coe064_appel.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Well, welcome back. Cultures of energy, listeners, we are very pleased to have you here. Welcome. Hello, Dominic, how are you?

Speaker2: [00:00:33] That's your this is your robot impersonation.

Speaker1: [00:00:35] No, I'm making it's a kind of singsong your voice. It's not a robot. It's important to you. It sounds mildly human.

Speaker2: [00:00:43] I think we're doing a late night edition here. So we're going to keep it kind of short, but very happy to have you back on back with us cultures of energy listeners.

Speaker1: [00:00:52] I'm very happy to have Hannah Apel talking to us too.

Speaker2: [00:00:55] Yeah, jump right to it.

Speaker1: [00:00:57] She's an assistant professor of anthropology at what they call a Latin America La La, also known as UCLA.

Speaker2: [00:01:04] I was going to go, but

Speaker1: [00:01:05] Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great name for it. It is pretty cool. Anyway, yes, University of California at Los Angeles

Speaker2: [00:01:14] And we have a we have a long, multifaceted conversation about oil today. Guinea, yes, Equatorial Guinea. But beyond we talk a lot about the U.S. we talked a lot about, you know, Petro states, we even slipped Norway in there. At the end, we got a lot. Yeah. Rex Tillerson. Oh, Rex. Yeah, we give Rex a little bit of a performance review, not just as secretary of state, but in his prior incarnation as a oil and gas example.

Speaker1: [00:01:41] We also have a we also have a referendum on the oil industry in total.

Speaker2: [00:01:45] So what I'll say one thing. I mean, just in terms of stuff that happened, a very busy and kind of tiring week so far was the rollback of the Clean Power Plan. Yeah, right. And that created a lot of news. I just wanted to share a couple of not to go through that news cycle again. I think we most of the people listening, maybe all the people listening to this podcast probably understand the stakes of that rollback. But I will point out, though, that not so well covered in the news. We're a report from Utility Dive, which is, don't you call like, I guess it's a kind of an industry journal. It focuses really on the electricity utility industry. And that, of course, is a big topic of the Clean Power Plan. And the idea is over in a world background to bring coal back. We're going to make it easier for local energy to be used and we're going to increase our energy, autonomy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, so they did six hundred surveys with people who work for utilities across the country and in Canada.

Speaker2: [00:02:44] And it was very interesting to see that these people who work inside the industry felt that what they were most certain about was that the next ten years would hold a large growth in solar, large growth in distributed generation growth and wind growth and natural gas. But almost no one believed that coal had a future. They thought everyone thought coal would decline and that nuclear energy would stagnate or at best, kind of keep even depending on what part of the country. And the other piece of news I want to share from this week is that Westinghouse, which is the only company that has been authorized to build a new nuclear power plant since Three Mile Island in the United States, went bankrupt this week, too. So despite the Clean Power Plan and all of the sort of allegedly good news that is for the fossil fuel industry and baseload power and everything like that, actually it was kind of on balance, a kind of crummy week for those companies. And I think if you look at the dynamics that we're still moving towards renewables. Well, yeah,

Speaker1: [00:03:44] Sorry, folks, because the other thing that's been part of this. The other thing that's been part of this news cycle about rolling back the Clean Power Plan and the supposed return of coal is that frankly, and we already knew this, that LNG is so cheap that that's the reason that coal is already on its downslide. And in fact, the clean power regulations, in fact, have not even been implemented. They've been tied up in court. Yeah. So, you know, the loss that the coal industry has seen and the loss of the jobs over the last couple of years is all about liquid natural gas. It's actually got nothing to do with the Clean Power Plan is what I understand that these regulations haven't even been implemented. The regulations, were they to be implemented, will certainly guarantee the death of the coal industry because they're very, very strict. But the point is is that when Trump is trying to capitalize on the fact that we have this very solid environmental plan to take care of, you know, this really highly toxic carbon producing energy industry, which is creating one third of the carbon dioxide emissions that we have in our country.

Speaker2: [00:04:47] More and a lot of other nasty stuff, too. Coal doesn't stop the carbon dioxide. There's a lot of particulates that it contributes to. And anyhow, the point is this was largely a symbolic move and it's a bad symbolic move. And it maybe it gives more heart to people who are opposed to low carbon energy transitions to decarbonise the economy, but it's not really going to be decisive. In fact, I don't really think you're saying that's going to have that much of an effect in the long run. But before we go and get to this interview with Hannah, you have to tell your story about the steam tunnels because the most exciting thing that happened this week was local was your venture to the steam tunnels. So how did you even find out about this? How do you get down into the steam tunnels?

Speaker1: [00:05:26] Okay. I mean, I don't even know if it's that exciting a story, but I can tell a little bit and and I realize I'm being really snorkeling, but it's because I have a terrible thing in my eye. As you can see, I can't even like I'm just covering my eye and audio podcast. I know, but you can see it. So you can vouch for me that I am suffering through some kind of particulate matter in my eye. It's a matter of particulates in here

Speaker2: [00:05:49] That could be that you're wearing a pirate's iPad, which I think is kind of the citation. I've been telling you not to dress up as a pirate for the podcast for a while. Again, it's audio podcast.

Speaker1: [00:05:57] People, you know so funny is that when I was little punk rocker, I really wanted one of those black eye patches. I thought it would look really tough. Yeah. I mean, I wanted to keep my eye on Adam and oh, shoot, really? Oh, I'm sure I thought of it before Adam did. Oh God, did I ever tell you the time that I saw Adam Mount and the drugstore and say,

Speaker2: [00:06:16] This is the story you should tell Adam that makes it to Santa Cruz? And what happened?

Speaker1: [00:06:20] Well, we actually had a lot of good bands come through town because we had this great music venue that is still there. It's called the catalyst, which is a pretty good name. Actually, there's a total of like seventies place, maybe even sixties place that people would go to. But Santa Cruz has a lot of, you know, audio files and musicians and people who are really into music. And so bands and singers like to come and perform there because the catalyst has like a kick ass sound system and you have these really like you have a completely devoted audience who pays attention to every stroke, basically. So the town has always had a good reputation as a place to go play. That is the reason why we would get these kind of outsized acts that normally wouldn't come to a town that size, except for this reputation. So anyhow, so

Speaker2: [00:07:04] Most people listening to us don't even know who Adam Ant was. Just take our word for it. He was a big act for about a year and a half in the 1980s.

Speaker1: [00:07:11] Yeah. Well, by now, they probably are. They're already on the interweb. They've already looked him up and they saw his picture. He's like, you know, he always had this sort of glossy look like he had like, I swear, he wore a blush. He always looks sort of like in soft focus, like a like a telenovela. He was always this kind of soft focus,

Speaker2: [00:07:27] Like a Cinemax film from back in the day. Oh my god. So anyway, the fact that you're tearing up about it, I think that that alone people are reading the affect off. They say, Oh

Speaker1: [00:07:36] God, I didn't tell

Speaker2: [00:07:37] You you had a memory is bringing back feels. Let's bring back the feel.

Speaker1: [00:07:42] They have some kind of inorganic matter in my eye, which is just making me cry. But it's true. It is. It sounds good as a good dramatic effect. So I'll give you OK, so OK. So what it was is it was OK. So Adam was in town and he was playing at the catalyst, but I was 15 or 16 too young to go to the catalyst, like you had to be 18 to go to the shows there. So we knew he was playing and I think we were probably fans. Although I have to say I never did own an atom at record of any kind like I knew who he was, but I wasn't into him. He was a little too poppy for me. I'm sure you didn't own any of the stuff either, right? Oh man. Oh, come on. No, don't don't tell me going to lose or lose respect. I can't have been into Adam.

Speaker2: [00:08:24] I actually I'm not trying to hide anything for me. I just don't remember there were a lot of there were a lot of like one hit wonder bands from the early nineteen eighties that you like Rockwell. Like, I got the Rockwell album, like I got the Thomas Dolby album. Like, There are things I got. I mean, yeah, they're not terrible, but like, so the point is like, yes, could I have had a had a single of goody two shoes? It's not impossible. Oh God, right? I'm not saying I'd be proud of it. I'm not going to be proud of it.

Speaker1: [00:08:49] That was the other thing he did this like retro fifties thing, which was so irritating because it was such the trope of the eighties. He didn't, and he had this really like

Speaker2: [00:08:56] Again, you are the one crying about him. Well, but maybe you're crying.

Speaker1: [00:08:59] I mean, everyone thought he was sort of cute and like a Peter Pan ish sort of way right now.

Speaker2: [00:09:04] He was cute. There's no doubt he was cute.

Speaker1: [00:09:05] Yeah, he was cute and he was English. I mean, he's British, so that counts. That's like makes you 50 percent cuter already. Definitely. Yeah. So anyway, so it was it was a weekday and it was a Tuesday. I remember that it was a Tuesday, and my dad wanted to go on this big bike ride and he didn't want to do it on the weekend. So I was playing hooky from school. Wow. I called in sick or whatever sent in a note just to be able to go off and do this thing. So it was a Tuesday like, you know, a time when there aren't supposed to be school kids walking around. It was like 11:00 in the morning or something. And for some reason we had to stop at this drugstore, which is called longues. But it's like a it's like a CVS or something in downtown Santa Cruz. I don't know sunblock. I don't know what we were doing there. Me and my dad were there. We were getting the sunblock. We were going to go on this big bike ride and then I look over on the line. And of course, the store is totally depopulated because there's just not anyone shopping at that time of day on a Tuesday.

Speaker2: [00:09:58] That was it alongs.

Speaker1: [00:09:59] Yeah, oh my God. There was adamant in line and he was in costume. Well, OK, I'm not going to say that he was dressed like he is on his album covers, but he was definitely dressed up in an outfit like he definitely stood out. He was quite spectacular. And you know, again, maybe it wasn't exactly what he was going to wear on stage, but it was very flashy and it really stood out. In Santa Cruz is like little surfer, right? And on a Tuesday at 11 a.m. and he had a big dude with him who is clearly his bodyguard. He had like a really big dude with him. And so they were at the they were in line checking.

Speaker2: [00:10:36] They were just getting a burrito.

Speaker1: [00:10:37] Well, I don't think they sold burritos there. I think he was good jobs

Speaker2: [00:10:41] To gain chapstick. I don't know. Guy was just getting ready to kiss a lot of girls that night.

Speaker1: [00:10:46] Well, that's really true.

Speaker2: [00:10:47] I got to get my lips and I got to get my lips in shape. I got to use protection.

Speaker1: [00:10:51] So. So I saw him. I mean, really, I mean, he really did stand out and and I saw this outfit and I was like, Oh my God. And then I look, I was like, Oh my God, it's Adam. And then my dad was right there next to me in line. Oh, but yeah, of course, he's like, who? And he's like, Oh, you should go talk to him. Like, Go say hello. I was like, Oh, no,

Speaker3: [00:11:09] No, no, no, no.

Speaker2: [00:11:11] And then and then we probably walked over and

Speaker1: [00:11:13] Introduced exactly well. We were in line behind them and it's like, Oh. Out, right? Mortified. I mean, he did like, he's all. Oh, excuse me, sir, like, my daughter is a big fan. Oh man, it's like the classic like dad mortification.

Speaker2: [00:11:30] That is a great story, and I haven't heard that one. So was that it? Did you say hi to?

Speaker1: [00:11:35] Oh yeah, he said hello. He said hello. But I was just like had my tail between my legs, and all I wanted to do was like, Go hide, hide my head in the sand and run away.

Speaker2: [00:11:43] And this is in the days before selfies. Like now, it would be totally kosher if you just walked up and said, Oh, can I get a quick selfie? And then you would have had that moment captured forever. It would have been your Facebook, your Instagram. Well, that's true. Tumblr.

Speaker1: [00:11:55] Yeah, that's

Speaker2: [00:11:55] Snapchat. And it would have been.

Speaker1: [00:11:57] And then it would have been validated, too, because the bummer was, is that then like that evening I went, you know, I called up my friends on my landline, right? Like, I got shot at Adam and at the drugstore today and there

Speaker3: [00:12:09] Was No, you didn't. You didn't. Yeah, I was like, Yeah, I did. I swear it. No, he wouldn't be there.

Speaker1: [00:12:15] Yeah, no one believed me, and I was like, Well, I don't care. Like, why would I make it up? I wasn't like a huge fan. It wasn't like I saw Peter Murphy or something.

Speaker2: [00:12:23] But people think, I mean, people think fake news began recently, but it really began a long time ago. And the reason why we've actually been able to hunt down like there's only a few types of fake news left because of the hegemony of the photograph now and the fact that everyone has a camera on them now. We pretty much like celebrity sightings have to be documented, but you have back in the day, it was like your word versus their skepticism. That's hard, you know, and your friends didn't want to believe that you had had this choice random encounter with Adam Ant and they hadn't. I mean, come on, it's devastating to them.

Speaker1: [00:12:54] They should have bailed on school that day. That was their fault.

Speaker2: [00:12:58] All right. Let's skip the Steam Tunnel story because it's late. I want to say is that you know who would have loved to have been there? A fly on the wall? Hannah Pell, Hannah Pell would have known what to do in that situation.

Speaker1: [00:13:07] Not only Hannah Pell. It probably doesn't know who had Amanda,

Speaker2: [00:13:10] And I felt totally knows who. I don't know. I'm going to email her right after this and make sure she knows

Speaker1: [00:13:16] Because I mean, she may. But she's she's not of that generation.

Speaker2: [00:13:20] I don't think it doesn't matter. She's just a person who knows things. And I just I also think she would have known exactly how to handle the situation and your dad at the same time so that everyone would have come out. You know, some people are like that. They just like they've got they've got social intelligence.

Speaker1: [00:13:34] Yeah, no. She has a lot of social intelligence. Well, if she just handled my dad, that would have been good enough. Nice. If she just handled my dad, then I could have, like, decided myself what I wanted to do with a little mystery.

Speaker2: [00:13:44] And that's a whole nother story. Some of these late night.

Speaker1: [00:13:49] Oh, so the final, the final thing. And this is true of every famous person, always so much smaller than you thought they would be. That's right. I'm not going to say who is tiny, but he was much smaller. It was much smaller than I thought it was. And I'm not a big person, as you know, but I was kind of like, Oh, he's like, he's little, you know, he was kind of little cute, but little.

Speaker2: [00:14:10] When I met Al Pacino, it was the same thing, but I'm going to save that for another podcast. At the time, I met Al Pacino, folks, we're going to find a time machine. We're going to send handheld back to that longs that day in Santa Cruz. You can tell somebody is really broken up. She's weeping openly here.

Speaker1: [00:14:24] I'm going to like, rip out my eyeballs,

Speaker2: [00:14:26] Eye patches soaked. It's kind of falling off her face now. But that's what true fandom is about, is about suffering. It's about loving your art, loving your artists. You know who loves her art and her artists and apple. Go, Hannah, go. Hannah.

Speaker1: [00:14:56] Welcome back to the show, cultures of energy listeners. We're glad to have you here and we're extra super glad to have Hannah Apel with us here, too. Hi, Hannah.

Speaker3: [00:15:07] Hi, Simone. Hi, Dominic.

Speaker2: [00:15:08] Oh, it's so great to have you on the pod. Ok, Hannah, so one of the things you mentioned to me in an email was that you could talk forever about Rex Tillerson, so we are going to hold you to that. But maybe his way of setting this up because you're somebody who knows a great deal about the oil industry and especially international oil industry. You probably heard of Rex Tillerson before, you know, November, unlike many people in the country. So how would you rate Rex Tillerson on a scale of one to 10, where one or 10 is like Beelzebub? And one is, I guess, what would the what would be the best case scenario for an oil energy executive? I'm trying to think who would be the most saintly we could imagine in

Speaker3: [00:15:50] Terms of, you know, George George Bush or something?

Speaker2: [00:15:53] The first the first one? Ok, OK. Here we go. Yeah. All right. So give give it to us on a scale from George Bush to Beelzebub, where where are we sitting with Rex Tillerson?

Speaker3: [00:16:00] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I so I did know about Rex Tillerson before he was nominated and eventually became the secretary of state. And the reason that I knew about him is because he was, of course, the CEO of ExxonMobil, which is one of the major U.S. oil and gas companies with whom I did research in Equatorial Guinea, this small country in central Africa. So having said that, I did not know much about him as an individual, though it was sort of widely known and widely talked about in among ExxonMobil employees on the ground in Equatorial Guinea that he had sort of overseen the fiscal blossoming and sort of absolute global expansion of ExxonMobil as a company. So he was understood by people who worked for him in Equatorial Guinea, and they are my small sample size here as kind of a in particular a fiscal genius. And the subtext of that in a place like Equatorial Guinea and we saw this subtext being raised in his confirmation hearings. The subtext of that is you become a fiscal genius, leading a U.S. based company in a place like Equatorial Guinea or like Azerbaijan, or sort of in these autocratic states by turning a blind eye. That's not even right. By colluding very actively with very repressive governments in which you are not obligated to follow any other kinds of industry regulations. Right. So though people, though employees in Equatorial Guinea never said that outright, because that would have kind of been slander on their boss. That was always the very present subtext, even with people for whom that wasn't necessarily a political liability, right? Even for people like for whom that would be a sort of a character plus for them? Right? Sure. So in terms of putting him on the bush to Beelzebub scale,

Speaker2: [00:17:54] Which by the way, we're trademarking that, we're trademarking that.

Speaker3: [00:17:56] I know there's like some alliteration there. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think I would put him squarely in the center, though as a good anthropologist and social scientist, I am also really reluctant to individualize him and more interested in sort of the effects that his work has had in the world, both with Equatorial Guinea and now going forward as a leader of the State Department. I mean, yeah,

Speaker1: [00:18:22] Well, I mean, I guess, you know, people are describing him as a fiscal genius and as you've pointed out very eloquently, that involved colluding with corrupt governments and essentially being an unethical actor, you know, consciously in every way. But I wonder, I mean, is that just a quality of being a quote unquote fiscal genius? Or is that just the condition? Is that just a condition of the president? When you're working with something like a massive transnational oil company and extractive practices in in a state like Equatorial Guinea, where the rule of law doesn't always apply and where there's a lot of financial desperation among some of the population, et cetera?

Speaker3: [00:19:02] Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good point, and I think that it could. There are ways to follow it in both directions, but my own interests in fiscal genius, you know, in this particular book project, in my particular, whatever sort of expertise and set of questions around energy does tend, I list toward the latter right. I list toward the specificity of that kind of leadership in extractive environments. And I actually feel like scholars both in anthropology and geography kind of critical disciplines, but certainly also in economics and political science have actually abetted this insofar as we have focused for so long on the effects of oil extraction as money, right? So that there's been so little attention on the industry itself. And what happens when you only think about oil as rents, when you. Only then it becomes the sort of problematic look at, oh, look, the African state is pathological again, right? And Tillerson and the people with whom I worked in Equatorial Guinea loved that they passed me articles on the resource curse, right? It became this. It became a way for them to say, Oh gosh, look, what's going to happen in Equatorial Guinea? As if they had nothing to do with that. And so I do actually think that it's really important to center, and I think it's fine in the end, the sort of demonizing way to center Tillerson, in other words, in a way to sort of assign liability to assign responsibility and but more importantly, to center U.S.

Speaker3: [00:20:30] transnational corporations in those in the kinds of analyses that we are. We need to do from now on because of course, if you only pay attention to oil as money, then you say, Oh well, ex-state Azerbaijan, Equatorial Guinea, fill in the blank, mishandles it. And it leads to the resource curse, which leads to this kind of poverty or the exacerbation of pre-existing poverty. And the oil companies drop out of the picture and they love that. So like Tillerson says, when he's on the stand, you know somebody asks him during his confirmation hearing. Somebody asked him directly about Equatorial Guinea, and he was very easy. It was very easy for him to say, Oh, I know we paid their government a lot of money, as if that was the only way. Yeah, right? If they were involved. So in other words, the sort of thrust of scholarship on oil and gas, in particular oil in particular in the global south because of the specific contractual arrangements you have there has really let oil companies off the hook. And that is has been problematic.

Speaker1: [00:21:28] Well, that's a brilliant response, Hanna, because it also points out, you know, in other contexts that there's nothing inevitable about the quote unquote resource curse, right? There's absolute there are agents behind that curse, right? It's not magic.

Speaker2: [00:21:43] Yeah, yeah. And I want to know I definitely want to talk about that. In a second, I just wanted to give like two footnotes to Tillerson before we move on. One is I saw some pictures of him from his North Korea visit, or I'm sorry, just Korea visit. And he looked like a guy who was having one of those. What have I done with my life? Moments like? He looks super miserable because, you know, this new budget is supposed to cut 30 percent of his office. You know, we've been talking a lot about the EPA and justly so, but the State Department is going to like a 30 percent cut, too. Yeah. And then the other thing was just something, you know, you reminded me of something Tim Mitchell said on the podcast a few weeks ago, which was that basically, you know, the Tillerson appointment is really business as usual. This is always what or what the U.S. has done for the past several decades. It's just that this administration gives zero fucks so that they just kind of do it in an outright way of taking somebody literally from the CEO position, not letting them go into private practice or do something else for a little while. So I think you're right. It's this is he's just a symptom of a much larger structural configuration.

Speaker3: [00:22:43] Yeah. And I actually just want to respond to both of those points very quickly, which is to say that I feel like one of the sort of major responses to Tillerson, and it was a mainstream response. What was certainly a kind of vaguely left response as well was, Oh no, he's a CEO. What does he know about statecraft? And I think it sounds like Tim Mitchell kind of went down this road a little bit, and maybe I'll go down it further. Or maybe I'll just reiterate something that he said is he's not just any CEO, right? Right. Which is to say that transnational oil companies have been involved forever in statecraft. In fact, it had been like the relationship that the U.S. has with Saudi Arabia today. I mean, I'm channeling Robert Vitale's work here. Right, was that relationship was forged by what used to be the joint venture Saudi Aramco. Right. And so too, in Equatorial Guinea, there had been like a very sort of tenuous diplomatic presence of U.S. diplomatic personnel and embassy. This and that for several, like over the period of the eighties when the post-independence dictator was killed.

Speaker3: [00:23:46] And the new guy came into power, you know, the U.S. set up an embassy and there were some like multilateral loan agreement stuff going on. But the U.S. embassy eventually pulled out in the early nineties over allegedly over human rights abuses and then in ninety four, a wildcat company that was eventually bought out by by what was then let's see. Exxon struck oil. They set up shop in Equatorial Guinea, you know, set up a walled compound and the embassy came back and located itself within that compound. Right. So it's just to reiterate that U.S. transnational companies in general and oil companies in particular, due to the specificity of the sort of geopolitical nature of their commodity, have been involved in statecraft for a very long time. So Tillerson knows what's up. And in that way, it is sort of like a naked, you know, showing of what Mitchell is saying, what you're saying of kind of how it's how it's been. But now he has less of a budget to do it with.

Speaker2: [00:24:42] All right. Joke's on you, Rick.

Speaker1: [00:24:44] Yeah, that that diminished EPA. We're going to be dirty with no diplomacy. No, that's right.

Speaker3: [00:24:51] Oh my god. Yeah, great.

Speaker1: [00:24:53] Yeah. Well, you know. It's interesting, too, though, because one of the other things that you know, his advocates were crowing about was that he had these incredible negotiating skills because he had run this multi gazillion dollar company and worked all over the world. I mean, do you think is he a is he a diplomat? I mean, what are what are the kinds of qualities that you know, diplomacy requires as opposed to, you know, insuring shareholder gain? You know, I mean, yeah, I don't know. Are they the same or are they different? What's your head on that? I mean,

Speaker3: [00:25:28] I have to plead radical ignorance or ignorance, ignorance.

Speaker2: [00:25:33] That's a good that's a good one.

Speaker3: [00:25:35] Yeah, thanks. Around like a sort of ethnographic sense of diplomacy. I I think the best thing to say is just that I'm I'm ignorant about it because I think if I were to say something, it would reveal just sort of the basest cynicism. So better to say that I'm ignorant, but I do. I mean, I think it is absolutely true that Tillerson, among other major transnational CEOs and even more specifically, as I said in the oil and gas industry, when you negotiate a contract, you negotiate that contract with the president, right? He knows Obiang Nguema and Bosworth, who's the president of Equatorial Guinea, very well. He knows the president of Kazakhstan. He, like, knows all these guys and I say guys in this case intentionally. So which is to say, to the extent that diplomacy has for a very long time relied on sort of a hyper masculinity club, he is very much in that club. I would imagine that he is well respected and somewhat feared in that club. I would imagine that people now in positions of power, we are not the only ones to see the nakedness of the situation, right? Which is to say that sort of the nakedness of the sort of collusion between corporate power and state power in the U.S., most people would say it was always there, and now it's sort of more naked and other leaders see that too.

Speaker3: [00:26:55] So to the extent that that was always part of diplomacy, then I think he's very well positioned now to to the extent that diplomacy also does other things. And I think that it undoubtedly does. I know, for instance, from WikiLeaks cables coming out of Equatorial Guinea that there's there are all kinds of rifts between State Department personnel and CIA personnel and embassy personnel, U.S. personnel on the ground in Equatorial Guinea and what the oil companies are doing right. Those risks, to be honest, don't seem particularly consequential to me in terms of what ends up happening. But it is to say that they would occasionally work at cross-purposes and we can't just homogenize them. And so to the extent that the role I mean in the North Korea is an interesting example, right, requires other kinds of skill, or at least arguably requires other kinds of skill that I can't say about him. I don't know. I don't know what that will look like.

Speaker2: [00:27:52] But do you think there's a chance that a photo will come out of him and Vladimir Putin going shirtless, horseback riding, hunting together as part of the kind of steady stream of information in the. Oh yes. Yeah, I saw that happening.

Speaker1: [00:28:06] I'm going to I'm going to pin that up over my bed when it comes out.

Speaker2: [00:28:08] Do you think they oil each other's chests up before they do that?

Speaker3: [00:28:13] Or oil? Yeah. So the best sort of vague conspiracy theory I've heard about that, which I heard from a guy who used to be a mortgage, I used to be a Republican, former lapsed Republican, former mortgage backed securities trader who has gone into sort of the good side of big data, meaning sort of fighting the evil uses of big data. He read the dossier that came out by whoever that was the CIA, you know, the some private investigator investigative firm was hired to figure out what on earth Trump was doing in Russia, right? Right. He read that dossier and his take on the Putin Trump Tillerson deal was that Rosneft was is in the process of being privatized and a sort of medium game long game. And Trump was going to get in, get in on the deal, as was Tillerson. After resigning, after stepping down as CEO of ExxonMobil and Trump, Stand stood to gain stands to gain a billion dollars from the deal. So there you go.

Speaker2: [00:29:21] Well, that's good. I mean, that's a good segue. Way to. Ok. Let's talk kleptocracy elsewhere.

Speaker1: [00:29:26] Yeah, because Trump needs some more billions. Well, and I just have to say, if that was your version of ignorance here, I want to get me some of that. Ok, let's see. Yes, yes. So one part of the world that we've been hearing a bit about, where you've been working for several years now and about which, you know much is Equatorial Guinea. So can you tell us the story of of oil in Equatorial Guinea?

Speaker3: [00:29:52] Yeah, yeah, I can. And this. I will tell not only because of what we've been talking about, but even had this been a podcast about something else entirely will involve Rex Tillerson, because Equatorial Guinea is a very small country in central Africa on the West Coast, it's sandwiched between Cameroon and Gabon, so Cameroon to the north and Gabon to the south. And in landmass, it's about the size of Delaware, the state of Delaware. There are about nobody knows exactly the population, but I would say it's probably somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred thousand people. There's a small landmass on the continent itself, and then there are a series of islands and the capital city, which was where I lived. Most of the time, though I also spent some time on the continent is on one of the islands and it's called Malabo Malabo. So it's and it's Spanish speaking. It's in fact at this point the only Spanish speaking country in sub-Saharan Africa. And Spanish colonialism under Franco bad not going to go into details. Just fucking bad, right? Like fascism, bad fascism meets colonialism. Really bad. Just like really, really bad and then post-colonial leadership immediately afterward. Similarly, sort of radically violent to the point where roughly a third of what was a population then of probably say, five hundred thousand people was either killed or fled into exile between what would that be sixty nine and seventy nine. So in a ten year period? Well, then this new dude takes over in seventy nine and there has been oil exploration even under Franco, even under the colonial regime, there had been oil exploration here and there.

Speaker3: [00:31:34] Under this new guy, he signs a bunch of sort of exploration agreements, and there are rumors that different Spanish companies had discovered oil. This would have been onshore at this point, but because of the sort of post-colonial tensions, understandable post-colonial tensions. The Spanish were doing things like demanding that if they developed this, these deposits, then they would get to lead the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Mines, to which the acquired Ghanaians obviously responded, Fuck off. Mm hmm. And so then in the early in the ninety two ninety three, a very small wildcat American company named Walter International found offshore deposits. So what had been happening in the interim, like before? Ninety two from this guy taking over in seventy nine, he's the same dude still president by ninety two, though, he was sort of a beacon of hope and many things did change immediately. Under him, the country was increasingly indebted as many countries on the African continent and in the global south more generally were. At this time, it was the era of structural adjustment. Things were pretty fucking desperate for the vast majority of inhabitants in Equatorial Guinea, including the presidential family, right? I mean, sure. Were they using public office for private gain? Yes. But there was there wasn't that much private gain to be had at this point. And part of what that did is that the superficial conditions on structural adjustment packages like, Oh, if we give you money, you have to have multiple political parties, right? Things like that that we know as anthropologists and critical social scientists have often just been superficial, actually in what was an incredibly paranoid and incredibly small military dictatorship opened these small avenues for types of opposition politics to take off.

Speaker3: [00:33:15] And in nineteen ninety, gosh, I want to say four or five, I don't know off the top of my head. A coalition of opposition parties won both the municipal and the state elections. It was the first time since this guy, Obiang had taken power in nineteen seventy nine. So however, many decades later, we are at this point in the early nineties that there had been any sort of opposition coalition, let alone a significant electoral victory, right? Which means they're going to they're going to. Opposition members are going to have a majority in parliament, and opposition members are going to have a majority in municipal governance. And there's they're supposed to be a presidential election two years later in ninety six. And of course, in nineteen ninety five, you know, nineteen ninety three, ninety four. Walter International has discovered this play. Exxonmobil buys them out. And only one year after this opposition coalition had won by a decisive margin. Municipal elections, parliamentary elections ExxonMobil has essentially pays to keep Obiang in power. Hmm. So they bring in so-called democracy consultants from the U.S. who help him engineer the election. He wins ninety eight percent of the vote. Ninety eight percent of the vote in a population that literally two years earlier, has just voted decisively against him.

Speaker1: [00:34:32] Sounds like that sounds like free and fair elections. Yeah, it doesn't.

Speaker3: [00:34:36] It doesn't it? Doesn't it sound like U.S. oil companies have nothing to do with African states? Yeah, right, exactly. And it is also so now we're in twenty seventeen. Last time I checked and Obiang Yanga-Mbiwa is still the president of Equatorial Guinea, and in fact, he is our. World's longest serving leader at this point. Wow. And I would attribute that essentially entirely to the contracts that he signed and the deals that he has with U.S. oil companies. Exxonmobil chief among them, who like when I in my own work talking with opposition politicians and talking with different lawyers and people who either overtly or covertly identify as members of the opposition, explain things like U.S. oil companies will not talk to members of the political opposition. There's one dude that the sole opposition member in parliament who himself has a law degree and has been sort of a beacon of sort of open dissent. They they refuse to speak with them, with him. He is not allowed on their compound and it's not like he's some sort of radical right. I mean, he's like sits in parliament, for God's sakes, right? So anyways, that's that's the brief history I would describe.

Speaker2: [00:35:48] Yeah, no. And the in light of, you know, recent political skirmishing over who's, you know, deeper in in bed with Big Oil. This happened during the Clinton era. So this was a kind of Clinton era diplomacy that allowed this to happen in the 1990s. So how would you, you know, again, I know it's always apples and oranges, but to get back to the issue of the oil curse of the resource curse discussion, I mean, a lot of that, a lot of that has focused. And I'm thinking here of your collaborator, Michael Watts from your recent edited volume, subterranean states. Did you get the plug? Got the plug in? Yeah, OK, which is terrific. A terrific volume. Also with our colleague here at Rice, Arthur Mason. And but you know, a lot, I'm thinking of his work, particularly a lot of that resource. Curse literature is focused on Nigeria, where there have been dramatic and incredible things have gone on, especially in Ogoni land. How would you compare those cases and would you do you think it is? I mean, in in the kind of journalistic sense, has Equatorial Guinea suffered a resource curse of that type?

Speaker3: [00:36:50] Let's see. I guess the first thing I would say and then I'll get to a sort of journalistic account of the similarities and differences and a comparison. But the first thing I would. Ok, just to clarify what the resource curse claims to say, please.

Speaker2: [00:37:03] Yes. That'd be great.

Speaker3: [00:37:05] Ok. So the resource curse claims to say that because of properties intrinsic to the resource of subsea or subterranean hydrocarbons, meaning that is, it is extracted, not produced, that it is specifically located rather than broadly available. Because of these natural right, they have a sort of like faux materialist argument. They have like what would be sort of material determinist argument because of these properties that are intrinsic to hydrocarbons. The money made off of hydrocarbons inevitably accumulates only to a centralized state, which will then spend it badly. Because those rents were not generated via taxation, they were not generated via any mechanism that might hold that state apparatus accountable. And so in the governance side of things, it leads to sort of anti-democratic tendencies. It can potentially lead to conflict, though it doesn't always, depending on the different resource curse scenario that's on the governance side of things. It leads to sort of, you know, bad development indicators, which shades us over into the fiscal side of things, which then gets you more into this thing that resource curse people call Dutch disease, which is this idea that, like as oil and gas itself, becomes a robust industry, in part because of what that does to exchange rates other pre-existing industries. It's called Dutch disease because it, like the Dutch, stopped exporting tulips or something. Agriculture, for example, are going to fall apart, right, so that the state will only focus what is essentially what is on this free money.

Speaker3: [00:38:44] So they'll know not only will they no longer export anything, but they'll no longer employ any of their own people, just like whatever shit falls apart. To paraphrase Chinua Achebe badly, yeah. Yeah. So, so this. Though so much has been written about Equatorial Guinea and the resource curse or Nigeria and the resource curse, I would actually say empirically. Historically, this holds for neither of those places, right? So you ask any anthropologist, any geographer, any historian what drops out colonialism immediately rises to the surface, right? Like what did Nigeria, the Nigerian economy look like? What did the Nigerian government apparatus look like, both under colonialism and in the post-colonial era? What did the Ghanaian government look like? What did the aquatic Ghanaian like productive economy look like, either under colonialism or in the post-colonial era? So in the case of Equatorial Guinea, OK, there was a there was a cocoa economy, there was a timber exporting economy under colonialism, you know, it was always run by preferential trade agreements. Blah blah blah. The Spanish leave under duress. Those in those industries collapse. And now economists and political scientists go around. Blabbing about the resource curse in Equatorial Guinea, which just actually makes no empirical sense, even in just sort of like the shortest empirical historical description of this place on the ground.

Speaker3: [00:40:03] In other words, there were no established industries to fall apart. There was no sort of pre imagined liberal state that was accountable to tax payers, right? And that's not because of African pathology, but because of the specific kind of colonial governments that was in place under Franco for fuck's sake anyways. Ok, so that is a long way of saying I don't buy the resource curse. It's not OK, so there's that. But that still leaves the question of what's different about Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria, and I'm going to give another big anthropologist explanation and I'm channeling, you know, maybe some of Tim Choi's recent work on ethnography is of comparison or an Stolar talks about this. And like, I guess, colonial studies had for a time been all about comparative colonialism. And then she makes the point that colonial regimes and colonial administrators themselves were invested in the project of comparison. And I would say the exact same thing about the U.S. oil industry, right? The people that I worked with, many of them had lived in Nigeria. They had lived in Gabon, they had lived in Ecuador, they had lived in Saudi Arabia. They had lived in Russia, right. Whether they were silent. What did these people call geologists, whether they were production managers, whether they were HR people? And so comparison for them was this incredibly fertile and productive space like, oh, Equatorial Guinea looks like Venezuela did 40 years ago.

Speaker3: [00:41:24] These these kinds of sort of seductive comparisons. But the thing about Nigeria, in part because it's such a close neighbor. In fact, the offshore subsea formations that we're talking about are in the Gulf of Guinea, which is a body of water that Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea share. So we're actually talking about the same. Geologically speaking, we're talking about the same subsea deposits. But Nigeria is a shit show. Yeah, right? Nigeria has. First of all, Nigeria is a huge company company that's funny country, the most populous country in Africa. It's also federated. So not only is it geographically enormous and has like a billion people, but it also has very strong local states that have very different forms of governance and are constantly fighting one another for resources. Oil chief among them. The oil industry went in, and when it first went in, it was an onshore. It was mostly onshore play or near-shore plays, right? So in the Niger Delta that's near shore, it's right there. Some of it is right there in the creeks and some of the platforms are further offshore. And it was really the sort of radical failures of Nigeria in which Shell in particular took the sort of an earlier strategy in oil development, which was a very open relationship with the state where Shell Nigeria said In exchange for taking your oil, we will help with your schools.

Speaker3: [00:42:45] We will help with your electricity supply, we will help with your running water like we will sort of put infrastructures in place for you as we put infrastructures in place for ourselves. And now those projects were very open. And as you might imagine, they were a sort of radical and catastrophic failure and shell as it should be people. People held it on the hook. The Nigerian state held it on the hook for failures to to provide what it claimed to provide and of course, Nigerian people in mostly in the delta. How how held shell responsible as well. So Nigeria becomes this model failure and Nigerian oil came on stream in like the forties and fifties, right? So in Nigeria, these relationships and the sort of political relationships they have made are sediment at under decades of this struggle. So for places that came on stream substantially after Nigeria, but with traveling experts who had worked there, Nigeria as this ghost story, right? It's like a haunting. So Equatorial Guinea, this is what I mean about the productivity of comparison. Equatorial Guinea, constantly, you hear not to be like Nigeria, not to be like Nigeria, not to be like Nigeria.

Speaker3: [00:43:53] So all corporate social responsibility programs are subcontracted out to for profit development corporations and separated from the company by multiple levels of liability. The the industry, though there is there are terrestrial hydrocarbon deposits. I mean, there are seeps everywhere. I have photos of them in my book. The oil industry refuses to go after them. They are only going after offshore, so they call it offshore and offshore becomes this incredible sort of encapsulating metaphor. They work for it to become this encapsulating metaphor of We don't touch it, we don't touch Equatorial Guinea, right? We were burned in Nigeria, so we are going to try. We are going to make it seem as if we are much more separate from Equatorial Guinea than what we looked like in Nigeria. And I should say, for a of Ghanaians as well, Nigeria is a moral failure, right? I mean, you can see at nighttime, you can see the offshore platforms if you look way north that are in Nigerian waters and they know what went on in Nigeria. They know what went on in Gabon. Right, I mean, they so the the sort of comparisons that the oil industry brings with it are Emek categories to be super anthropology.

Speaker2: [00:45:02] No, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:45:03] Well, and one of the things that you've highlighted and I'm glad you did is that this whole concept of the resource curse, such as it is, has been completely shaped by the very particularities of hydrocarbons and oil in particular. I mean, you know, you mentioned that, of course, part of the resource curse part of that sort of intellectual schema is that it has to do with the materiality of of, you know, of the resource itself, right where it's geologically located, that it's extracted rather than produced. But the other key element and you know, of course, this is kind of what Tim Mitchell's book is really about in many ways is that it's also a very particular material because the whole fucking global economy is dependent on it. Yeah, that makes it. That's a very particular resource in scare quotes because, you know, we don't really hear about like, let's think about someplace like Brazil, right, that has these incredible like hydro resources. I mean, we don't talk about the water curse. It really is right. I mean, it really is very it's a very specific kind of discussion that really rotates around oil.

Speaker3: [00:46:12] Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And it's interesting to think about. I've actually never. So when you read resource curse literature, especially the resource curse literature that comes out of economics and political science, you're not going to find the sort of capacious definition of materiality that you just gave. I've actually never heard anybody say that, and that's really interesting. So you will find it's extracted, not produced. It's located in these very specific and, of course, immobile geologic locations. But you, Simone just said that like it is also because of its materiality, right? The particular way that it is able to combust the particular sort of density of the energy that it can provide. And then, of course, all of this sort of material effects of that, right, like all of its its off gassing, all of its flaring, not to mention it's burning its carbon dioxide, et cetera, that that that not only has sort of powered capitalism, but that has also become sort of the central geopolitical commodity. And to think of that as part of its materiality and not as I would normally have done as part of its sort of geopolitical life is really that's great. That's so smart. I love that. That's great because it is right. I mean, it's different to burn this much oil than it is to burn this much of a fuel cell or, you know, that has to do with its materiality. What happens when you combust it?

Speaker1: [00:47:30] Right. Yeah, right. Right. Real qualitative difference.

Speaker2: [00:47:32] So let's move on to our next plug, which is for your book project and and we want to hear more about that. But also, you know, the way we got to know you first was through work on infrastructure. And I have a feeling that infrastructure is very key to your work, as is something that you're calling modularity. So as we move away from, you know, kind of the standard social science, take on this and towards your work and what you think are kind of more anthropologically adequate, you know, understanding of oil's impact on national economy and the making of a national economy in Equatorial Guinea. Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us about the analytics that get you excited.

Speaker3: [00:48:09] Yeah. So the book until the publisher gets their hands on it, when I'm sure they're going to tell me it's no longer called this by the book right now. I'm saying this not as a plug, because it actually won't be out for several years, but because I think it's relevant in terms of the analytics. It's called oil and the lycett life of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea licit so like the word illicit, but without the I right illicit illicit. So the publisher obviously is going to be like, what the fuck does that mean? Nobody's going to know what that means. Why should I buy your book and then we'll have that argument? But before the argument happens and I lose, as I've just narrated in part, Equatorial Guinea is widely considered to be one of, if not the most sort of corrupt dictatorships in the world. It is certainly the longest standing authoritarian dictatorship in the world. The U.S. oil and gas industry, as we know, is similarly disreputable, right?

Speaker1: [00:49:03] Nicely put.

Speaker3: [00:49:05] Yeah. So this book could have been sort of an ideal opportunity in which to expose the scandals of global capitalism's daily life, right? Not least in sub-Saharan Africa, not least in the oil industry. And instead, what I'm doing is basically making a kind of counterintuitive argument that oil, U.S. oil and Equatorial Guinea actually gives us the incredible opportunity to look at the opposite, like toward what smoothes scandal over toward what keeps this shit show on the rails, right? Because Equatorial Guinea is very much on the rails. People haven't heard any. People have heard about Nigeria. People have. I mean, now with Sudan, people kind of know about the disastrous effects of oil and gas. I think even the resource curse is sort of entered popular, popular consciousness, certainly in South America, et cetera, as you guys know from your work. But Equatorial Guinea, in a lot of ways, not least with Obiang still being in power and lobbyists taking out full page ads in the New York Times saying Equatorial Guinea is a pillar of stability in an otherwise unstable region. I mean, just like crazy shit. Yeah, it's just this really interesting example of how it is that the U.S. oil and gas industry sets up shop in a new extractive place. And when they have a government like Obiang Government Obiang regime that is willing to do essentially anything that they say because especially at the beginning, they were so desperate to stay in power.

Speaker3: [00:50:36] What does that look like? What do they want to do? Right. So the chapters and I say that because it is, they're organized around these analytics, right? It's like, where are these sites where the illicit life of capitalism is made that allows all of this to be OK, that allows all of these hydrocarbons to move from subsea deposit into the tankers and into our gas tanks or into futures prices or into lipstick or all of the many, many places that they go. So that's sort of the analytic conceit that the chapters are organized around. And so the first two chapters are about space and making space specialisation. So the first chapter is about this kind of encompassing metaphor of the offshore and bringing sort of talking about a little bit like a sort of history of the oil industry and a history of Equatorial Guinea. And then where those two forms meet and why the offshore becomes such a salient guiding metaphor. And you'll notice that I keep saying metaphor, even though, of course, there is offshore industrial production in Equatorial Guinea. In other words, it's not merely metaphorical, but also industrial and also financial. There are plenty of sort of offshore financial agreements going on there, too. But it is to say that the one of the ways that the sort of licit life of capitalism is produced is to imagine, to make, to do all of the work, to make it seem like Palani or simple were right to make it seem like capitalism embeds itself from social life.

Speaker3: [00:52:03] It doesn't. That's wrong, I think. And that's one of the big arguments that I make in the book. But there's a lot of work to make it look like it does, right? Because you want the oil company wants to see him disinvited from Equatorial Guinea. Ok, so the first chapter is about the offshore. It's about it starts from a visit to a rig and does whatever it talks about the offshore. And then the second chapter is about sort of an onshore offshore. What you might call. Let's see what are those shows called the Housewives? Oh yeah. Right? Real Housewives of Equatorial Guinea. That's nice, actually. But it might as well be called that. So it's about the enclaves, the residential enclaves onshore in which expatriate management, so the highest level management live with their wives because high level management is allowed to bring in wives, but also on some compounds. Because, of course, not all of their work is offshore. They have a liquid natural gas train. They have a huge electricity generating plant, so they actually have substantial onshore workers, all of whom are sort of imported from the from the world's oil diasporas where they live in segregated housing.

Speaker2: [00:53:09] And can I just can I just make a point about that because I taught, I taught an article of yours that that touched on this as well in our infrastructures class last year. And it was so great because, you know, basically these places kind of looked like Houston. They were made to look like Houston, and the clocks were set to Houston. Time even.

Speaker1: [00:53:26] And don't they the same area code or something? Yes. Am I remembering that right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:53:31] You sure are. So they say, thanks guys, for starting my work and remembering it so sweet. But yeah, so they use I mean, talk about infrastructure, right? So they use satellite telephone and internet services so that for me to call my mom who at that when I was living in Equatorial Guinea, was living in Boston was just a local call. I would dial one six one seven and find my mom to call me in one of those houses. I would give her a Houston phone number and pick up, and it would be me.

Speaker2: [00:53:57] Shout out to the seven one three area code. It is hilarious. The seven one three yo.

Speaker3: [00:54:04] So that particular chapter is called Suburbs of Houston, actually, which was anemic category. That was one of the ways that I focus specifically on these women, on the wives, but also on the sort of segregated housing more broadly. And then to introduce the point that sort of goes across all of the chapters in the book that these efforts toward making the licit life of capitalism, there's one way to see them through the technologies themselves, right? So through the offshore rigs, through the kinds of technology like satellite phone service that enable something that sort of approximates a Houston lifestyle, you can see them through the technologies. But you also, of course, have to see them at the same time that the sort of efficacy of those technologies and more importantly, the efficacy of the performance of separation is also always about gender and. Race in particular. Yep, yep, so this second chapter is very much about whiteness and domesticity and sort of white femininity and what because it's really only the upper level management, most of whom are from the U.S., some of whom are from Western Europe and only one of whom was a white South African when I was there. It is only them who are allowed to bring in their white wives. There were only two wives who themselves would identify as not white.

Speaker3: [00:55:17] One was one had married a Thai woman on a previous posting and one had married a Brazilian woman. She actually identifies as white, but the other women on the compound did not identify her as white. So it's a lot sort of using an strollers work to think about sort of feminist anthropology more broadly, to think about the centrality of relationships of kinship, race, domesticity, sexuality to the production of the illicit life of capitalism. So that's so the first two chapters are kind of about the use of space. The middle two chapters are about the contract. Oh, my God, could it be more boring and ridiculous? But I don't think it's boring or ridiculous. They're about the productivity of the contract form. So the third chapter is about production sharing contracts, which are these like thousand plus page documents that are signed between the subsidiary. Importantly, the subsidiary of a transnational company and the state. Right. So about the ways that these documents ratify and sort of a homogenized or make singular, what are otherwise these incredibly sort of multiple and contingent entities like the Shwedagon and State or like ExxonMobil? If you were to look at it in an actual organigram of all of the different subsidiaries and all of the different sort of offshore locations and all of the different rights of how the contract stabilizes those, but also allows for getting out of liability at important moments.

Speaker3: [00:56:42] And then the chapter that comes after that is about subcontracts. So about how labor is set up returns us very forcefully to race. And then the last two chapters are about making national economies. So where resource curse theory essentially starts with the national economy form and where, as I said, sort of historically, although it's changing now thanks to your work and other people's work like our approach is really focused so much on money. I use those first four chapters to say so much happens before oil turns into money. But then let's get to the moment when oil turns into money, and let's look at how it's different than we thought it was before. So the penultimate chapter is about the making of a national economy form, and the first part is about sort of a reconsideration of the resource curse. But the second half of the chapter is actually about the process of making national budgets. So the way that the state records and enacts national budgets is kind of an act of magical realism. And then the final chapter, which is also a conclusion, is about the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative ITII, which is considered the sort of liberal response to the problem of the resource curse, right? Which is to say there just needs to be more transparency, so the oil companies need to be more transparent about what they are paying.

Speaker3: [00:58:06] These regimes and the regimes need to be more transparent about how they are spending this money so that we can see when they pocket it and don't give it to schools. And so I worked as a in the Ministry of Finance and Budgets. I worked for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative effort in Equatorial Guinea, and it's basically about the sort of theme of the book in the Licit Life of Capitalism is about the limits of liberalism, right? That there's a specific idea of transparency that relies going back through the chapters that relies on a specific idea of how the national economy works. It relies on a specific idea about what contracts are supposed to do. They're central to sort of legal liberalism, right, as the figure of the contract. And then it relies on these ways of separating the US's from the thems, the black from the white, the standard from the corrupt. So yeah, those are the analytics, the sort of progressive, ideally progressive analytics by which I mean progressing from the first chapter to the last chapter. Not politically progressive. You're God.

Speaker1: [00:59:07] I mean, I love this. It's a really brilliant image of oil turning into money. It's so apt and, you know, kind of haunting. But I I wanted to ask you, Hannah, if you if you were queen of the world and and I and I kind of wish you were there, you're like halfway there because because I I know you do it in a very collaborative, non authoritarian way. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you had the power, what would you do in order to redeem if it's possible, the transnational oil industry?

Speaker3: [00:59:42] Oh my God. So I have these friends named Simone Howe and Dominique Boyer, who are writing about wind energy projects in Mexico. And I would ask them, what the fuck to do? I mean, I.

Speaker2: [00:59:53] Well, OK, let me let me let me let me just throw out one idea. A lot of people, a lot of a lot of people would say, I don't know, I'm not king of the world. I am just I am a squire on a podcast. Ok.

Speaker1: [01:00:05] Please.

Speaker2: [01:00:05] Fair enough. All I was going to throw out there is the idea of Norway because Statoil, Norway is often thrown out there as this is the one country that manages its oil ethically, both in terms of its extraction practices and in terms of what it does with the wealth it generates.

Speaker3: [01:00:21] So I think I'll say two things. The first one is somewhat lateral and then the second one will get to it. And the lateral one is that for me, the material that I'm working with in the book is, of course, the U.S. oil industry. But the larger point of the book for me is not specific to the oil industry. The larger point of the book is about capitalism. So I think somewhere in like the first couple lines I say something about like this is both a story of a specific capitalist project U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea. But it is also a book, and this is sort of controversial in our industry, but I'm trying to say it about things that are true of capitalism more generally, right? So like the use of space, the offshore, the enclave, the contracting, the National Economy Forum, ideas and sort of ideologies of transparency and particular the way, particularly the way that liberal ideologies, including law, transparency, the rationality of the market, all of that stuff are more and less productive for capitalism as a global project. So insofar as that's true for me, it's hard for me to say anything specific about a sort of redemptive capitalist approach to oil. So I'll just I'll bracket that. I'll leave that there. But now, I mean, you said whatever I was the queen of the world, but you know, I've also tried and continue to try to be an activist in my time, and it's like hard for me in so many other people to imagine a sort of thoroughly post capitalist world. But Norway, right? The example the example Dominic gives us is you're right. Like if Nigeria is the model failure, Norway is the sort of model

Speaker2: [01:02:08] Success

Speaker3: [01:02:09] Success. And I would say, I mean, I'm thinking here of work that's been done in the North Sea, like paying for the piper, the ways that the industry's transition from onshore to offshore has so changed, even in a place like Norway. From what I've read, I've never visited like a labour regulations, offshore environmental regulations offshore. You're absolutely right that if we are just to take the resource curse frame, meaning if we're just to take the idea that do states spend oil money wisely or unwisely? It seems like the the Norwegian state spends money relatively wisely, but certainly like thinking about the historical literature on the Norwegian industry. Like, I'm thinking, if there's this, I don't I don't speak the language, but there's a book that a grad student translated for me called Norwegian Oil Spanish sweat, right? Which is about the racialised history of that industry. And then also, if I'm thinking about that book paying for the piper and I'm thinking about the ways that that labor regulation has changed with the coming of the offshore industry, which does partake in this sort of like modular or to use Andrew Berry's term, right? The technological zone where the rigs themselves are still, they're coming from Halliburton, right? They're subcontracted from Halliburton or they're subcontracted from.

Speaker3: [01:03:30] I mean, it's the same sort of network of subcontractors that are floating movable infrastructures around the world and Norway like as, I mean, I don't want to conflate it with a place like Mexico, but these places that have incredibly robust histories of national ownership on closer examination, it seems to me I can't say this definitively, but that starts to break up a little bit. And so I yeah, I mean, it's not it's not an answer to like how how can we make it ideal? I think it's partially an answer to saying, I'm not sure that Norway is it, though if I were to do sort of like within the liberal imagination, would I like Equatorial Guinea to be more like Norway? Absolutely. Of course. But if I were able to sort of have a reitman esque like actual crisis of that imaginary and b imagine like a post liberal post capital moment, it's really hard for me to figure out. Right, right. It's hard for you to figure out.

Speaker1: [01:04:25] I mean, I think, you know, Norway is a very interesting example. And there are parallels, of course, with Mexico and Pemex, right? A nationalized oil company. So in Norway, you have this pension fund so that that oil essentially is able to support retired people. Right. And and in Mexico, you have a massive amount of the national federal budget coming from oil. The problem with, I mean, is it better to have? Collectively dispersed gains from oil extraction as opposed to, you know, just paying off the shareholders that at ExxonMobil. Absolutely. I would agree with that. Yeah, but the the bigger problem with this is that it still incentivizes oil extraction. There's still an incentive to do it. The Norwegians want to keep pulling oil out of the out of the water, out of the ground, in the water because it's paying for social goods. Now again, is that better than just a bunch of rich fuckers like, you know, getting rich off of oil? Of course, but it still encourages human beings to keep on taking this shit out out of the Earth and burning it like that's I don't know. So anyway, I guess the answer is it's it's irredeemable.

Speaker3: [01:05:38] I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:05:40] But I was just going to add that, you know, one of the things I think is is great about your work and how tightly you tie together. The study of oil and the study of capitalism is that, you know, there's one way if you look at it historically that you could, you could argue that oil such as it is I mean, oil has been acknowledged by human beings for a long time. But the reason why it was developed so aggressively beginning in the 19th and then into the 20th century was precisely as an accelerant to a capitalist system. I mean, that's what it's the lube. It's the it's the fuel. Yeah. And you know, so in that sense, if we're in a moment where what we I think you know what, what we add, a lot of the listeners of this podcast agree is that time where we should be really thinking about growth rather than growth, then it seems like oil is kind of somewhat besides the point. Like, we don't need more accelerant, we need decelerate and whatever that is, is what we need to be concentrating on.

Speaker3: [01:06:35] Yeah, yeah. So I think I mean, of course, like Simone, when when somebody first asked me the question, I immediately popped to like, keep the oil in the soil movement growth movement. But you know, I'm speaking to you guys as well. I know you have experience in these things, like as an activist, I know how challenging those efforts are. Yeah. So it's like the seduction of saying, you're the queen of the world, boom. Make it happen. It's just so we have so far to go and so much work to do. It's just so hard. It's so hard. Like the fantasy is too. It's too unrealistic for me.

Speaker2: [01:07:09] Well, I want to ask. I wanted to ask you more about your activism, too, because you know, one thing that that people should acknowledge if they don't know already is how active you've been. And in Occupy Wall Street and post Occupy Wall Street projects, especially ones like the strike debt and the debt collective. And you know, I think we are living in a time where on the one hand, we're we are facing what you've aptly termed, you know, a shit show politically. On the other hand, we've seen widespread mobilization and people coming in off the sidelines and getting interested in politics. They get a lot of people I know, at least in my sphere, who are not super political or getting political, and they are all kind of like looking around for orientation and ideas of what to do and is a seasoned activist as well as a seasoned and and thoughtful political analyst yourself. I'm curious what your what your thoughts are. I mean, now that we've we've endured the initial burst of Trumpism and we kind of beginning to see it for what it is. And obviously, the one thing it really wants to do is mess with the environment. That's pretty, pretty high on its list of objectives. What are some of the things that you think are helpful now and and 2016 complex here than it was so awesome, incredible things like Standing Rock, and it saw some real signs of hope, too. I just I wanted to. I wanted to take your temperature on all of this and tell us some of your reflections.

Speaker3: [01:08:25] Yeah, I mean, I'm going to preface what I will say with something going the other direction, because what I what I want to say is often met with incredulity and a variety of responses. But so I work at UCLA. I teach at UCLA and our undergraduate student body has between 800 and 1000 undocumented students. Yeah. So just starting there, right? The Trump presidency was a real rupture in a very present way, like in my classrooms, right and at my university and in ways that we have to face and talk about in faculty meetings. Not to mention, like the Iranian community of Los Angeles, not to mention my choice. Should I have taken it to have an abortion at the beginning of this pregnancy? Right? I mean, like there are real and serious ruptures. Not to mention, of course, the ability, the sort of threat on the ability to protest at all, regardless of the situation. Ok, so there are real and profound ruptures to the Trump presidency. That said, had Hillary Clinton been elected and had everybody just stayed, had celebrated which they would have had every reason to celebrate, I mean, that would have been exciting for a number of reasons. It would have continued. Just sort of gross violations of everything. So many people, certainly people listening to this podcast and even people way back toward the center and would hold dear the political center.

Speaker3: [01:09:50] So what do I mean? I mean, you know, so Obama deported more people than any other president in history. The infrastructures that ice needs now to round up and deport all of these people, the detention centers, the vast majority of those were being built under Obama, right? The wars that I don't want to. I don't. It's like Tillerson in the beginning. I don't actually want to individualize this to Obama right under the regime that he oversaw and the regimes before him. So which is to say that I think the more pressing thing are the continuities, the more pressing thing or the continuities, right? White supremacy, that's a continuity. Misogyny, that's a continuity disregard for the environment. That's a continuity. And again, my point is not to say, oh, it would have been exactly the same. It will absolutely not. It would not have been exactly the same. But if I but now that we are where we are. And just like you, I have people around me. I mean, suddenly professors at UCLA, there are all these listservs and they're like, What can I get involved in and what can I do? And if it's from liberal things like calling your representatives and calling your representatives en masse to slightly riskier things like direct actions in the streets to people who are actually starting to get involved in, like what would a real sanctuary movement look like and what would it actually look like if my phone number was available to undocumented students on campus to call? And can I house them in my house if they're in trouble, right? I mean, to sort of more radical and the potential for civil disobedience where it becomes necessary.

Speaker3: [01:11:22] I I feel emboldened by what I have seen around me, and I also feel critical of my radical colleagues and collaborators who are themselves critical of something like the Women's March. Right? So in L.A. alone, it brought out seven hundred and fifty thousand people. I didn't participate. It's not my thing. I did not. I didn't participate. I didn't. I didn't boycott it. It's not my thing. But I think it was. It was Keeanga-Yamahtta. Taylor wrote this in Jacobin. It's online. She's like, you know, liberals become radicalized because one, they become disenchanted with the system, whether through an experience that they had it or experiences that they're witnessing others having in it or two because they they find themselves in the company of generous radicals, right of understanding radicals of empathetic radicals. And they start listening to those points of view and start finding truth in them and start finding the potential. And so to me, like we need seven hundred and fifty thousand liberal people to start being like, Wait a minute, this isn't OK to me, what can I do? And if starting to call their representatives is the first thing that they do? God bless them.

Speaker3: [01:12:38] I think that's wonderful. So this is to say that I think that the foment of the current political moment is incredibly exciting. Some people have taken me saying this as saying a nothing is different under Trump or B. It's better that Trump is president than Clinton. It is not making a statement of that kind. It is simply saying, given where we are now and given what might have happened had Hillary been president, which, as I say, it would have just been fucking complacency with disaster, ongoing disaster, right? I feel I feel the potential of the moment and I feel happy about that. So too like the EPA data, right? The EPA data is a perfect example, and you get groups of computer people from groups of anonymous workers to groups working with Chris Kielty and Hannah Landecker at UCLA like hacking the data, trying to find where it is and trying to find servers to set it up on. I mean, that's like, it's just so great. It's so great. I love it. I love it. We're like expanding and diversifying our toolkit. And I so many more people are people are involved. And while I certainly wouldn't call it any kind of sort of activist utopia, I think it's the first step toward something that can be better.

Speaker2: [01:13:49] Yeah, yeah. Right on, right on.

Speaker1: [01:13:51] Yeah. And it's, you know, if nothing else, this presidency is illustrative. Right? Yeah, I mean, it's really it's really it's exposing all of the ugly continuities that you mentioned before and others, right? And so it's it's a it's a picture that has already been painted over and over again, and it's one that we now really have to look at and live with. Yeah, and try and work through it. So yeah, I really appreciate your optimism.

Speaker3: [01:14:20] Thanks. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:14:21] But also you're you're not willing to give up your your fierce demands also, of course.

Speaker1: [01:14:26] Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:14:26] For for the world that that you live in and that you're bringing your children into. Well, Hannah, we got to let you go. But this has been fascinating and as of course, we did a lot of chatting. I hope we hope we got through everything you wanted to talk about, about your work. If not, you'll have to come on again. Yes.

Speaker3: [01:14:41] Oh no. Thank you so much for having me. It was super cool and fun to be able to talk to you guys. Thanks for the invitation.

Speaker1: [01:14:47] But we loved it. We loved it.