The intensive use of carbon energies has allowed prosperity, particularly since 1945, and with it a relative pacification of international relations. Decarbonation therefore requires, according to P. Charbonnier, to invent another geopolitics.
And if the climate crisis that we suffered found its origin in the international order designed to ensure peace since the Second World War ? And if the contemporary pacification process had generated new risks, provoking evil by wanting to do good, channeling the war drive in a kind of armed peace against nature ? This is the stimulating thesis defends Pierre Charbonnier in this work.
The author’s ambition is triple. It is first of all a question of returning to the history of the links between peace and abundance in philosophical thought. The author insists that political modernity links prosperity and peace, but that sweet trade and interdependencies supposed to ensure this peace between nations are based on predation and intensive use of resources. Second ambition, the author traces the concretization and contradictions of this idea since the Second World War: the pacification of international relations based on economic prosperity, it would have made fossil energies the base of peace and, in doing so, caused the climate crisis. This original framing would also explain the dead ends of current climate governance. Finally, Pierre Charbonnier goes further by offering the concept “ war ecology », Whose ambition is to reconcile ecology and geopolitics. Contrary to an ecological thought which would refuse to think of power and playing the competition between states, the author proposes to design sobriety as a weapon and as a tool of power. This tripartition corresponds to the division of the work.
This reflection is part of the continuity of the work Abundance and freedom the same author Published in 2020, but also in the dynamics of recent works in energy history which are committed to connecting energy policies to political thoughts that underlie them. After having shown how unlimited economic abundance had confiscated the ideals of social emancipation, by relating the notion of freedom to that of abundance, the author studies the links between peace and energy abundance. To do this, the author mobilizes political philosophy, many works by especially English -speaking historians, as well as recent reports and articles to analyze the current international situation and in particular the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“” Carbon peace »At the origins of the current crisis
The book proposes to return to the roots of modern political philosophy to underline the environmental implications of the link which is made, since Kant, between prosperity and peace. The three pillars of pacification (law, sweet trade and industry) involve unlimited access to resources. According to the author, these philosophical proposals developed over several centuries are embodied in the policies following the Second World War. They also coincide with the “ Great acceleration Which is characterized by strong growth based on the consumption of fossil fuels, synonymous for the entry author into the anthropocene. The rupture would be total after 1945: the consumption of coal and oil would experience exponential growth not only for technical and economic reasons, but especially for geopolitical reasons. States would make it the basis of securing the world by interdependence created by infrastructure, the most clear example being that of the Ceca.
It is on this energy and geopolitical configuration that the current climate crisis is based: questioning fossil fuels would amount to calling into question the conditions of peace. The author recalls that this international organization is not free from tensions and conflicts, and that fossil resources can become weapons: north/south tensions are particularly embodied in conflicts around oil, which is a negotiation tool for the producing countries of the Global South.
This matrix has shaped climate negotiations since the 1990s: if it seems impossible to reach a climate crisis agreement, it is for two reasons according to the author. On the one hand, because the international negotiation system is not originally thought of for a limitation or exit of fossil fuels ; On the other hand, ecological thought, by its refusal to play the game of power and international relations, would not have made it possible to impose the environment in the geopolitical game. It is in this context that the author proposes the concept “ war ecology ».
By these terms, the author calls for grasping geopolitics to impose decarbonation by putting environmental policy at the service of the power of states: decarbonation must become a geopolitical weapon. The author thus goes from ecology to the service of power to “ War ecology Which gives his name to the work. This war is both a metaphor, in opposition to the “ carbon peace », And anchors in the news to designate the current European policy aimed at doing without imports of Russian gas in reaction to the invasion of Ukraine. It provides a program of conditions to carry out the release of fossil fuels without destabilizing the international order too much: by the recognition of the ecological debt of rich countries towards poor countries, by industrial transition policies to assume the consequences of rapid elimination of fossil fuels, and finally by reinvention of international institutions to achieve climate agreements.
A philosophical essay and not a work of environmental history
Philosophical and political proposals are stimulating, in particular to think of the roots of the failure of current climatic negotiations, which cannot work due to material conditions and framing resulting from the organization of international relations. However, contrary to what its title announces, the work is not a work of environmental history proper, but rather a work for programmatic aims which is part of the public debate, which explains certain shortcuts and implicit elements.
Indeed, the “ Environmental history methods “(P. 60) invoked are absent from the work, which is based on a large literature, but selects famous figures (Kant, Carl Schmitt) or less known to the general public (like the economist Thomas Schelling), without the reader always grasping what links these different authors. It is also a history of speech more than ideas relating to the links between peace and prosperity after 1945. It is sometimes confusing to note that the speeches of many political actors are taken up as reflections of reality without contextualization or critical decline, from Schumann to Chinese President XI Jinping. This overinterpretation of speeches also explains that the Second World War be considered by the author as a fundamental rupture in energy history, erasing material continuities with the interwar period, and even with long XIXe century.
A model of historically questionable international relations
This hiatus between discourse and reality stems from the hybrid character of the work, between political philosophy and history: to read the author, one has the impression that all energy policies are only the fact of states, states which act as personified actors, with the sole reason of action “ power ».
This model, however, implies certain historical shortcuts which are debated. The energy policies implemented after the Second World War are presented as a precise and coherent project, and above all geopolitical. States would only act by will of power, without any mention of economic, profit or private sector which appears only in the last pages of the work. The structures of energy mixes are not however reducible to the only public decision, but are the result of a set of economic, technical, social and cultural factors that make system. The author also denounces the “ strategic naivety of the European Union before its energy dependence on Russia “(P. 308) which would be a discovery of 2022. The announcement of the programmed end of imports of Russian gas by the European Union, associated with the desire to accelerate the transition to renewable energies, is interpreted by the author as the first use of decarbonation as a geopolitical weapon. However, on the one hand, the energy weapon is much older, and on the other it is above all a speech which presents this forced sobriety as an opportunity.
Another object of debate, the definition of war is deliberately limited, being defined as “ A violent relationship between political powers mediated by the territory, which is triggered when the problem of cohabitation in a common space no longer finds a peaceful outcome (P. 21). However, it appears during the work that it is a question of restricting war with high intensity conflicts, only between great powers (notably Western), conflicts which would have been limited before 1945 to the conquest of territory or resources. All so-called asymmetrical wars between state and non-state actors are put aside. The author can thus say that in the “ modern societies “Would have developed after 1945” aversion to organized violence (P. 21). This restriction of the very concept of war leads the author to assert that after the war “ The need to detach yourself from the fascist ideological scheme has anchored in the collective consciousness the impossibility of fighting for a land, the impossibility of politicizing the earth, of making it a factor of mobilization and polarization (P. 30). To accept the idea of a “ carbon peace After 1945, it must therefore be accepted that the Cold War and all its peripheral conflicts, that all the American conflicts linked to oil are not wars in the literal sense.
To conclude, this essay of political philosophy is intended above all to decision -makers or designers of current political thought and aims to participate in the public debate by reversing the perspective. The theoretical proposition connecting the climate crisis in the manner of jointly thinking international relations and energy policies is strong and attractive, but the reader should not seek a historical analysis strictly speaking. Despite the historical modeling on which it rests, the work enriches the concept of “ Trail dependence “(Path Dependecy) energy by giving it an international dimension. The Trail of Dependence explains how our societies are trapped in socio -technical and political choices inherited from the past: Pierre Charbonnier invites us to reflect how our dependence on fossil fuels and the resulting climate crisis are also inherited from our way of conceiving international relations and peace for three centuries.