If there is a caesura that the Russian aggression in Ukraine has brought in its wake, it is the one that has interrupted, for a long time and perhaps even indefinitely, the normal course of things in everyday life. . This normal course was, until this disastrous sequence triggered on February 24, that of “the era of abundance”, as the French president repeatedly recalled in one of his last speeches. What will succeed normality, let us be convinced, is an economy of scarcity, in which we are going, whether we want it or not, to commit ourselves without return.
Because we must not hide it: beyond the gas cuts – which Russia prefers to burn than to deliver – and the interruptions in electricity supply which could make us shiver next winter and paralyze our industries thereafter, it is a whole system of production and exchange that the murderous madness of a regime inspired in its actions by the darkest pages of European history is in the process of bringing down. We were used to having, without limits other than those of our purchasing power and our desires, goods and services ensuring our lifestyle. Here they are now – more surely, oh irony, than the impatient defenders of the climate would have ever hoped – rarefied by the state of scarcity in the process of being created.
This unprecedented return to the 1950s or thereabouts which is beginning (because not everything will come at once) reminds those who lived through them on either side of the Iron Curtain of images that had remained buried in their memory. Such as the sight of those pale imitations of American cars that the Soviets had put into circulation after the war under the Pobieda brand, or even those Rakieta watches, indestructible but clumsily designed, on which our cousins in the East fell back for lack of access ours. Let’s not exaggerate. The time did not know the immense progress which was going to follow with electronics and data processing, and the Russia of today, even sanctioned, is not any more that of the USSR. But the looming shortages will hit it hard and set it back decades. They will affect us a little less, sanctioned collaterally, that the diversity of productive activities specific to our economies protects from complete cessations of supply. Nevertheless: rare earths and metals are rare for everyone, and what configures most of our daily use objects as well as our production tools depends closely on it. From smartphones to electric cars, computing farms and industrial robots, lithium is ubiquitous. Even the essential nickel alloys are becoming rare. So weaning will be general.
War alone, however terrifying its human and material ravages, does not explain everything. In a way, it played the role of a triggering factor. What was accumulating before overflowing was the rise in global needs, the galloping demography of sub-Saharan Africa, the Chinese economic explosion, the thoughtless deforestation of the Amazon biosphere, the monocultures pushed to the absurd of the land Indonesian. The setbacks imposed by circumstances on these excesses, however beneficial they may be, do mean that we have entered an era of scarcity. Macron was therefore right.
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– From the era of abundance to the economy of scarcity
Marian Stepczynski
Posted today at 08:09