I recently started reading the latest book from Lucas Chancel, called “Énergie et Inégalités, Une Histoire Politique”.

A Story of Inequality

I actually didn’t know Chancel until I came across a random video where he was arguing in favor of the creation of the Zucman tax in France. If you’re not fully up to date with this debate, the French opposition wanted the new prime minister to show some bi-partisan commitment by adhering to their proposal of a “super-rich” wealth tax that was aimed at generating 5 to 20 billion euros per year by taxing the 1,800 households making €100 million or more. That’s the top 0.005% in case you’re wondering.

France being France (but really I expect the same to have happened everywhere else) they eventually managed to appeal to emotions in a way that the general debate took a general turn and a majority of the Assemblée Nationale voted to reject the tax. Just imagine for a moment the amount of sheer pressure that lobbying must have leveraged in that moment to preserve the ruling status of its richest minority.

In a way, Chancel’s account of energy development helps us understand the phenomena that led to the growing gap between rich and poor.

Colonies and Coal

One of the most interesting arguments made by Chancel is that the boost of productivity and wealth that emerged from the industrial revolution is not only due to engineering prowess and technological advancement, as it is widely claimed and venerated in our western history books. In addition, it intrinsically relied on colonies to supply to raw resources needed to operate the machines and sustain the level of production.

Specifically, the case of England (and Belgium as far as I can tell) exemplify countries that had reached their organic limits of land usage through deforestation and couldn’t have sustained their economic growth without the emergence of a new technology like the steam engine. In combination with coal, which both countries lucked out on having readily available, they only missed a continuous surplus of primary materials like cotton to fuel the production line. And this is in fact what the respective colonies were producing as exports for the respective countries.

It is important to correct this one-sided account in our schools, which focussed on the ingenuity of a few to drive economic growth. In fact, textbooks will already often account for the miserable working conditions of the working class during that time, which included child labour to work in the factories. It is now time to extend the story to highlight the extensive reliance on native populations that were victims of this expansionism and of the natural resources that were intrinsically stolen to fuel the colonial powers’ domestic industries.

This retrospective shows that coercion and abuse are a common pillar of technological development. Today, we still rely on child mining practices in Cobalt mines of Africa to provide the essential mineral of our electronics. If they were to be treated decently and to operate in human conditions, the distribution of wealth of the entire electronics industry would need to be shifted, which would hinder the overall wealth of a few ultra rich individuals.

Implications on Climate

The more latent yet dramatic aspect of this energy growth is linked to the climate crisis. As the world develops, it does so under a neo-capitalist model where consumption is encouraged and sustains the industrial development and global order of the largest corporations. As a result, it is possible to measure the amount of energy needed per person on earth. Just like wealth, the gaps between rich and poor are gigantic. The few richest individuals pollute disproportionately more than the poorer ones. Just think about the carbon dioxide emissions that comes from their travels but also the production of electronics needed to sustain their lifestyles.

As we know, our global impact currently consumes 1.7x the resources available on earth. Fossil fuels reliance, overfishing, natural disasters, we are professionalized in keeping the abusive practices alive and kicking. They sustain the global order in its current form. Meanwhile, at COP30, countries shied away from setting ambitious milestones that would ensure we would abide by the Paris agreement, from which the United States cowardly departed. Our global objective of limiting the temperature rise below 2°C is already looking very distant in our back mirror.

The global climate disasters - increases in floods, draughts, earthquakes, typhoons, are known to be related to our green house emissions and overall over-consumption, which is correlated to intense energy usage. Once again, the effects are not proportionally felt and some countries are suffering more from these. In the Philippines, the amount of super-typhoons have doubled since the beginning of the century, often leading to the evacuation of millions of inhabitants and thousands of casualties. Those news make up 6 paragraphs at most in western media. The accountability is inexistant.

Daring to Degrow

I want to end on the topic of “Degrowth” which comes from the French “Décroissance”. I believe that it’s becoming clearer and clearer that we’re not going to be able to meet the long term agreements we’ve aimed for in the Paris agreements. Our energy consumption keeps on rising, we are relying on more exploitation to sustain increasingly hungry modes of living that are clearly unsustainable. At the core, it’s hard not to blame the neo-liberal doctrines of over-consumption and the ever-reliant pursue of economic growth as the sole success criterion of our corporations.

Daring to degrow will be the necessary intellectual commitment that we will need to commit to as a society in order to reverse the course of damaging our planet and leading to more global conflicts for the control of rapidly disappearing natural resources. I’m afraid we won’t get there until even more serious disasters occur to us in the western world. Today, we still live in our little comfort and we have the luxury of looking away from those climate events. Eventually however, we will not have a choice, and we will need to ask for forgiveness from those we ignored for so long.