Consuming History of Energy
* Book: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.
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Discussion
Andrew Nikiforuk:
French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz ... is not surprised by our seeming inability to replace and subtract fossil fuels with renewables that require fossil fuels for their construction.
A green energy transition on the scale promised by global power brokers simply won’t happen, Fressoz says in his new book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. In fact, he refuses to endorse the term green energy transition, calling the phrase a delusion and “a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use.”
In two recent interviews, one with nuclear advocate Chris Keefer on the podcast Decouple and another published on the site Resilience, Fressoz laid out his reasoning as well as our startling history of energy consumption.
The problem, explains Fressoz, is that humans don’t neatly shift from one energy source to another like marionettes. Nor do they march in lockstep from biomass to coal to oil to renewables like some robot army.
Evolving high-energy societies incorporate their old energy addictions into new ones to solve more problems. As a result, they consume more energy of any kind.
Transition is just “the wrong way to frame it,” says Fressoz. He has a different phrase to describe our dynamic energy state. He calls it “symbiotic expansion.”
It’s the basic idea that technological society exploits different forms of energy to accelerate flows of material goods. In the process, society adds more energy sources than it ever subtracts.
This history suggests that adopting material- and energy-intensive technologies such as carbon capture and storage or electric vehicles to battle climate change won’t achieve net-zero carbon by 2050, and that only a radical reduction in energy and material consumption might make a difference.
Most schoolchildren and even the odd university student have heard the story about how the growing use of coal lowered demand of wood (biomass) for heat and thereby saved the forests. Indeed, biomass provided 98 per cent of energy for humans before 1800, but the tale is profoundly incomplete.
The advent of coal-fed furnaces and coal-powered steam engines did not conserve forests, says Fressoz. It merely repositioned the consumption of wood in the economy.
As the demand for coal increased, nations built more coal mines. And all of these new mines needed timbers to support the roofs and walls from caving in. Here’s a stunning fact: Fressoz calculates that coal mines actually used more timber for roof support in the 19th century than England burned in the 18th century.
“Forget the story about coal substituting wood. It didn’t happen that way.”
Now add the impact of steam-powered trains and the need for more tracks, which resulted in the consumption of 20 million cubic metres of wood for railway ties in the United States. That equalled 10 per cent of U.S. wood production in the 1800s.
“It is an entanglement of coal and wood that made the industrial revolution.”
Overall wood energy has fallen from 11 per cent of the world’s primary energy mix in 1960 to four per cent today. But consumption of wood has now reached an all-time global high (four billion cubic metres in 2022) thanks to chainsaws and feller-bunchers powered by oil.
“Raw materials and energy don’t go in and out fashion,” notes Fressoz.
The same can be said for oil. It did not replace coal but found new uses for it. In fact, every tonne of oil required 2.5 tonnes of coal to be extracted. The coal helped to make steel for pipes, trucks and wells needed for oil extraction.
“Instead of a transition we have a story of symbiotic expansion of energies.”
Meanwhile the oil industry likes to tell the story that its kerosene products helped to save the whales from extermination by eliminating the demand for whale oil for illumination.
But petroleum didn’t suppress the whale trade at all. It found new uses for whales (from corsets to lubricants) and actually accelerated the slaughter of whales thanks to fossil-fuel-powered ships that could catch more and larger whales more rapidly. As Fressoz notes, three times more whales were slaughtered in the 20th century than in the 19th century.
“The energy transition is a slogan but not a scientific concept,” explains Fressoz. “It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.”"
(https://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv21n02page4.html)
Others who echo Fressoz
Andrew Nikiforuk:
"Fressoz is not the first to make the dramatic assessment that faith in a green energy transition is misplaced because it ignores the complexity of the energy use (and its connections to everything) as well as the difficulty of designing a simpler civilization that uses fundamentally less energy.
The Australian geologist and mining engineer Simon Michaux has added up the sheer volume of metals and minerals needed to replace approximately 46,000 fossil-fuel-based power stations with nearly 800,000 renewable ones. His conclusion: there will be severe material shortages and bottlenecks to the extent that “the green transition will not work.” He proposes a total rethink.
Vaclav Smil, the noted energy ecologist, has also raised concerns about the sheer material intensity of renewables and the unsustainable demand for more materials.
The U.S. sociologist Richard York stated in a 2018 paper that the term “energy transition” is entirely misleading and counterproductive because history shows only a constant addition of energy sources over time.
“It is entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources.”
York warned that the production of more renewable energy sources, due to their material intensity and poor energy density, would merely encourage more growth in energy consumption.
Nate Hagens, one of the world’s leading energy critics, has made similar observations in his Great Simplification podcast and presentations.
He notes that solar and wind are indeed growing rapidly and now make up 2.5 per cent of total energy consumption. The figure is probably closer to 5.6 per cent, according to the Energy Institute. But global fossil fuel production has grown by 21 per cent in the last 15 years.
“So far there has not been a green revolution, only a green addition.”
To further illustrate the point, Hagens notes that the use of biomass (animal dung and plants) is now greater today than it was in 1850 before petroleum. In fact, consumption of biomass has doubled since 1800. The conversion of wood matter into pellets (electricity generation) and packaging explains the dismal trend.
In fact, approximately six per cent of B.C.’s electricity on any given day comes from the burning of biomass. That’s more than wind or fossil fuels combined."
(https://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv21n02page4.html)
Statistics
Andrew Nikiforuk:
"The late geologist Peter Haff made similar points but from a different perspective. He urged us to contemplate our entrapment within a “technosphere” of our own construction that acts as a parasite on the biosphere.
Haff explains that humans have used fossil fuels to construct a technological world dependent on a constant and growing supply of energy that appropriates rivers of materials to build complexity. Haff describes the technosphere as a largely autonomous phenomenon of which humans are mere components.
As a result, Haff doesn’t think the technosphere will tolerate a subtraction of energy sources.
“Whatever the future of particular renewable energy sources, the driving forces are already in place for transition to rates of energy consumption that are larger than, and perhaps much larger than, the current power level of fossil fuel use.”
"But he warns a dramatic change is coming whether it is planned or not.
“I would qualify Fressoz’s statement,” he told me, offering these bold-faced revisions: “An energy transition is unlikely to happen voluntarily, but an energy transition will most certainly happen, as fossil fuels are finite.”
He notes that industry cannot maintain current oil extraction rates for more than a decade due to depletion rates, and the increasing energy costs of producing poorer and poorer quality resources such as bitumen and fracked oil.
Global economies have been consuming more fossil fuels than they have discovered for decades, adds Hughes. In 2023, 10 barrels of oil and gas were consumed for every new barrel discovered, calculates the energy researcher."
(https://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv21n02page4.html)
Video
URL = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-7MPU109fY
"The vision of a carbon-free, net-zero society is often framed around the promise of transitioning away from fossil fuels. But what can we learn from past “energy transitions” that might inform how feasible – or unrealistic – this vision actually is? Today, Nate is joined by energy and technology historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz for a lesson on the importance of understanding the historical trajectory of energy use for realistically navigating the unprecedented challenges humanity faces today – including the dominant narrative of a modern-day “energy transition.” Jean-Baptiste explores the interdependent relationship between different energy sources—from wood to coal to oil—and reveals how this history shapes our hopes for renewables and nuclear energy moving forward. How can examining the history of energy and material use help us fully grasp the scale at which human societies actually consume them? What role do our current economic systems play in driving an ever-growing demand for new energy sources? In the history of our species, have we ever fully transitioned off of one energy source and replaced it with another – and what does this imply for the hope of a fossil-free future?"