The “Energy Transition” is a Myth
The “Energy Transition” is a Myth
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, a French historian of science and technology, challenges our understanding of energy history. In this episode, he unravels the myth of energy transitions, revealing the symbiotic relationships between coal, wood, and oil that have shaped our world in unexpected ways.
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the leader is speaking way too fast and unarticulated
I'm going nuclear. It's going to cost a lot, but in the long run, I will have cheaper energy than everyone else.
Reduced consumption is the only way to reduce environmental/climate effects.
A lot of commentators are missing the point. Transition as used for reduction he argues does not happen. New technology just adds to the total and previous technologies increase as well.
You do say your book is of the history of the transition of powers, and you're right, you're not a forecaster, and I don't believe you're a very good promoter of technology you live in the past
Nate Hagens latest talks of this lack of transition.
While some of the perspectives are really interesting and new to me, there are too many factual errors.
1. Wood – if the biomass is sourced from plantations them the whole cycle is carbon neutral. Any carbon emitted in the burning. Was taken out of the atmosphere in the growing phase. Thus you have to distinguish between source before making the statements made here.
2. Firmed renewables are now cheaper than new coal plants in most countries. And costs continue to drop year on year. Particularly so for batteries. The economics will dictate the outcome.
Thanks for this – I had not heard of Fressoz, but I ought to have, because his book has been widely acclaimed by the Anglosphere (including by the influential Financial Times), and is going into Penguin paperback at the end of 2025 – to get a book into Penguin is quite something. I am surprised Nate Hagens has not interviewed him yet, as they are often coupled together in blogs and articles – they both have the same solution to Greed – EAT LESS. Not a very popular one, but still, it is worth delivering various versions of EAT LESS until the penny drops with all 8 billion humans (might take a while).
"Just have a think" (here on youtube) will give you the ideea that we have a revolution in many directions, concerning energy. Like for example, different ways to make steel with very little coal.
A lot of wood is imported and burned in Europe as biomass, a known scandal.
Let us not be too catastrophic. Revolution already started. Trump and his "drill baby, drill", will slow it down, but…. in his words: "we'll see what happens".
I think what he means is that the old technologies/materials continue to be in great use as the new ones appear and grow. An example was railways sleepers while steam railways flourished. An example now might be paper: the computer came and said 'paperless office' but the use of printing machines and copy paper has reached unparalleled heights: every family into it now.
This is so stupid, it has happened we have only been using electrons for 200 years after millennia of chemical fire. This is going to be as profound as the switch from bronze to iron. The egalitarian production of cheap energy will totally change the global power structures. This idiot is trying to extrapolate a future based on a new power source based on history, we have had chemical fire for all of our species history but now we can turn the sun's fusion energy directly into electricity, without waiting millions of years for the planet to turn dead plants grown from sunlight into oil as an energy source. Solar plus battery storage will win on price not planetary protection against pollution, it is simply more efficient.
What was after wool? Could not understand sorry
Two centuries of transition, what planet was this guy on. There are problems with this fellows argument. To start with he argues that the transition to coal in fact increased the use of wood which is true But it did not increase the use of wood as an energy source. He also convienently ignores The British population quadrupled during the time he talks about. Current demographics are declining unless you want to talk of immigration which is the transfer of users from other arteas.
If you want a better comparison of a transition look to the transition of London.away from coal. when you speak of the 1800s transition to coal, what was driving it certainly was not global climate. In the transition of London a similar sitution to now was the transition that was forced by smog. The same old bs excuses to do nothing was used to continue using coal for heat etc in London until an outside situation forced it. When by modern estimates 12,000 people died, guess what it became policy with the Clean Air act was passed and the problem solved without the claims of the need for continued use of coal. The use of coal in London went down. This will be used as another bs claim by deniers to do nothing.
The claims of this guy is based on comparing entirely differenct circumstances in history, for example what happened to the horse population. Global warming due to CO2 polution will not go away by finding the best excuse to do nothing.
https://youtu.be/VXwGvLj4rak?si=WqbmI6fj8klWujjD
The "Energy Transition lead by western R&D" is a Myth. Let's see what the Chinese will be able to do now that they are leaders in the R&D of non-fossil fuel energy.
22:30. I'm a lumberjack and im ok.
Using less energy means free housing for everyone, since housing costs a third of income on average so free housing means that we can work a third less than we now do. Work is the consumption of energy and materials so less energy and materials will need to be consumed to pay for housing. This is a major part of energy transition. Insulation, geothermal heating and cooling, the elimination of packaging, localizing food, clothes, paper and tool production. Dividing cities with green space into self reliant villages. Social structure change is the start of a real transition. Grinding the earth into money is not going to be a working model anymore, since even 18th century civilization was destroying the ecology. Equality and ecology are inseparable.
With the planet on course for 3.1 0c rise in global temperatures. The sell out of humanity to economic interests, is passing rum.
Fantastic analysis! I work in the White H2 industry and am constantly having to point out that the believers have a fundamental dissonance between their dreams and good intentions and the hard practicalities which make it impossible in the timeframes they talk about!! Carbon neutral by 2030? No, 2050 no as well. If you’re lucky maybe it could be 2075 but the extremists make it impossible!
The situation is hopeless at this point. Limits to Growth suggested many decades ago 3 billion might be sustainable w/ modest life styles indefinitely. We have exceeded all possibility of reclaiming a sustainable future for our children and the tipping points will trip us into a hellscape of crop failures, drought, and fishery collapses. Only reasonable question at this point is to decide what form of civilizational collapse you prefer: MAD MAX TOTAL CHAOS or something like ELYSIUM or Blade Runner 2049. All future scenarios are bad at this point.
A question this raises with me is: what are the consequences of realizing this for climate policies. The outcome that the transition will fail is not going to be acceptable for most politicians. If the current approach to reach a transition does not work then we need an alternative policy to reach our goals.
I think the main conclusion is that stimulating renewable energy production in order to consequently get a transition is going to fail. There may be shifts in how and where those fossil fuels will be used, but it is unlikely to lead to lower fossil fuel consumption. So we need to focus on restricting/discouraging the use of fossil fuels and/or the emissions resulting from fossil fuel use. So no more stimulation of renewable energy; the reduction in fossil fuel consumption will create demand for renewable energy.
At present we already see both approaches being applied. That is interesting as it implies that politicians already (perhaps subconsciously) realize that a policy that depends on a transition taking place as a result of stimulating renewable energy doesn't work. So politicians are forcibly closing coal thermal plants and taxing fossil energy.
This was a great perspective, really correcting some of the narratives we hear all the time. We need a process that entrains symbiotic reductions in energy use, not just "oh hey nuclear will save us" which, of course, Jean-Baptiste did not say. Thank you for this.
There is only one energy like Einstein said & it is EM electric energy that comes from the Earth/Sun/Galaxies double torus/Oort cloud/Fermie cell magnetospehres.
"When you see the trees turning green due to rising CO2 from Earth's increasing magnetic north AXIAL TILT thawing frozen Carbon at the poles you are at the door. Knock he will let you in."
Buy an EM EV & leave the EM lights on to reduce Earth's increasing magnetosphere from crossing the ecliptic to create heaven on Earth & mitigate global warming. Fulfilling God's plan. Jesus.
How is it that France can only build 3 new nuclear reactors over the next decades, but China is building “thousands of nuclear reactors “???
Energy transition is storage transition. Not happening.
1:05:20 Talking about adaptation to climate change and GMO's in agriculture in 1976?
You lost me there. I was alive in 1976 and even thinking about nobody was thinking about GMO's back then… and you try to tell me that GMO's were very fashionable at that time
An energy transition away from fossil hydrocarbons as our primary energy base is inevitable… It just won't occur according to popular narratives and expectations. The economy that preceded the fossil fueled one was solar, and it will largely return to a solar economy, though perhaps with a few embellishments. The sun, and geo thermal are the two primary sources… and fossil hydrocarbons were just a form of latent solar energy… a one-time endowment that we as a species have been drawing upon, which will soon be spent beyond the threshold of economical viability. The fossil fuel age will soon be in terminal decline. So teach your children well! Solutions will depend, perhaps, on how one defines that concept, though certainly there will be mitigations… For those interested in what those might look like, focus your attention on the concept of Overshoot.
Climate alarmism is a manipulation for political leverage.
One of the key difference of an engineer (who actually has to build stuff) and a tinkering scientist is that the engineer always looks at scalability of anything he does: i.e. in that whole “energy transition” there are no engineers left in the West.
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference between them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.”?
lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-
the UK, where I live. We’ve reduced coal’s contribution to electricity from 40% in 2012 to just over 1% in 2023, and the last coal-fired power station was switched off in September 2024. We don’t burn fires in our homes anymore, except for aesthetics like a log burner. This clearly shows that older energy sources can be phased out and replaced.
The claim about rare earth metals is overblown. Most wind turbines don’t even use them, and solar panels are primarily made of silicon. If we set up proper recycling systems, we can reduce the environmental impact even further. And let’s be honest—any impact from renewables is still nowhere near as bad as the devastation caused by burning coal.
Intermittency is definitely an issue, but there are solutions. Smart grids, battery storage, pumped hydro like Coire Glas in Scotland (set to power 3 million homes in five minutes), demand-side management, and baseload nuclear are all part of the mix. Yes, it’s tricky, but it’s not unworkable.
As for the costs and infrastructure challenges, let’s put this in perspective: the costs of doing nothing—extreme weather, climate-related economic disruptions, and societal collapse—are far higher. Building renewable infrastructure is the smart, long-term investment.
Energy density and land use might be valid concerns, but offshore wind shows how to address them. In 2023, wind overtook gas to become the UK’s largest energy source, providing 32% of our electricity. Offshore wind uses no land at all. And while renewables might take up more space overall, what’s the alternative? Stick with fossil fuels and let climate change run rampant?
The entire discussion is an exercise of good cop/bad cop. Anyone that suggests that we as a species should or will need to cut our energy usage and consumption is always the bad cop. Everyone else rushes to be the good cop and explain ways to not cut our energy usage. The Earth will be the actual cop. Its resources will run out and force us to reduce consumption. Humans will not stop at all until we are forced to. Facts.
transvision vamp
It was always an American psyop to get status seeking Europeans to throw away their manufacturing.
No transition? Really? Duh!
Do you know, that the electricity needs of some parts of Germany and Austria, are completely covered by renewable energy? For instance Burgenland or Rhein-Hunsruck? And they are exporting electricity to others country parts?
Germany saved 2023 100 million tons of coal due to wind and solar power, so cutting coal burning by half is a myth? It is ridiculous to deny that progress, once we have large energy storage facilities in place and use electric cars and their V2G capabilities we will get rid of the other 100 million tons of coal, and reduce oil usage by vast amounts.
You have no clue what you are talking about.
JEM BENDELL is one of the few who is getting it right— we are going to collapse and this society like all that became before it will soon be completely gone. Jared Diamond and joseph tainter have written about how cultures destroy themselves, and our culture is next…
we have followed the pattern of every other animal or organism that finds huge new sources of energy , we rapidly increase our consumption and population and then as resournces run out, we collpase and the population declines back to the ecological carrying capacity of the natural world.
there will be pockets of wealth and happiness in small villages that can support their own population and defend what they have… because the population globally will probably go from 10 billion at its peak to 1billion or maybe 500 million at the end of this process… and who knows how long this will take… it's anyone's guess.