“The term ‘energy transition’ must be dropped”

Interview by Nicolas Gastineau.

In your opinion, this narrative around an ongoing or future energy “transition” is historically false…

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: The mistake is to describe energies as separate entities: coal replaces wood, oil replaces coal, the atom replaces oil, etc. The history of energies doesn’t follow a logic of substitution, as suggested by this idea of a transition, that is to say, a replacement of one by the other. On the contrary, energies are closely intertwined and work in symbiosis.

For example?

The industrial revolution has often been presented as a transition from wood to coal. Except that England in 1900 consumed more wood to hold up the galleries of coal mines than it burned in the 18th century! Coal didn’t replace wood – it stimulated its consumption. Of course, it is used as lumber, but also to produce energy. As of 2022, England still burns four times more wood energy than in the 18th century – mainly to produce electricity. In Europe, this figure was at least three times more in 2020 than in 1900. The world in general burns much more wood today than before the industrial revolution, namely thanks to oil, which allows us to exploit it much more easily.

‘Energies don’t replace each other – they add up and even reinforce each other’

Similarly, to extract oil, you need steel tubes made from coal. In the 2000s, in the US, these tubes alone represented more than all the steel the country consumed in 1900. The statistical observation is clear: we have never consumed as much wood as now, as much coal as now, as much hydraulic or wind power too... All energies are growing, and this is true for poor countries as well as for rich countries. Energies don’t replace each other, they don’t compete on a limited market – they add up and even reinforce each other. And this observation applies to almost all raw materials.

But why is this view of the history of energies so rooted?

This comes from a false view of the history of technology which has been well analysed by the British historian David Edgerton. This view focuses on innovation and confuses techniques with the idea of a technological frontier... If we make this mistake, it’s also because, rather than tell the story of materials, we have often preferred to tell the story of inventions – the kind of story which elevates to the pinnacle the figure of the inventor, who liberates the forces of nature… We recite again and again the story of James Watt and his steam engine, and evacuate that of the workers, the horses, the lighting oil, the scaffolding in the mines, and many other materials… The other difficulty is that we have studied energy as a technology, which therefore follows the law of the S-curve – a model of logistical diffusion rooted in thoughts on techniques, and this was true right up until the third group of experts of the IPCC…

‘Raw materials never become obsolete’

What is this S-curve?

It was originally invented by a biologist, Raymond Pearl, who modelled the growth of flies in a bottle to analyse the evolution of a population: in the beginning, there’s a very slow diffusion, then it suddenly grows very fast, until saturation. In the case of energies – renewables ones, for example – the idea is that we would very slowly equip ourselves with the first tools, using innovators and technological hubs, which would then grow more competitive, until suddenly, these renewables start imposing themselves everywhere and replacing other energies. This may have worked for the cell phone and the telephone booth, but it doesn’t work for energies and materials! I really like the phrase of a forester from the late twenties who said: “Raw materials never become obsolete.”

Unfortunately, the increase in renewables doesn’t imply an equivalent decline in fossil fuels. Renewables, like all other energies, are caught in energetic and material symbioses: solar panels are made with silicon, a metal that must be refined; wind turbines have large steel masts, etc. And more importantly, if renewable electricity powers the same world that depends on plastic, steel, fertilisers, cement – ​​materials that emit CO2 – this only solves part of the problem. Thanks to renewables, we can slow down warming, but certainly not stop it.

‘This vision of transition through innovation has served a real policy of procrastination’

What is the practical consequence of this view, in terms of environmental policies?

This type of argument and this vision of transition through innovation has served a real policy of procrastination. For a long time, the idea defended by the most prominent climate economists was the following: since it will be much more efficient and less costly to make the transition by taking advantage of future innovations, we might as well do nothing while we wait for them. Take the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics, William Nordhaus – one of the most prominent climate economists, and the first to make cost-benefit calculations on what climate change could cost us... In the 1970s, he developed the central argument of this transition-procrastination approach: it’s better to do nothing today because, in the long term, advanced technologies such as the breeder reactor will solve the problem at a much lower cost than the one we would otherwise pay.

And has the same logic continued since then?

In 1982, the head of R&D at Exxon also recognised the indisputable existence of climate change, but since the speed of the disaster then seemed very distant, he took up this same argument of a transition to come. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, American climatologists asserted that the change would be tangible by 2000, with economic consequences in 2020, and catastrophic ones in 2070... A hundred years earlier, this seemed like such a long time period that it seemed obvious to them that humanity would have time to complete its energy transition by then.

‘Since the 1970s, when the term transition appeared, the consumption of all fossils has only increased’

When you think about it, this was an incredibly light approach! These people had no idea what to do to achieve a real energy transition, since, as I said earlier, we have never done one before in history. And in fact, since the 1970s, when the term transition appeared, the consumption of all fossils has only increased. This is why we must now abandon the term and talk about reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, which is more modest, but gives a better idea of ​​the objectives to be achieved and raises the question of the size of the economy.

Does this mean that arguments in favour of innovation in order to decarbonise polluting activities – hydrogen-powered aircraft for example – are ways of delaying action?

I even consider it a form of climate denial. On the subject of the hydrogen plane, we have known since the 1970s that this is extremely difficult to do in practice, because the energy density of liquid hydrogen is three times lower than that of kerosene, and that it must stay at -253° C at eight kilometres of altitude, without there ever being any leakage... This is a textbook case of how the argument for transition through innovation is counterproductive: setting an impossible objective (decarbonising all aviation through innovation), which in the meantime allows us to avoid reducing the volume of aviation or studying new aircraft models that would go slower (which would greatly reduce their consumption).

At the end of September 2023, the French government unveiled a great “environmental plan”. Does the solution lie in large public projects, such as nuclear power, rather than in innovation?

Let’s not forget that this whole plan was initially an electoral manoeuvre to recover part of the green vote. The result is a few announcements and a plea for an “incentivising” and “non-punitive” ecology that doesn’t touch on sensitive issues.

When it comes to the environment, we must remain concrete and be wary of “-isms” or “-tions”. We mustn’t kid ourselves about the power of planning. For twenty years, we were made to believe that it was the market and free initiative that would solve the problem. Now, we have a New Keynesian discourse centred on the state and the trillions of dollars that should be invested to decarbonise the global economy... These two socio-centric forms of solutionism are also illusory and allow us – as with this myth of transition through innovation – to avoid answering the annoying question, which for me is the fundamental question of climate policy: what quantity of material goods should we produce, and how should they be distributed?

Picture © Emmanuelle Marchadour