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About the book:
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.

 

The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.

 

This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More (Penguin Books) forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

 

Discussion:

The author Jean-Baptiste Fressoz will be discussing his book and ideas with Elizabeth Chatterjee, Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the University of Chicago, and Ashwini K Swain, Fellow, SFC.

 

More about the speakers:

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science, technology and the environment, a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and a professor at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées. He is the author of several books : Happy Apocalypse. A History of Technological Risk, Verso, 2024 ; The Shock of the Anthropocene, 2016 (with C. Bonneuil) ; Chaos in the Heavens verso 2020 (with F. Locher). More and more and more. An All Consuming History of Energy, Penguin, 2024. This latest book proposes a new history of energy based on the notion of ‘energy symbiosis’, which is more apt to describe the past – and perhaps the future – than the all-too-common notion of ‘energy transition’. He also writes a monthly column for the newspaper Le Monde.

 

Elizabeth Chatterjee is an assistant professor of environmental history at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the history of energy and infrastructure in South Asia from the late colonial period to the present. She is currently completing her first scholarly book, Late Acceleration: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change. Published in venues including the American Historical Review and Past & Present, her articles cover a range of topics in environmental history, including India’s coal dependence, the disappointments of early solar technology, and dams that cause earthquakes.

 

The event will be held over Zoom. Register here.