MORE and MORE and MORE.
An All-Consuming History of Energy
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz – Oxford University Press
(Book presentation by Luc Magnenat - 14 rue de la Faucille, Geneva, Switzerland – magnenat@iprolink.ch)
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science, technics and the environment. After lecturing at Imperial College London, he is now a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (France) and teaches at the School for Advanced Social Studies and the Polytechnic School.
Fressoz has previously published The Happy Apocalypse, Les révoltes du ciel (with Fabien Locher) and The Shock of the Anthropocene (with Christophe Bonneuil) (back cover).
MORE and MORE and MORE is a radically new history of energy that reveals the fundamental strangeness of the notion of “energy transition.” The historiology reconstructed by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz explains how matter and energy are closely linked, grow together, accumulate, and pile up on top of each other. There has therefore never been any energy “transitions,” only energy “additions,” as Fressoz’s reinterpretation of history teaches us. Aspiring to a “transition” appears to be nothing more than an industrial marketing slogan, a source of scientific confusion, and political procrastination by projecting a past that does not exist onto a future that remains elusive (p. 1).
Why then, has the notion of energy transition become so prevalent asks the author? How did this hypothetical future without a past become, from the 1970s onwards, the future of governments, businesses and experts -- in short, the future of reasonable people? Where does this contemporary myth come from, a psychoanalyst might ask, and what is the driving force behind this illusion?
The issue is fundamental because the symbiotic links between energies explain both their permanence over the very long term and the titanic obstacles standing in the way of decarbonisation (back cover). This issue is not only practical, it is also emotional and cognitive, inflicting disillusionment on the reader: there will probably be no energy transition. It is for this reason that this book concerns every citizen and is bound to be of interest to every psychoanalyst.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s work is based on a sense of unease he felt when reading general histories of energy in the context of the huge boom in coal consumption in 2010 (p. ix). It is part of a reinterpretation of a phasic narrative of energy history, according to which we have moved from wood to coal, from coal to oil and to uranium, while waiting for renewable energies, hydrogen, and nuclear fusion. However, the 19th century was as much the age of wood as it was of coal, and the 20th century, heralded as the age of oil and electricity, burned more wood than ever before (p. 36).
Fressoz shows that the history of matter and energy flows is a history not of phases but of accumulation, stratification and symbiosis (p. 42). He bases this on the observation that today, after two centuries of so-called “energy transitions,” humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal, nor 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. Wood currently provides twice as much energy as nuclear fission, twice as much as hydroelectricity, and twice as much as solar and wind power combined.” (pp. 2-3). “Therefore, any serious discussion of climate change should start from the somewhat worrying observation that technological innovations have never, right up to the present day, caused any flow of material consumption to disappear. Over the course of the twentieth century, the world’s range of raw materials expanded and each was consumed in increasing quantities ... The total weight of materials used by the economy has increased twelvefold ... For the time being, therefore, substitution processes have always been trumped by the expansion of markets, rebound effects, and reorientation of raw materials to other uses.” (p. 16).
Let’s look at this in more detail. The history of coal is “woody”, notes Fressoz (p. 43), because coal mining increases wood consumption. In absolute terms, the number of trees felled only increased in the 19th and 20th centuries. Wood never became secondary to coal because “forests went underground” due to the props that supported the mine galleries. Without wood to shore up the mines, England would have had very little coal, and therefore very little steel and steam, to drive its industrial revolution (p. 45). Wood is the resource of the mining industry; it is vital both for industrialists and for miners, whose lives it protects. This is why “a good miner is a good carpenter,” as a French saying goes (p. 48).
Consequently, if a country is poor in wood, it is poor in coal (as was the case in China), and it is sometimes coal mining that forces states to concern themselves with protecting their forests (p. 51). Without abundant wood, Europe would not have had coal, and therefore no steam, steel, railways, etc. In addition, wood consumption skyrocketed because of coal, since, beyond the mines, railroad tracks were made of wood (and still are), as were railroad cross-ties, stations, bridges, wagons, etc. (p. 56). Wood therefore determines the extraction of coal, its transport, keeps trains running, builds houses (timber), prints newspapers, and packages consumer products (paper and cardboard). Charcoal remains an energy source for the manufacture of solar panels... (p. 59). This is why “the dynamic that governs the relationship between coal and wood is not that of a transition. Rather, we should be talking about a symbiotic relationship that intensified during the nineteenth century, followed by a gradual disengagement that really began in the second half of the twentieth century,” with open-cast mining (p. 55).
The mention of open-cast mining reveals another symbiosis, that between coal and oil. With open-cast mining, coal extraction became increasingly dependent on oil. “Oil became an energy source that literally moved mountains,” both during its extraction and during its transport over thousands of kilometres, notes Fressoz (pp. 80-82).
And oil production itself consumes a lot of coal because of its enormous steel requirements: oil is pumped by steel machines, transported by ships, tankers and pipelines, processed in steel factories, and then burned in steel engines, the steel itself being produced using coal (p. 68).
Even today, for example, it takes two and a half tons of coal to build a car (p. 79).
Often presented as two “development blocs” or as two distinct “energy regimes,” coal and oil are in fact deeply intertwined. Fressoz describes how the entire material and energy dynamic of the 20th century stems from this symbiosis: it is with steel machines, manufactured with coal energy and powered by oil, that most materials –- wood, agricultural products, metals –- are extracted, processed and transported (p. 67).
This symbiosis between coal, steel and oil has only grown stronger as dependence on the car has increased. The explosion in mobility requires roads made of cement, concrete and tar –- all materials dependent on coal –- i.e. road infrastructure that requires long-term flows of matter and energy for its maintenance, in other words steelworks and cement factories (p. 80).
In a phasic history of energy, oil and wood resources seem to have been kept at a distance from each other by coal: we seem to have moved from wood to coal, then from coal to oil (and then to uranium, wind and solar power, etc.). However, “from oil derricks to cardboard packaging, from (forest) plantations to construction panels, the symbiosis between wood and oil played a central role in the energy and economic growth of the 20th century,” notes Fressoz (p. 96, my parenthesis).
Wood was essential to the emergence of the oil industry. Not only were the derricks made of wood, the tanks were made of wood, the barrels were made of wood, as were the barges and boats that transported them, but wood was also used to produce the steel used to extract the oil, which in turn is also used in forestry (p. 96). The 20th century was truly an “age of wood” because it accompanied the rise of oil by its use in the immense symbiosis of energies and matters that constitutes the development of mobility and urbanisation, notes Fressoz (p. 102). “The growing consumption of wood for packaging or construction has had the unexpected consequence of increasing the use of wood in the energy mix of rich countries. This phenomenon went relatively unnoticed because it took place in sawmills, wood-panel factories and paper mills, while at the same time the consumption of firewood in households was falling.” (p.114). Overall, however, it can be estimated that Europe consumes around three times more wood energy in 2020 than it did a century ago, thanks to the rise of fossil fuels (p. 116). There has therefore never been an energy transition away from wood, neither in the 19th nor in the 20th century, neither in poor countries nor in rich countries, concludes Fressoz (p. 125-126).
It is at this point in his work that Jean-Baptiste Fressoz addresses a central question: the tripling of wood energy, the threefold increase in coal since 1980, and the continued growth of oil should have led us to abandon the “energy transition” as an analytical tool, or to use it only as a utopia. How has the phasist view of history been able to endure? How did the notion of transition become so prevalent at the end of the 20th century when all the energy dynamics of the time contradicted it? How did this notion become, from the 1970s onwards, a normal and consensual future for governments, businesses, and experts who claim to be guiding us towards a carbon-free world? (p. 127).
Fressoz traces the origin of this concept to the early 1930s, when new ways of thinking about and visualising energy dynamics emerged under the pressure of economic and social crisis, an imaginary world that still accompanies us today (p. 129). American technocracy readily used the term “transition,” whose vagueness reassured the middle classes, to refer to the political transformation caused by technical change, the backbone of any society (p. 132).
Secondly, it was nuclear technology that gave rise to expertise in energy transition. The origin of this concept is largely linked to the atom, to the transition of an atomic structure from one state to another, before becoming a keyword in nuclear futurology, which focuses on the end of fossil fuels and climate change, and even in science fiction utopias (such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series) (p. 142).
Four arguments were put forward in favour of an essential “transition” to nuclear power: the growth in energy consumption during the consumerist “great acceleration” of the late 20th century; the rising cost of fossil fuels (it was the energy crisis of the 1970s that brought the transition out of its nuclear infancy, driven by the dream of a smooth transition away from oil towards an inexhaustible energy system that includes nuclear and renewable energies); global warming (p. 148); and the idea that a nuclear transition would prevent a third world war over resources (p. 149). Awareness of the limits of uranium reserves completed this dystopian narrative of an energy transition by highlighting the need for a “transition” to fast breeder reactors (p. 154).
In fact, atomic scientists discovered a problem infinitely larger than the solution they were proposing, notes Fressoz (p. 159): nuclear energy plays only a marginal role in global energy, half that of wood; fast breeder reactor programmes have been abandoned; and nuclearization does not reduce CO2 emissions.
In other words, the future of global energy is already written due to its enormous inertia (p. 174). The system dominates the actors. As the system has its own will and its own timetable, “humility is required in the face of the iron law of the logistic curve:” we cannot govern this gigantic set of machines and uses that is the global energy system (p. 176). We discover that theories sidestep concrete technical problems: it seems impossible to decarbonise steel and cement (p. 187); taken together, steel, cement, plastic and fertilisers account for more than a quarter of global emissions and are sufficient on their own to make the Paris Agreement targets unachievable. And the share of fossil fuels remains stable to this day, accounting for more than 80% of the global energy mix (p. 191). It is therefore unreasonable to expect more from renewable energies than they can deliver: decarbonising electricity remains difficult and the current boom in renewables is not incompatible with the continued use of fossil fuels (p. 212).
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz concludes that climate change is caused by the whole of our “second nature,” i.e. all the techniques and infrastructure accumulated worldwide over the last two centuries (p. 34). The Anthropocene actually refers to a double irreversibility, a double accumulation, a cumulation of cumulations. Not only are matter flows piling up in the various compartments of the Earth system, but anthropogenic energy flows are also following an additive logic.
The origins of global warming are easy to trace, but what would stop it is beyond historical imagination (p. 330).
The “transition” thus appears as a strange and consensual notion of a strange and strangely consensual future. Born in the “atomic age” and envisaged as a distant response by rich countries to the depletion of fossil resources, the notion of transition has been taken up, without serious scientific or historical justification, to address the climate challenge (p. 332).
Fressoz points out that the rallying of the oil industry under the banner of “transition” has the merit of clarifying the ideological nature of this concept. Transition has become the politically correct future of the industrial world, following a political trend whose goal is no longer to protect the climate, but to protect economic well-being from the negative effects that could result from climate change (p. 305). The illusion of a “transition” makes it possible to avoid energy sobriety and degrowth, two terms that have become taboo, as if it had become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (p. 316).
Anthropo-psychoanalytic note
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book brings us down to earth with a bump (like other works such as that of historian Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse, which is more oriented towards an economic and political reading of human history): there will probably be no energy transition, despite the countless efforts of all those working towards this goal. This means that we have irrevocably entered the Anthropocene. We will have to endure the climate tipping points that have been predicted for decades by environmental scientists and mourn the loss of the Holocene, which was the cradle of humanity.
We, who are merely “children of the biosphere,” may have to “learn from the catastrophe,” individually and collectively. We may have to learn to live with climate change and biodiversity loss that are beyond humanity’s control. We may have to learn to live together despite the increase in social violence that such upheavals in our planetary “living environment” are bound to cause.
Aldo Leopold (1949), the father of environmental ethics, urged us to learn to “think like a mountain,” that is, like ecosystems. Today, having failed to learn to think like a mountain, we will have to learn to “think like our waste,” with the mountain of waste accumulated during three centuries of industrial, technological and energy revolution, a mountain that has taken the form, immeasurably extended in space and time, of the environmental crisis.
Following the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo—the planet Earth is not the center of the universe—Darwin—the human species is part of the evolution of all other species—and Freud himself – human beings are driven by their unconscious and inhabited by a death drive – today, it is the discoveries of environmental science that inflict a new “narcissistic wound” (Freud, 1917) on humanity: the notion of the ecosystem implies that human beings are only one stitch in the fabric of life, a “child of the biosphere” (Magnenat, 2019, 2021), as dependent on it (this ecosystem of ecosystems) as an infant is on its parents. Furthermore, these environmental sciences reveal that humanity is subject to an anthropogenic environmental crisis that is in the process of escaping all human possibilities of control. An ecological disillusionment thus adds to the cosmological, biological, and psychological disillusionments listed by Freud.
We could therefore hypothesise that the persistence of the illusion of an energy transition responds to a psychodynamic defence mechanism that supports a collective denial of the crime against nature constituted by the consumerist and extractivist lifestyle of that part of humanity that is narcissistically imbued with a neoliberal economic ideology that is literally ecocidal. As psychoanalysts, how can we not think that the economics of this illusion could be likened to that of the myth of the horde imagined by Freud? If there is a ‘crime’ for which we must take responsibility today, it is the ongoing “murder” of the rich biodiversity and stable climate of the Holocene, humanity's ‘primal scene’.
As a psychoanalyst, I am confident. Knowing that human beings are governed by their unconscious, I can only imagine that they are unconsciously developing new cultures adapted to life in the Anthropocene -- cultures that are not the delusion of an escape to the stars or into transhumanism but, more modestly, “the art of living on a damaged planet” within the limits of its biological finitude (Tsing, Swanson, Gan, Bubandt, 2017). I can see in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s remarkable book the expression of such cultural work.
References
Bonneuil, C. & Fressoz, J.-B. (2016). The Shock of the Anthropocene. The Earth, History, and Us. Verso Books.
Fressoz, J.-B. (2024). The Happy Apocalypse. A History of Technological Risk. Verso Books.
Fressoz, J.-B. (2013). Les révoltes du ciel. Une histoire du changement climatique XVe-XXe siècle. Paris, éditions du Seuil.
Fressoz, J-B. (2024). MORE and MORE and MORE. An All-Consuming History of Energy. Translated by the author. Penguin Random House UK.
Freud, S. (1917). Une difficulté de la psychanalyse. In OCF, vol. XV, 41-52.
Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County Almanach. Oxford University Press.
Magnenat, L. (2019). La crise environnementale sur le divan. Paris, Edition In Press.
Magnenat, L. (2021), « Think like a Mountain » – « to Think of Oedipus »: a Psychoanalytic Contribution to Environmental Ethics. Int J Psychoanal, 4, 734-754.
Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E., Bubandt, N. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. 3Minnesota University Press.