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In this seminar, Jean-Marc Jancovici will take a closer look at how access to energy has been fundamental to the tremendous scientific and technical progress since the Industrial  Revolution. Human ingenuity has relied heavily upon seemingly limitless access to natural resources like oil, gas and coal.

What we today call "prosperity" is actually the possibility to extract, transform and associate, at a pace never reached before, non-renewable natural resources. The question is: if our planet has physical limits, how long can this extraction continue last, and what would the  early warning of a coming collapse look like?

About Jancovici
Jean-Marc Jancovici is the author of the "Bilan Carbon" assessment tool for the French Agency for Waste and Energy (ADEME) and the French Inter-ministerial Greenhouse Gas Mission. In 2007, he founded the Carbone 4 consultancy firm together with the French  economist Alain Grandjean. He also co-authored the “Pacte Ecologique" which was endorsed by several candidates during the 2007 French presidential election campaign.

He is a professor at Mines ParisTech, co-founder of "Entretiens de Combloux" and chairman and founder of The SHIFT Project (Redesigning the Economy to Archive Carbon Transition), a think tank studying possible de-correlations between economic growth and the flows of materials and energy.