Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: ‘Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one’

Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: ‘Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one’

At first glance, no one is waiting for a historian to play down the idea of an energy transition. Certainly not at a time of environmental headwinds. But above all, Fressoz wants to correct historical falsehoods and reveal uncomfortable truths. ‘Despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.’

In his latest book, More and more and more, the historian of science, technology and environment explains why there has never been an energy transition, and instead describes the modern world in all its voracious reality. The term “transition” that has come into circulation has little to do with the rapid, radical upheaval of the fossil economy needed to meet climate targets. 

In France, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has been provoking the energy and climate debate for some time. He denounces the obsession with technological solutions to climate change and advocates a reduction in the use of materials and energy.

The cover of the French edition of your book says ‘the energy transition is not going to happen’. Why do you so strongly oppose this narrative?

We are reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, but that is not a transition. You hear very often that we just need to organise ‘a new industrial revolution’, most recently by US climate envoy John Kerry. You cannot take this kind of historical analogy seriously, this is really stupid.

The idea of an energy transition is actually a very bizarre form of future thinking, as if we would transform from one energy system to another over a 30-year period and stop emitting CO2. If it were to come across as credible, it is because we do not understand the history of energy. 

But don’t we have historic precedents? Didn’t we transform from a rural economy that ran on wood to an industrial society with coal as the big driver?

This is an example of the many misconceptions of the history of energy. In the 19th century, Britain used more wood annually just to shore up the shafts of coal mines than the British economy consumed as fuel during the 18th century.

Of course it is true that coal was very important for the new industrial economy in 1900, but you cannot imagine that as if one energy source replaced the other. Without wood, there would be no coal, and therefore no steel and no railways either. So different energy sources, materials and technologies are highly interdependent and everything expands together.

So I guess you won’t agree either with the claim that oil replaced coal in the last century?

Again, oil became very important, but this is not a transition. Because what do you use oil for? To drive a car. Look at Ford’s first car of the 1930s. While it ran on fuel, it was made of steel, requiring 7 tonnes of coal. That’s more than the car would consume in oil over its lifetime! Today it is no different: if you buy a car from China, it still requires about three tonnes of coal.

You should also take into account the infrastructure of highways and bridges, the world’s biggest consumers of steel and cement, and that is just as dependent on coal. Oil drilling rigs and pipelines also use large amounts of steel. So behind the technology of a car is both oil and a lot of coal.

You suggest looking at energy and the climate problem without the idea of ‘transition’. How? 

Focus on material flows. Then you see that despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased (excluding wool and asbestos). So modernisation is not about ‘the new’ replacing ‘the old’, or competition between energy sources, but about continuous growth and interconnection. I call it ‘symbiotic expansion’. 

How do you apply this idea of symbiotic expansion of all materials to the current debate about the energy transition?

The energy transition is a slogan but no scientific concept. It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.

Moreover, the word energy transition has its main origins in political debates in the 1970s following the oil crisis. But in these, it was not about the environment or climate, but only about energy autonomy or independence from other countries.

Scientifically, it is a scandal to then apply this concept to the much more complex climate problem. So when we seek solutions to the climate crisis and want to reduce CO2 emissions, it is better not to talk about a transition. It is better to look at the development of raw materials in absolute terms and to understand their intertwinedness. This will also restrain us from overestimating the importance of technology and innovation . 

Didn’t technological innovation bring about major changes?

Numerous new technologies did appear and sometimes they rendered the previous ones obsolete, but that is not linked to the evolution of raw materials. Take lighting, for example. Petroleum lamps were in mass use around 1900, before being replaced by electric light bulbs. Yet today we use far more oil for artificial lighting than we did then: to light the headlights of the many millions of cars. 

So despite impressive technological advances, the central issue for ecological problems remains: raw materials, which never became obsolete. We speak frivolously about technological solutions to climate problems, and you can see this in the reports of the IPCC’s Working Group 3.

Don’t you trust the IPCC as the highest scientific authority on climate?

Let me be clear, I certainly trust the climate scientists of groups 1 and 2 of the IPCC, but I am highly critical of the third working group that assesses options for the mitigation of the climate crisis. They are obsessed with technology. There are also good elements in their work, but in their latest report they constantly refer to new technologies that do not yet exist or are overvalued, such as hydrogen, CCS and bioenergy (BECCS).

The influence of the fossil industry is also striking. All this is problematic and goes back to the history of this institution. The US has been pushing to ‘play the technology card’ from the beginning in 1992. Essentially, this is a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use, which is not in the interest of big emitters like the US.  

What mitigation scenarios do exist that do not rely excessively on technology? 

As late as 2022, the IPCC’s Working Group 3 report wrote about ‘sufficiency’, the simple concept of reducing emissions by consuming less. I’m astonished that there is so little research on this. Yet it is one of the central questions we should be asking, rather than hoping for some distant technology that will solve everything in the future. 

Economists tell what is acceptable to power because it is the only way to be heard and to be influential, it is as simple as that. That is why the debate in the mainstream media is limited to: ‘the energy transition is happening, but it must be speeded up’.

The transition narrative is the ideology of 21st century capitalism. It suits big companies and investors very well. It makes them part of the solution and even a beacon of hope, even though they are in part responsible for the climate crisis. Yet it is remarkable that experts and scientists go along with this greenwashing.

Do you take hope from the lawsuits against fossil giants like Shell and Exxon? 

Of course Exxon has a huge responsibility and they have been clearly dishonest, but I think it is too simplistic to look at them as the only bad guys.  Those companies simultaneously satisfy a demand from a lot of other industries that are dependent on oil, like the meat industry or aviation. More or less the whole economy depends on fossil fuels, but we don’t talk as much about them.

That’s why it is inevitable to become serious about an absolute reduction in material and energy use, and that is only possible with degrowth and a circular economy. That is a logical conclusion of my story, without being an expert on this topic. 

Degrowth is not an easy political message. How can it become more accepted?

I do not offer ‘solutions’ in my book since I don’t believe in green utopias. It is clear that many areas of the economy won’t be fully decarbonized before 2050, such as cement, steel, plastics and also agriculture. We have to recognise this and it means that we simply won’t meet the climate targets. 

Once you realise this, the main issue becomes: what to do with the CO2 that we are still going to emit? Which emissions are really necessary and what is their social utility?  As soon as economists do a lot more research into this, we can have this debate and make political choices. Yet another skyscraper in New York or a water supply network in a city in the Global South?