“Petrosavoirs”, allies of climate skeptics against renewable energies

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A cultural war has begun. Continuous, open or hidden, explicit or diverted, it concerns the destiny of all humanity. It concerns knowledge about energy, and more particularly the untruths spread by international “petropowers”.

This is evidenced by the insolent success in bookstores of climate-sceptic works which explicitly fuel doubt .

The problem? These “petro-knowledges” are delaying collective and individual commitments to moving away from fossil fuels and understanding the fantastic potential of renewable energy flows .

Fossil fuels versus renewables: poison yourself, whatever the cost

IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency) made this clear in its Global Energy Transitions Outlook 2023  :

“Global investment in all energy transition technologies reached a record high of $1.3 trillion in 2022, but investment in fossil fuels was nearly twice that in renewables.”

To put it bluntly: renewable technologies are now widely available and mastered. Yet the world continues to hurtle toward disaster. Annual installed renewable capacity would need to triple to maintain the potential to stay on track to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2050, as mandated by the 2015 Paris Agreement.

This level could be reached in the next decade, with 2025 being a pivotal year . Even the need for “non-renewable baseload electricity” (nuclear or otherwise) has recently been modeled as unnecessary and too costly in stabilizing a renewable-based electricity system. Understand: renewables can be self-sufficient.

It is one thing that it is difficult to quit smoking. But it is another thing that you decide to continue to continually increase your daily cigarette consumption ( more than 15% increase in investments in fossil fuels in the last two years), while you have been diagnosed with lung cancer for several decades. Yet this is what humanity is doing with fossil fuels.

“Energy Humanities” to the rescue

Where does this global energy irrationalism come from, which, as we have seen above, borders on the suicidal? Both the problems and the solutions mobilize knowledge of collective and individual dimensions. Added to this are issues of disinformation and denial, lack of confidence in the ability to act and differences in the relationship to time. This is evidenced by the difficulty in projecting oneself and the domination in the media space of a “perpetual presentism”.

Thus, the proportion of French men and women who doubt the anthropogenic nature of global warming has doubled in 20 years and now stands at 30% . The most immediate economic or political interests are often invoked, jointly, to justify this.

There is, however, a broader and now well-documented human and social sciences perspective, notably through the Anglo-Saxon Environmental Humanities . The subfield of Energy Humanities is , in this respect, particularly interesting.

When “petrosavoirs” work to undermine good news

As anthropologist Dominic Boyer points out, the major players in fossil fuels are today mobilizing a very broad set of “petro-knowledge” in order to counter the reality of the energy transition and the possibility of controlling global warming. This is done either head-on or by trickery: the facts are distorted and an anti-democratic “post-truth” emerges .

These actors have mobilized significant resources to dilute or mask the “good news”, as illustrated in the recent French film Goliath (2022) through the lobbyist character played by Pierre Niney.

However, the potential of recent renewable energy techniques (solar and wind) is very real, as are those of smart grids or energy sobriety . Many researchers in the field testify to this, such as, in France, Daniel Lincot or Philippe Bruyere . They emphasize that, thanks to this progress, a complete transition towards a totally decarbonized and denuclearized energy mix on a global scale by 2050 is possible.

The facts prove them right. In the face of almost general indifference, wind and solar have, for the first time, overtaken fossil fuels in the EU in the first half of 2024. Beyond France, this observation is now firmly defended on the other side of the Atlantic , and not only by the pioneer in the field Amory Lovins .

But it is more tempting for the petrosavoirs to consider other totally far-fetched scenarios, such as covering the deserts with photovoltaic panels , or to suggest – wrongly – that dust or heat would prevent the production of photovoltaic electricity in Africa , especially at the very moment when Australia is launching the largest solar power station in the world , with a power equivalent to six nuclear reactors.

Moving beyond dystopian narratives

The fight is therefore underway to escape the domination of fossil fuels in culture and in the imagination, as evidenced for example by the work of the Petrocultures group . This is one of the most important “counter-hegemonic” wars in the history of humanity, the outcome of which could decide its survival.

Without knowing the possible positive energy solutions and their long-term implications, today’s populations find themselves easily exposed to the sirens of climate denialism .

Who still remembers the pioneering work on heat recovery by Augustin Mouchot (1825-1912) and the beginnings of thermodynamic solar energy in France, whose achievements were traced by Alexandre Mouthon in the 1970s  ?

The dystopian narratives that dominate current cultural productions thus echo the negationist sallies of Donald Trump , and what does it matter if 2024 is once again the hottest year ever recorded ?

It is also possible, as Dominic Boyer suggests, that these narratives correspond to a form of derealized “gerontocratic” power, comparable to the end of the Soviet system , if not to a real “fossil fascism” that is ever more threatening, where identity fears and the defense of the energies of the past are confusedly mixed.

In this context, publishers who thrive on the market of climate skepticism and petrosavoir are murderers and must be stigmatized as such. More than ever, it is urgent to deconstruct, everywhere and by all means, the cultural offensives of petrosavoir and to make people understand that renewable energies are a source of considerable hope for all women and men on the planet. It is possible to escape the inevitability of accelerating global warming and to allow human development and access to vital and energy services for all, particularly in Africa.

Author Bio: Frederic Caille is a Lecturer HDR in Political Science at ENS de Lyon

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