Source: TW
« The most pessimistic were far too optimistic » On the occasion of the publication of « Sans transition. A new history of energy » by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, we republished a detailed interview from May 2023 where he developed the theses of his book. In the conclusion of his work, he writes that « transition is the ideology of capital in the 21st century. Thanks to it, capital is on the right side of the climate fight. »
16 janvier 2024 Reading time : 20 minutes Interview conducted by Quentin Hardy and Pierre de Jouvancourt.
You recently published articles1 calling into question the notion of energy transition, by showing in particular that this notion biases the way in which we think about the transformations currently necessary in the face of climate change. Can you remind us what your main arguments are ?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz : The energy transition is the most consensual future there is. Faced with climate change, we obviously need to make an energy transition «. But when you think about it, it’s about something gigantic that you have no historical experience of. On a global scale, there has never been an energy transition, we do not know how long it can take.
This idea of energy transition seems natural because we have an entirely false view of the history of energy, according to which we have experienced several transitions in the past, that we have repeatedly completely changed our energy system (from wood, to coal, from coal to oil), when in fact we have only increasingly consumed all these energies.
On a global scale, there has never been an energy transition… The current notion of energy transition makes a civilizational problem look like a simple change in energy infrastructure.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz Our historical culture has normalized an extraordinarily strange futurology. The current notion of energy transition makes a civilizational problem look like a simple change in energy infrastructure. This is a category error.
In your recent work, you are talking about « energy and material symbiosis »2 on the subject of the relations between energy and productive infrastructure in history. Can you tell us what you mean by that and give some examples ?
Generally speaking, energy history is classically divided into major phases: in the 18th century wood and hydraulics were used, in the 19th century, with the industrial revolution, it would be coal and in the 20th century oil and electricity. In a book to be published soon, on the contrary, I study the symbioses between energies. For example, how does the use of coal mean that much more wood is consumed, including for energy reasons ? How the use of oil causes greater coal consumption, including for energy reasons, etc.
Let’s take the example of the wood-coal symbiosis. In England, coal mines in the first half of the 20th century consumed more wood than the country burned in the 18th century, because thousands of kilometers of underground galleries had to be maintained. In England in the 18th century, approximately 3.5 million cubic meters of wood were burned. At the beginning of the 20th century, 4.5 million cubic meters of props were used.… This is not firewood, but it is wood that is used to produce energy.(5)
In addition, as it is timber, it requires forest areas approximately six times larger.(5) That very renowned historians like Anthony Wrigley describe this transformation as a transition, or even worse, an exit from the organic economy leaves one wondering…
If you take the links between coal and oil, we observe the same phenomenon.
To make a car in the 1930s, it took seven tons of coal.
This is a mass equivalent to that which the car will consume in oil during its useful life. So when you think of coal, you have to think of wood. When we think of oil, we must think of coal, etc. These things are perfectly inextricable.
And then, thanks to oil, we have more and more wood. One of the greatest transformations of the last forty years in the history of energy is the explosion of charcoal in Africa. This is the first time in history that we have megacities of more than 10 million inhabitants massively using charcoal for cooking. For example, Kinshasa, a city of 11 million inhabitants, consumes 2.15 million tonnes of charcoal per year. By comparison, Paris consumed 100,000 tons of charcoal per year in the 1860s. This is another order of magnitude.(5)
This consumption of charcoal is made possible thanks to oil: we can fetch charcoal much further with trucks. Wood is oil and vice versa.(5) In rich countries, if we take into account forestry equipment and transport, we arrive at the result that it takes one calorie of oil to have ten calories of wood.(5)
All energies have symbiotic relationships. We have focused too much on certain local cases of substitution such as that of the diesel engine which replaced the steam engine in navigation and railways. But this does not prevent an enormous consumption of coal, if only to produce ships and trains.
Let us just stop at the argument of Timothy Mitchell, who was very successful. In his carbon Democracy Book, he maintains that that social systems are linked to energy systems, and in particular to the physical properties of the energies themselves. For example, coal would make possible favourable power ratios for the working classes in that coal workers were numerous ses, being able to block supply altogether (the mine is dangerous, difficult to access and therefore easy to block, etc). On the contrary, oil would be more of a flow than a stock, more or less liquid and distributed via pipes, tendentially requiring more educated personnel (engineers) and little questioning of working conditions and economic domination. Mitchell argues that the shift from one energy to another helps explain the rise of a state increasingly uneasy about wealth redistribution…
Mitchell is simply wrong because oil does not replace coal, or not until the 1960s. Mitchell’s thesis is based on a biased comparison, that of modern oil from the 1960s with a vision of coal frozen in the 1900s.
Oil encroached on coal markets only in the late 1950s and at that time coal was very capital intensive. It is with electric shearers that coal is extracted. In the United States, in 1958, coal mines employed significantly fewer people than oil fields and refineries. Not to mention gas station attendants, truckers etc… The American truckers’ union is a considerable social power, the most feared of the unions since the interwar period.
Additionally, coal is very fluid. It has been used to produce gas for a long time, electricity, and in power plants it is used in powder form etc. There are even carb pipelines, sort of coal pipelines…
Mitchell’s thesis illustrates an appetite for materialist explanations of politics but a paradoxical disinterest in the history of production, which leads to false narratives, its success is easily explained: intellectuals never mourned technical determinism.
In the 1950s, the idea of energy transition was very heterodox. We consider the energies to add up to each other, the coal then being unbeatable.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz In a recent article3, you show that the atomic lobby is an important root of the idea of energy transition. This environment is also concerned about the speed of population growth and the limitation of resources. Can you specify how this environment is neo-Malthusian4 and revisit the discourses and ideas carried by it at that time?
To make things quite clear, it must be said that initially the idea of energy transition is very heterodox. Economists, engineers, geologists do not think of the energy system as a substitute system at all. For everyone, coal remains and will remain the mainstay of the industrial world for a long time to come, even though oil and hydroelectricity are progressing and even though in the 1950s there is a hype surrounding the coming atomic age. We see this, for example, in the reports of Senator Paley’s committee: we do not speak of nuclear power as an interesting but not very important energy, which could at best be added to other fossil sources, without really replacing them.
But there is a group of intellectuals who think differently. They are scholars who are both atomists and neo-Malthusians, and it is important that they are both at once. They often worked during the war at the Manhattan Project and specifically at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. They came up with the first atomic battery under the Enrico Fermi umbrella and they are fascinated by the civil, energetic applications of the atom, especially the nuclear breeder that on paper has absolutely extraordinary yields. They also feel horribly guilty about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and want to explain that nuclear power is also the key to the survival of humanity.
As it was said the very day after Hiroshima…
Yes, Hiroshima is carrying out a scientific revolution, as The World headlined in 1945. The originality of these scholars is to fabricate a new futurology because they think the very long term. Will there be coal in 2050 ? in 2100 ? And related question: what happens in the atmosphere if you burn all the coal, all the oil ?
From this point of view, they are truly visionaries: they are the first to study global warming in very new ways using isotopes and the mass spectrometer. Nuclear power helps prevent both the depletion of fossil resources and global warming. This would also feed the world’s population. Because if we have the breeder reactor, that is to say unlimited energy, everything becomes possible: we could desalinate seawater, produce abundant fertilizers, make vast arid areas of the planet fertile. So nuclear power, they say, will increase the planet’s carrying capacity !
Until the 1970s, everyone thought that the energy future would remain structured by fossils.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz It was Harrison Brown, an atomistic scholar, formerly of the Manhattan Project and the Met Lab, a leading figure in the neo-Malthusian leagues who coined the expression « energy transition » in 1967. Initially, this term is a concept in atomic physics. This is an electron that changes state around a nucleus. Brown recycles a term familiar to him. Another source of inspiration is the idea of demographic transition dear to neo-Malthusians, which dates from 1945 and which we owe to the sociologist Kingsley Davis. He used the expression « energy transition » for the first time in a book on birth control, sponsored Rockefeller III, who was one of the philanthropists of neo-Malthusianism in the 1960s. Except for atomists, no one talks about « transition » until the 1970s, everyone thinks that the energy future will remain structured by fossils and in particular coal.
So, initially, the idea of transition is an argument for promoting the atom. It is carried by an influential milieu certainly, but very small in comparison with economists, experts in the oil and coal industry, etc. who are very sceptical about the economic interest of the atom. For the atomic Malthusians, economists have understood nothing: the aim is not to be competitive with coal, but to ensure that the atom is available when there is no more coal, on the horizon of the 21st or 22nd century. These people think about energy differently, in the very long term.
So there is a kind of energy idealism in a small techno-scientific milieu. Is it this energy idealism that permeates today’s ecological discourse ?
No because a lot has happened in the meantime…And first: the oil shock and the notion of an energy crisis. As early as the late 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission and General Electrics began to popularize the idea that we would face an energy crisis. There are blackouts including one in New York in 1965, which has a lot of press coverage.
The causes are well known: investments in infrastructure were lacking. There are also standards on sulphur which means that one cannot always use coal before installing equipment to desulphurise the fumes at the outlet of thermal power stations. So the lack of electricity is not due to a shortage of coal in the United States, obviously.
Still, the idea of an energy crisis is starting to be disseminated surreptitiously by the atomic lobby which says: « If you continue to bother us, to prevent the authorization procedures of power plants, we are going to have an energy crisis. » This is an anti-eco argument to begin with. The energy crisis is a weapon against the environmental crisis that is beginning to be talked about — think of the Earth Day of 1970.
Admittedly, the environment is very telegenic, we see seagulls in fuel oil, it is shocking, but the real problem, explains the atomic lobby, is that we are going to run out of energy.
Jean Baptsite Fressoz The idea is to say that the energy crisis is urgent when the environmental crisis is further away. Admittedly, the environment is very telegenic, we see seagulls in fuel oil, it is shocking, but the real problem, explains the atomic lobby, is that we are going to run out of energy. The aim is to obtain funding for the nuclear programme. People from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) are going to do seminars and train journalists, especially from the New York Times on the topic of the « energy crisis ». And we then see series of articles on the energy crisis, as in 1971.
The oil shock arrives. This idea of an energy crisis, obviously, is taking hold in the public debate and with it the idea of an energy transition. At that moment, the American environmentalist associations took up the enemy’s discourse. For example, Lester Brown is the founder of the World Watch Institute, an American neo-Malthusian agronomist who says the transition will be mandatory because there is no more energy. Oil is over. He makes the idea of an energy crisis look like something completely natural, when it was created from scratch.
So, initially, this talk of the energy crisis and the energy transition is not a talk at all that comes from ecology. This is a discourse that comes from the nuclear world. In fact, it was then taken up by American environmental associations. And that’s kind of the problem.
That is ?
Firstly, environmentalists took up this idea that oil was at the end of the race, which was not true. Deuxio, some have also taken up the idea of a malleable technical world, which initially comes from the nuclear industry. Amory Lovins is a very good example. He is a physicist and a member of Friends of the Earth. It is a promoter of « soft energies » (soft energy path) that is to say renewables, solar especially. In 1976 he published an article entitled « Energy, the path not taken » in which he defends the idea that in thirty years we can completely switch the United States to solar energy. For cars, no problem: we will make biofuels. Now it’s seen as a precursor, but his 1976 predictions about the energy mix have been completely off the plate.
It is also a very neoliberal discourse, which criticizes nuclear power as a state, bureaucratic, slow and expensive technology, etc. unlike renewables that everyone can appropriate. Every engineer in his garage is going to invent the new energy techniques and the transition will go very fast thanks to the ingenuity of the Americans. This is a very energy worldview startup nation, disruption and company, where the material world can shift very quickly.
First use of electricity from nuclear power 20 December 1951. Source : ANL. Another milestone in this story is Jimmy Carter’s April 18, 1977 speech on the energy transition. It presents its National Energy Plan which provides for a tripling of coal in the United States, a decision which is linked to energy sovereignty.
To describe this, he uses the term « energy transition » which gives a futuristic atmosphere to a return to coal…. His speech begins with a large historical fresco: « in the past, we made two energy transitions, the first from wood to coal, the second from coal to oil and now we must make a third energy transition ». The following day, The New York Times published an article saying that the US and the world are on the cusp of a third energy transition…. And coal is then only presented as transition energy, or « bridge to the future »5.
Interestingly enough, this future is not necessarily nuclear since Carter is not very enthusiastic about this technology, because he knows it well. A little-known point: Carter went to Navy school and worked in one of the first nuclear submarines, under the aegis of Admiral Rickover, a legend in the United States, who organized the conversion of U.S. Navy submarines to the atom. So Carter knows the atom very well and he knows from experience that it’s dangerous because he was directly involved in handling an incident in an American submarine.
By highlighting the enormous technical inertia inherited from our history, could we not think that your work renews precisely a form of technological determinism ? But how then can the possibility of a political bifurcation be rehabilitated ? Or does this seem impossible to you ?
No, it’s not impossible, but if you don’t understand the inertia, you can’t give yourself the means to make the bifurcation you’re talking about. The inertia of the energy system on a global scale is a real, titanic phenomenon, which must be thought of at its proper height and confronted head-on. Of course we must politicize but not just any way.
The inertia of the energy system on a global scale is a real, titanic phenomenon, which must be thought of at its proper height and confronted head-on.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz In history, recently, there has been this trend of presenting climate change as a plot hatched by a few capitalists. This seems radical. Above all, it is very comforting for the left and it is to underestimate the extent of the transformations to be made, it is to misunderstand the politics of the Anthropocene. Getting out of carbon is even more difficult than getting out of capitalism.
We come back to the old question of degrowth and the fact that it remains very difficult to discuss it with the vast majority of economists. In the latest IPCC Group III report, 3000 scenarios were tested, but no decay scenario was proposed. There is not an economist who said to himself « here, let’s model degrowth hypotheses ! » Not even to mention a fall in world GNP, they could at least look at what is happening if we drastically reduce the consumption of materials that we know we will not be able to decarbonize them by 2050—I am thinking of steel, cement— or even aviation.
Would this be the disaster ? Maybe not. If that happens, lots of other things will grow for the better. There could be plenty of « co-benefits » to talk like the IPCC.
Does not your work highlight that, basically, industrial and productivist societies, and with them, their national and international social stratification, are more resistant to the fight against climate change than to expose themselves to the consequences of very significant warming ?
Obviously, that’s why we don’t do anything. The energy transition has mainly had an ideological function in the countries of the North. Telling a green future is very useful to justify the present procrastination. Moreover, for the American elites, from the end of the 1970s, mass was said, there would be warming, the question was adaptation. As early as 1976, adaptation was discussed in the United States and it was concluded that the country was ultimately well equipped to deal with warming.
It was that choice that was made, but it was not presented like that. This choice must be made explicit, it must be made clear and it must above all be explained to countries where we will die of hunger — where we are already dying of hunger — because of warming and the price of foodstuffs being too high. The blabla on the transition also has this sordid aspect.
And there is no equivalent that could allow us to give political impetus by telling us that a bifurcation is possible ?
No sorry, I do not believe that history has any useful analogy to provide. We could invoke the New Deal, mobilization for the Second World War, etc. But it’s completely off the plate. We must do without most of what has manufactured second nature for a century. Any historical analogy would run the risk of underestimating what to do now.
High-profile sociologists in the latest IPCC report like to make this kind of analogy. They cite, for example, the French nuclear power program which made it possible to remove coal from the electricity mix.
Once imported emissions are taken into account, France’s carbon footprint stagnates or falls very slowly.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz But, even putting aside the fact that the rate at which we should reduce our emissions is far greater than the possible speed of installation of power plants, we must also remember that France has not seen its emissions fall drastically since the 1980s. Once imported emissions are taken into account, France’s carbon footprint stagnates or falls very slowly.
You say that the discourse on the transition is obsolete, should we completely abandon it ?
Yes and no, this speech is obsolete and at the same time you have to make a « transition », but where it is possible, namely in the production of electricity.
On this point another obvious fact: it would be a shame to let ourselves be locked into a debate « innovation versus degrowth » — solar panels cost less and that is so much the better — but the proponents of green growth must also understand that they have an aberrant vision of techniques and their diffusion times: renewables work well to make electricity, much less to make cement and steel. Now steel and cement is 15% of CO2, and that’s enough to get us past the 2°C milestone So whole sections of the global economy have to shrink, aviation of course, automobiles, cement plants, steel mills and so on. Basically the subject is to see what CO2 is really useful.
What interests me as a historian is not so much the question everyone debates: is this transition possible ? In the time allotted for 2°C everyone knows that no — but to show what the speeches on the transition have been used for in the past since the 1970s, who it has been used for and also what it is still used for.
Proponents of green growth have an aberrant vision of techniques and their diffusion times. Entire sections of the global economy must shrink: aviation, automobiles, cement plants, steel mills…
Jean Baptiste Fressoz For example, in my research I was very struck by a speech in 1982, by the head of R & D at Exxon, Edward David. He was invited to a conference by climatologist James Hansen, who subsequently became very media-friendly. This character admits the evidence of climate change produced by the burning of fossil fuels. The question he raises, however, is: « What’s going to go faster ? The climate disaster or the energy transition ? »
He then says that the world is in transition and that it will take place before the disaster. The strangest thing is to see how much the climatologists, the very people who are raising the alarm, are buying this argument.
They say that we will feel the effects of climate change in the year 2000, that it will have economic consequences in 2020 and that it will be catastrophic in 2070. But by then, it is thought, obviously we will have made an energy transition since a transition takes about half a century. This idea becomes a shared obvious fact, when nothing is known about it. We never really did.
Mais n’y a-t-il pas une contradiction avec le rapport Meadows de 1972, dans la mesure où celui-ci prétendait prédire un effondrement des sociétés industrielles si celles-ci poursuivaient la même trajectoire ?
Oui, c’est un moment important dont je n’ai pas parlé là pour l’instant. Ce rapport a eu indirectement une influence considérable sur la question climatique et cela pour au moins deux raisons.
Premièrement, d’un point de vue général, le rapport au club de Rome a pesé sur la manière dont le problème du réchauffement a été défini comme analogue à un problème de ressource. En 1979 lors de la conférence mondiale sur le climat à Genève, le météorologue américain Robert White déclarait : « il faut penser le climat comme une ressource ». Et c’est ce qu’avaient fait les économistes, en particulier William Nordhaus dont ne ne peut surestimer l’importance — néfaste — dans cette histoire.
Economists have thought of climate as a problem of net present valuation of a non-renewable resource. How to optimize GNP under climate constraints ? And they recycled the neo-Malthusian alert rebuttal of the report to the club in Rome into the climate economy. This gave a key place to innovation which until then had effectively parried, in rich countries, the depletion of resources, through efficiency gains, innovations, capacities to draw deeper, to find other deposits, elsewhere, further, etc. The problem is that climate change is a matter of unequal overabundance of carbon.
Secondly, a key institution for IPCC Group III which is called IIASA, for Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis, was created in 1972 with an energy group within it which was seen as the serious response to the Rome club. The idea is to use the same method, use computers and models, to show that the Meadows couple are wrong, that there are trajectories that allow us to make a « smooth transition », a smooth transition outside of fossils.
Now these models are going to provide the basis for those in Group III of the IPCC Nordhaus, moreover, makes his classes at IIASA. The strategy adopted by IIASA is as follows: we use coal to deal with the oil crisis, and then around 2000, we will finally have the nuclear breeder reactor. We have to make a transition, but later, when it is cheaper thanks to the breeder reactor. It is also the Nordhaus strategy and that of the 1995 IPCC Group III report.
Within IIASA works a fairly fascinating Italian scholar: Cesare Marchetti. In this energy transition case, if there is one intellectual to remember, it is he. A great promoter of the hydrogen economy in the 1960s and 1970s, he is in a way the ancestor of Jeremy Rifkin. His idea is that liquid hydrogen is the key to nuclear power becoming important, expanding beyond just the electricity market. In a way, behind his passion for hydrogen, he is the most fanatical defender of the atom.
In the 1970s, an Italian scholar judged that the time horizon of an exit from fossils in 50 years was completely unrealistic and ultimately the great energy of the years 2000-2020 was gas.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz In 1974, he began working for IIASA and began making the history of techniques by watching their broadcast time. And this is where he’s going to start using logistic diffusion curves to know how long an energy transition would take. In doing so, he begins to consider the evolution of energies in relative terms and defines transition as the time it takes for an energy to go from 1 to 50% of an energy mix. If Jimmy Carter talks about transitioning on April 18, 1977, it is because he saw graphics inspired by the work of Marchetti.
More interestingly, Marchetti criticizes the scenario method employed by IIASA. For him, the time horizon of an exit from fossils in 50 years is quite unrealistic and finally the great energy of the years 2000-2020 is gas, — he saw just by the way. And he criticizes the scenario method that gives the illusion that we are driving this colossal thing that is the global energy system, this enormous set of resources, markets, consumers, habits, laws, etc. With scenarios, we see a lot of possible trajectories. Marchetti rejects this view and defends the idea that the future is largely predetermined by history.
Of course, it is far too mechanistic. It was criticized by historian Vaclav Smil because with its diffusion logistics model, coal should have disappeared around the year 2000. So, yes, he crashed slightly. But, while he was very pro-nuclear, his message was to say, unlike his colleagues: « Don’t dream, it takes a lot of time to get out of fossils. » He is disappointed in a way by what history shows: he will never see his dream of a hydrogen society.
What Vaclav Smil does not say and which in my opinion is very worrying is that Marchetti was the most pessimistic prospectivist among the futurologists of the 1970s. To put it another way: the most pessimistic were far too optimistic.
Notes
- See in particular Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste. « The age of » and its problems. Of Material Phasism in the Writing of History », Review of 19th Century History, vol. 64, no. 1, 2022, pp. 173-188; Fressoz, John the Baptist. « The « energy transition », from atomic utopia to climate denial: United States, 1945-1980 », Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporain, vol. 69-2, no. 2, 2022, pp. 114-146. [↩]
- Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste. « For a history of energy and material symbioses », Annales des Mines – Responsibility and environment, vol. 101, no. 1, 2021, pp. 7-11.[↩]
- « The energy transition from atomic utopia to climate denial. United States, 1945-1980 », Modern and Contemporary History Review, 2022, vol. 69, n°2, pp. 114-146.[↩]
- « Malthusianism refers to a reduction in the birth rate, either planned by an authority (a Malthusian policy) or adopted by a population (a Malthusian behavior). […] In a broader sense, « neo-Malthusianism » can refer to approaches to the environment in which emphasis is placed on the limited nature of resources requiring population growth to be limited, in opposition to approaches advocating, for example, changes in lifestyles or a more equitable distribution of resources », see: http://geoconfluences.ens-lyon.fr/glossaire/malthusianisme[↩] ndlr: « a bridge to the future »[↩]