedy, but also a challenge, and an opportunity—a challenge to take a closer, more clear-eyed look at our policies, and an opportunity to realize that this is a hole that cannot be escaped simply by digging deeper to look for more oil. Instead, our only hope for a better energy future is to respond to the oil-darkened waters with clearer thinking—to move now to confront the reality of using ever-increasing quantities of scarce and precious petroleum, and to begin the move to a future that will be controlled by our decisions, not by our dependence on the fast-disappearing remnants of the time when dinosaurs last roamed the earth, a good hundred million years ago.¹³

The key here, as Freudenberg and Gramling so fittingly note, is that the explosion presented what had previously been unseen and unheard. The blowout in the gulf was almost like a repressed unconscious spewing forth into consciousness; it was something that “any of us would ever want not to see.” The crucial point I take away from this comment is that people do not want to see how they are implicated in the very policies and lifestyles that produce violence of this sort—much like the sign that read “Damn BP! God Bless America!” Although the Louisiana locals’ anger is understandable, those who posted the sign at the roadside need to be reminded that it is not just any policy but “our” policies (theirs included) that their sign conceals from view. Although it is important that those directly responsible are held accountable and are forced to incur the costs of cleanup and recovery, instead of just focusing on who is to blame, how might we understand all the failures that led to the spill as part of a larger narrative?¹⁴

As oil soaked the ecosystems of the wetlands, the Gulf of Mexico, wildlife, and local economies, the outrage experienced by the U.S. public in response to the spill produced a kind of ideological interpretation of the event—“BP is to blame.” I do not mean to suggest that BP is immune from being held accountable and responsible for its operations in the Gulf of Mexico that produced the spill. I do argue, however, that blame inscribed the event with moral meaning and in so doing defused the political potential of the shock.

It is not the allocation of blame that is at fault, but rather what this allocation of blame produces: denial. The real issue at stake is that the world’s climate is changing, and there is no difference between the pollution emitted from cars every year and the pollution that comes from oil spewing into the gulf. In this regard, the significance of failure does not lie in the content of historical failures, but rather in the formal position such failure occupies and subsequently the kind of being constituted by this position. Failure can also be a source of liberation, but only if it is released from the shackles of negativity and is allowed to activate a sense of optimism for the future as a source of change for the present: failure as an opportunity for liberating change.

This book has centered on this very issue: given the scientific consensus over the irreversible and harmful social and environmental consequences that a few climatic changes in degree will cause, it is vital that business as usual be disrupted. Enough with the disavowal, the “damn BP,” “damn the corporation,” and so on! Damn us all for damning everything but ourselves—the citizens of high-consuming societies who are implicated in the endless production and consumption of material life.

With high-oil-consuming populations working diligently at being more ecologically aware, recycling waste, eating vegan, wearing organic cotton, offsetting carbon footprints, driving hybrid automobiles, and so on and so forth, it is important that one does not lose sight of the larger picture of how capital accumulates and at whose expense. As capital accumulates, so too do injustices and inequities the world over. Simply modifying the current system is therefore not enough. President Obama’s six-month moratorium is an obvious modification, but so too is a permanent ban on offshore drilling and exploration. I can already hear my critics scream: “So you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t!” Not quite: I am suggesting that much more is needed if we are going to stop our dependence on fossil fuels and the structures of violence from which that dependence arises.

As we face the crisis of climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels, it is important that we put to work Naomi Klein’s explosive and bold thesis of crisis capitalism.¹⁶ We cannot permit the shockwaves of environmental and climate crises to be exploited as another excuse to impose free-market policies and practices. In other words, we cannot afford to succumb to the shock therapy imposed under the different guises of disaster capitalism described throughout this book: neoliberal capitalism, climate capitalism, environmental capitalism, and oil capitalism (all of which, I should add, are implicated in one another). More critical realism is needed, and, as horrible as it may sound, we need first to give up on the idea of “nature.”

In the context of pollution, starvation, species extinction, toxicity, contamination, and the rubble left behind by warfare and ecological disasters, mythologizing the natural world as a pristine untainted virgin space—the antithesis of the “artificiality” posed by technology and industrialization—is quite simply a waste of energy and at worst a displacement activity. Contemporary life is a cocktail of material life, technology, human activities, and the reproduction of capital. And the cocktail has to be one that people are more willing to imbibe if equitable pragmatic responses to climate change and the social inequities it will precipitate are to be implemented. This cocktail has a name: machinic life.

Machinic life is not the same as material life because the affective combination of energy, matter, force, surplus-value, and machines may be composed of material life but not be reducible to it. Machinic life confounds the clear-cut boundary between the artificial and the natural. It renders futile the impulse to delineate between the natural and the artificial. Trying to ascertain where the natural ends and the artificial begins is quite simply useless. After centuries of industrialization, what is called “natural” can only be an expression of a deep-seated anxiety and hostility toward change. Introducing critical realism into the current situation means posing the following two questions that machinic life presents: the aesthetic question “What kinds of affective and sensorial organizations does machinic life produce?” and the political problem “What motivates how machinic life is used and the subsequent organizations this use creates?” And here we can return to the images of the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill raised questions over the future of energy, offshore drilling, and stricter oversight of the oil and gas industries. The ecological catastrophe quite literally shook the public imagination, forcing into view the violence of humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels.¹⁷

The disaster imagery of the Deepwater Horizon bore witness to a struggle that took place between the subject and object of images and the affective landscapes coordinating these images; between the act of negation (as the workers attempted to impose a purposive form on material life in tirelessly trying to cap the well) and the affirmative power of creative production (as the well continued to spew forth oil for eighty-eight days despite professional experts’ efforts to cap it). The images of ecological disaster that appeared in the immediate aftermath of the explosion defeated the omnipotence of a rational thinking subject—a view that presupposes that subjectivity is basically immaterial. No amount of reasoning seemed to be able to bring the situation under control: contractors tried to cover the wellhead with a dome and then to close it with a submersible robot; then they frantically used chemical dispersants to break up the oil and eventually scooped up the gunk by hand, until finally a solution was found: the well was successfully capped and then filled with cement on July 15, 2010. The well was officially declared dead on September 19, 2010, five months after the explosion.

Despite the U.S. Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (Pub. L. 101-380),¹⁸ no amount of money spent by BP or military resources supplied by the U.S. administration could sufficiently contain the spill before it wreaked havoc on wildlife, ecosystems, and local communities. The crisis dramatically worsened before it could be resolved. Out of this animated combination of forces, energies, and affects, the aesthetic figure of machinic life presented a violent image of mythic proportions: blue skies were interrupted by clouds of thick black smoke; the ocean was ablaze; and pelicans were either freezing to death or frying alive because oil had destroyed their feathers’ insulation capabilities.

Footage of the oil spill was quickly disseminated across the globe on television media and other news outlets, prompting public outrage over the crisis. With this outcry came a momentary shift in attitude. Confronted with an ecological catastrophe of such magnitude, people could no longer evade the violence of machinic life with which their everyday lives are complicit. This confrontation radicalizes Marx, who so astutely observed that through labor human beings create their means of subsistence by imposing an objective form onto material life, thereby changing it into a commodity and subjecting it to use- and exchange-value. Through this process of alienation, capital is set in motion. Yet despite humanity’s efforts to objectify material life, it indefatigably asserts its autonomy by challenging both capitalist modes of production on its own terms and humanity’s conservative belief in “nature” as an organic balanced Whole that we exploit and subsequently upset the equilibrium of.¹⁹

The imagery of ecological catastrophe points to yet another dynamic at work in humanity’s relationship to material life, one that was not the focus of Marx’s thinking: the connections human beings establish with material life are not just negative; they are affirmative, creative, and sensuous. In many respects, machinic life is the effect of the intimate connections people establish with technology, material life, and capital accumulation. Just think of all the information people willingly offer up about themselves to Facebook, eBay, online banking, and so forth or of the implants that allow the deaf to hear again or of the pacemaker that improves debilitating heart conditions—all these things are examples of intimate technologies. The point is that bodies, technologies, material life, and capital are implicated in each other but cannot be reductively equated with one or the other; they resonate, activate, and energize each other. The affective processes coordinating machinic life means aesthetics is well positioned to pose new ways of engaging with the effects of machinic life. Through the politics of aesthetics, people are not reduced simply to making one another and the world in which they live, as Marx proposed; rather, to borrow a concept from Jacques Rancière, through the redistribution of the sensible people are better positioned to remake themselves and the connections they form with other entities and with the environments in which they live.²⁰ The key question is: How can people start loving machinic life for what it is, embracing it in all its brutality and sensuality?

As we witnessed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico uncontrollably burst into flames as the blowout in the 18,000-foot Maconda well refused to be tamed, a horrifying materialism presented itself. This is important because as an “outside,” machinic life seemed to keep humanity on its toes, defiantly gushing approximately 56,000 to 68,000 million barrels of oil into the ocean daily for a total of eighty-eight days, regardless of how many people worked around the clock trying to contain the spill.²¹ The approximately 4.4 million barrels of oil that filled the ocean during that time brought the oil mogul BP to its knees, savagely destroying the already weak economy of the gulf and leaving wildlife and wetlands in the region saturated in black gunk. In other words, through its radical alterity, machinic life intruded upon humanity’s sense of self-importance and the hubris underscoring this sense, for the miscreant Maconda well proved very resistant indeed.

The spectacle of ecological disaster such as the destruction left behind by the oil spill in the gulf subjectivizes violence. Charged with a sensorial power, the media images documenting such events pulsate across the globe. Yet even though such images might clearly identify the victims of violence (people, ecosystems, cities, wildlife) and the actor of violence (machinic life), they conceal what Slavoj Žižek calls “objective violence.” As he says, objective violence is “violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.”²² Objective violence operates at a structural level, allowing business to carry on as usual.

The objective violence that enables the average person living in an affluent country to lead a reasonably comfortable life is made possible by the myriad ways in which the violence of oil production and the geopolitics of oil operates throughout the world and has done so throughout history. For instance, oil impedes democracy by making governments of poor states who export oil more authoritarian. The first reason for this outcome is the rentier effect. The term rentier refers to states that obtain a large portion of their revenues from external rents—namely, foreign states, interests, or individuals.²³ Oil money is used to placate the population against holding the government accountable for what they suffer, resulting in the government’s being less likely to subsidize development programs.²⁴ This placation then feeds into a repression effect as the government uses its fiscal power to dull popular opposition, in turn producing more authoritarian forms of governance. Third, as there is less investment in the social field (education, health, services, infrastructure), the population is less likely to push for democracy.²⁵

The civil war in Sudan, the largest country in Africa, is a good example of how the subjective violence of the Deepwater Horizon event is undergirded by systemic forms of violence central to the geopolitics of oil. The inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits of oil production fueled the Sudanese civil war. The war resulted in approximately 2 million deaths, 4 million internally displaced, 420,000 refugees, and approximately 2,500 rebel child soldiers.²⁶ The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported in 2001 that oil revenues had provided the Sudanese government with “substantial new revenue that enabled it to double its military expenditures compared to 1998.”²⁷ When the Sudanese government in the North appropriated oil-bearing lands in the South, it expelled the indigenous population from their lands,²⁸ which incited violent protests by locals who depended on the land for their livelihood and the subsequent creation of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (established in 1983 by John Garang, a senior army official who defected from government forces).²⁹ Chevron Corporation (the first oil company to establish a permanent facility in Sudan), which had supported the Numeiri government of the North and later the Baggara militia in return for secure access to the oil-rich regions of the South, began withdrawing from the region in 1984 after its operations were attacked and three Chevron employees were killed by the Liberation Army.

At this point, I return to the epigraphs at the beginning of the chapter. Given how hostile George W. Bush was to multilateralism during his two terms in office, so much so that he withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol and was criticized by Senator John Kerry for being isolationist, it seems surprising that he was the driving force behind the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which provided $18.8 billion in funding to combat HIV/AIDS, treating 19 million people, mainly Africans.³¹ That is, it is surprising until one starts connecting the dots of objective violence. Here one quickly comes to realize that the money Bush provided to help relieve HIV/AIDS in Africa might have been provided because African oil is of central importance to the United States and is predicted to become even more important than Middle Eastern oil. Against this backdrop, Bush’s funding of HIV/AIDS programs in Africa seems like just another form of geopolitical oil strategizing—an act of economic opportunism, pure and simple.

All in all, what do the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico drunk on 205.8 million gallons of crude oil, the United States as the top oil-consuming country in the world as of 2009,³² climate change, the approximately 2 million people who died in the second Sudanese civil war (1983–2005), the thousands of Ogoni protesters murdered by Nigerian military forces in 1995, and U.S. “humanitarian” HIV/AIDS funding for Africans hold in common? Oil capitalism.

In light of the systemic violence throughout the history of oil production, how can responsibility be taken for the truth that ecological oil disasters present? This truth paradoxically cannot be accessed through visual perception alone; it requires a choice be made to refuse to be sidetracked by subjective forms of violence that, as Žižek explains, are perpetrated by “social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses [and] fanatical crowds.”³³ The spectacle of ecological disaster fetishizes “nature,” and in so doing it invokes a form of obedience to the subjective violence documented by the image. People direct their energies of rage toward an Other, all the while ignoring the real source of the violence: social organizations that perpetuate the consumption of large amounts of fossil fuel energy.

Although the spectacle of violence after the Deepwater Horizon disaster appears to have redistributed the investment of energies organizing the U.S. social field, producing a crack in the everyday life of the average oil-consuming person, by March 2011 dissensus had once more flipped in favor of energy supplies over and above environmental concerns. One Gallup Poll noted that the “significant uptick in Americans’ choosing the environment over production” just after the Deepwater Horizon spill had “proved a short-lived reaction to the event,” going on to summarize the situation thus: “And a record-high 41% now think the U.S. should emphasize production of fossil fuels as the preferred solution to the nation’s energy problems, although a 48% plurality continues to favor conservation. The same poll showed increased public support for offshore oil drilling and oil exploration in Alaska.”³⁴

Gallup reported in March 2011 that in a list of fourteen issues, the issue that concerned Americans most was the economy (71 percent). Environmental concern ranked thirteenth, with 34 percent reporting they worried about the environment a “great deal.”³⁵

So where did all the disagreement go? It turned into consensus when the images of cleanup set in, when the U.S. economic recovery slowed, and, more pertinent, when a criminal (BP) had been found. God forbid the criminal should be us! Denial of this sort is the pinnacle of objective violence. It emerged when the incomprehensible images were inscribed with meaning, enabling the general public to divert its energies of outrage toward the cleanup effort and BP. The effect of this diversion is that public dissensus was disciplined.