{"id":3512477,"date":"2025-04-28T10:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T10:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3512477"},"modified":"2025-04-28T10:26:33","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T10:26:33","slug":"energy-transition-the-end-of-an-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-04-28\/energy-transition-the-end-of-an-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Energy transition: the end of an idea"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the idea that there\u2019s going to be a smooth transition out of fossil fuels and into renewables that can rescue the existing high-energy global economy in anything like its present form comes courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and his 2024 book\u00a0More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy<\/em>. I wrote about the idea of a supposed energy \u2018transition\u2019 quite a bit last year (for example,\u00a0here<\/a>) and I don\u2019t plan to go over that ground again. But Fressoz\u2019s book is such an informative read that a post about it seems in order. Next up after this is a \u2018taking stock\u2019 post where I pick up on a few points raised by commenters previously that I\u2019ve lamentably failed to respond to yet, and then we\u2019ll move into some new territory.<\/p>\n

Fressoz is an academic, a historian of science and technology, and he uses his specialism to good effect in his book, as I\u2019ll relate in a moment. By the way, he appeared recently on Rachel Donald\u2019s always informative\u00a0Planet Critical podcast<\/a><\/em>, where he covers the main points of his book with her \u2013 I\u2019d recommend a listen.<\/p>\n

Unlike Fressoz I\u2019m not an academic expert on energy, though I\u2019ve long taken an interest in the topic. You don\u2019t really need much expertise to see that no transition out of fossil fuels is currently occurring or is likely anytime soon. Or that various transition clich\u00e9s in circulation like \u2018oil saved the whales and coal saved the forests\u2019 are untrue. Still, Fressoz nails these myths with stimulating scholarly precision in his book. The real question is why do they continue to get so much airplay when they\u2019re so obviously untrue? Largely, I think, because they tell a comforting story that people want to hear.<\/p>\n

Fressoz writes:<\/p>\n

Let us start by stating the obvious. After two centuries of \u2018energy transitions\u2019, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood. Today, around 2 billion cubic metres of wood are felled each year to be burned, three times more than a century ago. (p.2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If only it\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0obvious to more people, perhaps we\u2019d be having better discussions about the choices we now face.<\/p>\n

Useful as it is to be reminded that new energy sources have only added to total energy usage and that many of our transition stories are false, these points weren\u2019t exactly news to me. There were other aspects of Fressoz\u2019s book that I found more arresting.<\/p>\n

One of them was his many documentations of the point that the real history of energy has been about the \u201centanglement and symbiotic expansion of all energies\u201d (p.9).<\/p>\n

For example, Fressoz discusses the current use of charcoal for cooking in populous cities of Africa like Kinshasa at levels that dwarf past charcoal consumption \u2013 \u201cthe first time in history that megacities of more than 10 million inhabitants depend on wood for energy\u201d (p.124). This industry combines the energy of wood, human muscle and fossil fuels in the form of the bulldozers that open forests to logging, and the trucks that transport the charcoal to the cities.<\/p>\n

Other examples include historic mining and railways that used vast amounts of wood for energy and for construction (sleepers, pit props etc.), transport (four times more wood used in US pallet production in 2000 than in cooperage in 1909) and present-day electric vehicles (half the world\u2019s EVs are in China, where most of the electricity is generated from coal \u2013 not to mention the 2.5 tonnes of coal that\u2019s burned in making a car, let alone all the road infrastructure).<\/p>\n

And so the eye-popping statistics continue. A key point that emerges from many of these examples is that we shouldn\u2019t think of energy in energy terms alone, but also in terms of its entanglement with materials \u2013 plastic, steel, cement, fertilizer and so on. Fressoz writes that technological innovations have never reduced the quantity of raw materials consumed, the only major exception being reduced consumption of sheep\u2019s wool due to synthetic fibres which, he says, \u201cis not good news for the environment\u201d (p.16). This is interesting in view of the negative representation of the sheep industry in relation to climate change. The representation isn\u2019t entirely unwarranted, but the relevant research rarely offsets ovine methane emissions against the carbon sequestered in wool and the costs of its replacement by fossil fuels, quite apart from the other limitations of the argument.<\/p>\n

This tendency to forget about the entanglement of energy with materials is a problem in another topic \u2013 manufactured food. Again, I\u2019ve\u00a0written about this<\/a>\u00a0previously and won\u2019t dwell too much on it here, but the idea that we can get bacterial protein from \u2018thin air\u2019 powered by renewables neglects the fact that the relevant process only gets carbon and nitrogen from \u2018thin air\u2019 (via complex, energy-intensive processes), otherwise\u00a0relying on<\/a>\u00a0an awful lot of energy, water and nearly 90kg of added minerals for every tonne of protein produced. It\u2019s easy to get lost in the geeky details of this kind of stuff without appreciating its implausibility from bigger-picture thinking of the kind that our culture and academic institutions seem ill-equipped to provide. All the more reason to salute scholars like Fressoz when they come up with the goods.<\/p>\n

Probably the most interesting part of Fressoz\u2019s book is his detailed history of the \u2018transition\u2019 concept and associated ideas like the logistic or S-curve. I won\u2019t retell it here, but in essence Fressoz shows that the concept of energy transition arose in the 1970s and was propounded mostly by nuclear energy advocates of a neo-Malthusian bent in the context of the oil crisis at that time \u2013 in the context, therefore, of energy scarcity. How it came to be applied a decade or two later to the entirely different context of climate change in a situation of fossil energy abundance is a tangled tale that Fressoz sets out to unravel. He makes the point that earlier historians of energy never talked about \u2018transition\u2019 or assumed that new energy sources made older ones obsolete, for the simple reason that there\u2019s no evidence for it \u2013 \u201cthe idea comes not from an empirical observation of the past, but from anticipation of the future; it comes not from historians, but from futurologists\u201d \u2026 it is \u201ca future without a past\u201d (p.10).<\/p>\n

Two brief points to make about this. First, I find it interesting that this is relatively recent, mainstream, global history that I and other present generations have lived through, and yet it can still take the detailed analysis of a professional historian to set the record straight. While for my part I\u2019ve long been sceptical of the idea that we\u2019re going through a transition from fossil fuels to lower carbon energy sources, and I\u2019ve even done a bit of\u00a0historical detective work<\/a>\u00a0to disprove some of the more questionable transition talking points, nevertheless I\u2019ve still used the concept of \u2018transition\u2019 quite uncritically as if it\u2019s a historically neutral and well-grounded concept. The power of our stories to mislead!<\/p>\n

Second, in various occasionally illuminating but often frustrating discussions with transition-philes, I\u2019ve found that my scepticism toward transition easily gets represented as implicitly supportive of fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry. Fressoz neatly flips this \u2013 industrialists, says Fressoz, quickly understood the advantage they could draw from the \u201cdubious futurology\u201d of the transition concept \u201cto postpone the climate constraint into the future and into technological progress\u201d (p.187). On this reading, the notion of transition is a subterfuge of fossil-fuelled business as usual.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I believe that Fressoz\u2019s book, along with Brett Christophers\u2019 book\u00a0The Price Is Wrong<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 and along with basically just reading the news and smelling the coffee \u2013 finally puts the transition concept out of its misery. Where to go from there may seem harder to discern, but I haven\u2019t been banging on about small farm and local futures all these years for no reason. As I see it, people need to stop talking about transition and instead focus conversations around three other things. First, we can still welcome technologies like renewables, but we need to stop hailing them as saviour technologies that will rescue the high-energy business-as-usual world. Second, we need to start talking about energy priorities \u2013 what people need, rather than what they might like to have. This in turn means talking about global fairness, about how the energy pie is divided up, rather than talking airily about transitions to an abundant low-carbon, high-energy future promising prosperity for the present global poor. Any genuine concern for fairness has to be as much or more about lowering the wealthy than lifting the poor. Third, it means talking about adaptation to climate breakdown and other forces likely to upend the familiar contours of the present world, because a transition isn\u2019t on the cards. Ultimately, I think those conversations lead to agrarian localism and a small farm future.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Current reading<\/h3>\n

David Graeber\u00a0Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology<\/em>\u00a0(I\u2019m catching up with the late, great Graeber\u2019s back catalogue \u2013 I wish I\u2019d read this before finishing my new book!)<\/p>\n

Musa al-Gharbi\u00a0We Have Never Been Woke<\/em><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Hadler\u00a0Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the idea that there\u2019s going to be a smooth transition out of fossil fuels and into renewables that can rescue the existing high-energy global economy in anything like its present form comes courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and his 2024 book\u00a0More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3512496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79716,213529,79718,79719],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3512477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","category-energy-featured","category-environment","category-foodwater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3512477"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3512505,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512477\/revisions\/3512505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3512496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3512477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3512477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3512477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}