Letters

Adam Tooze brilliantly sums up the essential theses of my book More and More and More (LRB, 23 January). However, I would like to clear up two potential misunderstandings. First, as Tooze makes clear, I am not alone in pointing out the cumulative nature of energy history, something that can be discerned from any graph representing the evolution of primary energy on a global scale. My book shows that this vision was widely shared until the 1970s, when the discourse of the ‘energy transition’ spread from futurology to energy history. The subject of my book is not energy accumulation, but energy symbiosis, i.e. the mutually supportive relationships that exist between energies and materials. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, England consumed more wood simply to support the galleries in its mines than it had burned in the 18th century. In the 20th century, oil consumption stimulated demand for coal – to make cars, steel, roads, cement – and also greatly stimulated and facilitated the use of wood for energy production. Today, car headlights consume more petroleum than the world economy did in 1900, when most lighting was based on kerosene lamps. Historically, this symbiotic effect has largely taken precedence over substitution effects. The problem is that such symbiotic relationships still exist between ‘green’ technologies and fossil fuels.

My second point is about contemporary China. Contrary to the classic transitionist vision, the rapid deployment of renewables and electric vehicles does not imply a symmetrical reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. In 2023, despite the boom in renewables, emissions from the electricity sector were still rising. In Inner Mongolia, ‘new energy bases’ have recently been inaugurated, combining not just solar panels and wind turbines, but also new coal-fired power stations. These plants, which burn cheap local coal, make it possible to compensate for the variability of renewables and to recoup particularly high connection costs, as the electricity is consumed two thousand kilometres further east. At the 2023 COP, the Chinese envoy explained that it was ‘unrealistic’ to eliminate fossil fuels that are used to maintain grid stability.

In any case, electricity production accounts for only 40 per cent of global emissions. Decarbonising electricity production is only the first and easiest stage in the ‘transition’. Even leaving aside aviation and maritime transport, the production of key materials such as steel, cement, plastics, fertilisers and food remains very difficult to decarbonise. Nobody in China or anywhere else has the secret. Hence the enormous amount of ‘negative emissions’ (using non-existing or non-scalable technologies) in all the net-zero scenarios of the IPCC or the IEA. Despite all its electric cars, the carbon intensity (the ratio between CO2 emissions and GDP) of China’s economy remains extremely high – higher than Saudi Arabia’s and more than twice that of the UK. Even in the countries that are the ‘real leaders’ in decarbonisation, the energy mix remains dominated by fossil fuels: 75 per cent in the UK, 50 per cent in Denmark, France and Norway. IEA forecasters do not foresee a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, but rather a peak in emissions before 2030, followed by a plateau at a high level until 2050. This scenario takes us neither to 1.5 nor 2°C, but to 3°C – a catastrophic increase. The energy transition is projecting a past that does not exist onto a future that remains elusive, in China as elsewhere. Oppositions between East and West, and between the carbon-based 20th century and the decarbonised 21st century, fuel a stagist vision of the material world which prevents us from asking a question that global warming forces us to confront: how can we make do with less and less and less?

Fraser MacDonald recalls visiting Nan Shepherd at home as a small child and being bored by ‘the dreadful stillness of adult conversation’ (LRB, 23 January). He was unlucky. I too grew up in Cults and Nan was a family friend. On our visits, when she sensed the energy of her young visitors flagging, she would open a small wooden box and take out an ancient, threadbare monkey glove puppet with which to entertain us. I remember Nan, in her eighties, walking up the steep Quarry Road in the snow to deliver Mars bars for Christmas, a broad grin on her face. MacDonald mentions that some saw her as snobbish. She was a middle-class Victorian growing old in an Aberdeen convulsed by the oil boom, and had probably retained some of the class reserve of her upbringing. But many of her social relationships did cross class divides, such as with the writer Jessie Kesson and with many of her students. The Living Mountain can give the impression of an enraptured soul, alone in nature. That was just one side of a complex and unforgettable personality.

Stefan Collini, writing about Karl Polanyi, insists on the English origin of industrialisation: ‘It was beyond question that, however the changes were to be understood, they happened first in Britain, indeed in England’ (LRB, 23 January). This ignores the contributions of Wales and Scotland. The most dramatic images of the changes associated with the early industrial revolution were the ironworks at Cyfarthfa and Dowlais at Merthyr Tydfil, which were sketched by Turner. Dowlais was founded in 1759 and Cyfarthfa in 1765, while English entrepreneurs like Richard Arkwright were still finding their way. It was Dowlais that produced the rails for the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

The Scottish contribution was also fundamental. One of the intellectual cradles of the industrial revolution was the circle that gathered in the workshop of James Watt at the University of Glasgow to debate such matters as steam locomotion. Watt conceived the idea of the separate condenser – according to the Science Museum ‘the greatest single improvement ever made to the steam engine’ – while walking on Glasgow Green in 1765. New Lanark is powerful testimony to the fact that industrialisation was not confined to the North of England and the Midlands but embraced much of mainland Britain. In his succinct survey of the Scottish industrial revolution, Christopher Whatley concludes that by the middle of the 19th century the central belt of Scotland was the most intensively industrialised part of Britain.

All this said, it isn’t sufficient simply to insist on the British nature of the industrial revolution. As the economic historian Sidney Pollard pointed out long ago, we cannot understand the progress of industrialisation by using national frameworks. It was regionally based and patchy, spreading across borders:

Like an epidemic, it took little note of frontiers, crossing them with ease while leaving neighbouring home territories untouched. The political and legal base in each region was not without influence on it, but it is clear that the factors which made one area more susceptible to infection than another included locational advantages, resources and, above all, preceding economic development bringing in its train a favourable social structure.

The ‘Great Transformation’ was an international phenomenon and cannot be attributed to a single country.

Stefan Collini suggests that Karl Polanyi has limited relevance to us today because the ‘practices of contemporary technology-enabled finance may seem to require a different order of analysis’ from the one available to Polanyi, given his rootedness in the early currents of British socialism. But Polanyi’s importance lies elsewhere, in the pattern that he diagnosed. He saw that, repeatedly throughout history, the rise of liberalism had torn society apart as markets caused vast inequalities and proved incapable of creating the conditions necessary for decent lives. In Polanyi’s view, there were two possible paths to take in response: fascism or socialism. Fascism puts society back together by attacking foreigners and minorities. Socialism puts it back together by attacking inequality. Because their critiques originate in the same source – the failure of liberalism – fascism often borrows socialism’s critique of the economy, but blames the problem on outsiders rather than the market system itself. Polanyi thereby helps us understand why, for example, we see the critique of ‘techno-feudalism’ from both Yanis Varoufakis and Steve Bannon, but only Bannon talks about mass deportation as part of the solution.

David Shorney suggests that Jacques Derrida might have been better advised to connect his thoughts on hospitality to Leviticus 19:33-34, which encourages empathy with any ‘stranger’ who lives among the native community, rather than to the text from Numbers establishing ‘cities of refuge’ (Letters, 26 December 2024). It’s true that Derrida ignores the fact that Numbers 35:13-15 pertains only to refuge for unwitting killers, but his expansion of an ancient tradition to embrace contemporary ‘persecuted writers and artists’ is entirely consistent with the interpretative rabbinic tradition he inherited: earlier texts are open to amplification and reinterpretation in the light of new times and situations. Indeed, Shorney illustrates this homiletic, or ‘midrashic’, rabbinic approach when he quotes the Epistle to the Hebrews: ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ This is not a development of the Leviticus text to add the self-serving notion that ‘unanticipated rewards might accrue to the hospitable’, but a poetic reformulation of a well-known bit of rabbinic exegesis: that the guests who received Abraham’s hospitality (Genesis 18:2-5) were divine messengers (i.e. ‘angels’) in disguise. Such creative borrowings on the part of early Christianity were not infrequent.

Inigo Thomas and Mark Liebenrood mention Frank Auerbach’s use of letters and words in his paintings (LRB, 5 December 2024 and Letters, 26 December 2024). In the catalogue to Auerbach’s Arts Council exhibition of 1978 Catherine Lampert asked him why he did this. He replied:

I’ve been writing on them sometimes after the sort of explosive feeling of it not working, just rubbish words, sometimes things I’ve wanted to do the next morning. I’ve written on the names of the people I’m drawing. I don’t know why, perhaps for the same reason that you carve people’s names on trees. The person far from home writes the name of their village.

When I was a student, this interview became my manifesto, though Auerbach’s statement elsewhere that ‘Unity may be said to be the aim of all artists’ seemed to me to contradict his remarks about writing in paintings, since letters are disruptive to unity in a picture. That was one reason I never signed mine, much to the annoyance of my mother.

The only thing I missed in Rosemary Hill’s excellent piece on standing stones was mention of the polymath Julian Cope, formerly lead singer of the Teardrop Explodes (LRB, 26 December 2024). His book The Modern Antiquarian, a comprehensive gazetteer of the standing stone sites of Britain and Europe, has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. It’s a formidable scholarly work. I remember the launch at the Roundhouse in London in 1998, Cope wearing full leopardskin, from nine-inch platforms and leggings to bell-sleeved top and toque.