The much-vaunted “energy transition” that promised a great leap forward from fossil fuels to renewables along with a cornucopia of technologies is now struggling with history and complexity. A few facts tell the story.
Despite all the talk of “decarbonization,” global coal production reached a record high in 2023. The dirtiest of fuels accounts for 26 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption. And despite all the promises of a green revolution, oil, gas and coal still account for 82 per cent of the global energy mix.
Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions galloped to a new high in 2023. The concentration of carbon dioxide gases in the atmosphere has increased 11.4 per cent in just 20 years.
At the same time, the explosion of AI and data centres is now competing for new sources of electricity from renewables, methane and nuclear energy. That demand, some experts believe, will create an “insatiable demand for power that will exceed the ability of utility providers to expand their capacity fast enough.”
Unless we face such facts and make a dramatic course correction in how we behave and consume energy, we are surrendering human civilization to the vagaries of a prolonged climate crisis and the prospect of collapse. Given that a technical fix isn’t going to lower emissions on its own, isn’t it time to ask what kind of political, behavioural, demographic and economic transitions societies must consider to prepare for both climate chaos and limits to energy consumption?
Some clear-eyed experts are urging we rethink our response to climate change or face calamity.
One is French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, who is not surprised by our seeming inability to replace and subtract fossil fuels with renewables that require fossil fuels for their construction.
‘The wrong way to frame it’
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
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
