The Inclined Plane

A Philosophical Metaphor for the Ecological Transition

Abstract: The ecological transition is often described as a process in which the state makes economically attractive what the market, left to itself, would not reward: it tilts the plane and allows private decisions to slide in the desired direction. This article takes that metaphor seriously and puts it to the test, until the point at which it breaks down. What emerges is that a level playing field has never existed, because the economic advantage enjoyed by fossil fuels is itself the legacy of forgotten public decisions; that removing an incentive does not return the system to its starting point, but restores an older underlying slope; and that no one can know in advance whether the initial push will produce a permanent transformation of the system or merely a movement destined to cease once the support is withdrawn. The resulting conclusion concerns collective memory more than economics: a public policy truly succeeds when it ceases to be recognisable as a policy choice.

Keywords: #EcologicalTransition #Incentives #Externalities #EnvironmentalLaw #ExciseDuties #SpontaneousOrder #EnergyPolicy #CollectiveMemory #EnvironmentalEconomics #PublicPolicy #PolluterPays #Sustainability #OrestePetrone #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasReview #ScientificJournal #Humanities #SocialSciences #EthicaSocietasUPLI

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Collective choices happen.

They happen when millions of private decisions, made every day by people who do not consult one another, ultimately move in the same direction. And that direction is not necessarily the one we have declared that we want to take. It is the one that is most advantageous, or the one we are compelled to take.

Everything else may be decided and written down without necessarily happening. We can establish that a country should consume less energy, produce less waste or progressively phase out fossil fuels. But none of these decisions yet contains the millions of individual decisions required to make it happen.

Much of the ecological transition takes place within this gap.

Seen from this perspective, the transition is a simple operation. It consists in making economically attractive something that, under normal market conditions, would not be. Grants, tax credits, incentive tariffs, funds covering the cost differential: different instruments that all do essentially the same thing, namely shift the point at which private calculations become economically viable.

The state does not force anyone: it does not need to. It merely has to tilt the plane and allow potential energy to become kinetic.

An appealing metaphor, the inclined plane—I say so myself. And yet, even as I say it, I cannot help thinking that a good metaphor can make convincing even what is not yet entirely convincing. It is the classic rhetorical flourish.

In this case, the argument has more than a few cracks.

The first is also the most political.

To say that the state tilts the plane presupposes that the plane was previously horizontal. It assumes, in other words, that there is some neutral configuration of economic incentives, a natural state of affairs against which public intervention represents an alteration, an interference. But when we speak of energy sources, the economic advantage enjoyed by fossil fuels is not a geological fact. It is the accumulated result of a century of public decisions: which infrastructure was built with public money and now exists, making it inexpensive to use and costly to leave unused; which tax regimes, introduced for temporary reasons and never reconsidered, have gradually become part of the background.

One example above all. In 1935, a surcharge on fuel was introduced by Royal Decree to finance the war in Ethiopia. The war ended, the empire ended, and the regime that had pursued it ended. Fortunately. The levy, formally abolished, was absorbed into the ordinary excise duty rate, because relinquishing it would have meant giving up a source of revenue that had by then become established. No one filling up their car today is paying for a colonial war.

The price of a litre of fuel does not measure an intrinsic property of the substance. It measures a long sequence of choices about what should be included in the price and what, instead, should be left out.

The horizontal plane, in short, has never existed. The plane is not so much tilted as counter-tilted.

Those who describe an incentive as an alteration of the natural course of things are presenting the second intervention as though it were the first, because the first has become invisible—old inclinations have the privilege of appearing flat.

Seen in this light, the polluter-pays principle also ceases to look like an artificial imposition. A frequent objection is that it imposes a new cost on someone who did not previously bear one. But the cost already existed, because the damage already existed: degraded soil, water that can no longer be used, remediation that someone will eventually have to pay for are all real costs, and they were real even before any regulation had given them a name. They simply fell on people who had neither made the decision nor received the profit—those downstream, those who came later. The principle, then, does nothing more than return a cost to the party that generates it.

The second crack concerns the question that, sooner or later, anyone defending incentives is asked: is that cost somehow absorbed over time? In other words, is it a sacrifice we accept in the name of a cleaner and more sustainable world, or an investment ultimately capable of generating a tangible return as well, for example through lower energy costs?

Here the metaphor proves to be more than a merely evocative device.

On an inclined plane, a body moves downwards because the geometry compels it to do so; but if the plane is returned to a horizontal position, the body neither moves backwards nor immediately stops. It simply ceases to accelerate and retains the motion it has acquired.

Translated into economic terms, removing an incentive does not dismantle existing facilities or erase the expertise that has been accumulated; what disappears, if anything, is the force that was driving new decisions. And any reversal that may nevertheless occur does not derive from the mechanics of the plane itself, but from the fact that beneath that artificial slope another, older one survives, inclined in the opposite direction. Removing the counter-inclination, therefore, does not produce equilibrium: it restores the system to its original slope.

If the transition worked in this way, incentives would amount to perpetual expenditure and their removal would mean returning to the starting point—which is precisely the argument made by those who regard the transition as a costly illusion. Yet in economics the opposite sometimes occurs: the movement of bodies reshapes the terrain. Greater volumes reduce unit costs, supply chains emerge and begin to compete with one another, expertise becomes embedded in people who remain, and infrastructure, once built, does not simply disappear.

In such cases, the incentive is an investment in a permanent alteration of the geometry and works towards making itself unnecessary: the moment of its success is the moment at which it can be removed without anything moving backwards.

There are, however, situations in which the gap does not depend on the activity being incentivised, but on a price determined elsewhere and over which that activity has no influence. A recycled material that has to compete with a cheaper virgin material does not necessarily become competitive simply by becoming more efficient: it remains dependent on a price differential it cannot control. In such cases, the plane has to be kept artificially inclined indefinitely, and to call that condition a transition is an abuse of language—it is a steady state sustained from the outside.

The uncomfortable point is that the two regimes can be distinguished only retrospectively. When a subsidy is introduced, we do not know whether the initial push will transform the system or merely sustain it. The only way to find out is through the experiment itself: the answer comes only after the subsidy has been provided, by which time the expenditure has already been incurred. Any confident answer to this uncertainty is ideological: those who claim that incentives always pay for themselves and those who claim that they never do are both substituting a preference for a prediction. From this perspective, the transition is a wager on the system’s capacity to undergo plastic deformation under the pressure of the incentive—to retain, once the pressure disappears, part of the form it has acquired—and, like every wager, its outcome can be known only at the end.

There is then a third crack.

It is natural to place obligations on the same conceptual plane as incentives, as though an obligation were simply a steeper slope. In reality, it is not. An obligation does not alter the gradient; it alters the set of available paths: it is not a plane, but a wall. And the behaviour it produces is different, because a body that cannot move downwards does not simply slide more slowly; it looks for another route. These are the alternative routes that administrative experience has always recorded—convenient classifications, tailor-made exemptions, relocation to jurisdictions where the requirement does not apply—and they arise from the fact that every linguistic construction, including the one on which an obligation is based, is made of words, and words have negotiable margins. No one attacks a rule where it is unassailable: it is easier to work around its edges.

An obligation, therefore, is not simply a stronger incentive.

What, then, remains of our metaphor after we have pushed it to breaking point, crack by crack?

What remains is the part concerning method: when the state seeks to change the direction of millions of private decisions, it does so by creating the conditions that shape those decisions. What falls away, however, is the idea of a starting point—of a self-sustaining equilibrium that existed before state intervention disturbed it. In this sense, there is no horizontal plane to which we can return. Because every slope, if it lasts long enough, eventually ceases to be perceived as a slope. The public decisions that made fossil fuels economically attractive no longer appear to be decisions; they simply appear to be the way things are.

If the transition truly succeeds—if the initial push produces those permanent deformations whose occurrence we cannot know with certainty in advance—exactly the same thing will happen. A few decades from now, no one will recognise as artificial what we now debate as a subsidy. It will simply be what is.

There is something almost vertiginous about this. It means that the criterion of success coincides with the disappearance of its traceability, with the fading of memory; that the most successful choices are those that deprive us of the possibility of reopening the debate over them.

Those who come after us will not inherit our reasons: they will inherit a false flat. And they will mistake it for a plain.