Moreover, the climate crisis holds the potential of drastically reordering the global distribution of power as well as wealth. This is because the nature of the carbon economy is such that power, no less than wealth, is largely dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels. The world’s most powerful countries are also oil states, Timothy Mitchell notes, and ‘without the energy they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist’. Nor would they continue to occupy their present positions in the global ranking of power.
