Ln November 14, 2022, the CNRS published its carbon footprint: a researcher emits, on average, 14 tonnes of CO2 per year. Comparing this figure to the 2 tonnes allowed by the Paris agreements, including personal activities, is dizzying. Because it is difficult to imagine how we could reduce emissions by more than 80% without fundamentally rethinking research activities.
Then, on December 12, the ethics committee of the same organization, Comets, abandoned what had been, since the beginning of modern science, the standard position of most researchers: advancing knowledge is necessarily good. , it is then up to society to decide on the good or bad “applications”. A lazy, even hypocritical position, because it leads to claiming the right applications (medicines, etc.), while rejecting the bad ones (pollution, bombs, etc.) on society. The Comets affirms, on the contrary, that, faced with the seriousness of the environmental situation, research must try to assess its impacts beforehand, by asking whether “using or developing such large equipment (particle accelerator, large computer) or working on such a theme (synthetic biology, genomics) is likely to have harmful impacts for the biosphere”.
I see here two signs of a major shift in the process of redefining knowledge and its place in society. To better grasp the extent of this, let’s paint a broad outline of the stages that have passed. Until the XVIIe century, we lived in a world dominated by the biological, at the level of the economy (agriculture, wooden construction, etc.) or of thought (Aristotle). Modern sciences emerged following a double revolution, technical and political: the surge of machines and the emergence of free individuals.
New technologies (printing, navigation, telescope, etc.) have broadened knowledge of the world and upset old certainties. A new “mechanical” science, intimately associated with technological networks, has allowed an unprecedented positive feedback between theoretical knowledge and industrial growth, following the example of modern genetics, born in the laboratories of the brewer Carlsberg, which sought to stabilize yeasts for mass-produce beer.
On the political side, urbanization contributed to the emergence of individuals confident in their ability to understand and master the world. These two revolutions shared values, such as the concern for critical debate, but have always been in tension, because the sciences claim to have knowledge superior to the “opinion” of non-experts, and generate technologies that disrupt societies. by the markets, without democratic debate.
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