Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy" (Harper, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy”

Date: September 23, 2025
Host: Sydney (D)
Guest: Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (E), historian of energy at CNRS/EHESS, Paris

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Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation with historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz about his book "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy." The discussion challenges mainstream narratives about energy "transitions," debunking the common myth that industrial societies have shifted neatly from one form of energy to another. Instead, Fressoz presents a story of accumulating, intertwined energy and material consumption—what he terms "energy symbiosis." The conversation also delves into how these historical myths shape today’s climate and policy discourse, emphasizing the need for realism in charting routes to decarbonization.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Motivation for Writing the Book

• Challenging the “Stages” Model: Fressoz was struck by the outdated way energy history was structured around "transitions"—e.g., wood and water (18th c.), coal (19th c.), oil and electricity (20th c.) ([02:17]).
• Insight from Material Flows: Researching the vast amounts of wood used in 20th-century coal mining, Fressoz realized, "There is more wood in British coal mines in the 20th century than fuel wood in the 18th century in the British economy" ([03:48]).
• Key Concept – Energy Symbiosis: Instead of “energy transition,” Fressoz argues for understanding “energy and material symbiosis”—the way different energy systems grow together, not in succession but in accumulation and mutual dependence ([04:26]).

"The key topic... should not be simply energy transition. It shouldn't be just energy accumulation, which is too easy and too simple. It is energy symbiosis. Energy and material symbiosis... should be at the core of the history of energy." – Fressoz ([04:33])

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2. Explaining the "Anti-Stagist" History of Energy

• Seduction and Problems of Stage Theories: Fressoz critiques "lazy" reliance on concepts like the “organic economy” vs. “mineral economy,” or Lewis Mumford's chronology of ages ([05:57]).
• Misleading Visions: Even influential reports like those of the IPCC confuse technological change with actual energy/material consumption, leading to false impressions about past and future transitions ([07:20]).
• Political Stakes: The stagist narrative isn’t just academic—it underpins political messaging suggesting that energy transitions are routine and readily repeatable.

"This historiography has fueled a false ideology of 'we have done energy transition and we will be doing a new energy transition to solve the energy crisis.' ... The Industrial revolution is certainly not a good example for what we have to do now. It's precisely a counterexample." – Fressoz ([07:01])

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3. Accumulation vs. Substitution—The True Nature of Energy Change

• Empirical Evidence from Data: While common graphs show declining “shares” of certain energy sources (wood, coal, etc.), absolute consumption of all energy types has kept rising ([09:12]).
• Deep Interdependence: Coal relies heavily on wood for extraction (mines, rail ties, packaging); fossil fuels actually underwrite ongoing wood consumption ([10:37]).
• Case Study – Lighting: The arrival of electric light didn’t abolish oil—today’s car headlamps alone consume more oil than the entire world’s economy did for light in 1900!

"Today, just the headlamps of the automobiles consume twice more oil than the world economy in 1900s, when most of the people used oil to produce light." – Fressoz ([11:45])

• Key Takeaway: True "disappearance" of energy/material commodities is extremely rare.

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4. The Whales-and-Oil Myth: Why Transition Stories Mislead

• Debunking "Oil Saved the Whales": The notion that kerosene lamps spared whales is marketing from the oil industry and economists like William Nordhaus ([14:04]).
• Reality: More whales were killed in the oil age (20th c.) than before, their oil used in lubricants for petroleum and jet engines; real change only came from prohibitions and alternatives like jojoba oil ([15:27], [16:34]).
• Innovation Alone Won’t Cut It: Genuine reductions in resource use often depend on bans, not simply substitution or innovation ([17:25]).
• Policy Implication: Relying solely on technological innovation to make fossil fuels obsolete is unrealistic.

"If you want to reduce the consumption of material... prohibition is really the only way." – Fressoz ([16:19])

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5. Critique of Timothy Mitchell’s "Carbon Democracy"

• Context: Mitchell argued that coal’s labor-intensive system supported social democracy, while oil’s capital intensity enabled authoritarianism ([19:36]).
• Flaws in Comparison:
  • He compared coal and oil at different technological moments; both could be labor- or capital-intensive, and their transport/logistics realities blur Mitchell’s dichotomy ([20:39]).
  • Open-pit coal mining is highly capital- and machine-intensive; oil extraction used to employ more workers than coal ([21:49]).
  • Political implications are not so clear-cut—social movements emerged in oil economies as well ([22:48]).
• Academic Reception: Fressoz notes Mitchell’s popularity reflects hunger for materialist explanations, but criticizes historians' ignorance of actual production processes ([25:26]).

"It really shows like a kind of very shallow materialism where you don't really look at production." – Fressoz ([25:49])

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6. The Intellectual History of "Energy Transition"

• Origins of "Energy Transition" Rhetoric: The "stages" vision matured in the late 19th century and was popularized further by US atomic scientists after WWII ([26:51]).
• Phrase's True Origin: "Energy transition" in fact comes from atomic physics, describing the shifting of electrons, then was co-opted as metaphor for technological progress ([27:47]).
• Nuclear Propaganda: 1950s-60s nuclear promoters used the term to argue that fossil fuel scarcity would force a shift to nuclear; such transitions were imagined over centuries, not decades ([28:16]).
• Shift in the 1970s: Amidst the oil crisis, "energy transition" became a catch-all solution, embraced by policymakers (notably Jimmy Carter) for everything from more coal to pipelines to solar—its vagueness was political gold ([30:24]).

"A key character here... is Jimmy Carter. In 1977 made a famous speech... he said that in the past the US had made two energy transitions... and now we had to make a third energy transition. And after this speech... everybody started to talk about energy transition in the US and abroad." – Fressoz ([31:25])

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7. How the Energy Transition Model Was Applied to Climate Change

• Recycled Economic Thinking: Economists approached climate change with the same logic as the 1970s energy crisis—banking on future innovation and gradual price mechanisms like carbon taxes ([34:52]).
• Problematic Delay: This framework enabled procrastination: "Do not take measures that would harm the economy, because in the future it would be easier to make an energy transition" ([36:37]).
• False Comfort: Even with early knowledge of climate risk, leading scientists (Roger Revelle, World Climate Conference 1979) argued for delayed action due to the supposed time available for transition ([38:25]).

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8. The Political Uses and Limits of "Energy Transition" Today

• Double-edged Word: Some activists now use "energy transition" to advocate for urgent action, but Fressoz warns it remains an imprecise, technocentric idea that obscures harder truths ([41:05]).
• What We Should Say Instead: Deployment of renewables, windmills, or electric cars is more accurately described as “reducing the carbon intensity of the economy,” not a true “transition” ([41:43]).
• Structural Challenges: Energy transition talk distracts from the need to address the absolute size of the economy and the material basis of society.

"When you put solar panels or windmills or electric cars, you don't make an energy transition, you reduce the carbon intensity of the economy." – Fressoz ([41:24])

• Real Limits of Renewables: Renewables excel in electricity, but not in the production of steel, cement, plastics, fertilizers – the foundations of modern civilization ([42:56]).

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9. What an “Adult Conversation” on Climate Means

• No Quick Technofixes: Fressoz urges an end to naïve techno-optimism or belief in rapid, painless decarbonization ([44:22]).
• Diffusion Timelines: Innovation in technology today will have limited effect before 2050 due to infrastructure lags and systemic inertia ([44:41]).
• No Magic Bullets: Ideas like hydrogen are technological illusions for the next decades ([45:44]).
• Prioritization and Reduction: By mid-century, some sectors will still emit CO₂; societies must choose what is vital (e.g., agriculture) and what luxury sectors must shrink (cement, steel, aviation) ([46:39]).

"We need to have this discussion about differentiating luxury emissions and more... vital emissions. We have to be able to have models... without impacting too much the well being of societies." – Fressoz ([47:42])

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10. Current and Future Work

• Upcoming Project: Fressoz is working on a book about the continuing importance and growth of human muscle as an energy source, arguing it has synergized with, not been displaced by, fossil fuels ([48:03]).
• Investigating Expertise: Also focused on the disarray in scientific and policy advice on mitigation ([48:47]).

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11. Book Recommendations

• The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton – a critical history of technology ([49:14]).
• Fin du Monde et Petit Fort by Edouard Morena – an ethnography of the climate elite (in French) ([49:36]).
• Book by Lilo Magalhaes – on the history of concrete in 20th-century France (in French) ([50:04]).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On energy systems:

  • "The general truth about energy and materials is that they all grow." ([16:06])

• On technological fixes:

  • "Honestly, as a historian of tech, I think it's a doomed project... The idea that through renewables and batteries, you will make fossil fuels obsolete in 20 or 30 years is incredibly... improbable." ([17:00])

• On adult conversations:

  • "Before 2050, hydrogen will remain marginal. So do not dream about decarbonizing the industry with green hydrogen. That won't happen." ([45:44])

• Host’s summary of the book’s impact:

  • "You begin the book by saying we need to have a, quote, adult conversation about climate action... dealing quite directly with the fact that we have... a substantially bigger problem than has been discursively represented." ([43:43])

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Chapter Timestamps

• Book rationale & anti-stagist thinking: 02:17–08:10
• Material and energy accumulation: 09:12–13:29
• Whales & oil myth, innovation limits: 14:04–18:08
• Mitchell/Carbon Democracy critique: 19:36–26:22
• Intellectual history of energy transition: 26:22–33:08
• Energy transition & climate policy: 34:11–39:47
• Contemporary uses/misuses of 'transition': 41:05–43:43
• “Adult conversation” on climate: 44:22–47:53
• Upcoming research/projects: 48:03–49:04
• Book recommendations: 49:14–50:34

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Final Thoughts

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz convincingly dismantles the myth of seamless energy transitions and urges a far more realistic reckoning with the scale, persistence, and political challenge of decarbonizing modern societies—one that cannot simply rely on new technologies or easy narratives, but demands difficult societal choices and honest acknowledgment of limits.

For listeners seeking perspective beyond the dominant narrative of “clean transitions,” this episode is essential.

Transcript

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New Books Network.

[Host (Sydney)]

Hello and welcome to New Books Network. I'm Sydney, a host on the channel and today I have Jean Baptiste Fraiso, who is a historian of energy at CNRS and the EHSS in Paris. He works on the history of contemporary environmental crises. He's the author of several books including Happy Apocalypse, A History of Technological Risk, the Shock of the Anthropocene, Chaos in the Heavens, and the book that I'm very excited to talk about today, which is called More and More and An All Consuming History of Energy. Professor Frazilsk, why don't you just sort of first of all, welcome to the show. Why don't you just start off by telling us why you wrote this book? Like, why did you think that we needed. What made you sort of sit down with your colleagues and be like, I'm going to do this?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I think it's my reading of several books around the year 2010, energy history books which were still structured in terms of transition of energy transition. You could, I mean it's, it's quite easy to see that. You just have to, to have a look at the table of contents. Most of the time they were organized according to the same structure. You would have chapters on the 18th century, which would be mainly on wood and water. Chapters on the 19th century which were dealing with steam engine and coal, and chapters on the 20th century which would be dealing with electricity and oil. And the main topic of the book was the shift between energy systems transitions. And at the same time, as I guess everybody knows, coal was skyrocketing in Asia, on the American continent. So I think there was something deeply wrong about this transitionist stagest narrative of history of energy. So I really wanted to tell a different history of energy. Then. I had a good chance of working at Imperial College around 2011. And I was working with David Edgerton, who had written a great book called the Shock of the Old. And I thought it was very inspiring to reflect upon history of energy. And then later I was interested in the history of light, the production of artificial light. And I realized that mines, of course, coal mines, were huge consumers of, of artificial light, obviously. And then I was looking at all the inputs, all the material inputs that went into coal mines, and I realized the staggering quantities of wood, pit props, timber mining. And when you compare the amount of timber that goes into coal mines in Britain in the 20th century, and you compare that with what Britain consumed in the 18th century, just amazing. I mean, there is more wood in, in British coal mines in the 20th century than fuel wood in the 18th century in the British economy. So the story that is very predominant on industrial revolution, understood as a transition from wood to coal, which you find in every book, every book on history of energy about industrialization is misleading. Okay, Pit props is construction timber, but it serves to produce energy in the end. Right? So I mean, at that point I thought that really the key topic in issue of energy should not be simply energy transition. It shouldn't be just energy accumulation, which is too easy and too simple. It is energy symbiosis. Energy and material symbiosis. It is the growing and symbiotic expansion of all energies and material that should be the. What should be at the core of the history of energy. And that's really what my. What the first part of my book is about.

[Host (Sydney)]

Yeah. And you've mentioned this. You call this sort of like an anti stagist history of energy? Sort of. And could you maybe for listeners who have never actually heard or maybe have not read all of the sort of like books that this is in conversation with, what does that mean? Like, what does it mean to be anti stages? Right. Like, because people actually do have these stages narratives, but it might be useful for you to like name them.

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I mean, I can name them. But look at the concepts that are in vogue in history of energy and historiography in general. The idea of an organ organic economy superseded by a mineral economy, or the famous idea put forward by Lewis Mumford, the Eotechnic age, the Paleotechnic age, which is coal and oil, basically, and the neotechnic age, which will be water and hydroelectricity. I mean, we have been really, I think, too lazy by using all these concepts, and they are deeply, deeply misleading. Or once again, if you take the standard historiography, you have phrases such as, oh, electricity in the 20th century is a very important energy transition. No, no, no, no. Electricity actually increased the consumption of coal in the 20th century. So there's all sorts of problems in this geography. And I think several of my colleagues use this word energy transition in a far too general and confusing way. And actually, it doesn't really matter. I mean, if it were just historiographical debate, I think I wouldn't care so much. But the problem is that this historiography has fueled a false ideology of we have done energy transition and we will be doing a new energy transition to solve the energy crisis. And this idea is put forward by many different politicians. I mean, you've got all sorts of people, influential people, who can tell you that in the past we have done energy transition and now we have to mobilize climate change and make a new energy transition. For instance, John Kerry, the US Envoy for climate change, used to say, the energy transition is the new industrial revolution. What is he talking about? The Industrial revolution is certainly not a good example for what we have to do now. It's precisely a counterexample. In a way, all this lazy thinking in history has fueled a political discourse which is this deeply misleading about the challenge we face. So that's why I thought it was really a key, key topic. And I wanted to write a book on that.

[Host (Sydney)]

Yes, and the book really makes this point quite forcefully. I heard about this book because someone showed me the graph that I'm sure everyone who sort of hears about this book, hears from is in which you just sort of like show over time the amount of energy of different sources and where traditionally this graph is in shares. So for those following around at home, not looking at this, someone would be like, in 1800, there was 90% of source, and now it's 10%. You just show the absolute amounts. And what you realize is they're all increasing. But you call this in the book kind of like a statistical sort of triviality. All you had to do was count and then make a graph. Right? Like sort of in reality, a research assistant could have done this for you. But your main point actually appears to be going further, as you say, to really getting into the way in which they like the expansion of one source of energy actually causes and is enabled by another. So would you maybe just start from the beginning of that story? I believe you start with artificial light. So sort of like how did you. You mentioned a little bit, but maybe flesh out the story. How did you come to realize this?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I mean, indeed, the fact that energies for the moment at a global level have just accumulated on top of each other is very obvious. It is in any graph that the International Energy Agency produce, or any. I mean, you can find that everywhere. So it's not really the point of my book. It's not energy accumulation. I wouldn't have written a book to make this point. One graph would have been enough. I think the more interesting argument is that energies and materials are completely intertwined and it is very difficult to disentangle them and it takes a lot of time. I just gave the example of coal, which is completely dependent on wood. For the extraction of coal. You need a lot of wood, a staggering amount of timber. But actually the consumption of coal is also dependent on wood. Because, for example, the railways, they consume enormous amount of wood. They consume more wood than iron, actually, because you have to replace the railway ties, the sleepers, every five or ten years in the 19th century. And then when you've got more coal, got more goods, so you need more packaging. And packaging is predominantly and is still based on wood. So of course, wood is completely fueled by all the fossil fuels. Wood consumption is fueled by the fossil fuels. If you take the example of flight that you mentioned, I think it's an interesting case because it has been used by many different economists showing the power of creative destruction. This Schumpeter vision of history of tech, where the new replaces the old. I think it's a good example that shows that we have projected onto history of energy ways of reasoning, theories that are acceptable only for the history of tech. And I give you an example on light. In the late 19th century, the key innovation was not electricity, of course, which was very limited at the time. It was the oil lamps, the kerosene labs, which were cheap and readily accessible for a vast part of the population in the western world. And then electricity arrived which made kerosene lamps obsolete. It's much more pleasant to have electrical light than kerosene lamps, obviously. So electrification, I mean general electrification Takes place in the 1930s in the US and then it follows. I mean, it basically ends in the 1960s in the Western world. Does it mean that oil is obsolete for lighting? Not at all. Today, just the headlamps of the automobiles consume twice more oil than the world economy in 1900s, when most of the people used oil to produce light. Right, so you've got two different stories here. In terms of technology, yeah, there is a massive shift, a massive revolution. It is transformative. Electricity is a true technological revolution. Obviously, I mean, if this phrase technological revolution is applied for electricity, it is meaningful. But in terms of history of materials, it's a much more boring story. Oil is certainly not obsolete to produce light. I mean, we're still using massive amount of oil to produce artificial light. And it's really, I think one of the key problem with all the transitionist narrative, it is that they tend to confuse technological dynamics with energy and material dynamics. And I mean, Even in the IPCC Group 3 reports, you have this confusion which is present, which is really problematic when they say energy. I mean, in the last report of the IPCC Group 3, in 2022, you got a chapter on this topic or sections on this topic, and they write, energy transition can occur faster than in the past. This is very strange. I mean, for the moment we have not really lived through an energy transition, just accumulation of energies. Right. Everybody knows that. But why do they say that? Because they willingly or unwillingly confuse technological dynamics with energy dynamics. And the two are different stories.

[Host (Sydney)]

Yeah, you actually, I think, state in the book that it's quite difficult to find an example of any material commodity that went out of it, that just we ceased to find a use for it and thus stopped using. And this sort of comes to this like, kind of cute, kind of horrifying example where I don't want to. It may have been John Kerry, but I'm not sure who claimed that basically the energy transition saved the whales. And you point out that it actually was the Environmentalists in the 1970s who are the reason we still held whales. So maybe just tell that story because I think it really captures in like a little anecdote kind of what we learned.

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

Yeah, this is a cliche which is very favored by all sorts of eco modernists nowadays when they reflect on climate change. An example of an innovation, the kerosene lamp, the oil lamp that saved the whales. Actually, the cliche came from the oil industry which was really keen on saying that. I mean, very early on in the 1930s, they were already saying that we have Saved the well. So we are the good guys, right? Even if we pollute and so on, we saved the wells. But more interestingly enough, the problem is that Nordhaus, William Nordhaus, the guy, an economist who got the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on climate change, rehearsed this cliche that the Olat sells the whales. I mean, the truth on this story is that there were three times more whales killed in the 20th century, so under the age of oil than in the 19th century. And it is thanks to oil that whales could be killed easily because you could have more powerful boats, diesel engines that would chase the whales in the southern oceans and more. I mean, perhaps more surprisingly, one of the key sector for whale oil consumption in the 1950s, 1960s is the lubricants for petroleum engines and also for jet engines. So it's. I mean, probably the last drops of whale oil were used in airplanes. So, I mean, it's really deeply wrong to think that oil saved the world. If you want to attribute a kind of. I mean, who has saved the world? Basically, it's. First, it's jojoba oil. Jojoba is a tree that produce a similar fat, I mean, which has similar mechanical properties and so on. And also the environmentalist movements, indeed, that has pushed for bans on whaling. And by the way, whaling is not finished. I mean, we're still killing Wales in Japan and probably other countries as well. So, yeah, I mean, whale oil is interesting because it is, of course, brandished as a good example of energy transition, but is an exception. The general truth about energy and materials is that they all grow. I think that's really something we have to keep in mind when we invoke innovation as the solution for climate change. We just have to remember that despite all the innovations of the 20th century, all raw materials, or almost all raw materials, have expanded. Another exception is sheep wool, which has decreased by almost a third, I think, since the 1950s. And it's because there was a competition of synthetic fiber, but it's not a good news for the environment. And one last exception is asbestos, which was prohibited in several countries because it is a toxic material. So that's interesting, actually, if you want to reduce the consumption of material, I mean, probably prohibition is really the only way you have to take decisions and prohibit it. That works. Okay. I mean, we are still consuming asbestos on the global level, but that has had an effect. And interestingly enough, in the last IPCC report, they almost. I mean, they don't talk about prohibitions or bans. It's not I mean, what really strikes me is that the expertise is really geared towards technological innovation which will make fossil fuels obsolete. That's really the project. And honestly, as an historian of tech, I think it's a doomed project. The idea that through renewables and batteries, you will make fossil fuels obsolete in 20 or 30 years is incredibly, I mean, you know, improbable. And I think it's. I mean, if we want to have a serious discussion about climate change, we have to talk about prohibitions, about bans. Yes, of course we have to talk. I mean, it's not very pleasant, but we have to talk about that. All the scientists have to say that it's really one of the powerful tool. So good, so good, so good.

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[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

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[Host (Sydney)]

Yeah, I will get to this argument, but there's one more that I want to ask about the history of energy before we talk about the second half of the book, which is on sort of the history of ideas about energy transitioning, but that is that your book directly engages with Timothy Mitchell's book Carbon Democracy, which I really enjoyed reading and I've also enjoyed other of Mitchell's work. The book is quite influential and you directly criticize it not only for its Stage Life Stage theory, in which, again, for people who have not read this book, Mitchell has sort of a Stage in which he compares the 20th century political economy in Europe based on oil to the 19th century one based on coal, and makes an argument about how the difficulty of transporting coal gives power to labor unions and to labor organizations and allows for the creation of social democracy. I understand it, but there's a more specific argument about the Arab labor movement that you engage with. And I would like you to sort of lay out in a simple of terms, sort of for our audience who may be quite interested in the history of energy, why you think that sort of Mitchell's presentation should be updated.

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

First of all, when I read Mitchell's first article, actually there was an article first Dajold Carbon Democracy and then a book. I was also very seduced by the argument. I loved the argument. I thought it was a brilliant argument, but it was because I was a bit ignorant about history of coal and history of oil. I think the main problem with the argument is that it is based on a comparison between the technology of coal and the technology of oil, but at different epochs. He compares coal in the 1900s, in the early 1900s with oil, but then oil in the 1960s, and it's not a fair comparison. And he makes the point that coal was very labor intensive, so strikes were a real threat for the capitalist interest compared to oil, which is fluid and very efficient and very capital intensive and not so much dependent on labor. But in fact, when you compare coal and oil at the same period, they have similar characteristics. I mean, for instance, oil in the 1900s, early 1900s is very labor intensive. You have to produce barrels to transport oil and barrel is labor and cooperage is very labor intensive. Oil extraction was very labor intensive until the 1960s. Refineries were employing tens of thousands of people at that time, Right to the point that in 19, I mean, for the. I think I took the number for late 1950s US if you take the census, there is more workers in the oil extraction than the coal extraction. And coal is heavily mechanized after, I mean, during the interwar period. You've got electrical machines that got coal. It's no longer people and muscles that extract coal, it's machines. In rich countries, coal can also be, I mean, is transformed into powder. It's called pulverized coal. And it's massively used starting from the 1920s, 1930s, as in this shape, in this powder form. And it is transported just like oil in tubes under pressure. So there are all sorts of technical problems in this opposition between solid coal and fluid oil. Fluidity of oil was a nightmare for logistics for A long time. And the solidity of coal is very, I mean, you have to relativize this solidity. I mean, it can be transformed into powder and is also transformed into electricity, which is of course the most fluid source of energy that you can have. So I mean, the technical part of the story is problematic. And then there is the political part of the story, which I think is also problematic. I mean, I'm not an expert on that, so I don't want to go too far on that. But I just, I mean, just to think about the recent story, the recent history inequalities have been growing much stronger in the U.S. where coal was very important in the year 1990s and 2000, than in Western Europe where coal has decreased a lot since the 1960s. So the idea that coal tends to favor more democratic policies and so on, I think does not hold very well the test of history. Neoliberal government were very keen on actually pushing forward coal, coal extraction. Coal for instance, like in the big mines, big open cast mine of Australia or the U.S. the workers are paid very generously. So it's a very capital intensive industry. And then there is the case of Middle East. I'm not an expert in the history of Middle east, far from that, but I just noticed that looking just a little bit at the history of the, of the social movements in the Middle east, it just happened that oil was really a key sector for social mobilization, for strikes, for left wing politics in Saudi Arabia. So I think that there are many, many different problems. But what I think is interesting is not so much the problems in Tim Mitchell's thesis, it's rather how, how it was received in the academia as a major, major book, as a very important thesis, which I think it shows a longing for materialistic explanation of history, which I think is interesting, we have to push for that, but a very strong disregard for what is really happening in the production sphere. Basically historians and more generally the academia is quite ignorant about what has happened in coal production in the 20th century, which has been thoroughly revolutionized by all sorts of machines that we have forgotten. So I think it really shows like a kind of very shallow materialism where you don't really look at production.

[Host (Sydney)]

Well, there you have it, folks. Tim, if you want to come on the podcast and explain sort of that you think that there's something about your argument that should or has been misrepresented or should be salaried, please write me an email. We will happily have that conversation. Conversation.

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

The point has to say that we have to look at production in a very, very serious way. And we cannot have a materialistic history without a deep understanding of what is happening in the production.

[Host (Sydney)]

Yeah, no, I buy that. So moving on to the second half of the book where you deal with energy transition not as a phenomenon, but also as an intellectual project. And this is sort of the book almost switches from being a firmly material history to becoming something like an intellectual history where you trace the roots of energy transition or the idea of energy transition. Where are its origins? Or like, where in your story does it come from?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

Okay, I mean, there are several points of origins, as you know, for any concept. I think there is a maturation of the stages vision of history in the third part of the 19th century, where you got this idea that there is a coal age or a bit later, an electrical age. So that's really something which appears late 19th century for different reasons. These very stages materialist and stages vision of history. It's popular among all sorts of intellectuals, both socialist or capitalists. They all dream of an electrical age which will favor their politics. So that's probably the origin. But at that time, experts thought that it was a bit silly. They knew very well that oil was not replacing coal, that electricity would depend on coal, that you could not replace old coal with hydroelectricity. They knew that the quantities didn't add up. So it was this very stages vision of the material world was not considered seriously by experts. And then I think the key group of intellectuals that pushed forward this idea of energy transition was the atomic scientists, the US atomic scientists after World War II. The phrase energy transition is coming from atomic physics. It is a shift from an electronic changing state around this nucleus, right? And it was reused by a guy called Harrison Brown, an atomic physicist active in the Manhattan Project. And he used that to talk about the future of energy. So it is really in the early 1950s, 1960s, that this idea of energy transition emerged from nuclear propaganda. Basically, the idea was that in the long term, you would have an energy transition because we would exhaust fossil fuels. The scarcity of fossil fuels would force an energy transition to nuclear age. But for the nuclear promoters, they knew that this energy transition would take a long time. You know, it was like a purely secular process, especially at the global level. They knew that there was a lot of coal under the ground. And if you take the graphs of Mayan King Herbert, a famous geologist who was also working with the Atomic Energy agency in the U.S. you see that the end of fossil fuels at the global level is in four centuries. So it's a long Time process and four centuries. Of course, it allows you to imagine all sorts of technologies which make, you know, nuclear energy available for all sorts of uses. But it was a kind of marginal vision of energy. Like the experts, the economists didn't imagine any major shifts, sudden shift in the energy system. For instance, conservationists in the 1950s and 60s tried to imagine how much coal there was in the US to know if there was enough for three or four centuries of consumption. So for them, this idea of energy transition, it was quite alien to them, I think. And then something happened in the 1970s which really the key decade for the energy transition. This idea of energy transition coming from nuclear scientists was recycled as a solution for the energy crisis. It was a key topic in the 1970s. And energy transition came to designate all sorts of technologies that would increase energy sovereignty of the US so in the 1970s, energy transition could mean more coal. It could mean a pipeline in Alaska to use the oil that was discovered there. It could mean solar energy, and it could mean nuclear energy. I think the force of this idea of energy transition is that it's very encompassing. Everybody can be in favor of an energy transition because it doesn't designate any kind of technology in particular. So it's very consensual. A key character here to promote the idea of energy transition is a US president called Jimmy Carter. And Jimmy Carter in 1977 made a famous speech on television, the malaise speech of April 1977. And he makes kind of history lessons. Basically he said that in the past the US had made two energy transitions, one from wood to coal, the second from coal to oil. And now we had to make a third energy transition. And after this speech, sorry, everybody started to talk about energy transition in the US and abroad. So I think really this speech has had a key impact. Actually, the one recognized important of this speech is a colleague of mine called Duccio Bazozzi, an Italian historian. And I was interested in the origin of this vision of two past energy transitions. And here you see that there was a maturing of a new vision of energy systems from the early 1970s onward. And it was accelerated by the energy crisis. Energy systems seen as a dynamic of transitions. And it's really something new in the 1970s. It's really a new vision of, of the history of energy, that there is a tendency and a kind of inner mechanism that make energy shifts. You know, something, it's a new vision that really is constructed in the 1970s. 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[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

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[Host (Sydney)]

Yeah, that might be a good transition because at some point, and I know that we're using the word transition a bunch, but the discourse on energy transition shifts from being primarily focused with solving the 70s oil crisis and it becomes a way to imagine a solution to climate change that counterintuitively, and this surprised me, does not seem to involve climate action. And so could you just walk us through how this sort of vision of sort of nuclear physicists and the kind of has merged to solving like what is effectively an economic problem now turns into solving climate change or being seen as a solution to climate change.

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I think it's, I mean one of the key aspects is that the first people economists to think upon what we should do against climate change, they were also active a few years earlier in the debate around the energy crisis and they recycled the same theories and the same arguments. They were also very active in refuting the club of forum report explaining that collapse is not inevitable thanks to innovation, thanks to technological innovation, and they tend to just recycle the same reputation for the climate crisis. And that's how a very peculiar futurology, that of the atomic neo Matthewsian scientists of the 1950s and 60s. We imagine an energy transition, but that would take four centuries and driven by scarcity, was recycled to reflect on something which was completely different. I mean, we have to do the energy transition not in four centuries, but in four decades. And we have to do it despite the fact that there is still quite a significant amount of oil and coal and gas under our feet. So it's a very different problem, but the same kind of tools were used and that has had, you know, concrete consequences. For instance, think about the carbon tax, which is really the main tool put forward by economists to say, you know, what we have to do to change the behavior of producers and consumers. We have to increase little by little taxation on the price of carbon. Right. Actually this simulates the effect of resource scarcity on the economy. So it's really a tool which is made to mimic the exhaustion of fossil fuels. So you can see the influence of the debate around energy crisis on the way we think upon climate change. A key character here is once again William Nordhaus. I mean, the case is very clear. In 1973 he writes a paper on the energy crisis and he said that, I mean, do we need to restrict our consumption of oil? Not at all. On the contrary, we have to extract oil right now while it is expensive, because in the future there will be the nuclear Buddha reactor which could make oil obsolete. So there is no point in reducing our consumption of oil now. It's better economics to use it while it is expensive. Two years later you write the very first paper by an economist on climate change and he makes the same reasoning. There is a problem with greenhouse effect. Sure. Does it mean that we have to tighten our energy belt? Not at all. Because it will be so much easier to make the energy transition in a few decades. Basically what he had in mind was the 1990s. So we have passed this few decades already because there will be the new technologies that would allow us to make the energy transition. And it will be breeder reactor and solar and renewables. Right. So the energy transition really had a big power of procrastination. It was a tool that justified, wait and see approach. Do not take measures that would harm the economy, because in the future it would be easier to make an energy transition. One of the things that really surprised me was that the the promoter of the climate issue, climatologists, oceanographers in the 1970s kind of sabotaged their own alarm using this idea of energy transition. One key Example is Roger Revel, who is a very important scientist who has explained to us that climate would not. Sorry. That oceans would not absorb so much CO2, so climate change would happen. And when he's interviewed by the senate in late 1979, he said that, yes, you can use coal a lot because we will do an energy transition later. And this idea that climate change is serious, but it is a catastrophe that would come like mid 21st century. And that leaves us time to make an energy transition. It's very common in the late 1970s. Even the World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979 makes this conclusion, saying that climate change is a serious issue. It will have global effect by the mid 21st century, but that gives us enough time to change how energy, agriculture, industry, the economy works. There was a very strong naivety in our understanding of economic changes.

[Host (Sydney)]

Thanks. That really. That really brings us up to the present. And it actually surprised me somewhat. And I'm going to sort of push you a little bit on this, because I'm 27, so I entered climate science and social science much or a bit later. And the way that I hear energy transition used sometimes sounds like the delay tactics you're talking about. It does often come with this naive idea that if we can drive the price of solar down and we can sort of replace everything, we won't need fossil fuels. Which I read as largely trying to solve a political problem is we can't turn the lights off or people will hate us. But I also detect sort of in discourse on energy transition, something you might call energy revolution. Right. Sort of people who actually think we should do it now, we should not delay. We should basically put up as many of these as humanly possible, and we should start phasing out fossil fuels. Right. And this vision doesn't seem to be the same as sort of the Nordhaus vision, which is basically because energy transition is something we'll do in the future. Right. And so I'm just curious, kind of how this view of people who actually want to do this thing that Nordhaus is saying we'll do in the future, who want to do it right now, how do these people adopt the discourse on energy transition?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I don't see my role as a kind of censorship saying that you should not use this word. I mean, if you use this word in a political way and efficient way to really stop extracting fossil fuels. Fair enough. My point is I just want to underline the fact that it's not a very rigorous and scientific notion. When you put solar panels or windmills or electric cars, you don't make an energy transition, you reduce the carbon intensity of the economy. I think we should be a bit more rigorous when we are talking about such a serious problem as climate change. And I think it's important to frame the issue like this because it forces us to leave on the table the question of the size of the economy. And that's why I think energy transition is misleading because it gives the impression that, you know, in a few decades we will have solved this problem and our economy won't be connected anymore to climate. And I think this is an illusion, a very, very problematic illusion and that allows us to imagine a growing economy forever basically that would not have any effect on the climate. I mean, the problem with energy transition is also that it focused the things on technologies. Energy transition is about transforming the energy system. It's not so much about transforming society, consumption and all the rest. So it has had, I think, several effects on the way the climate issue was framed, which were deleterious. And that's why I thought it was important to also have a critical outlook on this vision. As you say, I mean, what we are talking, when we talk about energy transition, most of the time it is renewable. We are mentioning renewable energies, but renewables are very efficient or very interesting to produce electricity for all sorts of things which are very important. They don't have so much impact if you think at the production of materials like cement, steel, plastic, fertilizers, food in general, they're not very useful. It's not the issue. And the result is that by focusing on energy transition, basically we are just becoming the lobby for wind farms or solar panels. I mean, I have nothing against this industry, but the aim is not to save the planet. It's just to produce money by this technology which is better than fossil fuels. Obviously it's not the issue, but we have to realize that saving the planet, if this phrase is not ridiculous, it's much deeper and it goes much deeper than just installing few windmills and solar panels.

[Host (Sydney)]

Yes. And so I'll give you the, I guess, last word on the substance part of this. You begin the book by saying we need to have a, quote, adult conversation about climate action. And you've made quite clear through the interview that this largely means stopping pretending that we have ever done an energy transition, or at least that we have done one in the modern period. I don't actually know what happened before the industrial revolution and sort of dealing quite directly with the fact that we have a of lot, I would say a substantially bigger problem than has been discursively represented. But I'm curious, is there anything else you would like to say about what this adult conversation means to you before I transition to our last two questions?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I think this adult conversation would, I mean would acknowledge the fact that given the time horizon for the climate crisis, basically we have to act decisively now and be an activist result by 2050. A technological change, I mean innovation in particular is not the problem. I mean, it's not very interesting. I mean, new stuff that we invent now will have very little effect before 2050 because there is the problem of the time of diffusion. Another old conversation is we stop. I mean, we should not believe in our capacity to massively change the material world in a few decades, in 25 years. This is ridiculous. This is very naive. In the last IPCC Group 3 report, in the summary for the policymakers, they state that we could divide by at least two the carbon emission by 2030 with cheap technologies, many solar panels and I mean transelectrical sectors. No, we can't do that. This is ridiculous. I mean you have to change all the electric grids. It takes time. There is not the capacity of the state or the market to do this profound revolution in five years. This is ridiculous. In the last IPC good through report, there is also something about. There's a lot of things about hydrogen and hydrogen. It's like a very old promise. No, I mean since the 19th century you got blah blah around hydrogen which will replace fossil fuels. We should not buy that. It is a very dangerous technological illusion. Before 2050, hydrogen will remain marginal. So do not dream about decarbonizing the industry with green hydrogen. That won't happen. There is even something about the hydrogen airplane explaining that it has arguments in terms of efficiency. No, no, no, no, no. The efficiency of hydrogen airplane is a disaster. You need a tremendous amount of electricity to produce the hydrogen. You have to change all the planes. It's ridiculous. Do not even dream about it. Right? So if we want to be serious about that, about climate change, we have to stop believing in this kind of technological hype. So that's really what I think is an adult conversation is about, is to realize the fact that there will be CO2 in the economy in 2050. Obviously many things won't be decarbonized. So we have to reflect on where we want to put the CO2. I mean, there will be very difficult decision to take and we have to start thinking about these difficult decisions. Sectors will be considered as vital, will be protected and there will be CO2 from these sectors. Agriculture probably should be one of the most important sector in this respect. Other should, I mean we should start talking about decreasing them. You know, that's if we want to have an adult conversation. So this is the production of cement, of steel, airplanes, shipping. All these sectors have to decrease if we want to reduce the CO2 emissions. There is no secret, you know, I mean, and we need to have this discussion about differentiating luxury emissions and more, I mean, and vital emissions. We have to be able to have models and economic modeling of how we do that in an astute way without impacting too much the well being of societies. Right.

[Host (Sydney)]

Awesome. Well, always our final two questions. The first is of course the question academics always get asked because our jobs never end. What are you working on now?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

I'm working on similar issues about human muscle. Human muscle and fossil fuels. All the interactions and synergies between the two. The fact that the human muscle is certainly not obsolete and the fact that it has increased a lot thanks to fossil fuels. So it's really like the same kind of argument that I have done with the previous energy book. I wanted to make a chapter on the muscle to explain that muscle is an extremely important source of energy when you think about it properly. But I had not the place or the time to rewrite this chapter. So I'm trying to turn that into a book. Yeah, so that's one of the projects. And the other thing I'm working on, and I've recent article on that is the history of expertise on mitigation. How come that we end up in such a scientific disarray without having serious work, I think on what should be done.

[Host (Sydney)]

Well, when that comes out, I hope you'll write me an email and come back on the NBN to talk about it. And then again, always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to our audience?

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

Okay, so the first one, I have already mentioned it, I think it's Shock of the Old by David Edgerton, a tremendous book on history of tech. I loved a book. It's in French. It's called Fin du Monde et petit Fort by someone called Edouard Morena. It's a book, it's a kind of ethnographic or kind of ethnographic description of what he called the climate jet set. This elite of rich men, many men, white men actually coming from the tech or the finance sector, who started to see themselves as climate heroes and how they shifted the discourse around climate change and how they work with important NGOs and the UNO and COP. So it's a good description of this very elitist vision of climate change. And the third book I really liked, it's also in French, sorry, a book by Lilo Magalaes, a former student of mine. So I'm who has written a great book on history of concrete, mainly in France and concrete infrastructure in the 20th century.

[Host (Sydney)]

Awesome. Well, for our English and French speaking readers I will put the links to those in the chat. The book is more and more and more an all consuming history of energy. Jean Baptiste, thank you very much for joining me on the nbn.

[Jean Baptiste Fraiso (Guest Historian)]

Thank you.

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