The use of fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil, created a new form of politics, which Mitchell describes as carbon democracy. Carbon democracy relies on the production, distribution, and use of carbon energy. Mitchell follows the flows of carbon energy to understand the linkage between democracy and carbon energy. By doing so, Mitchell traces “how these connections are built, the vulnerabilities and opportunities they create, and the narrow points of passage where control is particularly effective” (7). As Mitchell demonstrates throughout the book, the ways of organizing the flow of carbon energy opened or narrowed democratic possibilities. Arrangements of violence, expertise, finance, and people in relationship to the distribution and control of carbon energy further enhanced or limited these possibilities.

At the beginning of the book, carbon democracy first “referred to the central place of coal in the rise of mass democracy, and then to the role of oil, with its different locations, properties and modes of control, in weakening the forms of democratic agency that a dependence on coal had enabled” (143). Beginning in Chapter 5, Mitchell expands the meaning of this term to include two new modes of government, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century and coincided with the increased reliance on oil-energy.