The seminar “Economic expertise and environmental actions” will welcome

 

Antoine Missemer and Daniela Russ

 

Energy Transitions and Planning

 

Adopting a historical perspective spanning several parts of the world, this seminar will explore the inclusion of energy in economic thought and organization.  How have economists and engineers approached energy issues? How has this influence the spatial, industrial, and political organization of the economy?

The seminar will be held in English.

Antoine Missemer (CIRED) – Towards a decompartimentalized history of energy transitions in economics

Since the 19th century at least, energy issues have been at the heart of economic and industrial dynamics. They can also be considered universal, in the sense that the access to energy sources, their conversion into useful forms, and their distribution among people can be important social, economic and political concerns (almost) all around the world. The ETRANHET project (ERC StG 2022-2027) aims to explore the way the discipline of economics, and economists, have dealt with energy issues, and influenced policy making on the matter, since the early 19th century, in different parts of the world (5 areas: Western Europe, the British Isles, North America, Latin America, South-East Asia). This presentation will consist in introducing the architecture and main research questions of the ETRANHET project, plus a few preliminary results through one or two case studies in Northern Europe and Latin America.

Daniela Russ (Global and European Studies Institute, University of Leipzig) – Designing Energy Regions: The Planning of Economic Space in the Soviet Union

In their attempt to build the first socialist economy, Soviet engineers and economists continued an existing Russian tradition of spatial economic planning. At the same time, they parted from previous planning theorists in emphasizing the role of energy and put forward a system of economic regions shaped and structured by energetic principles

 

Antoine Missemer is a researcher in economics at CNRS, CIRED – Centre international de recherche sur l’environnement et le développement (UMR 8568). His work mainly deals with the history of environmental, energy and natural resource economics, in relation to 21st-century debates on the ecological transition. He published Les Économistes et la fin des énergies fossiles (1865-1931) (Classiques Garnier, 2017), Faire l’économie de l’environnement (with E. Chiapello and A. Pottier, eds., Presses des Mines, 2020) and more recently A History of Ecological Economic Thought (with M. P. Vianna Franco, Routledge, 2023). He is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project ETRANHET – Energy Transitions in the History of Economic Thought 19th-20th c.) (2022-2027), hosted by CNRS.

Daniela Russ is assistant professor and historical sociologist at the University of Leipzig’s Global and European Studies Institute. Before, she was a post-doc at the University of Toronto and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. She holds a M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University in Berlin and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bielefeld. In 2020, she was awarded the IEEE Fellowship in the History of Computing and Technology.

 

Contact : Nassima Abdelghafour, Béatrice Cointe, Kewan Mertens ou Alexandre Violle