VIDEO. When the agronomist René Dumont warned about the energy crisis … in 1974

It was in 1974: the agronomist René Dumont was interviewed on television about the coming energy crisis and his predictions were far from reassuring. He called in particular for an awareness of the fact that we are on a limited planet, “that energy resources as currently exploited are limited“, he argued.”It took 600 million years to rebuild the existing oil reserves. We have already burned a good part of it in a century and if we continue, it will take less than a century to burn the rest. So, as this energy had been sold very cheaply, we built a type of civilization on a very practical and very cheap form of energy, as if it was inexhaustible.“, he said. It is in unequivocal words that René Dumont described the situation:”We see that we are at war for the survival of humanity, since resources are limited, more and more men. “

For the former environmental candidate, changing the way we consume was already a crucial issue: “It cannot go on like this because we are destroying the environment to such an extent that in ten or fifteen years we will have reached the point of no return. The solution is to stop population growth first, and in rich countries first, because that’s what wastes the most. And then stop certain forms of industrial production which are absurd“, he stressed.