Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ETRANHET (Energy Transitions in the History of Economic Thought (19th-20th c.))
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28
The ETRANHET project is based on several observations: the urgency of climate change is confronted with persistent difficulties in coordinating international public action; the production of energy is responsible for three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions; and the economic discipline, and economists, seem to play a critical role in public policy (including energy policy). To understand the current energy situation, and find ways out of the climate crisis, ETRANHET’s purpose is to dig into the history of energy economics and analyse the role of economists, and of the economic discipline, in shaping the past and present representations of energy, all around the world. ETRANHET has three main objectives: (1) to characterise the heterogeneity and context-dependency of past economic approaches to energy issues and transitions; (2) to uncover forgotten, yet relevant, ideas that could enrich current research into the energy transition; and (3) to determine how the economic discipline has been able to influence decision-making in energy affairs (and vice versa). The project covers a period starting in the early 19th century and ending in the 1980s, and it explores case studies from five market-economy contexts: Continental Western Europe, the British Isles, North America, Latin America, South-East Asia + areas formerly under colonial control. ETRANHET is a multidisciplinary project mobilising historiographical and science studies methods to study past economists and economic thinking. The preferred approach is an internal analysis of economic concepts, theories, models and tools, to contribute both to the history of economic thought and to contemporary economic analysis. In addition, expertise in economic and energy history, cultural studies, comparative methods and STS is also called upon. By taking a fresh look at today’s challenges in relation to the low-carbon transition, ETRANHET contributes to show that the history of economic thought, and more broadly the history of ideas, have a role to play in contemporary economic research and sustainability debates, both inside and outside academia.
Over the first 30 months of the project, the research has mainly consisted in identifying and exploring, monographically, relevant case studies in the history of economics, when controversies emerged on the role of energy in economic development, or when economists participated to the design of energy policies, in different places around the world. To date, research has been carried out on almost 10 countries, including The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, France, Great Britain, the United States of America, India, and Japan. Significant achievements have already been reached regarding for instance how economists and engineers differently considered energy efficiency as a lever of resource saving and climate mitigation, especially in Europe and North America. More specifically, results have been obtained on the reasons why state intervention remained quite low in the efficiency sector in the 1990s and 2000s, under the influence of economists. Another inquiry, into the reaction of Dutch economists to the discovery of gas reserves in the late 1950s, produced important insights with respect to today's attitudes in countries which have recently discovered energy reserves (e.g. Mozambique, Senegal). It appears that over-optimism is quite common when it comes to energy resource discoveries, whether fossil fuels (e.g. oil, gas) or new renewables (e.g. green hydrogen). The lessons of history are that optimism is often short-living and that energy diversification should remain a priority, even when new bonanzas seem to come true. Finally, in its early months, ETRANHET also enabled the start of a digitalisation process of relevant primary archival materials in the history of energy economics. Documents in Dutch, Portuguese, English, French, and Japanese have been collected during visits in The Hague (The Netherlands), Aberystwyth (Wales), Cambridge (England), Paris (France), Rio-de-Janeiro (Brazil), and Tokyo (Japan). These materials constitute new sources for future research in economics, history, and environmental humanities, to be consolidated in the next phases of the project.
ETRANHET's purpose is to give access to the first ever history of energy economics at a global scale. The selected case studies have not been examined in this way so far. On energy booms for instance, the literature has long explored what is called the ‘Dutch disease,’ i.e. the macroeconomic disturbances due to the boom, but the in-situ reaction of Dutch economists in the 1950s and 1960s had not been explored before ETRANHET. The same goes for the examination of coal issues in 19th-century Spain: so far, the literature has considered coal only in industrialised countries such as Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany. ETRANHET's on-going exploration of Southern Europe brings new insights on the circulation of energy development ideas in countries with few fossil fuel resources. Other examples could be taken, especially in Latin America and South-East Asia. ETRANHET's final objective, that is, to conduct comparative analysis between case studies, will also provide significant knowledge about how energy has been conceived in the past, and is still conceived today, in various parts of the world. At a time when international cooperation on climate change is of the utmost importance, this will be particularly valuable.