Philosophy of energy and energy transition in the age of the petro-Anthropocene^†

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the multidimensional issue of an ‘energy transition’ from a philosophical, that is, conceptual and analytical, point of view. The argument of this article is that ‘energy transition’ is not simply a technological and economic problem but also an epistemological, cultural, anthropological and even metaphysical one. Energy transition does not only consist of changing the kind of energy that is produced and consumed to power our modern middle-income societies, from fossil fuels to renewable energies. Energy transition asks us to understand what is implied in cultural and social terms by such a shift from ‘grey’ to ‘green’ sources of energy that does not only entail qualitative transformation but also could imply quantitative curtailment. What will be the consequences of our necessary departure from ‘petromodernity’, that is, from the mode of living that came with fossil fuels in modern times that shape our current age of the Anthropocene? To address this question, different dimensions of the philosophy of energy will be studied: epistemological, phenomenological, anthropological, critical and metaphysical. In conclusion, we will, first, propose the notion of a ‘negative energy tax’ to address the problems of ‘energy injustice’. We will then refer to Bataille to provide an ontology of energy that can help to redefine our assumptions and expectations regarding energy spending.

1. INTRODUCTION

The philosophy of energy is a relatively new and emergent field in the realm of philosophical investigation. It emerged as a specific domain of conceptual and critical inquiry in the 2010s because of the need to address environmental issues from a new perspective. The philosophy of energy stems from the concept of environmental philosophy, the latter of which examining ecological issues from ‘the perspective of nature’, so to speak. Environmental philosophy reflects upon the consequences of irreversible degradation of the environment and biodiversity for the interactions between man and nature. The philosophy of energy, in this sense, thus addresses the endogen basis of our human-driven ecological crisis. It reflects upon its causes at the social and individual levels: our current ecological crisis is analysed as the result of our own way to relate to energy.

It is in this sense that Anthropocene and philosophy of energy are connected. Anthropocene means a departure from the Holocene;¹ it means that ‘human beings’ have become the driving forces of geological changes. It denotes ‘the capability of contemporary human civilization to influence the environment at the scale of the Earth as a single, evolving planetary system’.² Dating the beginning of the Anthropocene is a huge and complex problem. In terms of the contemporary philosophy of energy, the Anthropocene will be said to start with the massive global use of fossil fuels. Thus, one of the goals of a philosophy of energy is to provide a renewed understanding of the social and technological process known as the ‘energy transition’.

In the specific context of a philosophy of energy, the shift from a ‘grey’ to ‘green’ power-based society will be understood not only as an administrative and legal issue but also as a cultural issue, related to social–political habits and expectations.³ Such a shift will not be achieved by the mere modification of existing energy mixes and power grids alone, but also by modifying urban and social networks so that energy is produced in proximity to the end-users.⁴ However, more philosophically, to be able to survive from the ‘Petrocene’, that is, from our current age of the fossil fuel-driven Anthropocene, we will need to comprehend the cultural consequences of such reliance on fossil fuels, that is, the material products (cars and planes), social habits (driving, travelling, etc), political regimes (Western democracies or authoritarian petromonarchies?) and individual expectations (economic growth, a certain quality of life, etc) produced as a result.

Despite decades of public campaigns and international recommendations for energy transition, 85 per cent of our world’s total primary energy consumption still comes from non-renewable sources. Some argue that the impossibility to completely switch to renewables, today, could justify our reliance on fossil fuels. However, such a dependence is not simply a matter of fact but also a social–economic construct: fossil fuel ‘subsidies’ still accounts for 6.5 per cent of the Global Domestic Product (GDP) or $5.3 trillion in total.⁵ According to The World Energy Outlook 2019: ‘The new data for 2018 shows a one-third increase in the estimated value of fossil fuel subsidies, reaching more than $400 billion. The estimates for oil, gas and fossil-fuelled electricity have all significantly increased, reflecting a higher price for fuels (which, in the presence of an artificially low end-user price, increases the estimated value of the subsidy). The 2018 data projects “oil return” as the most heavily subsidized energy carrier, expanding its share, in total, to more than 40%. In 2016, electricity briefly became the sector with the largest subsidy bill.’⁶

Thus, choices are made, and when choices are made, it is because we have goals, which implies a certain (cultural, religious, ethical, etc) idea of ‘ends’ not only of (technological, financial, etc) ‘means’.⁷ To ‘de-fossilize’ our lives, many adjustments will be required in almost every aspect of our lives (eating habits, housing habits, transportation habits, etc). Thus, new mechanisms of collective decision-making will be needed.

Moreover, since there are strong long-term correlations between energy consumption, GDP growth⁸ and CO₂ emissions, any action in one particular place may have a triggering effect on other places around the globe. This can entail consequential changes on ingrained social habits: when small Pacific nations are on the verge of disappearing because of the rising sea level due to accelerating Global Warming, is it not the responsibility of the nations who emits the most CO₂ per capita and of the consumption behaviours of their citizens? When neighbouring countries are suffering air pollution coming from People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) industries to whom their citizens should complain; their governments, China, the domestic or foreign companies generating it?

Because of the diversity and complexity of the issues at stake, there are also many different dimensions to understanding the philosophy of energy: an epistemological dimension aiming at understanding ‘energy’ in modern physical sciences; a phenomenological dimension which highlights the various modes of our mundane relationships to energy; an intercultural dimension illustrated in the comparative study of ‘energetic medicines’; an anthropological dimension aimed at exposing human social and symbolic relations to ‘energy’ at different moments of history; a critical dimension exploring the various literary and artistic expressions of the awareness to an energy crisis; and a philosophical and metaphysical dimension to challenging conventional narratives about philosophy, itself, attempting to propose alternative ontologies.

This introductory article will provide brief glimpses into these various aspects of the philosophy of energy. First, it will address issues related to the epistemology of energy by briefly discussing the notions of kinetic and potential energy in modern physics. Secondly, it will introduce the phenomenology of energy in order to categorize the different ways we relate to energy in everyday life. Thirdly, it will look at the role of energy in traditional and alternative medicines as a way to address the psychophysiology of energy. Fourthly, it will explore, with comparatively more length, the anthropo-sociology of energy through a brief historical account of the various forms of human dependencies to energy, while introducing the issue of energy injustice today. Lastly, it will inquire into the ‘metaphysics of energy’: interpreting the pre-Socratic ontology of elements in energetic terms, articulating Bataille’s conception of energy as free dissipation.

In all these different domains, the research question this article attempts to address remains the same: to what extent does our relation to and understanding of energy change in light of our current ecological crisis? Our claim is that the Anthropocene is both a historic consequence of human relationships to energy and a futuristic reason for the need to transform it. Such a claim acknowledges that energy should not only be understood as being simply an external source of power but should also be understood as a cultural and social mode of relating to oneself as a human being. Since energy is already a consubstantial part of our lives, it is only logical that our lavish consumption of energy is also consuming our species. In other words, the question is as follows: will ending the ‘Petrocene’ entail the end of the Anthropocene? – if so, to what extent will it end the human world as we know it?

2. EPISTEMOLOGY OF ENERGY: KINETIC AND POTENTIAL ENERGY IN PHYSICS

The notion of energy comes from Aristotle. Aristotle made a distinction between potentiality, or dunamis, and actuality, or energeia. Later on, the concept of dunamis was understood in relation to potential energy, the concept of energeia being understood in relation to kinetic energy. However, from a historical point of view, it should be stressed that Aristotle’s concepts, due to his teleological understanding of natural phenomena, differ from our modern understanding of the terms: ‘according to Aristotle, matter has a natural tendency to be actually so and so determined. This actual determination is its end. When it has become actually so and so, its potential is actualized, and at the same time it has reached its end; it is then perfect.’⁹ In Aristotle’s sense, the action of home-building relates to the dunamis of the architect, both in his capacity to even do so and his capacity to do it well. The house being built, itself, is an expression of his Energia. Our walking dunamis even exists where we sleep, whereas our walking energeia is expressed when we walk.

In modern physics, energy is related to work: the work done by all forces acting on a particle equals the change in the kinetic energy of the particle. Potential energy is associated with forces that act on a body depending only on the initial and final positions of the body in space. The total energy is the sum of potential and kinetic energy: this sum is constant. Simply said, if we consider the act of shooting, the charge of the gunpowder could be seen as potential energy, while the bullet launched by the explosion of this charge represents the kinetic energy of the shot.

This principle of the conservation of energy has been translated in thermodynamic terms by Rudolf Clausius: ‘In all cases where work is produced by heat, a quantity of heat proportional to the work done is expended; and inversely, by the expenditure of a like quantity of work, the same amount of heat may be produced.’¹⁰ The first law of thermodynamics is complemented by a second law related to ‘entropy’: the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time or, as Clausius, again, stated it: ‘The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.’¹¹

Our vital relation to energy comes from the fact that nature is not a closed system¹²: life on Earth is possible because it is open to solar radiation. Life in our organic and social bodies is possible only if we maintain its functional work, that is, if we incorporate energy into it (for plants via chlorophyll for carbon fixation and nutrients from the soils, especially nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium). To do so, at the social level, we rely on a few primary energy resources—at different moments in time: wood, fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) uranium (nuclear energy), solar and wind energy. The science of thermodynamics that emerged with the development of steam engines¹³ has been instrumental for the energetic transformation of modern societies. Although, for Aristotle, energy meant ‘the achievement of an action’, we typically define energy as being the transformation of the materialistic potential of a natural resource into socio-economic, efficient and productive work. The relation of energy and work in thermodynamic terms can be easily illustrated if we consider the relationship between physical exercises and losing weight: to dissipate the 280 calories of energy contained in a 60-gram chocolate recently consumed, we will need to lift a weight of 50 kg up to a height of 0.5 m for 40 minutes.

3. PHENOMENOLOGY OF ENERGY: ENERGY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

The aim of the phenomenology of energy, that is, the analysis of the structures of experience and consciousness that are mobilized in our ways to relate to energy, is to disclose the modalities of our routine interactions with energetic sources channelled by various technological devices. According to Idhe, the four ‘various ways in which I-as-body interact with my environment by means of technologies’ are ‘background relations’, ‘embodiment relations’, ‘hermeneutic relations’ and ‘alterity relations’.¹⁴ Idhe’s categories can work at the level of our environmental relationships not only to technology but also to energy, in general. As explained by Pierce and Paulos, ‘While the relations can be viewed as distinct modes of experiencing one’s world by means of technology, they also represent points on a continuum ranging from complete withdrawal of an object (background relation) to complete presencing of an object (alterity relations).’¹⁵

‘Background’ relation to energy can be illustrated by the relation of the embodied subject to central automatic heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in which the consumption of energy creates the ambient atmosphere of our ordinary life. Our ‘embodiment’ relation to energy can be illustrated by all the different means by which a tool (which needs energy to operate) becomes an extension of our bodily capacities (eg not only electric screwdrivers or electric mosquito rackets but also voice-controlled lights or writing on a computer with eye movements¹⁶). Our ‘hermeneutic’ relation to energy refers to the fact that reading the signs on the gauges of our various energy-powered apparels has become a daily, even hourly, routine. In the same breath, preventing them to run out of energy has become as vital as reminding oneself to eat during a busy day. Our ‘alterity’ relation to energy could be related to the tendency we have to establish almost personal relationships with our cars, trucks or bicycles, even to our affective engagements with digital avatars and intelligent assistants.

A phenomenological approach to energy can contribute to deciphering our modes of relation to energy in everyday life. As recently discussed, different ways of relating to energy can help deconstruct our relation to energy in a very systemic way. Thus, the question is: how can we reduce our consumption of energy at the background, embodiment, hermeneutic and alterity relations to it? For example, when we speak of the ideal temperature for heating or air conditioning in order to ‘save energy’, we only relate to our ‘background’ relation to energy. Conversely, our claims to reduce energy consumption did not align with our ‘embodiment relation to energy’, that is, it contradicts the proliferation of electric-powered ‘personal assistants’.

However, the phenomenology of energy faces the same limits as phenomenology itself. The notion that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something,¹⁷ that is, that there is a necessary correlation between (intentional) thoughts leads to forms of dualism¹⁸. Similarly, a strictly ‘phenomenological’ approach to energy could wrongly lead us into believing that energy is something to which we only externally relate, causing us to lose sight of the fact that energy is also a ‘thing we eat’ (the active ingredients of pesticides are hydrocarbons derived from petroleum). Moreover, energy is a part of what we are, not only in the case of an artificial cardiac peacemaker, for instance, but in a chemical and biological sense, as well, such as the metabolization of food. This latter case is best explained by the imbalance between potassium and sodium ions inside and outside the cells that results in natural regeneration. Our body is, in fact, a natural energy convertor via the Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) generated from metabolizing food.

4. PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGY OF ENERGY: TRADITIONAL AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINES OF ENERGY

The notion that the human body is an electric battery with its own electric circuit is as old as it is widely assumed¹⁹: the Chinese notions of qi and meridians, or the Indian notions of prana and chakras, are cross-cultural examples of ‘pre-scientific’ representations of the energetic body.²⁰ The notions of qi in China, and prana in India, relate to similar ideas of an intimate relation between life, breath and energy: life is an energetic fluid circulating through the body along a specific circuit anchored on a certain number of energetic nodes. In addition, this internal energetic fluid is thought to be related to the movements of energy taking place in the outer natural world.

It would be a mistake to believe that such notions existed only in ‘exotic’ non-Western cultures. In Greek medicine, health was defined similarly, in energetic terms, as the result of an equilibrium between the various humoral fluids (blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile and phlegm) circulating through the body.²¹ The excess of one fluid or another could induce different ‘energetic qualities’ affecting the psycho-physiological subject with melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric or sanguine emotions and feelings.²² Moreover, in all traditional Western,²³ Chinese²⁴ and Indian²⁵ medicines, the energetic state of the body was deeply connected to the environmental energetic background. Depending on the season, the energetic balance of the body changes. In order to maintain this balance, ‘cold’ aliments in the summer and ‘hot’ ones during winter are assimilated.

It would also be a mistake to believe such psycho-physiologic conceptions of embodied energy belong to an old-fashioned past. Many contemporary ‘alternative medicines’ (such as osteopathy or chiropractic) are related to similar understandings of health²⁶ and disease²⁷ in energetic terms.²⁸

5. ANTHROPO-SOCIOLOGY OF ENERGY: HISTORICAL DEPENDENCIES AND ENERGY INJUSTICE

To relate ‘energy philosophy’ to more demanding issues, we need to move from an individual level to the collective one. As stressed by the editors of Cultures of Energy, an anthropological investigation into human relationships with energetic resources is of primary concern: ‘Energy is an area ripe for anthropological investigation in at least three ways: (i) how people experience and utilize energies of various qualities (types), (ii) how we rely on its quantity (continued flow), and (iii) how we harness both qualities and quantities of energy to construct socially meaningful worlds.’²⁹

Relative to the quantitative aspects of social energy use in different anthropological settings, Fischer-Kowalski and others demonstrated that the shift from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian society (Neolithic revolution), and then to a modern society (Industrial Revolution) occurred with an increase in the use of energy consumption and production (which to a certain extent also contributes to increase the quality of life, as Steven Pinker convincingly demonstrated in Enlightenment Now³⁰): first gradual and localized, then exponential and globalized. From the 16th century and on, one could infer that the global urban population and consumption growths are causally related: ‘Energy use of hunter gatherers … may range between 200 and 300 kg/capita per yr., with an energy content of 3–4 GJ/capita per yr. … Mixed farming systems range most likely somewhere between 20 and 80 GJ/capita per yr. … Based on population estimates and regional data, we arrive at average metabolic rates for modern energy carriers … from 0.3 GJ/capita per yr. in ad 1500 to 85 GJ/capita per yr. in ad 1900 and further to 280 GJ/capita per yr. in 1980, since then they slightly declined.’³¹ Here, we have to remind ourselves that the average minimum energy requirement per person per day is about 7500 kilo Joules (kJ), which equivocates to 2.8 Giga Joules (GJ) per year (= 0.83 megawatt-hour or 28.4 therms US). The difference between the minimum 3 GJ per year and the 300 GJ/capita per year (which is actually used in the USA), in 2003, testifies that 99 per cent of our energy consumption is not for ‘vital’, that is, basic needs (ie dedicated to the powering of the modern apparatus of our technologically extended bodies: fridges, cars, TVs, etc). Indeed, due to our body reliance, and even ‘dependence’, on electric-powered devices, most of these items (fridges, cars, TVs, etc) have become as necessary as air and bread.

Qualitatively speaking, each society also had its own energetic patterns: hunter-gatherer societies’ quest for energy was cycloidal; agrarian societies’ quest for energy was extensive and horizontal (the main way of increasing energy input was territorial conquests); and modern industrial societies’ quest for energy is intensive and vertical (ie both below and beyond the Earth surface: drilling the Earth’s crust and the depths of oceans with projects to exploit the riches of other planets—even if space mining is still largely science-fictional). From a structuralist point of view, we could notice that while the horizontality of energy captured in agrarian regimes induced imperial structures of vertical domination, the verticality of energy captured in industrial regimes induced the horizontality of the means of political control. A point also noted by Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller: ‘In agrarian societies, landownership had been the most important basis of wealth and power. The fossil energy regime loosened the tie between land and political power, and it precipitated a phase of rapid urbanization, which led to the emergence of modern mass politics.’³² In other words, the rarity of energy in agrarian society induced the concentration of power in a few hands, while its ubiquity in modern societies gives more agency to individual actors at different segments of society. However, to assume a strong correlation between fossil-fuelled modernity and democracy would be a mistake: rapid urbanization and emerging middle-class mass consumption are not always abiding by the horizontal distribution of power, that is, with democratization (contemporary PRC being an example).

The socio-anthropology of energy is not only about historical human relationships to energy, but also refers to the problems of its contemporary distribution. Providing the epistemological basis of a philosophy of energy, Vaclav Smil developed a quantitative analysis of the problem of social–political inequalities in energetic terms, by posing as a principle that ‘annual per capita energy consumption of between 50–70 GJ thus appears to be the minimum for any society where a general satisfaction of essential physical needs is combined with fairly widespread opportunities for intellectual advancement and with the respect for basic individual rights’. In our quest for always ‘needing’ more energy as a means of generating more capital (and, in turn, emitting more greenhouse gases), we have convinced ourselves that the more we generate energy, the better off we will be. One of the most interesting findings of Vaclav Smil is that the desire to have more than this minimal amount of annual per capita energy consumption is counterproductive: ‘The quest for ever-higher energy use has no justification either in objective evaluations, or in subjective self-assessments’³³—it improves neither economic well-being nor self-perceived quality of life. Statistically, this proposition can be evidenced by the fact that the differential between Italy’s 2400 kgoe/year and the USA’s 8000 kgoe/year has no incidence on their respective results in terms of preventing infant mortality.

Moreover, it leads to an unsustainable mode of development and creates a form of energetic injustice: ‘[i]n 1999, annual average per capita energy use in Germany (175 GJ) was only half, and in Thailand (40 GJ) a mere one-eighth of the U.S. rate (340 GJ).’ Indeed, economic unfairness (26 per cent of the richest people owning as much as the poorest 50 per cent) doubles down on ecological unfairness (10 per cent of the richest part of the population contributing to 50 per cent of world emissions³⁴) and triples down on energy unfairness: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries amount to 20 per cent of the world’s population and 40 per cent of the consumption of the primary energy traded worldwide. Forty per cent of the population from the rest of non-OECD and non-BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries amount to 23 per cent of it³⁵ (in 2015, the BRICS countries accounted for 37 per cent of the world energy demand and for 41.4 per cent of the CO₂ emissions due to energy usage³⁶; in 2017, the BRICS constituted 36.9 per cent of the globe’s primary energy sources consumption, 21.2 per cent of world’s oil production, 21.7 per cent of world’s natural gas production, 63.7 per cent of world’s coal production and 38.3 per cent of the world’s electricity generation³⁷).

Such an uneven impact of climate change can be also observed at the regional level. ‘In addition to the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many wealthy countries have likely become even more wealthy by the resulting global warming. Likewise, not only have poor countries been excluded in the full benefits of energy consumption, but many have already economically suffered (in relative terms) by the energy consumption of wealthy countries.’³⁸

This raises the question of ‘energy justice’. ‘Energy justice’ refers to the prevention of the asymmetry in terms of national and individual access to energy. It is defined in comparison to the concept of ‘environmental justice’ which relates to the necessity to have a fairer distribution of both ecological goods (eg natural resources) and ‘bads’ (eg pollution).³⁹ One could argue that countries lacking access to sufficient energy are seeking such access. Yet, if ‘sufficient energy’ is defined with reference to the most dispendious nations in terms of energy production and consumption, the term ‘sufficient’ will be grossly inappropriate. The claim of ‘energy justice’ for developing nations could be used to justify the overconsumption of energy in developed ones. In this sense, true energy justice will never be achieved by increasing the means of the poorest nations access to energy—developed nations must also limit their own overconsumption of energy. If there indeed exists a strong correlation between GDP and energy consumption, this correlation is much weaker for energy consumption and ‘human happiness’,⁴⁰ or energy and the Human Development Index.⁴¹ Again, the differential between Italy’s 2400 kgoe/year and the USA’s 8000 kgoe/year shows that there indeed is ample room for adaptation.

A drastic (ideal?) solution could be to create a worldwide energy tax that would be financially and legally strict enough to discourage individuals to consume more than the world average 110 GJ annual per capita energy consumption. To augment such a proposal, reference could be made to Piketty’s global tax to reduce inequalities: ‘The ideal tool would be a progressive global tax on capital, coupled with a very high level of international financial transparency. Such a tax would provide a way to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral and to control the worrisome dynamics of global capital concentration.’⁴² Here, the additional idea will be to base this progressive global tax not on capital (stock and revenue), but on energy (consumption and correlated CO₂ emissions): while taxing capital often creates an impulse to generate even more profits to increase dividends, taxing energy could have a real disincentive effect for individual and corporate energy use, both in qualitative (‘grey’ or ‘green’) and quantitative terms.

The fact that the basis of the tax will be, at most, ‘the world’s average annual per capita energy consumption’ nullifies the claim that taxation is always a heavier burden for the poor: indeed, the annual energy consumption of individuals with the lowest incomes stand well below this level. To prevent the counterargument that the richest (individuals, nations or companies) can always resort to paying more to continue overconsuming energy one could add that this ‘energy tax’ will be based on the principle of negative taxation. Negative taxation means that, to those consuming less energy than the global average, monetary compensation can be given (at the national level, this compensation will be used to invest in greener forms of energy) while, conversely, taxation will gradually increase with rising levels of energy consumption above average. In this regard, an ‘energy tax’ should not be confused with a ‘carbon tax’: the principle of negative taxation does not allow the opportunity to ‘pay more’ to ‘consume more energy’.

6. ENERGY HUMANITIES: VALUES AND AUTONOMY IN CONTEMPORARY ‘PETROCULTURES’

Such global ‘solutions’ raise the difficult problem of political values in their potential indexation on fossil fuel-based social organizations. As Hannes Bergthaller pointed it, it is precisely in respect to the cultural and political challenges raised by the energy transition that scholars in humanities can participate and contribute to the debate: ‘If the challenge for engineers is to develop technologies of energy provision which allow for a decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions, environmental humanists face a parallel task: to disarticulate our notions of liberty from a life-style centered on the liberal dissipation of energy.’⁴³ One could assume that, even with an energy transition, people still expect a similar lifestyle than today. However, ‘energy transition’, in the philosophical sense of the term, is not only about changing the source of energy, but changing our expectations about it as well. As already mentioned, the fact that 85 per cent of our world’s total primary energy consumption comes from non-renewable sources reveals that renewable energy will not allow, at least in the short term and perhaps ever, the same amount of energy. This will, thus, induce a change in our lifestyles.⁴⁴

Among pioneering scholars in this specific field of critical inquiry, one should look no further than Barrett and Worden’s 2014 Oil Culture,⁴⁵ LeMenager’s 2014 Living Oil ,⁴⁶ Farca’s 2015 Energy in Literature⁴⁷ and Szeman’s various papers on ‘petrocultures’ and ‘oil fictions’.⁴⁸ Energy humanities aim at bringing critical awareness to the many ways through which the complex nexus of energetic dependencies came to fruition after the Industrial Revolution induced new forms of social expectations and cultural beliefs: ‘… especially since human communities began to use petrocarbons to an ever-increasing degree; first, through the addition of coal in the expansion of industrial capitalism in Northern Europe, and then, via the global expansion of economies and populations through the extensive (if globally uneven) use of oil and gas …, [o]il and energy have shaped attitudes, values and beliefs.’⁴⁹

Among the many interesting ideas developed by scholars in the energy humanity field, nothing is perhaps more provoking than the connection established between fossil fuel-powered growth and liberal Western values. To quote Bergthaller’s 2017 paper, again, ‘the individualized forms of freedom cherished by those who live in the “global North” are in fact conditioned by an array of barely understood dependencies and coercions’. A conceptual analysis is needed to address the problem at stake. First, there is an absence of a causal link between political regimes and the energy mix: be it China or Taiwan, Iran or the USA, coal and oil are the main components of their domestic energy mix despite their divergent political regimes. Secondly, the point is less about the mythology of political ‘freedom’, and is more about the illusion of an individual ‘autonomy’.

What John Urry termed ‘car culture’ is an important component of this illusion of autonomy rooted at the core of the modernist project that is today completely globalized.⁵⁰ To illustrate, China has been, for years, the most dominant market for car sales with an average of 1,235,179 units sold per month from January 2000 to August 2019. Sheller and Urry argue that ‘mobility is as constitutive of modernity as is urbanity, that civil societies of the West are societies of “automobility”’.⁵¹ Their claim is only partially true since, as Junxiu Wang pointed out, ‘China has joined the rank of automobile-dependent societies at a stunning speed.’⁵² Despite colonialist claims victimizing the ‘Global South’ or post-colonialist claims vindicating the ‘Global North’, capitalist petro-modernity is, at large, a ‘transcultural’ phenomenon.

In this respect, ‘energy humanities’ should adopt a post-postcolonial perspective on the current trends of the geopolitics of energy: the European Union’s energetic reliance on Russian energetic resources becomes problematic when Moscow is constructing new pipelines to bypass the Ukrainian nation that is supposed to receive the full political backing of the European Union.⁵³ China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) which, according to the former International Monetary Fund (IMF) Director Michel Camdessus, manifests Beijing’s drive ‘to “guide international society” towards a “more just and rational new world order”’,⁵⁴ demonstrating how deeply interconnected geopolitical and geo-economics issues really are.⁵⁵ Indeed, on the one hand, ‘BRI is entwined with geo-economics and geopolitical goals developed to supplant Western globalization, limit U.S. global dominance, and to strengthen China’s global influence.’⁵⁶ On the other hand, the BRI entails massive coal plant exports⁵⁷: ‘coal-fired plants constitute half of announced CPEC [China Pakistan Economic Corridor] energy generation projects and 69% of capacity’.⁵⁸ Coal and gas geopolitics are reshaping the Eurasian continent in ways that are not totally reducible to Wallenstein’s ‘world system theory’ in which North/West countries impose their domination over South/East nations.⁵⁹

Since the ‘Great Divergence’ between European and Asian nations between 1750 and 1950 (due to the ‘fortunate location of coal’ in European soils and the importation of primary products from America)⁶⁰ is gradually becoming something of the past, energy humanities should adapt its critical syntax to this new state of affairs. In this regard, it is highly significant that the Anthropocene Working Group is now considering ‘the mid-20th century [as] the optimal beginning of a potential Anthropocene Epoch’:⁶¹ it is precisely after 1945 that contributions to CO₂ emissions stopped to come solely from Western nations and started to become a global phenomenon.

Energy humanities should remain critically aware of any kind of ‘Green Orientalism’ (deconstructing catchphrases such as ‘Chinese Ecological Civilization’⁶²); it should refrain from framing the problem of energy in a culturalist way and disengage its critic of ‘petro-modernity’ from the ‘Western culture’ from which it originally emerges but eventually extends well beyond. Today, countries in all corners of the globe all contribute to the rising levels of energy consumption. Thus, the necessary decorrelation between ‘Petrocene’ and ‘humanity’ does not translate into a necessity to depart from everything constituting modernity at the political (democracy), social (individualism) or economic (capitalism) levels. It does not translate into embracing its very opposite (‘Asian’ authoritarian ‘socialism’) as its only viable alternative, either. It asks, however, for a complete redefinition of what democracy, individualism and capitalism are supposed to deliver: peace and prosperity, or political chaos generated by ecological catastrophes?

7. METAPHYSICS OF ENERGY

Traditionally speaking, the history of philosophy is narrated as a history of the opposition between materialism and idealism, between Democritus and Plato, Descartes and Spinoza, Fichte and Marx, as well as many others. Introducing the issue of energy, in this debate, could be instrumental in nuancing this narrative, refreshing our perspective on the history of philosophy, in turn assisting us in developing a new kind of ontology.

Assuming one goes beyond Aristotle’s biased rendering of their philosophical achievements, an energetic reinterpretation of pre-Socratic philosophers would be instrumental in achieving these goals. According to Aristotle (Metaphysics 983b), pre-Socratic philosophers were materialist philosophers debating the identity of the material things at the origin of all natural processes. ‘Of the first philosophers, … most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things. … Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says the principle is water … Anaximenes … make air prior to water, and the most primary of the simple bodies, while … Heraclitus of Ephesus say this of fire, and Empedocles says it of the four elements.’⁶³

Such a description did not capture the real intention behind the notions of water for Thales or fire for Heraclitus—more than being the material stuff from which things are made and to which they return, pre-Socratics’ elements are analogies of modes of energetic interactions governing natural phenomena. Heraclitus’ Fire should be understood not as the material substance composing the stuff of reality, but as an energetic force connecting things by virtue of its specific transformative power. ‘Fire as a principle’ means that all changes in nature occur by virtue of an inexhaustible circulating fire at the contact of which everything comes to be irreversibly transformed⁶⁴.

Both materialism and idealism overlook the nature of energy: materialism defines Energy inside the realm of ‘Beings’, while idealism arises from attempts to overcome this limitation: a philosophy of energy aims at positing Energy as Being as such. A metaphysics of energy contends that, ontologically speaking, there are neither ‘things’ nor ‘Ideas’ but only energies: primary ‘binding energies’ connecting or disconnecting secondary actual (‘atoms’) or virtual (‘concepts’) entities in fire-like (combustion), water-like (dissolution) or air-like (dilatation) processes.

From the perspective of the metaphysics of energy, the notion that there could be a shortage of energy is meaningless; energy is overflowing, so much so that human existence is threatened as a result. As human beings, our mundane relation to energy consists of deploying technological devices to capture, stock and canalize it—even though, in doing so, as Heidegger suggested,⁶⁵ we betray its inner-transformative essence to retain only its disposable kinetic power.

8. CONCLUSION: PHILOSOPHY OF ENERGY IN THE AGE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Among contemporary philosophers, Georges Bataille is the only one who wrote entire essays specifically dedicated to the concept of energy.⁶⁶ In the very beginning of a first, short essay (not translated into English), Georges Bataille defines the ground for an anthropo-philosophy of energy: ‘Essentially wealth is energy: energy is the basis and the end of production.’ Translating a thermodynamic principle into metaphysical claims, Bataille argued that ‘any system with a certain amount of energy must spend it’; man’s activity on Earth being nothing more than an expression of ‘a need for the globe to lose what it cannot contain’.⁶⁷

In his second longer essay, The Accursed Share, Bataille provided a historical account of historical civilizations and their relationships to energy,⁶⁸ expressing the paradoxical idea that the goal of the political economy is not the accumulation of wealth, as classic and Marxist economists believe, but its dissipation: ‘The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving. Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality.’⁶⁹ What Bataille attempts is to redefine energy in a non-anthropocentric way. To re-articulate cosmic energy and human energy, Bataille defines ‘energy’ as expressing an intrinsic drive to freely dispense all accumulated potential.⁷⁰ In this regard, it could be argued that the historical correlation between the Anthropocene and the ‘Petrocene’ comes from an anthropocentric perception and capitalistic enframing of energy as something that shall be spent for immediate human goals and for viable economic reasons. In Bataille’s sense, the problem of the overconsumption of energy, today, does not come from this excess itself, but comes from the paucity of the goals that such an orgy of energy helped us to achieve. On the one hand, progress in terms of life expectancy and literacy, but, on the other hand, the production of massive amounts of quickly discarded objects generated at the cost of irreversible ecological damages. Thus, one shall not mistake Bataille’s idea of energy as ‘spending without return’ to be an ode to hyper-consumerism. Quite the contrary, it stands in opposition to contemporary hyper-consumerist societies and developmentalist economies: since the dissipation of energy into ‘things’ that can be accumulated is the lowest kind of waste, a Bataillian philosophy of energy as intrinsically dissipative entails an ‘energy ethics’ of radical disentanglement from possessiveness.⁷¹

What Bataille pointed out could be conceptualized as ‘a third contradiction of capitalism’. According to Marx, there is an inner contradiction in capitalism: the long-term diminution of return to profit and the raising awareness of the working class will eventually trigger a crisis⁷² whose result will be ‘communism’, that is, the social–economic mode of organization in which accumulated wealth becomes a common good. However, after the publication of Limits to Growth,⁷³ a second contradiction to capitalism became manifest (some scholars have argued that Marx already took notice of it⁷⁴). This contradiction states that, even before having fully exploited the whole of mankind and having reached this ‘ideal’ state of a universally leveraged working class, capitalism’s ability to use people to extract resources will find its limits in the availability of resources themselves.⁷⁵ This second contradiction is important for energy transition: as recently highlighted by British scientists, to replace all fuel-powered vehicles by electric ones, primary resources may never be enough.⁷⁶

Even here, this second contradiction of capitalism should be completed by a third one, relative to our Anthropocenic age, that is, to the climatic and ecological consequences of this continuous over-exploitation of man by man and of nature by society. To relate again to the case of the minerals needed for the shift to ‘green energy’, as stated by Jason Hickel in a recent paper in Foreign Policy, the problem is not about the lacking of resources, but about the consequences of overexploiting them: ‘The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals—although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of over-extraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world.’⁷⁷ Even before capitalism ceases to exploit all men equally and similarly (while providing benefits to some along the way, though in a rather unequal fashion), even before we use the final remnants of oil, coal and gas (while providing higher standard of life, though at the same time inducing a dependency to petro-modernity), most of planet Earth could become inhabitable as a result of our ecosystems’ inability to absorb such large amounts of carbon, nitrogen and various wastes. Ironically, our civilization might be the first one that could disappear not because of a lack of energetic resources but because of an excess in energy use.⁷⁸

This is generally not understood. Yuval Noah Harari, in his first bestseller book Sapiens, rightly acknowledged that ‘Capitalisms belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe.’ But he seemed to induce that ‘innovation’ will come at a rescue: ‘Everything depends on the people in the labs … If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times.’⁷⁹ In his second bestseller book, Homo Deus, Harari rightly stressed the irrationality of this rationalist credo: ‘How rational is it to risk the future of humankind on the assumption that future scientists will make some unknown discoveries?’⁸⁰ But our growth conundrum is still framed in terms of limitation of resources: ‘In order to ensure perpetual growth, we must somehow discover an inexhaustible store of resources.’⁸¹ However, the problem, I argue, is not simply that ‘we have only one Earth’, it is to believe that it is not enough, that there should be more. Thus, our energy ethics is clear: as long as our fear of lack is stronger than our sense of loss, there will be no way to address this issue.

This article is part of the Special Issue on ‘Strategies to Balance Energy Security, Business, Trade and Sustainable Development: Selected Case Studies’, edited by Professor Paolo Davide Farah and published by the Journal of World Energy Law and Business (JWELB), Oxford University Press (OUP).

Footnotes