Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, "More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy" (Harper, 2025)

Sep 23, 2025

In this engaging discussion, historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, renowned for his work on the history of energy and the environmental crisis, challenges conventional narratives of energy transition. He reveals how different energy sources are intertwined, dispelling myths like 'oil saved the whales.' Fressoz critiques the concept of 'transition,' arguing it delays genuine climate action and emphasizes the need for hard choices in reducing carbon intensity. His insights uncover the complexities of our all-consuming relationship with energy and its implications for the future.

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INSIGHT

Energy Systems Grow In Symbiosis

Energy history is not a sequence of replacements but a growing symbiosis of fuels and materials.
Coal, oil, and wood expanded together because each new energy relied on others for extraction and use.

INSIGHT

Technology≠Material Replacement

Technological revolutions (like electricity) transformed usage but did not eliminate older fuels.
Materials and energy flows remained entangled, so oil continued supplying lighting and other needs despite electrification.

ANECDOTE

Whales Weren't Saved By Oil

The cliché that kerosene lamps 'saved the whales' originated with oil industry propaganda.
In reality, whaling rose under oil-era technologies and only conservation and alternatives later reduced catches.

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It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources.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: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Harper, 2025) forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian at the CNRS and the EHESS. He works on the history of the contemporary environmental crisis. He is currently working on the history of energy and material symbioses in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book Recomendations:

1. The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton
2. Fin du monde et petits fours by Édouard Morena
3. Accumuler du béton, tracer des routes

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