“We are living the end, for those who had it, of a form of carelessness. » While the risks of energy shortages are looming with the fall, the words spoken by President Emmanuel Macron on August 24 have an echo that is a little more painful every day. In addition to their economic implications, their very literal meaning challenges. Because who, until now, really lived in carelessness? Asked about the subject in the program ” The Company of Works “, broadcast on August 30 on France Culture, the philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc provides a fairly sharp answer: no one. Nor the less well-off, of course, anxious about the difficult end of the month. Nor the richest, worried about the protection of their heritage. Anxiety changes in nature according to social class, but it is never absent.
Did the baby boomers, who experienced the euphoria of the “glorious thirties” (1945-1975), have the chance to escape the weight of worries during their adolescence? Not even, assures the philosopher, who calls to be wary of the illusion of paradise lost: “Each era is traversed by different forms of fear and thematizes what it calls the end of recklessness. » In the 1980s, it was the irruption of AIDS. In the 1990s, that of mass unemployment. In the years 2000 and 2010, that of the attacks…
The 2020 decade will be marked by the awareness of the limitation of resources. We come up against the “knot of contradictions in the development of our societies”, explains Guillaume Le Blanc. We open our eyes to “planned obsolescence of the planet due to the systemic predation of resource capitalism”.
Triple challenge
Getting out of this knot requires breaking with the obsession with growth and placing the vulnerability of our ecosystems at the center of concerns. But, in the short term, this overhaul will be thwarted by the recession in Europe, due to the energy shock caused by the war in Ukraine. Governments will have to deal with the emergency – protect households and businesses brought to their knees by soaring electricity prices. In the medium term, this review will also be thwarted by the difficulties of access to the raw materials essential to the energy transition and to our very survival – like water. The end of recklessness marks the entry into the resource war. She has already started.
A recent study of the Peterson Institute for International Economics tries to assess who, through the game of shareholders, controls the key parts of the global supply chains of minerals and rare earths. “This analysis is not straightforward, as companies are not necessarily incorporated in the countries where extraction and production activities take place, and shareholders may exert influence through multiple subsidiaries”, explain the authors, economists Luc Leruth, Adnan Mazarei, Pierre Régibeau and Luc Renneboog. But their observation is clear: China dominates these value chains, and this much more than is commonly admitted.
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