The political fallout from Fukushima and the deepening financial crisis appear have relegated the issues of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous back burner. Bucking the trend are two books just published in France that put carbon and climate issues back into the sun. Jade Lindgaard reviews two conflicting, compelling and ultimately complimentary works.
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One of the most striking recent political developments worldwide is the near total disappearance of the issue of climate change from public debate. While the Japanese Fukushima nuclear plant crisis did have the saving grace of shunting energy policy back into the focus of political discussion, the fallout from the catastrophe is also why nuclear power seems to have monopolised the whole energy debate.
There seems to be little concern about greenhouse gas emissions anymore. Editorialists in Japan are openly calling for an exemption from the binding Kyoto Protocol targets so the country can open up new thermal power plants in a bid to wean itself from atomic energy. Meanwhile, the United States is planning to build one of the longest pipelines in the world, the Keystone XL, to pipe crude oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Texas. It is as if we have taken a collective step back to before 2007, the year the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and when Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, came out.
Bucking this trend are two books just published in France which, from two different standpoints, focus on the political impact of carbon emissions: Des esclaves énergétiques (‘Energy Slaves') by historian Jean-François Mouhot (a research fellow at Georgetown University) and, in a very different vein, La Dictature du carbone (‘The Carbon Dictatorship') by journalist Frédéric Denhez.
Mouhot likens fossil fuels to ‘energy slaves' and asks how our unbridled exploitation thereof will be regarded by future generations as they grapple with the disastrous consequences of climate change. La Dictature du carbone by Frédéric Denhez, on the other hand, inveighs against our "carbocentric" age and its blinkered technocratic take on the depletion of natural resources - at the expense of social equality.
«Des esclaves énergétiques»
Taking up an analogy oft-mooted of late by climate defenders and popularised in France by climate and energy expert Jean-Marc Jancovici, historian Jean-François Mouhot likens oil consumption to slavery: fossil fuels are our new slaves, our ‘energy slaves', in the sense that machines now perform the modern-day equivalent of the work once delegated to servants (the average European has the mechanical manpower of roughly 300 workers under his or her thumb). The author does not feel it necessary to free these machines like the human slaves of yore, but to challenge the morality of our social model: after all, a hundred years from now, won't our unbridled consumption of fossil fuels seem as appalling to those suffering the disastrous effects of climate change as human servitude seems to us today?
Actually, this is more of a philosophical and political question than an historical one. Moreover, Jean-François Mouhot's gloss on the history of slavery and abolition is cursory and incomplete, essentially confined to the ante- and post-bellum US and early 19th-century UK. Where the book does become absorbing is in its analysis of the preconditions for abolition: "History suggests that slavery did not begin to be seriously rejected, and ultimately abolished, until the public realised there was an alternative to slave labour," he writes. He also points out that "efforts towards a compromise - the so-called ‘gradualist' approach - proved more effective in furthering the anti-slavery cause than the intransigent stance" of some hardcore abolitionists. In other words, abolition was not achieved on its own merits, through the victory of the principle of human equality, but because a substitute for this free labour happened to be available: namely steam engines, the ancestors of today's ‘energy slaves'.
So if we extend the analogy to our present-day situation, we may conclude that the way to give up fossil fuels is not so much to think green and prioritise environmental concerns as to demonstrate that credible alternatives do indeed exist: renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation, transitioning to a low-carbon economy, relocation, even deglobalisation. This is the crux of today's political battles over energy policy in Europe, the US and even in China. Do we opt out of nuclear energy or not? What about shale gas and shale oil? How do we make measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions effective? Jean-François Mouhot's essay is edifying if only for these forward-looking ideas.
In his essay La Dictature du carbone (‘The Carbon Dictatorship'), journalist Frédéric Denhez presents not so much an opposing as a symmetrically inversed argument. He is troubled by what he calls "carbocentrism", referring to an obsession with CO2 emissions in ecological discourse and in present-day policies to combat global warming. Elevating carbon dioxide to public enemy number one is part and parcel of a narrowly economist and blinkered view of the depletion of natural resources. "Seeing everything in terms of carbon, like seeing everything in terms of GDP, reduces the world to a system of cogs and exchangers, stocks and flows," he writes: "a mechanistic and highly technological view of life. This abstract and ultimately inhuman conception can only suit the engineering mindset that reigns supreme and governs France."
Specifically, the author parses the various policy tools designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions: carbon emissions trading, the concept of the carbon footprint, carbon offsets, energy performance certificates, promoting ‘sustainable development' and so on. These measures are ineffective and, above all, liable to prove counter-productive by creating the illusion that new policies will be able to forestall the depletion of natural resources, when in fact they only aggravate it in a different way.
In this regard Denhez takes up part of the argument made by Daniel Tanuro in L'Impossible Capitalisme vert (‘The Futility of Green Capitalism'), though casting it in more post-modern terms: he makes carbon a veritable political player, the subject of a new economic order. Carbon dioxide, by dint of its manifold dimensions (at once a gas, raw material and negative externality, as well as a financial value and speculative object), is not politically neutral. It corresponds to a certain approach to economics, development and North-South relations. The author provocatively posits the existence of a "carbon dictatorship", though at the risk of causing a misunderstanding. Denhez is by no means to be counted among the ranks of the climate sceptics. He is not asking for the world to stop worrying about the environment, but for us to go about it differently, less mechanically, less systematically, using a more diversified approach, on a smaller and less macro scale.
The US historian and political scientist Timothy Mitchell brilliantly showed in his book Petrocratia how oil ushered in the Keynesian economy. In reading Denhez, one realises to what extent the crusade to eradicate CO2 emissions might be tied in with a new stage of capitalism - still neoliberal, individualistic, consumer-oriented, providing ample opportunity for experts, services providers, scientists etc., but to the detriment of social issues and the fight against inequality. So it is that, in setting out to combat carbon, we end up facing the core issues of the financial crisis.
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'Des esclaves énergétiques' by Jean-François Mouhot is published by Les éditions Champs Vallon, priced 17 euros. (It is based on an acclaimed paper written by Mouhot and published in the US).
'La Dictature du carbone' by Frédéric Denhez is published by Fayard, priced 14.99 euros.
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English version: Eric Rosencrantz
(Editing by Graham Tearse)