This is the belief of many decision-makers: in the global fight against climate change, technological innovation is one of the keys to success in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. For Philippe Bihouix, on the contrary, this technological headlong rush will not save us, and it is urgent to imagine a world with a different relationship to innovation. Engineer, he notably wrote in 2014 The age of low tech. Towards a technically sustainable civilization (Seuil) and has just published, with Sophie Jeantet and Clémence de Selva, The Stationary City (Actes Sud, 352 pages, 23 euros), a book devoted to the issue of urban sprawl.
This graduate of the Ecole Centrale de Paris is now Managing Director of AREP, the largest architecture agency in France, a subsidiary of SNCF Gares & Connexions, which carries out infrastructure and urban projects on a global scale. . In this episode of the “Human Heat” podcast, broadcast on the website of the World on November 8, he explains that more technology means more raw materials, more energy, and therefore more impact, at different levels, on the planet.
Faced with the scale of the climate crisis, the idea that “we will indeed find a solution”, implying a technological solution, comes up often. Whether it’s hydrogen, nuclear fusion or digitization… Why don’t you share this hope?
Because technologies have an impact: they consume non-renewable resources, often metal resources, which must be drawn from the earth’s crust. And even if we have at our disposal thousands of times the energy necessary for humanity, which falls on us in the form of the sun, we need converters to capture this energy, transform it into electricity, or store it. And for that, you need a lot of metals. It was an unthought about ten or fifteen years ago. Today, the International Energy Agency, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission, everyone recognizes that there is going to be an incredible need for resource extraction to feed a transition with a lot of renewable energies, and with the switch to electric mobility. This will create a strain on metals such as copper, zinc, nickel, or so-called “rarer” metals, such as lithium or cobalt, which are used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles.
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