Capitalism forgot that the planet was finite, but it is, and the 21st century is the century in which those natural limits, which energy had always imposed, once again prove insurmountable. This is the main thesis that runs through the book ‘The War for Energy’, from the Península publishing house, in which Alberto Garzón draws a map on what is already the main geopolitical battlefield.
The book that the former minister presented this Wednesday in Barcelona, accompanied by Ada Colau and Gerardo Pisarello, had as its initial title “Ecosocialism or barbarism”, as he himself revealed. But the work is not a mere political plea, although also, but above all a genesis of how energy has marked economic and political relations since the beginning of civilizations – a version of historical materialism –, and how it conditions them today.
“The time of fossil fuels is a historical anomaly,” said Garzón. “We have only been living on fossil fuels for 200 years, and that is a Pandora’s box, because, on the one hand, it has allowed us to greatly increase our development and our quality of life, but it has an impact that is impossible to pay for,” he indicated.
Therefore, the main challenge for humanity is to be able to overcome a double problem: on the one hand, abandoning fossil fuels to alleviate the climate crisis. On the other hand, do so without collapsing the living conditions of the majority of human beings.
“The challenge we have as a society is historic because when we stop consuming fossil fuels, we must decide how to maintain the living conditions that we have achieved, among other reasons, thanks to the gift of fossil fuels,” the author stated.
This solution, which Garzón identifies with ecosocialism, is a solution yet to be built and for which ‘The War for Energy’ gives clues. “The book aims to be a tool to understand the current moment,” said Garzón, who assured that when writing it he tried to approach the subject in an interdisciplinary way from corners as seemingly distant as physics, economics or anthropology.
One of the ideas that runs through the entire work is that everyone who is minimally attentive seems to have woken up after the dream imposed by capitalism of perpetual growth. “It was not true that everyone wins with trade, which was a postulate that was based on not taking into account that the world is finite,” Garzón explained.
Nature, like it or not, imposes physical limits. And this is something that not only environmentalists, or the left, have understood, but also probably the new version of capitalism that Donald Trump embodies. Except that the response that the American president finds to the challenge posed by finitude is neither resigned nor humanistic, but savage: making sure that the world ends sooner for everyone else than for me.
“This is the classic imperialist conception,” the author explained, “and for Trump it is evident that if he does not control the resources of Greenland or Venezuela, whoever has them will be a rival.”
This is the reason why, if there is something that differentiates the imperialism of the nineties from the current one, it is that it is now stark and savage. “Today the United States finds it unnecessary to justify any of its international actions regarding Human Rights,” explained Garzón. If there is no longer a possible common good, there is an every man for himself.
In this sense, the author has defended, the European Union must also understand that what is being disputed now is “a new distribution of the global division of labor.” And that perhaps the EU is no longer the center of the world and, therefore. Its role should be to “collaborate with historically peripheral areas”, such as Africa or Latin America.