EA surge in gasoline prices, tensions over gas supply, growing fuel poverty, global warming… At a time when the exit from fossil fuels was becoming the remedy for these ills, history reminds us how our energy dependencies and why the answer cannot be purely technical, by entrusting engineers with the famous “transition”.
Every society has an energy system that shapes its ecology as well as its social structures, by which it transforms primary sources (solar radiation, wood, water, coal, etc.) into useful energy (muscle force, heat, mechanical movement, electricity, etc. .) and/or appropriated (horse rides, water wheels, steam or explosion engines, photovoltaic cells).
The adoption and evolution of these energy systems did not take place via peaceful transitions, but through lively debates and tensions, resulting today in the incessant increase in all consumption: we have never had so many consumed wood, coal, oil and so-called renewable resources. If energy systems were first studied in a linear way as the result of progress in human inventiveness, the energy question is now thought of as the fruit of social relations, imaginations and political choices of each society.
Transitional civilization
Environmental history works first remind us how extraordinarily energy-intensive our societies are, disproportionate to those that preceded them: between 1820 and 2000, global energy consumption would have been multiplied by at least 25 (World Energy Consumption. A-Database, Paolo Malanima, 2022). And again, this is an average that hides huge disparities: in 2015, a North American consumed 282 gigajoules per year compared to 4.5 for a Malawian. Contemporary societies have largely relied on this ability to mobilize energy in very large quantities to shape their environment and increase their power.
But contrary to what we sometimes imagine, the process was neither linear nor natural. If “progress” is celebrated, voices are raised, from the 19e century, to denounce attacks on the environment: pollution and accidents, disfigurement of the world, plundering of natural resources, imperialism, etc. We celebrate nature all the more the more it is devastated. Entrepreneurs and engineers have favored sobriety or sought to do without fossil fuels which were initially expensive and difficult to mobilize, for example by developing the old “natural energies” like hydraulics, wind power, animal power, so many dynamic trajectories before being closed and forgotten. The first car made by Ferdinand Porsche in 1898 was electric.
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