Trouble Transitioning

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 concrete sleepers more familiar in Europe. The problem was that the railways created the need for more not less lumber. For thousands of years, the work of felling, dressing and transporting wood was undertaken by men and horses. Until the mid-20th century, when petrol-powered chainsaws and then logging machinery took over, the energy output was organic: men wielding axes, horses pulling wagons. Today the timber is moved by truck and railway but, until recently, huge rafts of timber were floated downriver on the currents, a practice known as log driving. Organic energy has not been totally supplanted – humans are still required to handle the tools, haul the timber, lay the sleepers – but it is deeply intertwined with coal, electricity and petrol. Similarly, a car with an internal combustion engine is powered by petrol, but the engine itself is made of steel, which is smelted using vast quantities of coal. The concrete that is poured into roadways in many places is manufactured using coal. Asphalt is a by-product of oil refining.

Fressoz is not the first to make the point that the history of energy is not a story of transition but accumulation, in which each new source increases demand for the others. The historian On Barak anticipated much of this argument in Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonisation (2020), which shows how the organic energy of human bodies was intertwined with the new coal-fired systems of the maritime British Empire. But Fressoz puts paid to the energy transition paradigm by showing incontestably that the great displacement never happened.

More wood is used today, including for firewood, than ever before. As Fressoz points out, anyone who claims that the dawning of the coal age in the 19th century freed us from our reliance on organic materials has never been down a mine. Miners traditionally preferred timber pit props to hold up mineshafts not only because they are cheap and flexible, but because their creaking gives early warning of a failure. Survival as a coalminer depended on being a competent carpenter. Mines needed forests. As recently as the 1990s, mining in China was shaped by the scarcity of timber for pit props, which forced miners to dig tightly bunched, one-man shafts straight down to the coal seam instead of excavating extended galleries underground.

Wood is bound up not just with coal, but with hydrocarbons too. The first oil rigs were made of timber and so, until the 1910s, was the ‘barrel’ of oil. Standard Oil was once the world’s largest cooperage. Wood fibres married with hydrocarbons were the great hope of the early promoters of plastics. In the siege economy of Nazi Germany, pundits imagined a future based on synthetics derived from cellulose. It is a rich-world conceit to imagine that firewood is obsolete. In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is projected to become the world’s largest city by 2075, an estimated 4.8 million cubic metres of wood fuel and charcoal are used each year.

What is true of wood is also true of coal, which far from being displaced by the ‘age of oil’ is today consumed in greater amounts than ever before. The UK’s gaping trade deficit is fed by imported manufactured goods which contain the equivalent of tens of millions of tons of coal, burned mainly in Asia. Even in the US, peak coal production wasn’t reached until 2008, driven by a new generation of giant open-cast pits created in Wyoming in the 1970s. Oil and coal weren’t substitutes but complements: without vast supplies of diesel fuel, the monstrous mining machinery would have been paralysed. And when you end coal consumption for power generation, as the UK managed to do in 2024, what do you turn to instead? The giant Drax plant in North Yorkshire now burns wood pellets imported from North America.

Our distorted view of energy history isn’t a product of pro-business techno-optimism. Plenty of Marxists are attached to simplistic stage theories of technology. As Fressoz points out, for all its supposed materialism and its abstract focus on surplus value generated at the point of production, much Marxist thought is uninterested in what actually goes on in factories, and far too ready to settle for clichés such as ‘the industrial revolution’ or ‘the age of Fordist mass production’. Beyond politics, a more general ignorance, or even resistance, is at work. I am put in mind of Bruno Latour’s thesis in We Have Never Been Modern (1991), where he argues that there has been a systematic blindness to the giant entangling of natural resources and technologies that has enabled the expansion and acceleration of modernity. In Powering Empire, Barak draws on Foucault to show that in the 19th-century British Empire, coal (and thus steam power) figured as independent of the human labourers that mined it and fuelled the boiler fires. The prevailing energy episteme required that the actual source of motive power be obscured. Fressoz acknowledges his debt to David Edgerton, who argued in The Shock of the Old (2006) that we do not understand modernity because of our fixation on innovation and our lack of interest in the way systems of production operate.

Accounts of contemporary reality organised around technological synecdoche – ‘the age of steam’, ‘the age of the machine’ and so on – began to take hold at the end of the 19th century. What Fressoz aptly calls ‘monomaterialisms’ were popularised by historical economists including Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen as well as social and cultural critics such as Lewis Mumford. In the 1920s, the declaration of the ‘age of Fordist mass production’ generated a new wave of technological enthusiasm – this time for the motor vehicle and the assembly line – which receded with the Great Depression. In the 1930s, there was some anxiety that politics and society were failing to keep up with the pace of machine production, and that oversupply would become chronic. Such pessimism was overtaken by events.

The surge in oil consumption during the Second World War and the years following encouraged a new wave of monomaterialist thinking, which has carried into the present. In his widely-read study Carbon Democracy (2011), Timothy Mitchell argued that as oil displaced coal in the mid-20th century under the influence of Anglo-American hegemony, it undermined the bargaining power of unionised mineworkers, dockers and railway workers, whose work centred on the mining and distribution of coal. A change in the energy system resulted in a change in the political order.

Mitchell’s account is in some respects just the kind of entangled history that Fressoz and Barak are calling for, but his analysis is vitiated by its monomaterialist account of history. The 1940s and 1950s did not see the displacement of coal by oil, but an acute shortage of energy. Oil was a complement, not a substitute. In most large economies of the world, coal-fired power stations remain essential for the supply of electricity down to the present day. And far from undermining labour, oilfields in countries such as Iran, Mexico or Venezuela were zones of unionisation, democratic activism and sovereign self-assertion.

Given the geopolitics of the Middle East, the prominence of Opec and the power of the oil lobby in the US, it isn’t surprising that oil-based monomaterialist theories of modernity prevail. But transition theory may not have become so dominant had it not been for the advent of the ‘nuclear age’. The promise of nuclear power was great. Many thought it had the potential to replace all other energy sources and thus to bring about a true energy transition. However, the levels of investment and technological risk involved were daunting. A speculative long-term gamble demands a compelling vision of history. The promise of a comprehensive exit from fossil fuels – the energy transition to end all energy transitions – was the vision the nuclear advocates needed. Since fossil fuels were the target, it wasn’t by accident that champions of nuclear energy were among the earliest proponents of climate science. The line was that the comprehensive adoption of nuclear energy would keep the planet cool. As Fressoz shows, by the late 1970s the closeness of the relationship between nuclear and climate advocacy was taken for granted. Their common enemy was the plan to replace increasingly scarce oil deposits with synthetic fuels produced by coal hydrogenation. In the wake of the oil shocks of the 1970s, this ruinously inefficient technology – first rolled out on a large scale by IG Farben in Hitler’s Germany and later by the apartheid regime in South Africa – was seized on by the G7 as a futuristic alternative energy source. As was apparent even then, the implications for the environment were catastrophic.

At the same time, the prospect of global warming was being brought to wider public attention, for example in the Charney Report of 1979, which forecast that a doubling of carbon dioxide levels could lead to a global temperature rise of 3°C. As Fressoz points out, the first reaction of many politicians and business leaders to these alarming predictions wasn’t denial but a confident assertion of the ability of the existing system to adapt. Degrowth wasn’t an option, nor were the radical visions of technological transformation put forward by theorists such as Amory Lovins, who in 1976 called for a future of decentralised ‘soft energy’. Instead, they turned to the stage theory of energy transitions teed up by the nuclear industry. It offered an all-purpose vision of comprehensive change, shorn of any assumption of radical socio-economic or political transformation.

Futurologists and economists converged on the energy transition theory to posit that it was only a matter of time before technological development, if directed correctly, would yield green technologies to replace fossil fuels, just as surely as cars had displaced horses. It was unhelpful at the time that quantitative economic historians such as Nicholas Crafts were debunking simplistic stories of the industrial revolution. But such subtleties were ignored in favour of the fables spun by future Nobel Prize winners such as the economist William Nordhaus, who insisted that economic growth should not be fettered by unduly heavy carbon pricing for fear that slower growth would retard the technological transition. In due course, this would allow the planet to stabilise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5°C of warming. Having estimated a loss function and weighed the costs of investment and adaptation, Nordhaus’s sage advice was that growth was the best way to get to this new equilibrium.

Thinking​ in terms of energy transitions is, in Fressoz’s view, one of the main reasons truly radical action on climate has been delayed. Like Nathaniel Rich and Naomi Klein, he sees the 1980s as the decade in which the opportunity for decisive early action was lost. Fressoz concludes More and More and More with a sceptical coda on recent developments. He is no fan of Green New Deals or big-push investment programmes. He has nothing but scorn for the ‘nebulous group of neo-Keynesian experts, NGOs and foundations thriving in the shadow of the COPs’ who ‘regularly put forward estimates of the “cost of transition”’ – four trillion dollars a year, for instance, in a recent report – without any indication of the way this money would ‘change the chemistry of cement, steel or nitrogen oxides, or how it would convince producing countries to close their oil and gas wells’. Not only do advocates of the Green New Deal and Green Marshall Plan have little grasp of technology, but Fressoz also scoffs at their habit of festooning their climate plans with other egalitarian objectives. ‘It’s all very well to mock the supposed “techno-solutionism” of engineers,’ Fressoz writes, ‘but the normative positions on climate that prevail in the social sciences are even more ridiculous.’

Fressoz doesn’t wish to dismiss the possibility of change. The point, rather, is to dereify it. But how then do we describe and analyse the changes that are underway? If we are to achieve an energy transition, it will not follow a familiar timetable. It must mark a fundamental break with an otherwise irresistible logic of accumulation. It doesn’t require unanimity or consensus. It doesn’t require that no one is left behind. What it does require is a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense. It is hard not to be reminded of the contrast drawn by Marx between, on the one hand, our existing state of ‘prehistory’, in which we live in a confused turmoil, buffeted by contradictory social forces that we glimpse only through the distorting lens of ideology, and, on the other, the promise of an era of autonomous history-making to come, in which humanity will direct its destiny. As Fressoz describes it, a true energy transition would require nothing less.

This is at least a good deal clearer than conventional transition talk. But, formulated this way, it can’t help but seem hopelessly out of reach. And, as far as net zero by 2050 and stabilisation at 1.5°C of warming are concerned, that may be so. But having put paid to naive hope, it is a shame that Fressoz concludes his book in the early 1990s. Over the last quarter-century, a new kind of energy history has been made in the development of green technologies and the decarbonisation of parts of the energy system. For the reasons Fressoz lays out, it is coal rather than oil that is at the centre of this push. The closure of coal-fired power stations doesn’t, of course, mark a complete departure from coal. And new energy technologies come, as usual, with their own material entanglements. We need key minerals in huge quantities. But it is change on a scale that would have been thought impossible until quite recently. To clearly assess the possibilities of the present moment we must rid ourselves of the obfuscating vision of an energy transition. But, having done that, we will need a demystified, non-teleological account of the limited but significant changes that are already underway, an account that moves beyond the chronological and conceptual confines of Fressoz’s era, in which the climate problem was first fully defined.

More and More and More is iconoclastic in every respect except one: its Western centrism. The history of energy as told here is surprisingly Anglocentric, far more so than Barak’s account of coal in the British Empire. The dominance of the Anglo-American energy model in the 20th century isn’t debatable, but Fressoz is a historian who understands the scale of things. Already in the 1980s and 1990s it was clear that an account focused on Western Europe and the US could not carry us into the 21st century. From the late 1970s, pollution in the Soviet bloc took on grotesque proportions. In the last decades of the 20th century, all the new centres of heavy industrialism were to be found in East Asia. Japan and South Korea became the great new centres of steel production and shipbuilding. The 21st century began with an explosion of industrial production and energy use in China unlike anything seen before or since. In the production of steel and cement China recapitulated the entire industrial history of humanity in the space of two decades. As a result, Europe and the US are today responsible for less than a quarter of global emissions.

Fressoz is right to say that any hope we have of future climate stabilisation depends on making a break with the last three centuries of energy accumulation – and with its misleading portrayal. But if we extend that idea to the present moment, that also means breaking with the Western-centric framing of Fressoz’s own work. What makes this future so hard to conceive, at least in the West, is not only its radical novelty, which exceeds the impoverished ideological categories that have framed our understanding of modernity, but also its non-Western origins. Both the escalating crisis and the main thrust of the energy transition are being driven not by the West but by the vast forces of economic and technological change that are at work in Asia, and above all in China. Fressoz has given us a properly materialist history of the 20th century. A 21st-century sequel must carry that logic to its global conclusion.