Three years after its first publication, Christian de Perthuis’s Carbone fossile, carbone vivant [Fossil Carbon, Living Carbon] is to be published in a revised ‘paperback’ edition. In that book the economist drew attention to the paradigm shift produced by climate change: “In the traditional growth-based economic approach, nature is conceived as a standing reserve from which raw materials are drawn. The climate crisis forces a paradigm shift on us: that crisis isn’t produced by the scarcity of raw materials but by their excessive abundance. Too much coal, too much oil and too much fossil gas are leading to a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
As he reasserts here on the occasion of this new edition, the end-goal of the economy is no longer abundance of goods and services, but resilience. The challenge of the coming decades will not be to manage scarcity but to manage the abundance of resources. In this context, an effective ecological transition will have to be structured around two axes: ending reliance on fossil carbon and preserving living carbon, the plant-generated kind. On this last topic, no doubt less familiar to readers, the main levers of action are the transformation of agricultural and forest-management practices (via the development of agro-ecology) and the preservation of terrestrial and oceanic carbon sinks. His analysis of the interdependence of fossil and living carbon makes it possible to tackle the climate issue by linking it to biodiversity. It also incorporates the notion of fairness, without which there can be no successful ecological transition.
The article is downloadable only in French. It is not available in English.
