"Degrowth can wait" Philippe Charlez (Interview)

On the occasion of the release of his new book, The Utopia of Green Growth: The Laws of Social Thermodynamics, mining engineer and Doctor of Physics Philippe Charlez answered questions from European Scientist. A fascinating interview in which you will discover how the author uses the laws of thermodynamics to answer the question of sustainable growth.

The European Scientist: COP 26 has just taken place. What conclusions do you draw from this? Is this kind of event what you consider a green growth utopia?

Philippe Charlez: The concept of COP is fundamentally flawed for three main reasons.

First, the signing of the Paris Agreements gave naive hope that humanity was going to tackle the climate issue head-on by shaking up cultures, codes, financial interests and small electoral calculations. When you look at the heterogeneity of cultural situations resulting from history, geography but above all from differences in means and levels of development, you really had to be candid to believe it. Dreaming of global green growth is indeed utopian.

Secondly, the Paris Agreements are legally non-binding (1) and are characterized by an alarming absence of figures. They are somewhat reminiscent of a loan between a bank and an individual where the two parties would agree on the amount to be repaid (“limit the temperature to 1.5°C”) but, without specifying either the annuities or the schedule reimbursement (i.e. the means to achieve it).

Finally, the main margins for progress are in emerging countries which today consume 80% of coal and are responsible for 65% of emissions. But they are also the poorest countries and therefore the least able to generate financing. The $100 billion per year that the rich countries have pledged to mobilize only represents a drop in the bucket compared to the needs. According to British economist Nick Stern (2), compliance with the Paris Agreements towards a low-carbon society would require a transfer of…2,000 billion euros per year, or around 3.7% of the OECD's GDP (3). Mission impossible then!

If I don't believe in these great sterile masses, I don't believe in the effectiveness of a sum of national energy transitions either. The evolution of the mix based essentially on electricity and gas will require close cooperation between neighbors whose electricity and gas networks are closely linked. For this reason, I am in favor of much more restrictive regional COPs. On this point, Europe represents a favorable framework for cooperation.

TES: You make the second principle of thermodynamics the alpha and omega of physics and attempt to transpose these laws to society. Can you explain your thesis to us in a few words? Don't you think that your analysis, as fine as it is, comes up against the pitfall of a form of reductionism?

PC: Einstein wrote that thermodynamics was “the only science with universal content”. I myself was fascinated by the incredible scope of this discipline when I was a student more than forty years ago at the Polytechnic Faculty of Mons. At the beginning, scientists imagined thermodynamics to explain the functioning of thermal machines: when left to evolve naturally, a closed system tends towards a state called "thermodynamic equilibrium" egalitarian, disordered and irreversible associated with a total loss of movement. and information. The thermodynamic equilibrium can be qualified as “clinical death” of the system.

To fight against this deadly situation, which is by far the most probable, nature has imagined the concept of "dissipative structure" theorized by Belgian Illya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Permanently maintained out of balance, open to its external environment, ordered but unequal, a dissipative structure draws material and energy resources from the external environment (ie its environment), conserves high-value energy (we speak of "free" energy) for its own functioning and rejects in this same environment highly entropic waste of very low value.

Prigogine demonstrated that all inert natural systems (galaxies, stars, planets) but also living ones survive in this way in a universe which nevertheless seeks at all times to impose thermodynamic equilibrium on them. The human body is no exception: you eat and breathe (incoming energy flow), you move, you think and you maintain your temperature at 37°C (free energy) and you release CO ₂ into the environment. and excrement (outgoing waste stream). As for the thermodynamic equilibrium of the human body, it quite simply corresponds to clinical death: your temperature returns to that of the room (egalitarianism), your body is dispersed in the humus of the soil (disorder) and you lose all the wealth of your movements and information from your brain.

In my latest book “The Utopia of Green Growth. The Laws of Social Thermodynamics”, I clearly demonstrate that the growth society is a gigantic dissipative structure. It consumes material resources (ore, humus) and energy (83% of which are fossil fuels) as input, produces free energy in the form of goods (material wealth) and services (informative wealth) and discharges into the waste environment including CO ₂ responsible for global warming. Like any dissipative structure, this production of wealth requires an open system (free trade), social inequalities and order (ie authority).

Those who refute these conclusions (and in particular the fact that only an unequal system can produce wealth) and would call me a reductionist very often hide behind their Judeo-Christian morality considering that human societies are much too complex to be managed by a principle that would apply to inert matter. "And yet it turns" as Galileo said. The many examples that I describe in my book very clearly demonstrate the power and validity of this model. Often when I am pushed to my limits, my joker is the following: “imagine an ocean where all the fish are equal in size! ".

TES: You defend the thesis that the growth society is unequal and that the communist system, on the contrary, which wants to be more egalitarian, precipitates towards a form of annihilation.

PC: I'm not defending, I simply note that the production of wealth is inseparable from inequalities and that imposing egalitarianism can only lead to absolute poverty. Without inequalities, you stop all flows, whether material, financial or informative. So imagine a teacher at the same level as his students: there can no longer be any flow of information and, eventually, everyone will converge inexorably towards mediocrity. I therefore confirm that the reduction of poverty requires the creation of wealth and is therefore inseparable from order and inequality.

Those who consider that poverty is fought by imposing egalitarianism are mistaken: this model can only lead to absolute poverty for all. The real value chain is that of the dissipative structure: inequalities = creation of wealth = reduction of poverty = reduction of inequalities (without eliminating them). The globalization of the economy is a clear example of this. A gigantic dissipative structure generalizing capitalism to the entire planet, it has been an unprecedented source of wealth production (world GDP multiplied by three in 20 years), has lifted nearly a billion human beings out of poverty and has reduced by a factor of three inequalities between OECD countries and emerging countries.

Surprisingly, we find in the thermodynamic equilibrium the classic values ​​of the left (egalitarianism and therefore refusal of selection and competition, ideological closure and refusal of authority -disorder-) while the dissipative structure rather covers the values ​​of the right such as selection and competition (inegalitarian system), free trade (open system) and authority (ordered system). The thermodynamic equilibrium being unique leads to more sectarianism whereas the dissipative structure covering an infinity of possible unequal states is more synonymous with pluralism.

The second principle of thermodynamics therefore appears as the drama of the human race, the leveling up unfortunately not appearing in the catalog of nature. As the incomparable Winston Churchill rightly wrote, “if the vice of capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, the virtue of socialism is the equal distribution of misery”. Don't mind, "protect your rich and you will enrich your poor"!

TES: You don't believe in economic decline. Why ? Jean-Marc Jancovici thinks that we have no other choice than forced downsizing. Conversely, many authors show that things are going radically better despite the ambient catastrophism and try to defend Promethean science and civilization. Which side are you on?

PC: Leaving the growth society and accepting economic decline amounts to accepting the thermodynamic equilibrium towards which nature inexorably wants to lead us: an egalitarian society of absolute poverty for all. The real degrowthists like Serge Latouche or Pierre Rhabi also claim the renunciation of development, a return to primitive vernacular societies contenting themselves with the essential minimum. The founding priest Ivan Illich even speaks of a society “without hospitals and without schools”. Jean-Marc Jancovici, whom I also appreciate for his perfect knowledge of energy issues, is somewhat on this line but has the courage of his opinions: degrowth would be a society of deprivation and not, as Delphine Batho claims, a society of more . I share with him the observation: like any dissipative structure living at the expense of its environment, the growth society will not be eternal. Our difference is at the level of the term. Jancovici thinks that degrowth cannot wait, a collapsological view that I do not share. On the contrary, I consider that our growth society is far from being optimized and still has a bright future ahead of it; I defend the thesis of sustainable development based on sustainable growth. The current values ​​of energy intensity and carbon intensity show that with the best technologies and the best behaviours, we could do as well with four times less. So I'm not ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I am one of those who believe that our children will live better than we who lived much better than our parents and our grandparents. I am and will remain an uncompromising defender of science, liberalism and Promethean society.

(1) The UN which carries the project has no power of sanction vis-à-vis the States

(2) https://newclimateeconomy.report/workingpapers/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2016/04/Infrastructure-investment-needs-of-a-low-carbon-scenario.pdf

(3) The GDP of OECD countries was equal to 53 T$ in 2019. Data source: World Bank.

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