The British navy played a historically fundamental role in the globalization of coal. In 1824, the East India Company used steamships in Burma in its war against the kingdom of Mandalay. From the 1830s, they were used on the China coast by British opium traffickers. These small gunboats gave the traffickers tremendous assurance. When threatened by the governor of Canton, William Jardine, a large shipowner and an opium trafficker on the side, replied haughtily: ‘Our commerce must not be subject to arbitrary rules that gunboats could break by a few rounds of mortar on this town.’ The first Opium War (1839–42) demonstrated the superiority of steamships over the Chinese military junks. As well as steam propulsion, their metal hulls enabled the British gunboats to navigate in shallow waters and thus proceed up rivers to pursue enemy embarkations or threaten inland cities.50
It was at that point that the Admiralty, along with the British Geological Survey, organized a global survey of coal resources suitable for ensuring its supply lines: Bengal, Australia, Java, New Guinea, Malaysia, Brunei, Palestine, Syria, Nigeria, Socotra, Aden, Natal, etc. The British Empire developed a dense network of coal mines and supply points that were the basis of its naval domination until the twentieth century. For those countries already in the British orbit, asking for geological expertise was also the most rapid and effective way of attracting British capital and engineers.51
The British Admiralty also played a major role in the conversion of world shipping to oil and, more generally, in the harmful union between the military and oil in the twentieth century. In July 1911, the German warship Panther was cruising off the coast of Agadir. According to Churchill, appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in September, the superiority of the Royal Navy vis-à-vis its German rival was an absolute imperative, with the survival of the empire at stake. Pressed by oil interests, he was also convinced of the tactical interests of oil: more concentrated than coal in terms of energy, it gave ships a greater radius of action and a faster speed; it saved both space and manpower, and could be more rapidly loaded. But the empire had no oil of its own and had to provide this. The British government bought a 51 per cent share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and signed a twenty-year contract for supplying the British navy. This decision inaugurated a century of rivalries and wars in the Persian Gulf.52
The First World War confirmed the strategic importance of oil. In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force in France had only 827 motor vehicles; by the end of the war, it had 56,000 lorries, 23,000 cars and 34,000 motorbikes. The war was perceived by the general staff as a victory of trucks over locomotives.53 It accelerated research into oil combustion, and the speed, performance and power of engines doubled in four years. With state support, automobile constructors renewed their equipment, introduced assembly-line work and generalized the application of Taylorism, making it possible to use semi-skilled workers. In France, the automobile industry quadrupled its capacity.54 More than 200,000 combat aircraft were produced by the belligerent states.
War and the Great Acceleration
It was the Second World War, however, that made for the decisive break, marking a leap forward in energy terms in relation to its predecessor. The average American soldier in the Second World War consumed 228 times more energy than in its predecessor. The main strategic advantage of the Allied armies lay in their almost unlimited supply of American oil. The new role of aircraft sharply increased demand. US Air Force statistics indicate a consumption of aircraft fuel of close to 50 billion litres, of which 80 per cent was consumed within the United States, underlining the major importance of logistics and the military-industrial complex in military consumption.55 The share of oil consumption represented by the US military rose from a pre-war level of 1 per cent of the national total to 29 per cent in 1944. In parallel with this, the United States strongly developed its extractive capacity from 1.2 to 1.7 billion barrels per year.
Oil logistics were transformed in the course of the war: pipelines and refinery capacity were steeply increased in response to military needs. The production of aircraft fuel (100-octane aviation spirit) formed one of the most important industrial research projects of the Second World War. Investment in the process of alkylation rose to $1 billion, half the total of the Manhattan Project. By the end of the war, the United States could produce 20 million tonnes of aircraft fuel per year, followed by Great Britain with only 2 million.56 Similarly, two gigantic pipelines (Big Inch and Little Big Inch) were constructed at breakneck speed in 1942 to connect the oilfields of Texas to New Jersey, from where oil was shipped to the European front. These pipelines, initially conceived to ensure safe transport immune from German U-boats, are still in service today.
The ‘Great Acceleration’ of the 1950s should naturally lead us to investigate the key role of the Second World War in the history of the Anthropocene, and the US war effort in particular. More precise quantitative studies could show that the Great Acceleration was the result of the industrial mobilization for the war, followed by the creation of civilian markets designed to absorb the excess industrial capacity.
Between 1940 and 1944, US industrial production increased more rapidly than in any other period of history. Whereas it had grown by an annual 7 per cent during the First World War, it tripled between 1940 and 1944 (production of raw materials increasing by 60 per cent).57 Businesses that had been crippled by the problem of overproduction in the 1930s were reticent to develop their productive capacity as much as military needs demanded. Investment in production was thus largely financed out of public funds: the US government paid for infrastructure, equipment and machinery, leaving the management of production to private companies. The share of industrial investment in US public expenditure also reached an absolute historical record in 1943 of 70.4 per cent (it is now less than 10 per cent).58 The result of this orgy of public investment in productive infrastructure or transport was a fifteen-fold multiplication of aircraft and munitions production, tenfold for shipping, three times for chemical products and bauxite, twice for rubber, and so on.59 Road transport measured in kilometre-tonnes more than doubled, air transport multiplied by six, and the volume of oil transported by pipeline increased five times.
The problem of productive over-capacity and its reconversion in peacetime may be illustrated by the case of aluminium. Production of this metal is both very polluting and highly energy-intensive: the bauxite has first to be converted into alumina (aluminium oxide), then alumina into aluminium. Today, aluminium production consumes 4 per cent of global electricity. In France, which was the cradle of the aluminium industry between the wars, the industry took root in the Alps on account of the abundance of hydro-electricity. Before the Second World War, the uses for this costly mineral were very limited.
The development of military aviation during the Second World War radically changed the situation. In the United States, production increased from 130,000 tonnes in 1939 to 1.1 million in 1945, and in Canada from 66,000 tonnes to 500,000 tonnes. World production grew three times during the war, with North America supplying three-quarters of the total. As a result, the geography of bauxite itself changed: France, Greece and Italy, which had been the main sources, were replaced by Suriname, British Guyana and Jamaica.60 Bauxite production is very polluting on account of the heavy metal residues that contaminate ground-water, and the shift of sources of ore to poor countries simplified the extraction process.
After the war there were several initiatives to find outlets for the aluminium industry. In Britain, a law passed in 1944 provided for the emergency construction of 500,000 prefabricated houses. The aircraft industry saw in this a possibility of reconversion and produced en masse both family homes and schools, using aluminium and asbestos.61 In the United States, the Beech aircraft company asked the architect Buckminster Fuller to design aluminium houses. The aluminium industry went on to conquer several markets for industrial equipment, automobiles, transport, turbines, etc. Despite health warnings, it was sold as a material for cookware par excellence, neither rusting nor giving off
a taste, a good conductor of heat, a preservative and emulsifier in food, an anti-agglomerant in cosmetics, etc.
The history of Volkswagen and its flagship post-war product, the ‘Beetle’, well illustrates the connections between warfare and civil consumption. In 1933, Hitler charged the Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche with developing a ‘people’s car’ for less than 1,000 Deutsche Mark. To finance the factory, the Nazi regime set up a Volkswagen savings plan that people had to subscribe to for several years before being able to obtain a car. No Volkswagen was delivered to individual customers during the war. On the other hand, the Wolfsburg factory produced more than 70,000 ‘Kübelwagen’ for the Wehrmacht on the basis of Porsche’s designs. After the war, Volkswagen converted the Kübelwagen into the Beetle.62
The contemporary aircraft industry is likewise a product of the Second World War, both technologically (aluminium, radar, jet engines) and institutionally: in Chicago in 1944, fifty-two countries signed the convention that founded the International Civil Aviation Organization, the aim of which was to promote ‘the development and international expansion of trade and travel’. One article of the 1944 convention prohibits the taxation of aircraft fuel and so makes it hard to realize current projects to tax air travel as a means of combating climate change. Despite the increase in oil prices, travelling by plane is still extremely cheap in terms of cost per kilometre. Aviation is the economic sector whose emissions of CO2 are rising most rapidly, doubling approximately every ten years.
The Second World War thus prepared the technological and legal framework for mass-consumption society.
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1Mark Harrison and Nikolaus Wolf, ‘The Frequency of Wars’, Economic History Review, 65:3, 2012: 1055–76.
2Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 8.
3Harrison and Wolf, ‘The Frequency of Wars’.
4Michael Renner, ‘Assessing the Military’s War on the Environment’, in Lester Brown (ed.), State of the World 1991, New York: Norton, 1991. See also John R. McNeill and David S. Painter, ‘The Global Environmental Footprint of the U.S. Military, 1789–2003’, in Charles Closmann (ed.), War and the Environment, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009, Chapter 2.
5Sohbet Karbuz, ‘US Military Energy Consumption – Facts and Figures’, resilience.org, 21 May 2007.
6Amy Dahan and Dominique Pestre (eds), Les Sciences pour la guerre. 1940–1960, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2004.
7For more long-term historical perspectives on the link between war and environment, see John R. McNeill, ‘Woods and Warfare in World History’, Environmental History, 9:3, 2004: 388–410; Richard Tucker and Edmund Russell (eds), Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War, Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004; and Joseph P. Hupy, ‘The Environmental Footprint of War’, Environment and History, 14:3, 2008: 405–21.
8Hans Erich Nossak, ‘Interview mit dem Tode’, 1948, quoted in W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, New York: Modern Library, 2004, 35.
9Ibid., 32.
10See Clyde Edward Wood, Mud: A Military History, Dulles: Potomac Books, 2006, 10–13.
11Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2001, 64.
12A. Joshua West, ‘Forests and National Security: British and American Forestry Policy in the Wake of World War I’, Environmental History, 8:2, 2003: 270–93.
13William Tsutsui, ‘Landscapes in the Dark Valley: Toward an Environmental History of Wartime Japan’, Environmental History, 8:2, 2003: 294–311.
14Jean-Paul Amat, ‘Guerre et milieux naturels. Les forêts meurtries dans l’Est de la France 70 ans après Verdun’, Espace géographique, 16:3, 1987: 217–33, and Jean-Yves Puyo, ‘Les conséquences de la Première Guerre mondiale pour les forêts et les forestiers français’, Revue forestière française, 56:6, 2004: 573–84.
15In the 1960s the French forestry office established a triage system to record timber that was unusable due to munitions remnants.
16Paul Arnould, Micheline Hotyat and Laurent Simon, Les Forêts d’Europe, Paris: Nathan, 1997, 114.
17Barry Weisberg, Ecocide in Indochina: The Ecology of War, San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1970.
18Greg Bankoff, ‘A Curtain of Silence: Asia’s Fauna in the Cold War’, in John McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (eds), Environmental Histories of the Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 203.
19Yves Lacoste, La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (1976), Paris: La Découverte, 2012: 60–3.
20Thao Tran, Jean-Paul Amat and Françoise Pirot, ‘Guerre et défoliation dans le Sud Viêt-Nam, 1961–1971’, Histoire et mesure, 22:1, 2007: 71–107.
21James R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 179–88.
22Bankoff, ‘A Curtain of Silence’, 226.
23Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2013, 91–108.
24The concept of brutalization was introduced by George L. Mosse to describe the banalization of violence brought about by the First World War. See Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
25Quoted in Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 61.
26Philippe Cury and Yves Miserey, Une mer sans poissons, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008, 112–13, and Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002, 197–253.
27Cury and Miserey, Une mer sans poissons, 83–5.
28Josephson, Industrialized Nature, 88–91.
29Francis W. Carpenter, ‘United Nations Atomic Energy News’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 6:1, 1950: 19.
30Camille Rougeron, Les Applications de l’explosion thermonucléaire, Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1956.
31Scott Kirsch, Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005.
32Sarah Jansen, ‘Histoire d’un transfert de technologie’, La Recherche, 340, 2001.
33Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, 20.
34Brian Balmer, Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy 1930–65, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
35Quoted in Russell, War and Nature, 23.
36Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 134–51.
37Thomas Le Roux, Le Laboratoire des pollutions industrielles. Paris 1770–1830, Paris: Albin Michel, 2011, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique, Paris: Seuil, 2012.
38David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, London: Profile Books, 2008.
39Alexander Gladstone, ‘Coal Emerges as Cinderella at China’s Energy Ball’, Financial Times, 1 May 2013.
40James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1789–1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 106–14.
41Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London: Penguin Books, 2008, 46; Thomas Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970, New York: Berghahn, 2007, 51–66.
42David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 181.
43Peter Galison, ‘War against the Center’, Grey Room, 4, 2001: 5–33.
44Stephen B. Goodard, Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 184.
45John R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (eds), Environmen
tal Histories of the Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 7.
46Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 276–88.
47Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, 82.
48Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006, 175.
49Jean-Antoine Chaptal, De l’industrie française, vol. 2, Paris: Renouard, 1819, 113. Denis Woronoff gives higher figures: 600,000 tonnes in 1789 and 900,000 by the end of the empire. See Histoire de l’industrie en France, Paris: Seuil, 1994, 194.
50Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 17–58.
51Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
52Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (1991), London: Simon & Schuster, 2008, 137–47.
53Ibid., 156.
54Jean-Pierre Bardou et al., La Révolution automobile, Paris: Albin Michel, 1977, 114.
55http://www.usaaf.net/digest/operations.htm
56Edgerton, Britain’s War Machines, 185.
57Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, 63.
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