.
That got wrapped into the country’s polity particularly after 1953 and the coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, with the reimposition of foreign control over Iran’s oil. That was a core complaint which animated the 1979 revolution, a revolt against economic inequality and the Shah’s patronage regime and its corruption. Because of its topography, being in a bowl in the mountains where it collects air pollution, they could see the same thing happening in their own cities, particularly Tehran,.
Hence, it fell to Iranians themselves to claim the gas, build markets and get it there, which thus infused this technology with the politics of anti-colonial resource nationalism and sovereignty. ’ So, Iranians, looking at the horrific smogs of London or people perishing from air pollution in Los Angeles, said, ‘We don’t want this dark downside of the industrialised world. Movahedi-Lankarani says, ‘One of the core promises of the Iranian state since the 1950s has been development, with economic and social justice. The state told the people — we will help develop your lives, you will grow more wealthy. This was something the preand post-revolution states said and, to some extent, both succeeded — except both also saw extensive economic inequality and corruption.
A core challenge became — what do we do with all this gas we are currently discarding? Foreign oil firms had no interest in gathering this gas — it was thought far too expensive a prospect. Yet, as the economy was industrialising, many people were driving cars and using fossil fuels — they saw natural gas as a way to accelerate their ambitions, even while people were conscious of the harms of this. Many sought ways to have the prosperity of industry while avoiding its environmental downsides.
For a time, the Islamic Republic did a decent job — since it had based its legitimacy on this, it rapidly built things like natural gas networks in villages and working-class neighbourhoods that had been left out earlier.’
Movehedi-Lankarani pauses, then emphasises, ‘But that changed over time — in the Islamic Republic, increasingly, extreme income inequality and inequality in general has grown between social classes. Wealth has become concentrated at the top of the social hierarchy — that is linked in part to an authoritarian and aloof governmental system. It’s also been accelerated by Iran’s foreign conflicts and the sanctions regimes that have largely cut off Iran’s economy from the broader world — as that happened, powerful figures within Iran’s government, mostly notably, the Revo-lutionary Guard, have come to control Iran’s export sector.
Through both smuggling and controls on smuggling, you now have enormous oil pooling within a very small slice of Iranian society —and this is feeding directly into the discontent we see in Iran today.’