Society, environnement and industry • Energy transition
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Energy and sustainable development are undeniably the themes of the 21st century. Energy is grabbing the headlines as citizens and politicians become increasingly aware that oil, the source of the second industrial revolution, is no longer eternal and that the time has come to consume better, or even less, or differently.
We need to make a clear distinction between these two distinct but complementary themes:
• energy refers to the consumption that we use in our daily lives to heat, light, move, process products, cool elements, etc;
• Sustainable development, on the other hand, goes much further, since it involves promoting concrete behaviour that is less wasteful of the planet’s resources, so that we waste less, consume less energy, eat better and… perhaps travel less?
The term ‘development’ is the subject of much controversy in degrowth circles, for whom sustainable development is an oxymoron, and who wish to reject all forms of consumption and return to the fundamentals of peasant life and feudal frugality. As this is a highly political issue that has nothing to do with the train, we won’t dwell on it any further.
While development implies ‘growth’ – if only in terms of demographics – this growth must be ‘measured’ – and therefore sustainable – and accompanied by new forms of social and political support, for example through densification or low-energy travel. This is an issue of direct relevance to rail, since one of the reasons it is losing its appeal is precisely the fact that housing, jobs, shops and sports/leisure facilities are all spread out too thinly. Today’s logistics have reached a critical threshold with the rise of e-commerce and the increasing number of small-scale services, the flows of which have completely bypassed rail.
Energy
The development of our contemporary societies is very closely linked to energy, without which there would not have been the development we are experiencing today, whether it is open to criticism or not. By learning to harness the power of fire, wind and water, and to use wood, then coal and finally oil, we have achieved the level of prosperity we have today, albeit very unevenly from one region of the planet to another (but that’s another debate).
Coal, which is highly polluting and the source of many illnesses among miners, ‘made’ the first industrial revolution, which led to the industrialisation of the West. Oil, from the 1920s onwards, spawned the second industrial revolution, along with all the derivatives of fossil fuels, such as plastics, and has greatly polluted the planet, by facilitating individual transport for billions of people, with access everywhere and at all times. The third industrial revolution is not, on the face of it, about energy. It’s about data, digital data, reputed to be non-polluting, and globalising the entire planet into a global village. But it would still be an energy revolution, thanks to the ability of data to calculate and review our consumption. That’s the subject of this page.
Energy can be used in two different ways:
• energy used as fuel for heating, driving, cooling, etc.
• energy used to transform materials in industry (steelmaking, construction, refining, asphalt, finished products, etc.).
In one way or another, each process has a carbon footprint. So to reduce it, we are now using a whole host of formulas to find alternative manufacturing processes and consumption patterns that rely less and less on fossil fuels. 🟧
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Society, environnement and industry • Lexical