In January 2024, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz published Sans transition. This book offers a material perspective on the world history of energy, with the central aim of explaining the accumulation of energy sources. This highly ambitious project is more than just a synthesis: Fressoz proposes "a new history of energy", breaking with the "phaseist" approaches that have dominated the discipline until now. He also contributes to debates on the future of energy, exposing all the socio-technical complexity of decarbonizing the global economy.

The introduction and chapters 1 and 2 introduce the book's approach and trace the genealogy of what Fressoz calls "material phasism": references to a new age defined by a material. Chapters 3 to 8 are the heart of the demonstration: using dozens of examples from all regions of the world, they expose the material symbioses that have been forged between energies over the centuries. Chapters 9 to 12 and the conclusion trace the genealogy of the notion of "energy transition", and criticize its application to global warming.

Breaking out of phaseism

Fressoz starts from the now consensual observation that there has been no energy transition in the past. He observes that energy historians have sought to construct "transitionist narratives", eliding certain major evolutions in the global energy system because they do not correspond to the idea of successive transitions.

To understand the origins of this tendency to divide history into phases corresponding to specific materials, he looks at the birth of expressions using "the age of", such as "the age of steam", "the age of steel", "the age of coal", "the age of electricity", and so on. They emerged at the end of the 19th century, in the advertising narratives of certain industries eager to associate their production with the idea of progress. In response, specialists - engineers, economists, statisticians, foresters - have repeatedly shown that materials are never obsolete. They always find outlets, in energy production or other sectors.

Despite these constant rebuttals, these expressions endured and gained intellectual legitimacy with the contribution of several scientific disciplines. From 1830 onwards, prehistorians theorized the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, which gave a scientific support to the narrative of steel industries. In the 1970s, foresight researchers began producing quantitative histories of energy, with graphs of energy production in relative shares rather than absolute volumes, giving a visual expression to the idea of phases. Energy history is thus "born of foresight" (p.26), and inherits some of its biases.

From innovation to materials

To construct his "new history of energy", Fressoz departs from the phasist heritage. He thus redefines his object of research in two ways.

First, he moves from a history of innovation to a history of technology. The history of energy has been very focused on innovation, notably under the influence of "transition studies". This domain tends to confuse the emergence of new technologies with the obsolescence of other technologies and materials. Following Edgerton,¹ Fressoz points out that few innovations generalize rapidly and linearly, and few technologies replace others.

This understanding of the history of technology leads him to qualify and even refute certain "political" explanations of energy history. For him, the Fossil capital (Malm 2018) and Carbon democracy (Mitchell 2013) are based on incomplete knowledge of the technologies and materials in use at the time. Mitchell explains the rise of oil by its fluidity, which would have increased the power of capitalists by increasing the capital intensity of energy production and reducing load breaks.² But he compares 20th-century oil technologies with 19th-century coal mining technologies. By the 1930s, coal production had become largely mechanized. It was ground to a powder to circulate in pipes, and fed into power stations located near the mines, producing an energy carrier that was much more fluid than oil.

Second, Fressoz adds a material history to his history of technology. He explains that, due to conventions of economic statistics, some materials may no longer be counted in energy production, even though they are incorporated in the devices used to extract, transform and transport energy. He therefore brings together a large number of statistical sources to reconstruct energy supply chains. He shows that only an analysis of the circulation of materials can accurately describe the social metabolism of a time, which is what the "transition" is about.

These two shifts in the historical gaze make this book unique: it describes machines, infrastructures and material flows, much more than actors, representations or narratives. Many writings in social sciences have focused on the description of the framing of energy issues by different actors. But Fressoz uses the same statistical sources as economists and engineers, from a realistic, quantitative perspective. As such, this book is as much a work of ecological economics as of energy history.

An embedded world

Fressoz knows how to produce engaging, accessible narratives while remaining scientifically rigorous. This talent nevertheless sometimes leads him to under-explicit some of the book's central arguments. I'll try to summarize them below.

Energies are not substituted because their production depends on other energies and materials. In Fressoz's words, these materials are said to be in "symbiosis", or "embedded". These words are chosen to point out that dependencies are rarely unidirectional. For example, on the one hand, certain uses of oil have led to a sharp rise in forest productivity, and on the other, charcoal is widely used to manufacture steel pipes for pipelines.

As a result, an increased production of one energy source, far from competing with others, will stimulate demand for other materials and energies. The arrival of new materials on the market has the same effect. Although the book is mainly devoted to wood, coal, oil and nuclear power, this observation also applies to other energies and economic sectors. In fact, Fressoz also studies many non-energy materials: steel, bricks, cement, concrete, plastics, lumber, etc.

Some materials may be "disembedded", but this leads to the formation of new symbioses. For example, coal and wood are less interdependent today than they were in the mid-20th century. Indeed, open-cast mines became widespread from this period onwards, and they do not require galleries supported by wooden beams. However, timber production continued to increase, finding more lucrative outlets in the paper industry, while coal production became more dependent on the oil used by excavation machinery.

Thus, the difficulty of the "energy transition" lies less in the pace of development of renewable energies than in disembedding material production from fossil fuels. Fressoz highlights that the carbon intensity of steel has stagnated since 2000, while that of cement and plastics has increased, and substitution processes are far from reliable.

The challenge seems all the more daunting as materials become increasingly embedded over time. Technical innovations regularly make it possible to increase energy efficiency in the production of goods and services, but these gains are achieved at the cost of a material and logistical complexification of the global economy. Objects include a growing diversity of materials, and travel ever greater distances in vehicles that run on hydrocarbons.

Finally, Fressoz insists several times that the directions taken by the world economy in recent centuries "do not derive from an irrefragable law of thermodynamics" (p.329). Above all, he argues for a better consideration to the inertia inherent in the technosphere, whose rapid reconfiguration seems impossible in a growing economy, especially under capitalism.

Future research

This book opens up a number of avenues for further research.

First, the book's findings converges with several recent results in ecological economics, which state that the biophysical efficiency of an economy and its size are strongly interlinked (Brockway et al. 2021; Sakai et al. 2019; Palmer 2018). Gains in energy and material efficiency would thus invariably lead to macroeconomic rebound effects, which would increase output and cancel out savings. It could be interesting to try to model the mechanisms described by Fressoz, in order to build more detailed explanations of how rebound effects work.

Second, it seems important to better characterize the socio-economic mechanisms behind the technological dynamics described in the book: what is it that makes the global economy tend towards symbiosis and material complexification? For example, Fressoz describes numerous cases where the production capacities of a material are redirected towards other, more lucrative uses. But taking for granted this tendency to "find outlets" could naturalize the organization of the economy. More broadly, these theses would benefit from a dialogue with research on the growth imperatives in capitalism (Cahen-Fourot 2022; Lawn 2011). Such an extension of Fressoz's theory could prevent accusations of technological determinism, which this book is likely to receive.

Finally, the last chapters show that even in the 1970s, researchers were doubting that an energy transition could happen in 50 years. These findings were taken so seriously in the USA that, by the 1980s, adaptation to climate change was the only option seriously discussed. Fressoz explains how the transition was framed as a technological problem to preserve USA's economic growth, keeping the planet on an unsustainable trajectory. Some forty years have passed since then, and the unsustainability of economic growth has been proven by hundreds of works, for a large number of environmental indicators (Hickel and Kallis 2020; Parrique et al. 2019; Vogel and Hickel 2023). Yet the thousands of mitigation scenarios assessed by the IPCC still presuppose a continuous economic growth (Kuhnenn 2018; Cointe and Pottier 2023), and national and European mitigation scenarios incorporate virtually no structural sufficiency measures (Lage et al. 2023; Zell-Ziegler et al. 2021). How is it that the economy-energy-environment modelling communities continued their focus on technological solutions? This calls for a socio-historical investigation of models and modellers, as empirical work on the subject is still very rare (Cointe and Pottier 2023).

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