We really are in climate trouble now. The intergovernmental climate agreements, for whatever they were worth, are in peril. The target of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees is effectively lost. A more chaotic global order beckons, as Trump lashes out furiously at the international institutions the declining USA so long dominated.
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| A coal miner in Xingtai, China, which now burns coal at 15 times the rate that Britain did in the 19th century Photo: Wikimedia commons |
New rounds of fossil-fuelled capital expansion threaten. AI and other technologies, far from helping, turn the screw of rising energy consumption. And pathetic, shameful politicians assure us that capital will meet the challenge with its “energy transition”.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s wonderful book shows how the whole idea of “energy transition” is deceitful and dangerous – “bad history”, on which we can not base our visions of the future. If we are to find real answers to the climate crisis, we will need better understandings of energy and material dynamics than that.
There are two main parts to Fressoz’s argument. First, he shows how clunky, stagist simplifications, such as “transitions”, have distorted historians’ understanding of changes in technologies and fuel uses. False assumptions about past “energy transitions” are used to support comforting but illusory narratives about how we might move away from fossil fuels.
Second, he explains how, in the 1970s and 80s, a future “energy transition” – a shift of technologies, firstly to nuclear power – became the dominant, false “solution” to global heating, largely at the bidding of the US ruling elite. He interrogates the ideological prejudices that influenced the economists, energy analysts and other scholars who fed this narrative, and shows how it took hold – albeit not unchallenged – in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 1990s.
Energy history
The first part of the argument concerns tonnes of wood, coal, oil and other energy carriers. In the popular imagination, and the work of some careless historians, wood was displaced by coal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and coal by oil in the twentieth. But that’s not what happened.
Far from wood being left behind by coal and oil, in the twentieth century more was consumed than ever, in buildings, railways, crates, barrels, cardboard, paper – and pit props in coal mines. Far from coal being left behind in the “age of oil”, global production and consumption has risen in the twenty-first century to unprecedented heights.
“After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood”, Fressoz writes (page 2). China now burns coal at about 15 times the rate that Britain did at the height of its “age of coal”.
That’s the “More, more and more” of the book’s title. But this is not just about quantity; it is also about the complexity of energy systems in which wood, coal, oil and other materials are used in increasingly interdependent ways.
To underline the point about wood and coal, Fressoz describes the heavy dependence of twentieth-century coal mines on the availability of wood for pit props. “Without abundant wood, Europe would simply have had no coal, and hence little or no steam, little or no steel and few or no railways”, he writes (page 55).” Things have changed, but this is not a transition, he insists: “rather, we should be talking about a symbiotic relationship that intensified during the nineteenth century, followed by a gradual disengagement that really began in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Even now, hundreds of millions of people rely on woody biomass for basic fuel needs; in Africa’s big cities, charcoal is a fuel of choice – two or three times more energy-dense than wood, and transported by oil-fuelled vehicles. “This new energy system is based on a combination of wood, muscle power and oil”, Fressoz writes (page 124).
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| Women workers loading timber for pit props in the UK in 1943. Photo: Imperial War Museum |
Neither does it mean much to talk about a “transition” from coal to oil, Fressoz insists. While the wood-coal symbiosis weakened in the late twentieth century, the coal-oil symbiosis became stronger. More steel from coal-fired furnaces was needed to extract and transport oil, and to build hundreds of millions of oil-consuming cars and other oil-driven machinery. Conversely, mining coal from huge open-cast operations, and transporting it ever-greater distances, needed oil.
If the coal-to-oil “transition” did not happen, then the fashionable idea that it reshaped the relationship between labour movements and political power makes no sense. Fressoz offers an iconoclastic take-down of this false logic.
His bluntest questions are for Timothy Mitchell, who argues in Carbon Democracy: political power in the age of oil (2011) that the workers’ movement’s advance in Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was closely linked to coal miners’ economic power, while oil, extracted with significant capital and minimal labour, largely undermined labour.
Carbon Democracy’s “enthusiastic reception in the academic world testifies to an appetite for materialist explanations of politics and a paradoxical lack of interest in the history of production”, Fressoz writes (page 86).
“Energy transition” as politics
The second part of Fressoz’s argument concerns “energy transition” as a political discourse centred on technological innovation, an ideological cable that binds together governments’ “climate policies” and corporations’ PR fables.
He starts in the USA in the 1920s, when the apparently eccentric technocratic movement urged “transition” from capitalism to a society based on the most efficient use of energy and labour, through the rational deployment of technology.
In the 1940s came the atom bomb, which helped the US achieve unparalleled geopolitical and economic dominance. Its nuclear scientists found themselves in an unusually privileged position. In this milieu, long-term energy forecasting was all the rage – firstly, to convince politicians of the benefits of generous state investment in nuclear power, and, specifically, in breeder reactors that promised to produce new nuclear fuel more rapidly than they burned it.
Fressoz shows how nuclear lobbying sat comfortably with neo-Malthusian ideas about resources, including fossil fuel resources, running out due to population growth. Into this mix of ruling-class ideology, and the science influenced by it, came the issue of climate change:
Because the nuclear lobby was defending a very long-term technological option – the fast-breeder reactor – it produced a dystopian and innovative futurology, focusing not only on the end of fossil fuels, but also, as early as 1953, on global warming (page 154).
In the 1960s and 70s, “energy transition” was brought into wider public discourse, together with a new discursive battering-ram: “energy crisis”. That was a misnomer for the 1973 oil price shock, when social and political ferment in the Middle East and Latin America, culminating in oil company nationalisations and a partial boycott of sales to the USA, forced a shift in the terms of trade in the oil-producing nations’ favour. Fressoz argues that the “energy crisis” had already been invented by the nuclear lobby in the late 1960s: the battles over oil made it taken-for-granted common sense.
Energy system forecasting, too, went mainstream in the 1970s, thanks to the oil price shock and advances in computing. Fressoz shows that the computer models often focused on one technology superceding another, e.g. nuclear over oil, rather than the cumulative expansion of energy supply in the context of capitalist economic growth. He critiques the work of the Italian nuclear physicist Cesare Marchetti, who pointed to energy systems’ inertia, and argued that we could learn more about the future from historical statistics than from models that sketched a transition to nuclear dominance.
Fressoz concludes that, for half a century, energy research has focused too much on technological innovation and too little on the persistence of old technologies:
Even today, the many studies of technological diffusion hinder our understanding of the climate challenge. On the one hand, […] they say nothing about the disappearance of the old, making the assumption – implicit or explicit and in any case unjustified – that this would be symmetrical with the diffusion of the new. On the other hand, […] since energies and materials are in symbiosis as much as in competition, we simply cannot use a technological substitution model to understand their dynamics. Nonetheless, the experts are still comforted by the upturn in the diffusion curve for wind and solar power, as if it were equivalent to the disappearance of fossil fuels. (pages 178-9).
Who cares about the history of research, now we are confronted by climate crisis? We all should, because – as Fressoz shows in a fiercely polemical chapter on the IPCC – the technology-focused futurology summoned up by the “atomic Malthusians” of the 1950s, and written in computer code by the energy forecasters of the 1970s, now walks tall across the pages of the scientific reports on which the international climate talks rely.
By the 1990s, “a neo-Malthusian technological futurology for rich countries had suddenly become a safeguard plan for the entire planet … How was this scientific and political scandal possible?” Fressoz asks (page 180).
In the 1980s, as the climate scientists’ understanding of global heating improved, and fossil fuel burning confirmed as indubitably the main cause, it became clear that energy policy goals had to shift. The move away from fossil fuels had to be faster, not because of a Malthusian exhaustion of resources, but because of the damage done by the global economy’s constant expansion.
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| A meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the 1980s. Photo from the Geneva Environment Network |
Corporate technological “solutions” to the 1970s “energy crisis” were now repurposed for this real climate crisis, Fressoz argues. The Nobel-prize-winning economist William Nordhaus, who sketched out the economic-growth-plus-innovation strategies that heavily influenced the IPCC, has much to answer for.
Fressoz quotes the minutes of the 1979 World Climate Conference in Geneva, at which oil company representatives talked of a long transition away from fossil fuels (to 2100), mainly by way of technological innovation, and many prominent scientists agreed – until the nuclear physicist David Rose warned that Nordhaus’s approach, of postponing the transition until new technologies and new capital made it less painful, was “the perfect recipe for climate disaster” (page 190).
Fressoz describes how scientists, engineers, and social and political researchers sometimes resisted, cut across, worked alongside, or capitulated to the ideological pressure of capital. Or complicated combinations. I hope this account will be read, and thought about, by activists who in Extinction Rebellion’s heyday coined the slogan “listen to the science”, as though “the science” is a deity existing above and independently of the societies we live in and the rapacious capital that dominates them. It is not.
By 1988, when the IPCC’s Working Group III was set up, with a brief to advise governments on mitigating climate change, the aim of those governments, the US’s in particular, “was to regain control over international climate experts, who were quick to brandish emission-reduction targets without weighing up their economic effects” (page 199).
Did they bring the scientists to heel? Yes and no. In the run-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015, scenarios mapping slow progress were superceded by those envisaging rapid decarbonisation, in line with the 1.5 degree target adopted. But, as Fressoz shows, the most powerful governments had meanwhile proceeded in practice with the slowest decarbonisation trajectories.
As the gap between these pathways and reality widened, it was filled with a new technofix – “negative emissions” technologies such as carbon removal, that would help achieve “net zero”.
Without saying so, without discussing it, in the 1980s and 1990s, the industrial countries chose – if that word has any meaning – growth and global warming, and gave in to adaptation. […] Populations were not consulted, especially those who will be and already are the victims (page 211).
Fressoz concludes that the concept of “transition”, which lives on in the current obsession with carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and other false “solutions”, is “the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century. It turns evil into cure, polluting industries into the green industries of the future and innovation into our lifeline.” (page 220).
Past, present and future
To make the change that Fressoz suggests is needed – that is, to move away from fossil fuels by a deep restructuring of the economy – would require “a powerful coalition to impose its will, to make history in the most radical sense”, the economic historian Adam Tooze argues in an earlier review of More, More and More. But, he adds, “formulated this way, it can’t help but seem hopelessly out of reach”.
Maybe stabilising the temperature at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is out of reach, Tooze continues, but to assess the possibilities of the present moment, we need to look at the progress of decarbonisation so far: “it is change on a scale that would have been thought impossible until quite recently”.
Fressoz, by contrast, stresses that what looks like decarbonisation may not be. Historically, symbiosis between fuels took precedence over substitution. “The problem is that such symbiotic relationships still exist between ‘green’ technologies and fossil fuels”, he responded to Tooze in a letter (go via that link and scroll down to the end to see it).
In my view, that symbiosis is reinforced by the narrative of technological transition. And Fressoz further considers that narrative in an article just published in the academic journal Energy Research & Social Science.
He starts with Working Group III’s latest (2022) report, which mentions “technology” 2111 times, “innovation” 1667 times and “hydrogen” 1096 times – as against 232 mentions of “sufficiency”, 29 of “degrowth” (mostly in the references), and three of “prohibition”.
Fressoz proposes that this “technocentric focus” is caused first, because universities and research institutes “almost by design” prioritise novelty (e.g., focusing on hydrogen when sufficiency is more likely to matter for decarbonisation); second, research funding structures and intellectual property frameworks push scientists to work with industry researchers who are constrained by their corporate funders; and third, the way the IPCC itself operates.
He suggests that a milestone for mitigation expertise “will be the recognition that global carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2070 is not simply challenging but technologically impossible”. Accepting the impossibility of net-zero targets is “essential to freeing climate expertise from misplaced optimism and technological illusions”.
To my mind, the problem runs even deeper than this: we need to consider the ways in which the international climate talks, and the IPCC’s work, are not only part of the solution but also part of the problem. This involves questions about political power and its relation to capital.
Fressoz’s work, and his exchange with Tooze, make me think of four crucial research questions. First, we need a real assessment of current decarbonisation progress, as Tooze suggests – but conducted with an approach alert to the danger that e.g. expanding renewable electricity generation, desirable as that is, in the context of headlong economic expansion and capital accumulation may not result in any decarbonisation at all.
Second, we need to ask what a movement to forestall and obstruct that form of expansion could look like, given the global social and political conditions. Third, how can the fight against “technophilia” and technofixes be conducted most effectively? And fourth, what is our assessment of the international climate talks, and the relationship between science and political power around the IPCC?
This in turn begs another question raised in More, More and More: the position of researchers – whether historians and humanities scholars or scientists and engineers – in relation to power and capital. We are not neutral either.
📚 The Earth and us: ways of seeing (a review of The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz)
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