OPINION. A simple power outage was enough to reveal the extreme fragility of our modern societies. Far beyond electricity, it's the entire foundation of natural resources that is wavering. In a world where powers now clash for control of raw materials, Europe seems to hesitate between paralysis and resurgence. By Géraldine Poivert, founder of (RE)SET (*).
By Géraldine Poivert (President of (RE)SET)
Published on May 21, 2025 at 08:23
It only took a power outage to plunge the Iberian Peninsula into a disaster movie atmosphere, paralyzing the economy, causing a series of accidents, cutting off the internet, mobile phones, and more. A simple reminder of our now absolute dependence on the god electricity. But far beyond energy, it is all natural resources that are at risk today. If you truly believe, while skimming through the news or following certain budgetary decisions, that the challenge of planetary boundaries is no longer in vogue, it's because you haven't understood anything… and "they" are deceiving you. Because we now find ourselves at the heart of the wars related to the environmental transition. Simply, they have taken on a different face than that of preservation.
Drill baby drill
That this transition would not be a smooth and steady river was suspected fifty years ago, and has been observed for the past twenty. Yet today, the long river has become a furious torrent, punctuated by waterfalls, tunnels, and diversions. Donald Trump was elected in part on his slogan "drill baby drill," within a context of climate denialism. He might seem to have forgotten the resource challenge... The opposite is almost true: the United States is now fully aware of the real current challenges. When the American President openly covets Greenland, Canada, the subsoil of Ukraine, that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and even the ocean depths, all without any regard for the rules of international law, it is for many reasons, but one outweighs all others: resource scarcity.
Washington is doing it in its own way: brutal, unapologetic, unrestrained. It is the way of "predators" whose time has come, as Giuliano da Empoli so aptly writes. The Italian-Swiss author is not the only one to have correctly identified the mechanisms at work. Dominique de Villepin, in his "Point of Doctrine" published in "Le Grand Continent," describes the foundations of the ongoing "total war."
This, he writes, is rooted "in a unique phenomenon, the exhaustion of the development model (...) based on the intensive exploitation of natural resources, the continuous intensification of global trade (...) and the illusion of competing with the gods." Because, he continues, "Prometheus is exhausted": "Our development model is revealed for what it is: unsustainable, insatiable, unfit. (...) What we are touching upon is the scarcity of the world, the narrowness of our planet." - European.
The "Trumpian model"
Several logics are now clashing in what will be a ruthless resource war. First, the "Trumpian model," based on frontal denial, the deliberate negation of any limits. This model blends extractivism, hybrid capitalism, and neo-economic imperialism, with a purely utilitarian relationship to the world. The horizon, explains the former Prime Minister (who is hardly a "green extremist"), is "a global economy siphoned off for the benefit of a single people, a single state, a single man." The planet burns and we watch Trump...
The second imperial logic at play does not deny the limits, but internalizes them. It is the logic of self-sufficiency, championed by Xi Jinping in the legacy of Maoism. The empire does not expand outward; it turns inward, building a Great Industrial, Technological, and Moral Wall. Elsewhere, particularly on the African continent, attempts are made to use the unquenchable thirst of imperial powers for metals, timber, and other resources to preserve the wealth of a few autocrats and their families... As in Solann's song, "I no longer recognize anything where Gargantua is king, and nothing is right since the ogres ate the World."
In this context of total war, then, Europe evokes the trembling rabbit, frozen, blinded by the headlights of the car about to crush it. To use the unequivocal, if sometimes misunderstood, terms of President Macron, Europe cannot accept becoming "a theater inhabited by herbivores, which carnivores, according to their agenda, will come to devour." In the age of predators, the rabbit posture is not the best! It remains that Europe must affirm and defend its own, narrow, path, between imperialisms of the American or Chinese type, based on respect for international legal order, aware of the limits of Prometheus, of the structural exhaustion of resources. A form of ecological humanism.
But "humanism" does not mean naivety. The resource war is in full swing and is here to last. Faced with the fury from across the Atlantic and the Asian trenches, the posture of the elephant is preferable to that of the rabbit. Wise, powerful, prosperous, and benevolent, they say, the elephant cares nothing for aggressive postures and holes in the ground! Impressive in its serenity, gifted with a prodigious memory, it follows its path with determination and resilience. If attacked, its tusks can reach three meters. Enough to make one forget its apparent heaviness and a certain inertia. Let us regain our composure and build an industrial circular economy. Quickly.
Géraldine Poivert , founder and CEO of (RE)SET, France 2030 ambassador, member of the board of directors of the INEC
