Energy transition: the end of an idea

Pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the idea that there’s 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 More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. I wrote about the idea of a supposed energy ‘transition’ quite a bit last year (for example, here) and I don’t plan to go over that ground again. But Fressoz’s book is such an informative read that a post about it seems in order. Next up after this is a ‘taking stock’ post where I pick up on a few points raised by commenters previously that I’ve lamentably failed to respond to yet, and then we’ll move into some new territory.

Fressoz is an academic, a historian of science and technology, and he uses his specialism to good effect in his book, as I’ll relate in a moment. By the way, he appeared recently on Rachel Donald’s always informative Planet Critical podcast, where he covers the main points of his book with her – I’d recommend a listen.

Unlike Fressoz I’m not an academic expert on energy, though I’ve long taken an interest in the topic. You don’t 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 clichés in circulation like ‘oil saved the whales and coal saved the forests’ 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’re so obviously untrue? Largely, I think, because they tell a comforting story that people want to hear.

Fressoz writes:

Let us start by stating the obvious. After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, 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)

If only it was obvious to more people, perhaps we’d be having better discussions about the choices we now face.

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’t exactly news to me. There were other aspects of Fressoz’s book that I found more arresting.

One of them was his many documentations of the point that the real history of energy has been about the “entanglement and symbiotic expansion of all energies” (p.9).

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 – “the first time in history that megacities of more than 10 million inhabitants depend on wood for energy” (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.

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’s EVs are in China, where most of the electricity is generated from coal – not to mention the 2.5 tonnes of coal that’s burned in making a car, let alone all the road infrastructure).

And so the eye-popping statistics continue. A key point that emerges from many of these examples is that we shouldn’t think of energy in energy terms alone, but also in terms of its entanglement with materials – 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’s wool due to synthetic fibres which, he says, “is not good news for the environment” (p.16). This is interesting in view of the negative representation of the sheep industry in relation to climate change. The representation isn’t 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.

This tendency to forget about the entanglement of energy with materials is a problem in another topic – manufactured food. Again, I’ve written about this previously and won’t dwell too much on it here, but the idea that we can get bacterial protein from ‘thin air’ powered by renewables neglects the fact that the relevant process only gets carbon and nitrogen from ‘thin air’ (via complex, energy-intensive processes), otherwise relying on an awful lot of energy, water and nearly 90kg of added minerals for every tonne of protein produced. It’s 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.

Probably the most interesting part of Fressoz’s book is his detailed history of the ‘transition’ concept and associated ideas like the logistic or S-curve. I won’t 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 – 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 ‘transition’ or assumed that new energy sources made older ones obsolete, for the simple reason that there’s no evidence for it – “the idea comes not from an empirical observation of the past, but from anticipation of the future; it comes not from historians, but from futurologists” … it is “a future without a past” (p.10).

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’ve long been sceptical of the idea that we’re going through a transition from fossil fuels to lower carbon energy sources, and I’ve even done a bit of historical detective work to disprove some of the more questionable transition talking points, nevertheless I’ve still used the concept of ‘transition’ quite uncritically as if it’s a historically neutral and well-grounded concept. The power of our stories to mislead!

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

Anyway, I believe that Fressoz’s book, along with Brett Christophers’ book The Price Is Wrong – and along with basically just reading the news and smelling the coffee – finally puts the transition concept out of its misery. Where to go from there may seem harder to discern, but I haven’t 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 – 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’t on the cards. Ultimately, I think those conversations lead to agrarian localism and a small farm future.