2024-05-09 17:00:00
Renaud Duterme is a Belgian writer and geographer. After his book The hidden debt of the economyin 2014 he just published Lack, when everything is missing, published by Éditions Payot & Rivages. Interview.
How did you come up with the idea to address the theme of scarcity in a world that wastes so much?
I have long been interested in the question of the links between our societies and their environment and in particular the ecological influences on the climate and on biodiversity. It started with the Club of Rome (1972) and its report on growth. We see the contradiction between the increasing number of warnings regarding the situation and the inability of the economic system to cope with it. All this because the very nature of our economic system is based on growth. Something that requires increasing material flows, energy flows, etc.
What is the goal of this new book?
The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the physical, economic and social constraints that weigh on our various supplies (energy, raw materials, agricultural products, industrial goods). What surprised me the most was the system’s vulnerability to these flaws. The most telling example is Covid-19. We believed that the concept of scarcity belonged to the past for our so-called developed economies. But the Covid-19 pandemic, the blockade of the Suez Canal for just a few days and the war in Ukraine have brought it back to the forefront of the news. Energy, raw materials, food, medicine, building materials, auto parts, microchips, labor, etc. no sector seems to be spared from this worrying trend.
“Excitement” before the decrease in the fuel discount: many gas stations sold out once more
Has the unbalanced function of globalization been revealed thanks to the crisis?
And with good reason. Almost all the goods we buy and use come to us through long and complex supply chains. They consist of several stages, ranging from the extraction of raw materials (ore, agricultural products, energy) and their transformation, to delivery to supermarket shelves, through production, storage and, of course, transport. Capitalist globalization obliges, these various stages have been increasingly distant from each other, increasing the risk of domino effect disruption. Conflicts, natural disasters, climatic hazards, strikes, attacks, epidemics, so many events can “seize” one link in the chain, or even several, and thus cause bottlenecks that call into question the functioning of the chain itself. All our vulnerabilities penetrate each other and affect each other.
Increasing global demand for oil
After Covid-19, economic life has returned to its natural function and the race towards growth has resumed. Is man not able to learn from disasters?
If the images of hypermarkets robbed of packages of toilet paper or pasta have been overpublished, during Covid-19, consumers returned to their usual behavior, but with a lot of fear. Preparing for a disaster also avoids the phenomenon of panic. And that is also the theme of this book. I return to the question of energy and the environment. The energy issue has always been central to how societies operate. Let’s take the current example. Backhoe loaders are busy digging the ground over thousands of kilometers in Uganda, just a stone’s throw from herds of giraffes and elephants. In the Murchison Falls Protected Park, in the west of the country, one of the highest biodiversity hotspots in the world. Despite all the criticism from environmental protection associations, 136 TotalEnergie’s wells will be able to produce black gold for the rest of the world from 2025. An investment of 9 billion euros was concluded between Uganda, Tanzania and the Chinese oil company CNOOC. Global demand for this polluting energy continues to be strong.
To read. Lack, when everything is lackingby Renaud Duterme, published by Éditions Payot & Rivages.
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