7Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35; 2, 2009: 197–222, 212.
8Ibid., 209.
9Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science, 155, 1967: 1,203–7; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco: Harper, 1980; Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
10Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, 16. Our emphasis.
11Richard Heede, ‘Tracing Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Methane Emissions to Fossil Fuel and Cement Producers, 1854–2010’, Climatic Change, 122:1–2, 2014: 229–41.
12Alf Hornborg, John R. McNeill and Joan Martínez Alier (eds), Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, New York: AltaMira Press, 2007; the writings of Kenneth Pomeranz, Mike Davis and Tim Mitchell also share this perspective.
13See in particular Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts (eds), Global Political Ecology, London: Routledge, 2010.
14Libby Robin and Will Steffen, ‘History for the Anthropocene’, History Compass, 5:5, 2007: 1,694–719.
15David Satterthwaite, ‘The Implications of Population Growth and Urbanization for Climate Change’, Environment and Urbanization, 21:2, 2009: 545–67. This study also shows how between 1980 and 2005 there was a negative correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and demographic growth.
16Jacques Lizot, ‘Économie primitive et subsistence. Essai sur le travail et l’alimentation chez les Yanomami’, LIBRE, 4, 1978: 69–113. See also Geneviève Michon, ‘Cultiver la forêt; sylva, ager ou hortus?’, in Serge Bahuchet et al. (eds), L’Homme et la forêt tropicale, Châteaneuf-Grasses: Éditions de Bergier, 1999, 311–26. Our thanks to Thierry Sallantin for these references.
17Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Databook 2014, Zurich: Credit Suisse Research Institute, 2014, credit-suisse.com.
18Hervé Kempf, How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
19Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
20Kempf, Comment les riches détruisent la planète.
21Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, 856.
22Charles Fourier, ‘Détérioration matérielle de la planète’, in René Schérer, L’Écosophie de Charles Fourier. Deux textes inédits, Paris: Economica, 2001, 81. This is a manuscript of 1820–21, published posthumously in La Phalange in 1847.
23Will Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship’, Ambio, 40, 2011: 739–61, 757.
24Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, 850 and 853.
25James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, London: Allen Lane, 2006, 13. Our emphasis.
26Sylvestre Huet, ‘Une ère conditionée’, 22 January 2011, liberation.fr.
27‘The Geology of the Planet: Welcome to the Anthropocene’, Economist, 26 May 2011.
28Serres, The Natural Contract, 11.
29Ibid., 3.
30Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, Gifford Lectures, 2013, 79, bruno-latour.fr (accessed 22 June 2013, link since suppressed).
31Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 2013; Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992; Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge: Polity, 1994; Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage, 1994.
32Frederick H. Buttel, ‘Ecological Modernization as Social Theory’, Geoforum, 31:1, 2000: 57–65.
33Stéphane Haber and Arnaud Macé (eds), Anciens et modernes par-delà nature et société, Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2012.
34Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘The Lessons of Disasters: A Historical Critique of Postmodern Optimism’, Books and Ideas, 27 May 2011, booksandideas.net.
35Fourier, ‘Détérioration matérielle de la planète’, 117.
36On the notion of ‘modern disinhibition’, see Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique, Paris: Le Seuil, 2012.
37Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr., Our Plundered Planet, Boston: Little, Brown, 1948; William Vogt, Road to Survival, New York: Sloane Associates, 1948.
38Osborn, Our Plundered Planet, 32 and 45.
39Vogt, Road to Survival, 285.
40Roger Revelle and Hans E. Suess, ‘Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase in Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades’, Tellus, 9, 1957: 18–27.
41Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, 22.
42François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et experiences du temps, Paris: Seuil, 2001.
43The expression is Latour’s, in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.
44Ingolfur Blühdorn, ‘The Politics of Unsustainability: COP15, Post-Ecologism, and the Ecological Paradox’, Organization and Environment, 24:1, March 2011: 34–53.
45Interview cited by Weronika Zarachowich, ‘Gaia, la Terre mère, est-elle obligée d’aimer ses enfants?’ Télérama, 3303, 4 May 2013, telerama.fr. This may well be more journalistic than the thought of Bruno Latour, but it is still significant in terms of the grand narrative.
46Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 23.
47Folke and Gunderson, ‘Reconnecting to the Biosphere’, 55.
48Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature, 415, 3 January 2002: 23.
49Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter, 41, 2000: 18.
50For a discussion of the issues involved in geoengineering, see Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
51Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, 858.
52Bruno Latour, ‘En attendant Gaïa’, Libération, 29 June 2011.
53Bruno Latour, ‘Love Your Monsters’, in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (eds), Love Your Monsters: Post-Environmentalism and the Anthropocene, San Francisco: Breakthrough Institute, 2011, 17–25, 24.
54Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, 860 and 862.
55Ibid.
56Ibid., 861–2.
57Folke and Gunderson, ‘Reconnecting to the Biosphere’, 55.
58Michelle Marvier, Robert Lalasz and Peter Kareiva, ‘Conservation in the Anthropocene: Beyond Solitude and Fragility’, Breakthrough, Winter 2012, thebreakthrough.org. See also Emma Maris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, London: Bloomsbury, 2011.
59Catherine and Raphaël Larrère, Du bon usage de la nature, Paris: Aubier, 1997, 9.
60Serres, The Natural Contract, 110.
61Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, ‘Anthropogenic Biomes’, The Encyclopedia of Earth, 3 September 2013, eoearth.org.
62Mark Lynas, The God Species, London: Fourth Estate, 2011, 8.
63For an example of technophile and cornucopian vulgarization of the Anthropocene, see Christian Schwägerl, The Anthropecene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet, Santa Fe: Synergetic Press, 2014.
64Cited by Hamilton, Earthmasters, 135.
65Erle C. Ellis, ‘Neither Good nor Bad’, New York Times, 23 May 2011, nytimes.com. For a critical reading of the eco-modernism of the Breakthrough Institute, see Clive Hamilton, ‘The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us to Disaster’, Scientific American, 19 June 2014, scientificamerican.com.
66Virginie Maris, ‘Back to t
he Holocene: A Conceptual, and Possibly Practical, Return to a Nature not Intended for Humans’, in Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne and Christophe Bonneuil (eds), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London: Routledge, 2015, 123–33; see also Frédéric Neyrat, Enquête sur la part inconstructible de la terre. Critique du géo-constructiviste, Paris: Seuil, 2016.
67For a comparative analysis of the first four of these grand narratives of the Anthropocene, see Christophe Bonneuil, ‘The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene’, in Hamilton, Gemenne and Bonneuil, The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, 17–31.
68Michel Foucault, A History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, New York: Vintage, 1990, 135ff. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, ‘Biopower Today’, BioSocieties, 1, 2006: 195–217.
69Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
70Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
71Ronald E. Doel, ‘Quelle place pour les sciences de l’environnement physique dans l’histoire environnementale?’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 56:4, 2009: 137–64; Yannick Mahrane and Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Gouverner la biosphère. De l’environnement de la guerre froide à l’environnement néolibéral, 1945–2013’, in Dominique Pestre (ed.), Le Gouvernement des technosciences. Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945, Paris: La Découverte, 2014, 133–69.
72UNESCO, Final Report: Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of the Biosphere, Paris, 1970, 15.
73Yannick Mahrane et al., ‘From Nature to Biosphere: The Political Invention of the Global Environment, 1945–1972’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, 113, 2012: 127–41, available in English only online at http://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_VIN_113_0127--from-nature-to-bioshpere.htm; Chunglin Kwa, ‘Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme’, Social Studies of Science, 17:3, 1987: 413–42.
74Paul Edwards, ‘Construire le monde clos. L’ordinateur, la bombe et le discours politique de la guerre froide’, in Amy Dahan and Dominique Pestre (eds), Les Sciences pour la guerre. 1940–1960, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2004, 225–6.
75Joseph Masco, ‘Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis’, Social Studies of Science, 40:1, 2010: 7–40.
76The title of a 1989 compilation of Scientific American.
77United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
78Clark Miller, ‘Resisting Empire: Globalism, Relocalization, and the Politics of Knowledge’, in Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello (eds), Earthly Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, 81–102; Arturo Escobar, ‘Whose Knowledge, Whose Nature? Biodiversity Conservation and the Political Ecology of Social Movements’, Journal of Political Ecology, 5, 1998: 53–82.
79Peter Sloterdijk, Règles pour le parc humain. Suivi de La Domestication de l’être, Paris: Fayard, 2010.
80G. M. Batanov, I. A. Kossyi and V. P. Silakov, ‘Gas-Discharge Method for Improving the Environmental Characteristics of the Atmosphere’, Plasma Physics Reports, 28:3, 2002: 204–28.
81James R. Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, 236. See also Hamilton, Earthmasters; Sebastian Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut. L’Invention de l’environnement global, Paris: Seuil, 2014.
82Michael Allaby and James Lovelock, The Greening of Mars, London: André Deutsch, 1984.
83Fleming, Fixing the Sky, 172.
84Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut.
85Paul J. Crutzen and John W. Birks, ‘The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon’, Ambio, 11:2, 1982: 114–25.
86Simon Denyer, ‘Kerry Calls Climate Change a Weapon of Mass Destruction, Derides Skeptics’, Washington Post, 16 February 2014, washingtonpost.com.
87On the notion of a ‘state of exception’, inspired by Carl Schmitt, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, and Homo Sacer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
88Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut, 300. See also Mick Smith, ‘Against Ecological Sovereignty: Agamben, Politics and Globalization’, Environmental Politics, 18:1, 2009: 99–116.
89Graciela Chichilnisky and Geoffrey Heal (eds), Environmental Markets: Equity and Efficiency, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
90Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Une nature liquide? Les discours de la biodiversité dans le nouvel esprit du capitalisme’, in Frédéric Thomas and V. Boisvert (ed.), Le Pouvoir de la biodiversité, Paris: Presses de l’IRD, 2015, 193–213.
91Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, London: Calder and Boyars, 1973, 107.
92Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
93‘Les Inventeurs’ (1949), in René Char, Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1983, 322–3.
94Henri Michaux, ‘La Ralentie’ (1938), in L’Espace du dedans, Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 216–18. Our thanks to Clara Breteau for leading us to discover this poem and many others.
PART THREE: WHAT HISTORIES
FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE?
CHAPTER 5
Thermocene: A Political
History of CO2
We are all familiar with the curve that is the very emblem of the Anthropocene, tracing the exponential growth of carbon dioxide emissions over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But no matter how famous this is, the curious fact is that we lack any history of it – a history sufficiently precise, for example, to distinguish the share of responsibility of different technological choices for the climate crisis: Have cars emitted more or less CO2 than artificial fertilizers? How many times more CO2 does road freight represent compared with rail and river freight?
Or again, what are the main institutions that have set us on the road to climate cataclysm? What are the great historical processes (imperialism, wars and war preparations, economic globalization, automobiles, Fordism, suburbanization, etc.) that are most important in relation to this curve? These questions currently remain unanswered and constitute the object of what we propose to call the ‘history of the Thermocene’.1
Political reflection and public debate suffer from this lack of history. For want of precise knowledge, the spontaneous narratives of the environmental crisis are lost in unfocused criticisms, incriminating capitalism in general, or, worse still, modernity. As for the anthropocenologists, we have seen their tendency to propose infra-political narratives that emphasize demography or economic growth.
A history of additions
In what way does the history of the Thermocene that we are aiming at differ from energy history as currently practised?
Because of the climate crisis, energy history is experiencing a revival of interest. According to certain historians, examination of the ‘energy transitions’ of the past makes it possible to elucidate the conditions that will permit the advent of a renewable energy system.2 Energy history thus questions the focus of the present debate on production. In past transitions, in fact, demand was the determinant factor: the automobile created the oil industry, the filament lamp created electric power stations, and not the other way round. Energy history also argues for a long-term public support for renewable energies: the first entrepreneurs to adopt a new source of energy played a crucial role in developing engines and improving their performance, and this incremental process could only take place in a niche situation. For example, the first steam engines in England had such poor performance that they were only viable at the mouth of coal mines. Finally, this history questions the pertinence of the present objectives of energy efficiency. On the one hand, in relation to the tendency measured since 1880, they do not seem particula
rly ambitious;3 on the other hand, energy history confirms William Stanley Jevons’s great discovery about steam engines: by becoming more economic with coal, machines became more profitable, their use spread and the national consumption of coal finally increased. Historians have thus observed rebound effects in several sectors. In Great Britain, for example, between 1800 and 2000, the price of light (measured in lumens) fell by a factor of 3,000, but consumption increased 40,000 times.4 According to goods and their price elasticity, the rebound effect varies, but on the whole, energy efficiency has been more than outbalanced by economic growth.
Despite these practical results, energy history with a managerial approach is actually based on a serious misunderstanding: what it studies under the name of ‘energy transition’ actually corresponds to the very opposite of the process that needs to be fostered today in the context of the climate crisis and peak oil.
The bad news is that, if history teaches us one thing, it is that there never has been an energy transition. There was not a movement from wood to coal, then from coal to oil, then from oil to nuclear. The history of energy is not one of transitions, but rather of successive additions of new sources of primary energy. The erroneous perspective follows from a confusion between relative and absolute, local and global. If, in the twentieth century, the use of coal decreased in relation to oil, it remains that its consumption continually grew; and on a global level, there was never a year in which so much coal was burned as in 2014.
Energy history must therefore free itself first of all from the concept of transition. This was promoted in the space of politics, media and science precisely so as to spirit away worries bound up with the ‘energy crisis’, an expression that was then still dominant. Between 1975 and 1980, the term ‘energy transition’ was invented by think-tanks and popularized by powerful institutions: the US Department of Energy, the Swedish Secretariat for Futures Studies, the Trilateral Commission, the European Community and various industrial lobbies. In most cases, this talk of ‘transition’ served to indicate an indispensable recourse to so-called ‘alternative’ fuels: nuclear in particular,5 but also gas and shale oil, coal and synthetic fuel.6
The Shock of the Anthropocene Page 11