The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  To say ‘transition’ rather than ‘crisis’ made the future less generative of anxiety, by attaching it to a planning and managerial rationality.7 The further success of the notion of transition, as understood particularly in ecological milieus (see the ‘solar transition’ of the 1980s), also drew on a conception of technology developing in great radical shifts.

  On the one hand, however, the notion of transition obscures the persistence of old systems, while on the other hand it overestimates technological determinants to the detriment of economic arbitrage. For example, world coal consumption grew from 7.3 to 8.5 billion tonnes between 2008 and 2012.8 If China made up the greater part of this growth (from 3.0 to 4.1 billion), there are sectors in which Europe could experience a ‘return’ to coal. For instance, because of the development of shale gas in the United States, the price of US coal fell so much that it was profitable to substitute it for Russian gas. In Britain, the proportion of electricity produced from coal grew from 30 to 42 per cent between 2011 and 2012; in France, the consumption of coal for electricity generation leapt by 79 per cent.9 In this sense, coal is not an ‘older’ energy than oil, but looks more likely to be its successor.

  An example drawn from the book by Kenneth Pomeranz, A Great Divergence, clarifies the issue for the writing of history. Take two technologies: the steam engine and the Chinese furnace, more economic on energy than its European counterpart. How should we judge their historical importance? Why does the first seem worthy of historians’ interest, while the second is generally unknown? It is only the abundance of coal that makes the capacity to draw more energy from combustibles appear more determinant, and relegates Chinese furnaces to a footnote.10 If the English coal mines had shown signs of exhaustion from 1800 on, the hierarchy would have been reversed. The oil peak and climate change thus raise the question of direction in the history of technology, forcing us to reconsider its objects and envisage a ‘disoriented’ history.

  If it is to dispense with the idea of transition, energy history should abandon its classic terrain and study past historical situations in which societies were forced to reduce their energy consumption. The crisis of the 1930s offers some interesting cases: carbon emissions in the United States fell from 520 to 340 million tonnes, and in France from 66 to 55 million. In the latter case, this reduction was not just bound up with the recession, but also with the differential evolution of prices: that of coal rose by 40 per cent during the crisis, while the general price index stagnated. It was also in the 1930s that wood fuel experienced a peak, before a definitive decline after the Second World War.11 A historian of energy degrowth could also study the case of post-war Germany (from 185 to 32 million tonnes of carbon), or, nearer our own time, the fall of the Soviet Union (606 million tonnes in 1992, 419 million in 2002). In each of these cases, production fell sharply (the GDP of the former USSR falling by half between 1992 and 2002).12

  The examples of North Korea or Cuba after the fall of the USSR allow us to give a concrete meaning to what may lie concealed behind the pleasant euphemism of ‘energy transition’. Between 1992 and 1998, deprived of Soviet oil, North Korean agriculture based on mechanization and chemical inputs saw its yields of maize, wheat and rice fall by half. The North Korean state prioritized fuel supply to the army, leaving between 600,000 and a million of its citizens (3 to 5 per cent of the population) to succumb to famine before deciding to call for international food aid.

  In the same period, deprived of Soviet oil and under American embargo, the Cubans confronted for a ten-year periodo especial, a situation that presents certain similarities with that awaiting our industrial societies. In order to save on energy, working hours in industry were reduced, domestic electricity consumption was rationed, the use of bicycles and car pools was generalized, the university system was decentralized, solar energy and biogas were developed (supplying 10 per cent of electricity). In agriculture, the cost of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, very greedy in terms of energy, led the Cubans to innovate: biological control of pests by insect predators, organic fertilizers, and urban horticulture that enabled the recycling of organic waste. Finally, food was strictly rationed.13 Cuban bodies were significantly modified by the special period. In 1993, when the crisis was at its worst, the daily ration was reduced to 1,900 kilocalories. Cubans lost an average of five kilos per person, which had the benefit of reducing cardiovascular disease by 30 per cent.14 What is most disturbing, given the efforts made by the Cuban population, is that the reduction in CO2 emissions was in the end rather modest, falling in ten years from 10 million to 6.5 million tonnes, much less than the 40 to 70 per cent reduction of world emissions by 2050 called for by the IPCC that would cap global warming at a two-degree celsius increase.

  Nor should we fall prey to illusion as to our technological capacity to reduce the energy shock. The French nuclear power programme of the 1970s and ’80s offers a vivid demonstration of this: despite colossal public investment (in the order of 400 billion francs at 1990 prices), French CO2 emissions continued to rise during these two decades, from 90 million to 110 million tonnes per year.

  A history of inefficiency

  In relation to energy history, the history of the Thermocene also needs to free itself from two abstractions that overdetermine results: GDP and the very concept of energy.

  The exponential growth curves traced by historians are based on nineteenth-century thermodynamics, that is, an intellectual project that brings every form of work (from brain to blast furnace) into a generalized equivalence, on the hypothesis of a general substitutability of energy sources. The main difficulty is that this history depends on statistics of energy production. It counts the energy theoretically available from a kilogram of coal or oil, rather than the services actually performed by combustion. This has two consequences: since the quantity of energy contained in fossil fuel is immense, it overwhelms renewable energy systems, whether organic or simply economical. The history of energy thus very likely overestimates the upheaval introduced by fossil fuels.

  Take the case of gas lighting, for example. This technology, which appeared in London in the 1810s, was extraordinarily inefficient. It consisted in distilling coal – using more coal to heat this – in order to produce a gas designed to light housing or streets. Its energy yield was absolutely disastrous: a third of the coal was burned to produce gas, a third of this gas escaped in pipes that massively leaked, and at the end of the day the light it gave was very poor. Contemporaries had a very clear perception of both the dangers and the waste involved in this technique.15 In this particular case, the transition from oil lamps to gas lighting, that is, from an organic and locally applied energy to a fossil energy distributed over a network, while massively increasing energy consumption, above all increased the losses.

  Secondly, the ‘energy consumed per capita’ traced by historians actually corresponds to national production of energy divided by population. It includes for example the energy spent on waging wars, running the navy and controlling the empire, as well as the energy dissipated in inefficient technological systems. What we lack is a history of energy services, which would show the energy actually used by different classes of consumers.

  Figure 6: Annual energy consumption per capita in England and Italy (in megajoules)

  GDP is no less problematic than the concept of energy. In studying the evolution of the ratio between GDP and energy consumed, historians conclude that the energy intensity of industrial economies has steadily decreased from around the 1880s. But what does this result mean?

  First of all, it is based on the debatable hypothesis that GDP is a genuine measure of wealth produced. But according to this logic, buying a car that costs £20,000 and does 30 miles per gallon increases the energy performance of the economy more than buying a car that costs £10,000 and does 50 miles per gallon. Secondly, the ratio of GDP to energy aggregates processes that are completely different: the growth in the share of financial services in GDP in the late twentieth century improved ene
rgy efficiency only in a completely artificial sense. Thirdly, one of the great lessons of economic analysis in terms of energy, as this was practised in the 1970s, was on the contrary to show the decrease of energy yield in certain sectors, of which the case of agriculture was the best studied. The ecologists David and Marcia Pimentel, for example, showed that the transition from a traditional agriculture to an intensive and mechanized one led to a fall in energy yield: more calories (basically derived from oil) had to be used in order to produce each calorie of food. In the case of maize, the shift was from a ratio of ten calories produced for each calorie invested to a ratio of only three to one.16 The generalization of this type of analysis, that is, a general history of thermodynamic (in)efficiency (taking up Ivan Illich’s thesis of counter-productivity), would undoubtedly lead to a far more ambiguous account than that conveyed by energy history and its ascendant curves of energy, wealth and efficiency.

  A history of alternatives

  Finally, and this is its chief objective, the history of the Thermocene will have to denaturalize the history of energy. The latter was not written in advance: its transitions and additions follow neither an internal logic of technical progress (the first steam engines were very expensive and highly inefficient), nor a logic of scarcity and substitution (the United States, which possesses immense forests, resorted to coal on a massive scale in the nineteenth century), nor even a logic that was simply economic.

  The history of energy is also and above all one of political, military and ideological choices that the historian has to analyse, by relating them to the strategic interests and objectives of certain social groups. This political reading of energy history is particularly important in the present climate context: recourse to unconventional oil and shale gas shows that it is never ‘natural’ reserves that are allowed to dictate the tempo of energy transition. According to climate models, at least two-thirds of proven reserves of oil and coal would have to be left in the ground in order to limit the rise in temperature to less than two degrees by 2100.17 To prevent runaway climate change, it is absolutely necessary to put a political constraint in place before ‘price signals’ force us to change models.

  In this field as in others, however, history has an extraordinary power to denaturalize. Historical analysis dissolves many prejudices as to the supposedly indispensable character of certain technologies. For example, in 1914 coal made up only 2.7 per cent of French GDP, and 6 per cent of British GDP in 1907.18 The historian Robert Fogel has also shown that, contrary to accepted ideas, without the railways the United States could have had the same very rapid economic development that it had in the nineteenth century. In 1890, the ‘social profit’19 of the railways as compared with the best available alternative (an improvement in canals and carting) represented only between 0.6 per cent and 1 per cent of American GDP. Given the rapid growth of the United States at this time, Fogel concludes that the absence of railways would only have slowed the development of the American economy by a few months!

  In the same way, the historian Nick von Tunzelmann20 calculated that in 1800, in England, the social profit of steam engines represented less than a thousandth of GDP. Induced effects at this time were all but non-existent. For example, the major innovations in textiles (mechanical loom, spinning jenny) preceded the application of steam. Tony Wrigley calls England in the age of the industrial revolution an ‘advanced organic economy’ oriented primarily to agriculture. The number of horses in fact rose from 1.29 million in 1811 to 3.28 million in 1901.21 Andreas Malm has similarly shown that the energy potential of English rivers was far from being fully exploited. The switch of the cotton industry to coal that took place in the 1830s was not caused by a scarcity of energy or a simple economic calculation. On the contrary, the 1820s and ’30s realized large-scale hydraulic projects that combined reservoirs, dams and mills to ensure the industrialists of Lancashire and Scotland a renewable energy at a lower price than steam. Their defeat was due to the industrialists’ refusal to submit to the collective discipline that a common management of hydraulic resources would have imposed: how to be sure that the energy needed would be available at the right moment, how to guarantee paying only for one’s own motive power, and how to expand a factory easily. All these problems and many others necessitated a collective coordination and centralization to which the entrepreneurs were unwilling to undergo. The steam engine, on the other hand, despite being more expensive, constituted a flexible, modular and individual source of energy that matched very well the ideology of English textile capitalism of the 1830s.22

  If we consider the case of shipping, wind energy was still largely dominant in the late nineteenth century: in 1868, 92 per cent of British merchant shipping was powered by sail.23 In the same year, British dockyards produced 879 sailing ships and 232 steam ships. The second half of the nineteenth century was the age of the clippers, large sailing ships that broke speed records to sell their cargoes ahead of their competitors and profit from higher prices. It was not until the early twentieth century that steam overtook sail in global tonnage. The economic globalization of the late nineteenth century, therefore, was carried out for the most part by wind power.

  The focus of historians on energy, the industrial revolution and fossil fuel obscures economic transformations that were equally important. For example, the demographic explosion of the English-speaking countries in the nineteenth century was based on a ‘non-industrial’ revolution: on the energies of wind, water, animals and wood. It would be reductive to term these energies ‘traditional’. Thanks to selective breeding, livestock were rapidly improved: the American draught horses of the 1890s were 50 per cent more powerful than those of the 1860s. The trotting record for a mile fell from three minutes to two minutes between 1840 and 1880. Historians estimate that in 1850 horses provided half of all American energy. The number of horses in the United States, in fact, reached its peak at the end of the century: in Chicago and New York, in 1900, there was approximately one horse for every twenty-five people.24 Likewise, in 1870, thanks to new turbines, hydraulic power supplied 75 per cent of industrial energy.25

  More generally, the history of renewable energy sources – animal, wind and solar – before these were considered as merely ‘alternative’, shows a past rich in neglected technological paths and unrealized potentialities. The relatively few works on this subject lead to striking results: at the end of the nineteenth century, 6 million windmills, operating the same number of wells, played the historically fundamental role in opening up the plains of the American Midwest to agriculture and husbandry. These windmills were not pre-industrial but rotors built according to the principles of fluid dynamics, capable of following the wind and produced on a mass scale.26 In the American farmland, decentralized electricity production (using windmills and battery storage) remained dominant until the great programmes of rural electrification of the New Deal and post-war years.27

  In the same way, in the late nineteenth century, solar energy aroused considerable interest on the part of the French government because of an anticipated shortage of coal and the exploitation of tropical colonies. Several technologies were experimented with. In the 1870s, Augustin Mouchot invented the first solar steam engine. He received large subsidies to develop his system in Algeria, a country with no coal resources.28 In 1885, the engineer Charles Tellier, who had made a fortune in developing refrigeration procedures, developed a solar collector that ran on ammonia.29 At the start of the twentieth century, in the United States, the Sun Power Company already sold solar engines. Their cost may have been higher than that of classic steam engines, but it was far from prohibitive in appropriate conditions: $164 per horsepower as against between $40 and $90 for coal.30

  It was in domestic use above all that solar energy almost came to dominate. In California and Florida, the combination of abundant sunshine and distance from collieries explains the rapid development of solar water heaters. In the 1920s, an investment of $20 could save $9 per year in coal.

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sp; ‘Passive house’ technologies were developed in the 1930s: making maximum use of orientation, sunshine and shade, large south-facing windows, insulating blind walls to the north and double-glazing (which appeared on the market in 1932). These were in general luxury homes in the American individualist tradition, which sought to free themselves from urban constraints bound up with energy networks.

  During the Second World War, the American government financed large-scale research programmes aiming to reduce domestic oil consumption and maximize the share sent to the front. After the war, the fear of exhaustion of resources was an encouragement for solar power. In 1945, MOMA held an exhibition on affordable solar homes (less than $3,000), which seemed at the time the only available option to tackle the country’s housing need in the post-war years.31 In 1948, Mária Telkes, a physicist at MIT, developed a solar home that was 75 per cent self-sufficient in energy. Physicists who had worked on the Manhattan project, such as Farrington Daniels, switched their interest from civil nuclear power to solar. In 1952, the Paley Commission on US natural resources predicted an oil peak in the 1970s and advised the development of solar, wind and biomass. Finally, resorting to simpler technologies, small companies sold hundreds of thousands of solar water heaters. In Florida in the early 1950s, almost 80 per cent of homes were equipped with these.32

  A political history of CO2

  By relativizing the inexorable character of fossil fuels, history enables us to re-politicize their present domination.

  The notions of irreversibility (‘lock-in’) and path dependency make it possible to grasp the importance of political choices in energy policy.33 ‘Initial conditions’ such as the abundance of coal or oil, but also political conditions that encourage one source of energy rather than another, determine technological trajectories over a very long term. These decisions are then perpetuated by regulatory frameworks, by the need to protect investments, by the existence of infrastructures bound up with this energy source, as well as by customs, culture, etc. Analysing in this way the decisions that produced our almost exclusive dependence on fossil fuels dispels the illusion of an optimal and efficient contemporary technological world.