Lucas Chancel (CRIS) will present his latest book Énergie et inégalités, Une histoire politique

Localisation : Room CS13, 1 place Saint-Thomas (or online)

For millennia, the use of energy has shaped human societies, structuring their hierarchies and power relations. Its control has been both a vector of emancipation and an instrument of domination. The ownership of energy resources and infrastructures has long been a site of social, political, and geostrategic struggle. Depending on who controls energy, radically different societal choices can emerge.

But how has the relationship between energy and inequality been constructed since prehistory? Drawing on research in economic history and climate science, Lucas Chancel traces how, over the long run, the technical and political frameworks governing energy use have been intertwined with the distribution of wealth among individuals, social groups, and nations.

The history of energy cannot be reduced to its technical dimension, nor to the sum of past political decisions. It points instead to a range of possible futures, in which decoupling energy consumption, material resources, and prosperity is inseparable from the question of social justice.

This book argues for an ecological transition grounded in the collective reappropriation of energy. Drawing on the diversity of twentieth century redistributive institutions, it outlines an alternative to ecological breakdown and extreme inequality, through the development of new forms of public and participatory ownership in the twenty-first century.

The talk will be followed by a discussion led by Morgane Gonone (CIRED, visiting PhD at CRIS) and Pierre Charbonnier (CEE)

Speaker

Lucas Chancel is an economist, Associate Professor at Sciences Po, member of the Centre for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS) and the Department of Economics. He is also Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), Senior Advisor at the European Tax Observatory. His work focuses on the study of economic inequality, its interactions with unsustainable development patterns, and on the implementation of social and ecological policies