Energy symbiosis, not transition: A revealing take on climate challenges

Jean Baptiste-Fressoz's book exposes how governments and corporations embrace green rhetoric while reinforcing the carbon economy

More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy

Author:  Jean Baptiste-Fressoz

Publisher: Allen Lane

Pages:  336

Price:  Rs 2,331

  Jean Baptiste-Fressoz has written one of the most important books on the challenge of global climate change, laying bare the self-serving and utterly cynical deflection of the climate discourse towards artfully calculated obfuscation and conjuring up a future of abundance decoupled from fossil fuel-based energy. This is a damning expose of governments and corporations, in particular the powerful fossil fuel conglomerates, from the developed, industrialised world that have adopted the rhetoric of a green future while reinforcing the entrenched underpinnings of the carbon economy. In a brief review it is impossible to capture the wealth of compelling data and historical perspective that the author deploys to support his analysis and conclusions but one will try to present his key findings.

 

The author rejects the notion of “energy transition”, which posits a historical, stage-by-stage shift from wood to coal to oil and natural gas, each more efficient and “cleaner” than the previous main source of energy. The inevitability of the next stage —a non-fossil future based on renewable and clean sources of energy—is presented as the promise of environmentally sustainable development. The book demonstrates the phenomenon of “energy symbiosis” rather than energy transition, pointing out that historically, at each stage the consumption of the fuel category of the previous stage has increased together with the newer fuel source.

 

Thus, in the early years of the oil boom, it was wooden derricks and barrels that were used before steel came in. The volume of timber multiplied several times more than during the age when it was the main fuel source. In 2010, figures showed that in the past three decades, “gas consumption would triple, coal consumption would double and oil consumption would increase by 60 per cent.” By 2010, China alone was burning as much coal as the entire world in 1980.

 

In the past couple of decades, renewal power capacity has dramatically increased but in achieving this, so has the use of steel, of concrete and a slew of materials, all of them using fossil fuels in the production of solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear reactors. The production of electric vehicles may be expanding rapidly but the electricity they consume is coming mainly from burning fossil fuels and that certainly is the case in China. The final product may be consuming clean electric power, but the supply chain leading to it may be overwhelmingly carbon-based. As the author points out, “This symbiosis is the foundation of the entire material dynamic of the 20th century. Most materials — wood, agricultural products, metals — are products extracted and transported using steel machines, manufactured using coal and powered by oil.” Decarbonisation of energy, even if it were possible in a shorter time-frame, does not translate into decarbonisation of material processing and production. The notion of energy transition obscures this uncomfortable reality.

 

The author assails what he calls, “dubious futurology” which seeks to “postpone the climate constraint into the future and into technological progress.” This is a ploy adopted by the corporate world, in particular the fossil fuel industry, to prevent consideration of the drastic action that is required to deal with the climate emergency and which would impact their profit margins. “It is always easy to imagine major changes when the time horizon is distant,” he writes. And that is precisely the problem we are facing with the goal of net-zero by 2050. The energy transition away from fossil fuels, which is supposed to get us there, is really a delaying tactic — and it is succeeding.

 

The spread of electricity use is rightly welcomed as a key index of development. And renewable-based power and nuclear power are promoted as carbon-free sources of electricity. But they are not sufficient. They should be promoted as they already are by India. In doing so, it is important to appreciate the compelling reality posed by the author, that our world “whose very materiality is and will be, for a long time to come, based on carbon.”

 

What emerges from the searching analysis presented by the book is a certain collective blindness that afflicts the world when dealing with the climate crisis. In this, the developing countries have been as complicit as the advanced industrialised countries, though the former will be more impacted than the latter. They have tacitly accepted the terms of the climate discourse set by the advanced countries rather than  fashioning  their own narrative based on the true nature of the challenge we all confront. I must confess that as a one-time climate negotiator, I wish I had the benefit of the sharp perspective provided by this book rather than having to tilt at the wind-mills set up to draw the developing world into pathways that lead to unproductive dead-ends.

 

This book is a must-read for policymakers in India and in other key developing countries. It should also lead to a re-think of our own development strategies. One is more convinced than ever that India must pioneer a development pathway that does not mimic the Western world and China. Its success in doing so will itself be a significant contribution to dealing with the global climate crisis. 

 

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary and a former chief negotiator for Climate Change (2007-10)