Economic history and environment

Program

Environment and business logic (9:30-11:00)

• Antonin Pottier (CIRED, EHESS), “Peut-on faire de l’histoire économique de l’environnement ? Quelques réflexions à partir de l’historicité de l’environnement et de l’économie”

Je m’intéresserai aux conditions de possibilité intellectuelles de l’existence d’un champ nommé l’”histoire économique de l’environnement”. Etant donné l’historicité de la catégorie d’environnement d’une part, et l’historicité de la catégorie d’économie d’autre part, je me demanderai comment une histoire économique de l’environnement est concevable et quelles peuvent en être les spécificités.”

• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (CRH, CNRS), “Effets rebonds latéraux”

The world’s energy history is cumulative. There has never been a “transition” away from coal, or even away from wood. Energy and materials evolve according to symbiotic dynamics. Nineteenth-century industrialization was not a “transition” from wood to coal: in 1900, the UK consumed more wood just to extract coal (in the form of props for mines) than it had burned a century earlier. In the 20th century, oil consumption stimulated demand for coal, if only to manufacture cars, steel, roads, cement, oil pipes and so on. Oil also increased the availability and use of wood energy. By 2024, wood will produce twice as much energy as nuclear power. Since 1992 and the world’s official concern about climate change, CO2 emissions have doubled, while the share of fossil fuels in global energy has remained more or less stable. The energy transition projects a past that doesn’t exist onto a future that remains ghostly.

• Eric Herbert (LIED, UPC), “Ressource, substitution, rétroaction. Le système économique est-il transi ?”

A society organizes and exploits techniques that depend on two coupled flows of matter and energy. The industrial revolution is characterized by the transition from a non-controllable flow of energy (solar power) to a stock energy available on demand (fossil fuels), which provides controllable power. With the availability of high-quality energy (abundant, convenient, dense), new uses have emerged, based on specific techniques that harness previously unattainable power levels, and exploit them on a large scale. These techniques are optimized solely to maximize production volume, which implies not only an increase in the flow of energy, but also in the flow of materials. This raises the crucial question of the dependence of uses on these flows. This question is the subject of long-standing debates in various academic fields, which are renewed as constraints on the availability of materials and energy become more pressing, without ever coming to a halt. Using the example of the Roegen / Daly vs. Solow / Stiglitz controversy in the journal Ecological Economics in the 1970s, then rekindled in the 1990s, we’ll show how this vital question occupies the economic field, what matter and energy are compared to, and how their replacement is thought of.

Adapting to climate change (11:30-13:00)

• Petros Chatzimpiros (LIED, UPC), “Transformations agroalimentaires dans le cadre de la transition énergétique”

For almost a century, the mechanization and industrialization of agri-food systems have brought about numerous transformations in their organization, as has their energy transition from a regime of autonomy to one of dependence on stock sources. The current energy transition, which aims to move away from this dependence on stocks and return to renewable flow, calls into question the relevance of current structures and, more generally, the deep implicit dichotomy between biological powers, using flow, and mechanics dominated by stocks.

• Mélanie Gittard (Center on Food Security and Environment, Stanford University), “Impacts of repetitive droughts and the key role of experience: evidence from Nigeria”

This article explores the impact of long-term experience of historical climate shocks on households’ ability to adapt to droughts in Nigeria. In the 1980s, the Sahel and Gulf of Guinea were hit by severe, long-term droughts, which affected rural households, forcing them to find coping strategies. Since the 2000s, farmers have been faced with uncertainty over the timing and intensity of the rainy season, and erratic rainfall with strong inter-annual variations. Can the experience of past droughts (prolonged drought in the 1980s) reduce household vulnerability to recent shocks (recent droughts in 2013 and 2015)? The short-term effects of a drought on agricultural production and food security indicators translate into a 14% reduction in yields and a reduction in the diversity of household food consumption of around 1%. However, for households that acquired their first plot of land before the drought of the 1980s, the reduction in yields during the drought of 2015 is only 3%: acquired experience counts and expresses a capacity to adapt to climate change.

Environment: long-term outlook (14:00-15:30)

• José Halloy (LIED, UPC), “Sept transitions énergétiques majeures dans la longue histoire de l’humanité”

The concept of “energy transition” raises two issues: the notion of transition and that of energy. The question of transitions is approached in the natural sciences from a historical angle, as shown by the distinction between gradual and punctuated evolution in the life sciences. With regard to the concept of energy (Joule, quantity), physicists have sown confusion by emphasizing an abstraction rather than the implications of power (Watt=Joule/second, flow) and the materiality of living and technological systems. It is possible to revisit the long history of planet Earth and human societies by taking into account the metabolism of living and technological systems. Metabolism is defined here as all the physico-chemical processes that enable a system to function. This clarifies the vague notion of “energy transition”.

• Mathieu Arnoux (LIED, UPC, EHESS), “Transitions énergétiques et systèmes techniques : une approche de longue durée (XIIe-XIXe siècle)”

Coal is most often at the center of narratives about the transition that gave rise to the Anthropocene. In this perspective, the energy potential associated with the most abundant of fossil fuels opens the way to unlimited power. We know, however, that coal has been mined and used in considerable quantities, particularly in England, since at least the 14th century. It was its combination with iron production, from 1709 onwards, that kick-started the industrial boom. The presentation will focus on iron and its role, over nearly a millennium, in the quest for energy efficiency. Does the gradual diffusion of iron in most technical devices point to another story of the emergence of non-renewable socio-technical systems?

• Christophe Bonneuil (CRH, CNRS), “Penser des régimes de planétarité historiquement situés. Le cas des alertes et “solutions” environnementales planétaires de l’âge des empires, fin XIXe s.-début XXe s”

In line with François Hartog’s notion of “regimes of historicity”, the notion of “regimes of planetarity” inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes to write an environmental history “en plein” (and not “en creux”, by what they would lack compared to today) of planetary environmental reflexivities in different societies at different times, and the associated cultural, political and material dynamics. To put this notion to work and examine how it might intersect with economic history, the paper will document how, around 1900, Western imperial elites and expert communities approach various environmental alerts of great spatial and/or temporal magnitude. How they fabricated the “planetary” by aggregating figures and maps, looking to Mars or the geological past to speak of the present. If many “planetary” alerts are present, we will finally examine the “solutions” put forward by these expert communities, imbued with coloniality and technological solutionism: the invocation of future generations (but which ones?), planting as a sustainable use of tropical land, fish farming, acclimatization and bio-prospecting to make up for the extinction of species and varieties, the superior right of white man to develop the planet and say how it should be used.

Environment and economic policy (16:00-17:30)

• Thomas Kekenbosch (CMH, EHESS), “Introduire l’environnement dans l’économie. Statistiques et comptabilité environnementale en France dans les années 1970”

The ways in which the environment became institutionalized and established as a public issue in the 1970s were manifold. In addition to growing media coverage, a global conservationist agenda and the organization of struggles, the “technocratic” environment appeared to be the dominant frame of reference both at the time and in collective memory. Putting the environment into statistics, and then into accounting, is a little-known legacy of this period. This talk looks at fifteen years of work by expert statisticians and economists who accompanied the formation of the environment as a new field of public action, from the formation of a new ministerial perimeter to the threshold of the shift towards sustainable development.

• Lucie Rondeau du Noyer (CIRED), “”The Indian Fuel Problem” : un débat impossible dans l’Inde coloniale de l’entre-deux-guerres ?”

At the founding conference of the Indian Economic Association on January 1, 1919, K. V. R. Aiyangar declared that university economists were the experts best placed to solve what he proposed to call “The Indian Fuel Problem”. An avowed heir to the Indian economics thinking that emerged in the 1870s, this professor from the University of Madras sought to persuade his colleagues that this “fuel problem” was both urgent and specific to colonial India. According to Aiyangar, if the colonial state did not take swift and drastic action, the growing demand for energy in Indian homes would lead to a shortage of wood that no other organic or fossil energy source would be able to compensate for. The economists present at the 1919 IEA conference failed to recognize Aiyangar’s original and innovative conceptualization of India’s fuel problem. It’s important to understand why.

• Nelo Magalhães (CRH, EHESS), “Le sable et la terre. L’État et la gestion des matières ordinaires du capitalisme français (XIXe-XXe)”

This talk will offer some thoughts on the metabolism of the French economy over the past two centuries. In particular, we’ll look at the two most important material flows in France: sand and soil. We will analyze and compare their growth, the way they are handled by different social groups (entrepreneurs, administrations, engineers, etc.), the associated difficulties and regulations, and finally the statistical accounts that objectify them.

Organizers:

• Jérôme Bourdieu (PSE, EHESS)
• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (CRH, EHESS)
• Jean-Yves Grenier (CRH, EHESS)

This event is organized by the Centre for Economic and Social History François Simiand, in collaboration with the Économie politique du changement institutionnel (EPCI) seminar.