The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  In Great Britain in 1935, for example, the industry that consumed most coal was gas for lighting, even above steel. It consumed a fifth of English coal production (or 23 million tonnes). Using coal to produce light, however, is very bad business: 728 tonnes were needed to produce £100,000 in profit, as against 240 tonnes in steel-making and only 120 in electricity, the rival technology.34 Major technological systems such as gas lighting (or nuclear power) have a very great inertia: the volume of capital invested, and the interests involved, explain their survival a half century after the appearance of far more efficient technologies.

  Conversely, promising technologies may be killed off at birth. In the 1950s, in the United States, investment in solar energy came to an end with the development of suburbs, the promotion of low-cost prefabricated homes (the famous Levittowns) and very aggressive marketing on the part of electricity companies. In 1968, Congress commissioned a study of these practices. General Electric was even threatening building developers not to connect new estates if they offered alternative sources of power. For such developers, offering only electricity made it possible to reduce construction costs and shift energy expenditure onto the homeowners.35 This was how, in the 1950s and ’60s, the thermodynamic aberration of electric heating was promoted in the United States without any technological necessity for it.

  The suburbanization and motorization of Western societies are certainly the most massive example of a technological and civilizational choice that is profoundly suboptimal and harmful. In the United States between the two world wars, suburbanization was a political project: the one-family house seemed the best rampart against Communism, and President Herbert Hoover deliberately encouraged it so as to stimulate the property instinct. In 1926, in order to protect property values, the Supreme Court legitimized the practice of zoning, separating residential spaces from both industrial activity and ethnic minorities. During the Great Depression, construction and suburbanization were perceived as an essential factor for economic revival.

  After the Second World War, an economicist and free-market vision of urban development came to dominate, based on the rational choice of consumers who arbitrated between housing and transport expenditure. In this logic, given that the price of mobility was steadily falling and that of housing relatively stable, town planners were bound to project the development of megapolises in synchrony with mass motorization.36

  In actual fact, if we look more closely, the choice of the individual car corresponds to processes that are far more contingent than is generally believed. American historians have shown that the dismantling of streetcars and suburban railways, and their replacement by individual cars and buses running on petrol, did not follow any technological or economic logic, but considerably increased the costs of mobility, and in the medium term even slowed this down!37

  In 1902, in the United States, streetcars carried 5 billion people on some 35,000 kilometres of electrified lines. This was a safe and relatively comfortable mode of transport. Given the national rail network, the development of urban and interurban electric trams and the lack of good highways, the individual motor car did not seem a particularly promising technology in America at the start of the twentieth century.

  The switch from collective to individual transport, which seemed absurd to many contemporaries, was rooted in an old antagonism that opposed local authorities to the streetcar companies. At the start of the twentieth century, the latter were subject to constant attack by the press and public authorities, which presented their monopoly situation as a restriction on business freedom. At the same time, Ford’s Model T invaded the streets (the number of cars in New York rose from 40,000 in 1915 to 612,000 in 1927), slowing down streetcars and trolley-buses. These cars also increased the running costs of public transport, since in the majority of cities the streetcar companies were responsible for maintaining their routes in good shape – in New York, this cost them 23 per cent of their revenue.38 On top of this were the charges they paid to the local authority. Paradoxically, the streetcar actually subsidized the automobile.

  The concessions granted in the 1880s and ’90s no longer corresponded to the new economic situation. The sacrosanct ‘nickel fare’, for example, had not followed the doubling of the hourly wage during the First World War or the compulsory presence of a second employee in each streetcar. The streetcars’ competitors, for their part, were not subject to any of these regulations: the 1920s saw the proliferation of the ‘jitney bus’, collective pirate taxis that picked up passengers at the streetcar stops. This was the decade when investors turned away from the streetcar companies. Streetcars and trolley-buses seemed to be obsolete technologies.

  The second act in the tragedy of the streetcars took place in the 1930s. Two great corporations, General Electric and Insull, now owned the majority of the streetcar companies, their interest being to smooth out consumption peaks and optimize the production of their power stations. In 1935, the Wheeler-Rayburn Act compelled local electricity companies to sell their streetcar divisions. Suddenly, hundreds of small and unprofitable companies were placed on the market. General Motors, Standard Oil and Firestone dealt them the final blow, allying themselves with two small transport businesses, the Rapid Transit Company and Yellow Coach, to purchase the streetcar companies in some fifty American cities at rock-bottom prices. Once in control, they closed down the streetcar lines or replaced them with petrol buses, in order to create new outlets for the automobile industry. In 1949, a court decision against General Motors, Firestone and Standard Oil fined them a derisory $5,000.39

  In the 1930s, in both France and the United Kingdom, cities had a free-market approach to urban transport: trams were compelled to be profitable and could not be subsidized. Companies adopted a Malthusian policy, concentrating on profitable lines and delaying investment. With the economic crisis, many lines closed, and by the 1950s, the majority of cities had lost their networks.40 The comparison with Weimar Germany is instructive, confirming the importance of politics in the definition of modes of transport. First of all, given the central position of the coal-rail industrial complex and the relative weakness of the automobile industry, the German government had no interest in encouraging suburbanization and motorization. On the contrary, in 1927 the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) chose to tax motor cars heavily in order to finance public transport. The creation of the public rail company Deutsche Bahn in 1920, along with the municipalizing of the majority of tram companies, was likewise an element in a social policy aiming to reduce the cost of transport for workers.41

  The Anthropocene is an Anglocene

  The eminently political nature of energy additions is confirmed by the historical statistics of CO2 emissions: Great Britain and the United States made up 60 per cent of cumulative total emissions to date in 1900, 57 per cent in 1950 and almost 50 per cent in 1980. From the standpoint of climate, the Anthropocene should rather be called an ‘Anglocene’.

  Comparison between France and Great Britain is instructive. In 1913, the British GDP per capita was 20 per cent higher than the French, while cumulative British emissions were four times that of France (6 billion tonnes of carbon as against 1.5 billion). During the long nineteenth century, therefore, the British emitted four times as much CO2 to reach a standard of living not much greater than France. The great historiographical thesis of the plurality of paths of industrialization and the ‘soft industrialization’ of France, long preserving a dispersed industry inserted into the rural fabric and based on human, animal and hydraulic energy,42 is thus entirely confirmed by the very different responsibilities of the two countries for the present climate crisis. In 2008, France’s cumulative emissions made up 4 per cent of the world total, while those of Great Britain constituted 10 per cent.

  Figure 7: Annual emissions in thousand tonnes of carbon

  The overwhelming share of responsibility for climate change of the two hegemonic powers of the nineteenth (Great Britain) and twentieth (United States) centuries attests to the fu
ndamental link between climate change and projects of world domination.

  Coal was indeed the fuel of British hegemony. Besides those territories directly under Westminster’s control, Great Britain possessed an immense ‘informal empire’ based on the export of people, capital, technologies and engineers, an empire founded on free trade, which systematically worked to its advantage thanks to its control of economic circuits. Coal exports made it possible to fill the holds of ships leaving England43 and contributed to the exceptional profitability of the British Merchant Navy.

  Figure 8: UK and USA’s share in global cumulative CO2 emissions

  Between 1815 and 1880, five-sixths of the British capital invested abroad was outside the formal empire, chiefly in activities that were high emitters of CO2 (see Chapter 10 on the ‘Capitalocene’). Let us take a concrete example that shows the link between the British informal empire and the globalization of coal. After the Napoleonic wars, the British government imposed bilateral trade agreements on the newly independent countries of South America. From the 1820s, British traders and engineers flocked there in droves and bought up many mines, particularly copper mines in Chile and Peru. The city of Swansea in Wales, already specialized in the refining of ore from Cornwall, became the world capital of copper. This was an unprecedented historical phenomenon: raw material was shipped to the other end of the world to be transformed and sometimes re-exported to its country of origin.

  Coal lay at the heart of this globalization. Swansea had a competitive energy source in the coal mines of South Wales and an expertise in smelting with coke, while the exported coal served as cargo for the voyage to South America.44 The export of British expertise led to a new interest in coal throughout the world.

  US hegemony in the twentieth century was based similarly on carbon. The energy intensity of American development has been explained in terms of the colonial origins of the country. In the early nineteenth century labour was scarce, while raw materials, wood and coal, were found in great abundance. Employers thus had an interest in reducing the need for labour and using machines instead, irrespective of their productivity in terms of energy.

  The historians Bruce Podobnick and Tim Mitchell have recently introduced a new argument into this familiar story. Throughout the twentieth century, oil was constantly more expensive than coal – far more so in Europe, and a little more in the United States.45 How then are we to explain its extraordinary rise from 5 per cent of world energy in 1910 to more than 60 per cent in 1970?

  In their view, social history provides the key to this enigma. In contrast to oil, coal has to be extracted from mines piece by piece, loaded onto conveyors, transported by rail or boat, then again loaded into furnaces that have to be fuelled, overseen and cleaned. The weight of coal gave miners the power to interrupt the energy flow that fuelled the economy. Their demands, after long being suppressed, had finally to be taken into account: from the 1880s, great miners’ strikes contributed to the emergence of trade unions and mass political parties, the extension of universal suffrage and the adoption of social insurance legislation.

  Once the historical connection between coal and the democratic advances of the late nineteenth century is brought into the equation, the petrolization of America and then Europe gains a new political meaning. It corresponds to a political project, which the United States facilitated in order to defuse working-class movements. Oil is far more capital-intensive than labour-intensive; its extraction is done on the surface and thus easier to control, requiring a great variety of skills and a labour force that fluctuates greatly in numbers. All that makes the creation of powerful trade unions difficult.

  One of the objectives of the Marshall Plan was to encourage recourse to oil in order to weaken the miners and their unions, and thereby anchor the European countries to the Western bloc. As with every emergent technological system, oil needed to be massively subsidized. The funds of the European Recovery Program served for the construction of refineries and the purchase of generators. In the post-war decade, more than a half of the petrol supplied to Europe was directly subsidized by the ERP.

  Thanks to its fluid nature, oil made it possible to bypass transport networks and the workers who operated these. Pipelines and tankers, by reducing loading breaks, created an energy network that was far less intensive in labour, more flexible and decidedly international. In the 1970s, 80 per cent of oil was exported. With a supply that was now global, industrial capitalism became far less vulnerable to the demands of national labour forces. Finally, the oil network was centred on a few key points (wells, refineries and terminals), and thus readily controllable.46

  Historians have analysed in the same fashion the ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s, connecting it with the Cold War and the American policy of stemming Communist influence. The US government, with the aid of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, then the World Bank, set out to win the hearts of the rural masses of Asia and Latin America by modernizing their agriculture and assuring their food security. The green revolution was based on hybrid varieties of rice and maize, along with the use of machines, pesticides and chemical fertilizers, consumption of which rose from 30 million to 110 million tonnes between 1960 and 1980. As a strategy for increasing production, the results were incontestable: production of wheat, rice and maize rose considerably, from Mexico to India. But this agricultural model did not meet the needs of small peasants and led to countless environmental side-effects: water tables were exhausted and polluted, soils salinized and compacted, etc.47 The green revolution, very demanding in terms of energy, also completed the petrolization of the world.

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  1Jacques Grinevald and Alain Gras introduced the concept of ‘thermo-industrial civilization’. See Alain Gras, Le Choix du feu. Aux origines de la crise climatique, Paris: Fayard, 2007. We owe the ‘Thermocene’ neologism to Thierry Sallantin.

  2The journal Energy Policy recently devoted an issue to this theme. See Arnulf Grubler, ‘Energy Transitions Research: Insights and Cautionary Tales’, Energy Policy, 50, 2012: 8–16; Charlie Wilson and Arnulf Grubler, ‘Lessons from the History of Technological Change for Clean Energy Scenarios and Policies’, Natural Resources Forum, 35:3, 2011: 165–84; Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects, Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.

  3Paul Warde, ‘Low Carbon Futures and High Carbon Pasts: Policy Challenges in Historical Perspective’, History and Policy Working Paper, 109, December 2010. Watt’s steam engine converted between 3 and 6 per cent of the energy contained in coal, the best combined steam engine of the late nineteenth century converted 20 per cent, the diesel engine from 30 to 50 per cent and the present combined cycle gas power stations up to 60 per cent. See Smil, Energy Transitions, 9.

  4Roger Fouquet and Peter J. Pearson, ‘Seven Centuries of Energy Services: The Price and Use of Light in the United Kingdom (1300–2000)’, Energy Journal, 27, 2006: 139–78.

  5See for example, A. R. Gloyne et al., Dynamic Energy Analysis of the EEC Energy Transition Programme, report of the Energy Studies Unit, Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1976, inis.iaea.org.

  6John A. Belding and William M. Burnett, From Oil and Gas to Alternate Fuels: The Transition in Conversion Equipment, Washington, DC: Energy Research and Development Administration, 1977.

  7John C. Sawhill, Hanns Walter Maull and Keichi Oshima, Energy: Managing the Transition, The Trilateral Commission, 1978.

  8US Energy Information Administration, eia.gov.

  9Department of Energy and Climate Change, Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics 2012, London: TSO, 2012; and Denis Cosnard, ‘Électricité. L’Europe retourne au charbon’, Le Monde, 28 November 2012, lemonde.fr.

  10Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 60–2.

  11Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Déléage and Daniel Hémery, Une histoire de l’énergie. Les servitudes de la puissance (1986), Paris: Flammarion, 20
13, 244.

  12These data on emissions are all taken from the database of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, cdiac.ornl.gov.

  13Eliso Botella, ‘Cuba’s Inward-Looking Development Policies: Towards Sustainable Agriculture (1990–2008)’, Historia Agraria, 55, 2011: 135–76.

  14Manuel Franco et al., ‘Population-Wide Weight Loss and Regain in Relation to Diabetes Burden and Cardiovascular Mortality in Cuba 1980–2010’, British Medical Journal, 346, 2013: 1,515.

  15Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘The Gas-Lighting Controversy: Technological Risk, Expertise and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London’, Journal of Urban History, 33:5, 2007: 729–55.

  16David and Marcia Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2008, 99–119.

  17No more than 886 gigatonnes (886 x 109 tonnes) should be emitted between 2012 and 2050, whereas proven reserves of coal and oil are equivalent to 2,795 gigatonnes. See Carbon Tracker, Unburnable Carbon, 2012, carbontracker.org; Michael Jakob and Jérôme Hilaire, ‘Unburnable Fossil Fuel Reserves’, Nature 517 (2015), 150–2.

  18Debeir, Déléage and Hémery, Une histoire de l’énergie, 207.

  19Defined as the volume of scarce resources (transport, energy, etc.) that the use of a particular technology can release for other uses. Robert Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Economic History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964.