Adam Tooze · Trouble Transitioning: What energy transition?
Trouble TransitioningAdam Tooze
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Vol. 47 No. 1 · 23 January 2025
Trouble Transitioning<br>Adam Tooze
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More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy<br>by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.<br>Allen Lane, 310 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 0 241 71889 6Show More
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Any hope we have of containing the escalating climate crisis depends on getting to net zero, which will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy – muscle, wind and water power – to coal. The second was from coal to hydrocarbons (oil and gas). The third transition will be the replacement of fossil fuels by forms of renewable energy.<br>The transition narrative is reassuring because it suggests that we have done something like this before. We owe our current affluence to a sequence of industrial revolutions – steam engines, electricity, Fordism, information technology – that go back to the 18th century. Our future affluence will depend on a green industrial revolution, and to judge by the encouraging headlines, it is already well underway. The standard estimate is that energy transitions take about half a century; if that were true of the green energy transition, it could still be on schedule for 2050.<br>This is the way that many governments and experts think about the future of energy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change takes advice from specialists in ‘transition theory’. Analysts touting S-curves of technology adoption benchmark the take-up of electric vehicles against previous phases of technological change. Figures such as Elon Musk are cast as the Edisons of our day.<br>But history is a slippery thing. The ‘three energy transitions’ narrative isn’t just a simplification of a complex reality. It’s a story that progresses logically to a happy ending. And that raises a question. What if it isn’t a realistic account of economic or technological history? What if it is a fairy tale dressed up in a business suit, a PR story or, worse, a mirage, an ideological snare, a dangerously seductive illusion? That wouldn’t mean that the transition to green energy is impossible, just that it is unsupported by historical experience. Indeed, it runs counter to it. When we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Economic growth has been based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdependent agglomeration. Using more coal involved using more wood, using more oil consumed more coal, and so on. An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic mainstays of our modern way of life – is without precedent.<br>This is the argument of More and More and More, the latest book by the French historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the scale of what lies ahead, the first thing we have to do is to free ourselves from the ideology of the history of energy transition.<br>Take transport, the history of which will often begin with stagecoaches and horse-drawn barges before proceeding to the development of coal-fired railways, petrol-driven cars, aeroplanes and space travel. As Fressoz points out, this schema is misleading. The first railways ran on rails held together by timber sleepers and, in the US, timber sleepers still predominate. American railway companies don’t want to spend more money than they have to and insist that timber handles extremes of temperature better than the...