Tribune. Rightly or wrongly, the fear of scarcity marks our vision of the world. Our resources, it seems to us, are running out in the short term; our societies and economies would risk collapsing as a result of this scarcity. The idea was recently taken up again by the economist Jean Latreille (“Universal income will not make us work less, on the contrary”, The world, April 29). It is in the tradition of brilliant theorists: Thomas Malthus of course, Paul Ehrlich who announced in 1970 imminent famines in the United States and many others today.
The famous report on thehe limits to growth, the “Meadows report” published in 1973, thus exposes in its main scenario a collapse linked to the exhaustion of raw material resources. But this remarkable work, which deserves to be read as much as it is cited, also offers alternative scenarios. One of them assumes unlimited resources. It also results in a collapse, not under the effect of scarcity but on the contrary of an out of control pollution allowed by the abundance of resources.
Fifty years later, it is this second scenario that comes true. Far from having diminished, the reserves identified are now much higher than those cited in the report. We are consuming a lot more resources, aided by the structural fall in their price. Even oil is more accessible: in France, ten minutes paid at the minimum wage allow you to get a liter of gasoline; this was double in 1970, when a liter of gasoline cost 1.10 francs for a minimum wage of 3.50 francs an hour.
Scarcity persists in not happening
Our incredible capacity for innovation has enabled us to invent new prospecting, extraction and refining processes which have made a finite resource abundant, postponing its disappearance indefinitely. It is precisely this abundance that threatens our ecosystems.
Global warming ? Excessive use of hydrocarbons, meat, nitrogenous fertilizers.
Air pollution ? Excess of fine particles and nitrogen oxides produced by ubiquitous vehicles.
Acid rains ? Excess sulfur dioxide. The ozone hole? Excess CFCs linked to refrigeration equipment and aerosols.
Excessive consumption of goods that have become, by human genius, abundant and cheap. Our environmental crises are crises of excess and not of lack.
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