The Energy Transition Myth (w/ Jean-Baptiste Fressoz)

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This is an episode that fundamentally challenges the way I've thought about tackling climate change. I've always understood the history of energy as a history of transition. We went from burning a lot of wood to then burning a lot of coal, then moving from coal to mostly oil, then oil plus gas. But our guest today, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, says that thinking is totally wrong. Instead of undergoing a series of energy transitions, where one form of energy largely replaces the other, history shows much more addition to substraction. The result: we keep burning and consuming more and more and more of everything. He argues the very idea of transition is a lie.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology. In his new book, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, he argues not that an energy transition is impossible, but that we simply have never seen anything like it before. He notes that the relationship between different forms of energy is based on symbiosis, not competition, and as. a result greater consumption of all energy has just led to more of everything being used. So how did the idea of the energy transition take hold? Why is it still a salient concept in public energy discourse today? Jean-Baptiste explains. We also discuss how the fossil fuel industry has taken hold of this concept and used it to slow down action on climate change.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of The Happy Apocalypse and The Shock of the Anthropocene. Read More and More and More.

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