The “Energy Transition” Delusion

Growthism and Ecological OvershootTechnological Fundamentalism

Mar 18

Written By Population Balance

There is no energy transition - only ongoing and symbiotic energy addition. Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, author of More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, joins us. Highlights include:

How the symbiotic relationships between wood, coal, and oil have led to increased use of all of them;
Why decoupling economic growth from energy and materials use is a delusional myth;
How the energy transition narrative evolved and why it's an "intellectual scandal" used to delay climate action through faith in techno-driven growth;
How the IPCC’s focus on economic growth drives the energy transition narrative, downplays degrowth and sufficiency, and relies on unproven techno-fixes, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS);
How safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital, and how criticisms and objections around technological risks were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:00:00):
We should not understand the history of energy as a history of competition, as if energy were fighting on the market. In fact, really we have to think about energy and materials together and how they grow together, that the energies are completely intertwined and symbiotically linked. So how come that this very simple idea of energy transition, you know shifting from one energy system to another, has become so natural that everybody is talking about energy transition. You know, we've got a problem with climate change. We need to decarbonize the world by 2050. No problem. We'll be doing an energy transition, which is ridiculous when you think about it in a serious way, that really kind of I think intellectual scandal of a very strange futurology derived from atomic scientists and applied then to the climate crisis. It's a fantastic rhetorical device to do nothing.
Alan Ware (00:00:48):
That was today's guest, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, an historian of science and technology. In this episode of OVERSHOOT, Jean-Baptiste exposes the delusion of energy transition and how there never has been nor will be an energy transition.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:12):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:01:36):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of a shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
(00:02:16):
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is an historian of science and technology previously based at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the French National Center for Scientific Research. He's the author of Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk, co-author of the Shock of the Anthropocene, and co-author of Chaos in the Heavens. His latest book, More and More and More: An All-Consuming Hisotry of Energy has received several prizes in France and Britain. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:02:51):
Hello Jean-Baptiste. Welcome to OVERSHOOT. It is really lovely to have you here.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:02:57):
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj (00:02:57):
And we're grateful to especially have you on the podcast as you're one of the very few people working on the history of science, energy, and technology, and challenging the pervasive narrative that there is such a thing as an energy transition. We at Population Balance look at how the increasing scale of population and consumption demands an ever increasing use of materials and energy, which then drives depletion, pollution, and species extinction among a myriad of issues. And we have appreciated your evidence-based skepticism that technology can create a smooth energy transition that can maintain business as usual for the growth-based industrial capitalism. So thank you once again for this much needed work. Let's start with your most recent book, More and More and More: An All Consuming History of Energy. In recent decades, renewable energy advocates have argued that the world needs to have what's called an energy transition away from polluting fossil fuels.
(00:04:03):
But your work shows that the past so-called major energy transitions from wood to coal and then from coal to oil and natural gas were not transitions in which the newer energy source replaced the old one. Instead, the newer energy source and older energy source were both used to symbiotically increase the use of both. So we'd like to start by looking at wood, humanity's oldest energy source and one that most of us might think the world is now using less and less. But as you note, far from coal and oil replacing wood use, there has been a symbiotic increase in all energy source uses. So the total wood consumption is greater than ever before. Could you start by providing an overview of the symbiotic relationship between wood and coal throughout history?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:04:58):
Yes. Basically, the idea that wood is an old fashioned energy is clearly wrong. I mean, we are using more and more wood even just to burn it. Globally we have never burned as much wood as nowadays, even in the rich countries. It is not only the energy of the poor. It's also the energy of the rich. Wood energy, for instance, represents twice as much as nuclear energy nowadays. So we are obsessed with the new, but in fact, all sources of energy are extremely important. In the rich countries, in the US, in Europe, wood energy still is the biggest renewable energy. I mean renewable, I should put quotes around renewable because the way it is extracted is clearly not renewable. But even in the rich country, wood energy has expanded a lot in the 20th century. Wood is increasing thanks to fossil fuels. We should not understand the history of energy as a history of competition, as if energies were fighting on the market, which is the classic way of thinking upon the dynamics of energy systems.
(00:05:57):
In fact, when you look in a global way, energies expand symbiotically. I mean, why coal for instance, increased the consumption of wood, for a very obvious reason. In the 19th century and until the 1960s to extract coal, you needed an enormous amount of wood in the form of pit props. Timber mining, I mean we're talking about serious quantities of wood. Just to give you an example, Britain in the 20th century consumed more wood in the form of timber mining than it burned in the 18th century. So just to produce energy, industrial Britain used more wood than pre-industrial Britain. And on top of that, all sorts of technologies that we tend to assimilate with coal and iron like the railroad for instance, in fact depended on enormous amounts of wood. I mean if you take the railroads it consumes much more wood than iron, for instance, because of the railroad ties that had to be changed every five or six years.
(00:07:00):
And then when you've got an expansion of population, of urbanization, you need more wood for construction obviously. And this expansion is fueled by coal In the 19th century. Without wood you would've had very little coal, very little steam, very little steel, no railroads. So wood remained absolutely central in the energy system of 20th century industrialized countries. So that's why really we have to think about energy and materials together and how they grow together. And I mean just to be perfectly clear wood also expands for energy purposes. I mean there is one spectacular case in Britain nowadays, which is the Drax power plant. It was built in the 1970s to burn local coal. And around the year 2000 it was converted to biomass. But biomass is a code name for wood - wood which is imported from Canada and the US, and which is burned in absolutely massive quantities with the strange result that nowadays Britain consume four times more wood just to produce this electricity in this power plant than it had used in the 18th century. So with the great result that after two centuries of energy transitions, Britain has never used so much wood. And the tragic thing is all this wood creates only 1.5% of its energy. So I think it's a very good example of the impossibility of having the same kind of economy that was built with the fossil fuels and to have the same kind of economy now with organic energies, with wood or biomass. The quantities are not there.
Nandita Bajaj (00:08:35):
And then you add oil to the mix beginning in the late 1800's and wood use continues to increase. What are some of the symbiotic relationships between wood and oil that help make that happen?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:08:49):
Well, there are many, many symbiotic effects here. I mean, first of all, obviously oil has completely revolutionized forestry. Just think about chainsaws, trucks, forestry roads. Everything is changed thanks to oil. So wood is getting cheaper and cheaper thanks to oil, because you need less manpower to extract wood and you can transport wood easily. So it increased the economic resource. It reduces the forest, but it increases the economic resource. And then with oil and coal, you cannot really separate the two, actually. You've got a growing economy that produces more and more goods. Those goods need to be packaged. So you've got an expansion of the paper industry. And paper industry is of course an enormous consumer of wood and also of wood energy because part of the energy consumed in the paper industry relies on wood, black liquors is the name. So it's quite interesting. You've got a symbiotic effect at a far distance.
(00:09:47):
You've got more coal, more oil, and therefore more wood energy in the paper industry, for instance. And once again here, just to look at the quantities. I mean, a paper mill nowadays needs to be competitive at least 1 million tons of wood per year. I mean if you look at 18th century figures, it's just incredible numbers. It's like the biggest cities at the time would consume such a quantity of wood. I mean basically nowadays, according to the global number of the World Food Organization, we consume 4 billion tons of wood per year. Half of it is burned and the other half is other uses, construction, packaging being the two biggest uses. But as I said already, I mean the use of wood for construction, the use of wood for packaging is clearly connected to the history of fossil fuels. I mean, if you've got more and more construction, it's because you've got cars. And so you build more houses and you've got urban expansion. And that of course requires wood everywhere, especially in America where many houses are made out of wood. But even in Europe where there is much more of course houses built out of cement, wood is also increasing because of construction.
Nandita Bajaj (00:10:50):
And we hardly ever think about that. And when we're speaking about emissions, we don't think about construction the way we talk about fossil fueled car use or aviation. But if you count construction in terms of emissions, it would be a pretty large number, wouldn't it?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:11:07):
Very, very large number. Depending on the estimations, you can find like 30% of emission coming out of construction. And the use of building of course, a very big chunk. And the sad thing is in this respect, there is no tendency to decarbonization for a very simple reason, is that globally construction materials that we're using are more and more carbon intensive. If you look at the massive trend in urbanization since the 1960s, it's a shift on materials like earth or bamboo actually, which was a very important construction material in the tropical world, to concrete. So it's more carbon intensive, or a shift to aluminum, which is also very carbon intensive. So I mean in this particular sector, there is no talk about energy transition. Construction materials are more and more rooted in fossil fuels.
(00:11:57):
And another example is the increase of charcoal in the poor world. This is really a massive transformation of the energy system starting from the 1960s. It is the first time in the history of humanity that you've got large megalopolises, like cities that have more than 10 million inhabitants, that are using wood to cook. This is the first time in the history. If you look at the case of Kinshasa, for instance, in Congo, according to experts, they burn each year, 2.3 million tons of charcoal. So this number seems very abstract, but you just have to realize that in the 19th century, the city that burned the most charcoal at that time in the 19th century was Paris because London was already using more coal. And Paris at that time was burning only a hundred thousand tons of charcoal. So one large city in the poor world now consumes more wood than a large European country in the 19th century. And of course this expansion of charcoal in the poor world is linked to trucks because charcoal is transported on trucks, whereas transporting wood is more complicated. Charcoal is a way to transport wood energy in an efficient way. There are many other examples, but of course with oil and trucks, everything becomes cheaper, and wood becomes cheaper because transportation gets cheaper. And so you use more of it basically.
Alan Ware (00:13:14):
Right. The symbiosis as you've mentioned between coal, oil, and increasing the amount of wood consumption. And I recently read a few months ago, John Perlin's book, A Forest Journey, which you probably are familiar with just showing how civilization has been so dependent on wood from the beginning of Gilgamesh and the Sumerians denuding their hillsides to Cyprus, to Rome, taking gall the south of France and denuding that for pottery and gold and silver, glass, salt, bricks, all of that required wood plus the navies. So you're just seeing throughout history this constant depletion and deforestation that civilization has done.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:13:54):
But here, I mean my book differs from this narrative, I think because in fact, the main reason for deforestation is agriculture. The idea that we destroy forest because of wood energy is clearly wrong because if you need wood energy, you protect forests because you want to have sustainable production of high furnaces. For instance, in Europe in the 18th century, the reason why forests were protected where you would produce iron still. And the other thing is, I mean very important I think to remember it's thanks to fossil fuels, we can also have a much, much more intensive forestry. I mean, one key figure I think that you have to have in mind is that 30% of wood is produced on only 3% of forest plantation. When I said there was a revolution in forestry, there is also a revolution in the yield of forestry. And nowadays you can produce plantations in Brazil or in China or in Spain. They can produce 40 cubic meters of wood per year per hectare. Forestry in the 19th century Europe would be only two to three cubic meters of wood per year per hectare. This transformation, this enormous increase in productivity is clearly connected to fossil fuels because you need fertilizers, you need herbicides, pesticides, it's intensive agriculture basically.
Nandita Bajaj (00:15:14):
And that in turn is related to again, increase in demand for food. When you see if 50% of the habitable land is being used for agriculture, you can see why you need to keep clearing land, to keep meeting the demands of increasing food.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:15:30):
That's something which was noticed in the late 18th century, that the big advantage of coal was not to protect the forest, but on the contrary is we can get rid of the forest, because we've got coal. So we can get rid of the forest and put coal and more agricultural production instead of forest. The classic narrative is we were running out of wood, so the British people started to use coal instead of wood. It doesn't work really that way. It's more like with agriculture, forests was reduced and Britain could import actually wood from elsewhere.
Alan Ware (00:16:00):
Now, as you make clear in the book, although coal as a relative share of energy sources is declining in absolute terms, we've never burned more. And I looked at the International Energy Agency data and showed global coal use is up over 80% since the year 2000, which seemed amazing to me. So in spite of coal burning being a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, of course, what do you think explains that continued growth of coal use?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:16:26):
I mean, the enormous expansion of coals since the 1980s is linked to the development of Asia, first and foremost. In China, coal consumption has been multiplied by tens in the 1980s through its major transformation. On the other hand, coal consumption has also increased between 1980 to 2010 in the US for instance. So coal is not the energy of development. It was also the energy of the increase of consumerism in the United States, and now it has decreased mainly thanks to electricity produced with gas. The big issue here I think is to realize that coal is used of course for electricity mainly, but not only. And if in the case of electricity, you can imagine a kind of transition, I think because we know how to produce electricity in a different way. The premise is for steelmaking, here coal is going to be required for a very, very long time. It's more the industrial use of coal which are going to be difficult to really transform.
Alan Ware (00:17:24):
Yeah, you had a fascinating fact that just the US oil industry used more steel in the 21st century than all of the US used in the early 1900s in steel.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:17:33):
Well, that's the symbiosis between coal and oil, which is very obvious. It's not like a discovery of my part. It's completely obvious. When you read any engineer, any expert, they know that very well. Oil is an enormous consumer of steel. I mean all the infrastructure of oil is dependent on steel and steel is mainly produced with coal, 75% of steel is made out of coal, 1 billion tons in total. And of course, I mean oil from the extraction to its burning is dependent on steel. So oil has been a very big driver of the steel industry and therefore the coal industry as well.
Alan Ware (00:18:05):
Right. And how many tons of coal for each car produced?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:18:07):
I mean, it depends where and when. But the funny figure is that in the 1930s Ford company would use seven tons of coal to produce a car because of course you need electricity, you need steel, so you need the coal. And it is more or less the amount of the same weight in oil that this car would use during its lifetime. So when you look at a car, you have to imagine it's a coal technology, not only an oil technology, but nowadays there has been technological progress. So it has evolved. But in China, according to a lifecycle assessment that I've read, it's around three tons of coal to produce a car. And I guess in the US or Europe, it's not so much lower. It's lower because electricity is less carbon and less coal-based. But I mean still, when you look at a car, the main ingredient in a car remains coal. The first ingredient is coal. The second is iron ore. It's not only the car. It's all the infrastructure that the car needs. I mean the roads, all this is very carbon intensive, coal intensive because you need cement, you need steel. And with car of course you got urbanization, construction so more steel, more concrete, more coal.
Alan Ware (00:19:12):
Yeah. We had interviewed Robert Jensen who wrote a book called An Inconvenient Apocalypse that was more of a general overview of the human predicament. And they mentioned in there that we, like all life, we seek out energy rich carbon. We started with soil, the forest, coal, oil, natural gas. So we're symbiotically adding on all these sources of carbon over time. And there are a few exceptions to that pattern.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:19:39):
I don't know if it's a law of nature, but it's clearly a law of the economic system as it is today. Also want to point out that about coal, it's probable that in the next decade it'll decrease for every simple reason, which is solar panels and solar panels in China. China consumes lots of coal globally, and the majority is for electricity production. And here you can install solar panel. It does not make coal disappear. It's more complicated than that because you need to solve the problem of intermittency in renewables, but it helps to decrease the amount of coal that you burn. So sometime in this decade or the early 2030s, we will be passing peak coal, which is rather good news, but it's far, far, far from sufficient for our climate objectives
Nandita Bajaj (00:20:25):
As you've documented so well, the reality of energy use is not a transition from older to newer energy sources, but a symbiotic addition over time where the new is simply added to the old and both continue growing in their level of use. Despite this energy reality of symbiotic addition, the idea of an energy transition has taken hold of the public imagination for decades now. How did this come to be?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:20:53):
Okay, it's a long story, which of course is intriguing when you look at the figures, when you understand the fact that the energies are completely intertwined and sympathetically linked. How come that this very simple idea of energy transition, shifting from one energy system to another has become so natural that everybody is talking about energy transition. We've got a problem with climate change. We need to decarbonize the world by 2050, no problem. We'll be doing an energy transition, which is ridiculous when you think about it in a serious way. The short story, it's really from after the Second World War and the idea of atomic age and nuclear scientists that push this idea of energy transition. And just to be precise, the first appearance of the word energy transition comes from nuclear physics changing the status of an electron around its nucleus. So it's really a term of nuclear physics.
(00:21:44):
And then it was transposed to energy futurology by nuclear scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. But interestingly enough, nuclear scientists, when they were talking about an energy transition, they didn't see it coming soon. It was a really long term forecast, and there will be an energy transition for one simple reason is that fossil fuels, all fossil fuels will become scarcer and scarcer. So you would have to produce electricity and energy in general with atomic energy. But the transition out of fossil fuels at a global scale was linked to the exhaustion of both oil, coal, and gas. And that would take place in the far away future in three or four centuries because there is a tremendous amount of coal in the world, not really oil, which is more limited, but coal there is enormous quantities and enormous reserves. So the energy transition was really something in a far away future, and it was driven by the fact that it would be more and more expensive to extract it because you would have to go deeper and so on and so forth.
(00:22:46):
The strange phenomena that took place was that this very, very weird futurology was transferred to the climate crisis. When I say this strange futurology, because most of the experts in the 1950s or sixties, they didn't think about energy in terms of transition. Nobody would talk about energy transition before the 1970s actually, except the nuclear scientists. I mean experts would be perfectly clear that oil was not replacing coal. It's completely trivial when you think about it. I mean, there is nothing new in this remark. And if you read conservationists' literature in the 1950s, the question they ask would be, will there be coal in the US in three centuries? It shows that they did not think about the future of energy as something completely different from the present. They looked at energy, at future energy, as an expanded present, as a bigger present, not as a radically different present.
(00:23:39):
And it's really in the 1970s that the idea of energy transition coming from nuclear energy really took root in the media and in expertise. And the reason is the energy crisis. I think we have forgotten the intensity of the debate of the anxiety about the exhaustion of oil in the 1970s. I mean, you just have to look at the public discourse of Jimmy Carter, a US President, is the one talking about you know it looks really like degrowth thinking. We have to really deeply change our society. We are not becoming happier because we pile up goods. It doesn't work like that. He has very powerful discourses, which didn't make him popular, unfortunately, but you know interesting discourses. And in 1977, he makes a speech on the TV about energy transition. It is really like I think the main character for why energy transition became so widespread. Because after this discourse, everybody in the US started to talk about energy transition basically to please Carter's administration.
(00:24:38):
When you were against nuclear, which was most of the environmentalist movement, then you became for a solar transition. So it's much more positive to be for transition than to be against something of course, and energy transition, everybody likes it. You can put anything in it. It can be about nuclear. It can be about renewables. Everything can go into energy transition. So it became a very, very popular phrase. And the problem is it's exactly at the same moment that the climate issue emerged in the US. So the result of that is that the very same economists and experts working on the energy crisis and mobilizing this idea of energy transition, use the same kind of reasoning and the same kind of models to deal with the climate crisis, whereas the two are completely different.
(00:25:25):
I mean, to solve the energy crisis of the 1970s to talk about energy transition makes sense. You reduce the share of oil, you increase the share of coal, of nuclear, something like that. But the problem of climate change is completely different. It's not the problem of scarcity. It's the problem of overabundance. We've got far too much fossil fuels under our feet and that we can transform the planet in a very, very deep way. So we have really used models which were not designed to deal with a sudden change in our energy consumption. For climate crisis, I mean, we have to get out of fossil fuels not in three or four centuries like the atomic scientists thought we could do, but in three or four decades. The timescale is completely different. And we've got very serious technological bottlenecks, stuff that we don't know how to decarbonize, in fact. And the last thing is the energy transition of the nuclear scientists, it was driven by increasing cost of fossil fuels.
(00:26:20):
Now the energy transition, we have to do it, whereas fossil fuels are cheap and easy to use. They are more practical in many, many respects compared to renewables. So that really kind of I think intellectual scandal of a very strange futurology derived from atomic scientists and applied then to the climate crisis. And it's a scandal, which is very easy to explain. It's a fantastic rhetorical device to do nothing. You just have to look at the US expertise in the 1980s, 1990s, especially under Bush father administration, they keep talking about energy transition as a way of postponing any serious policy about emissions. And it was pushed forward by the US expertise and the US negotiators at the '92 Climate Conference in Rio in Brazil. It made perfect sense. I mean, for the US at that time were the first emitters, and they were also the first technological power.
(00:27:16):
So it makes sense to talk about new technologies that are going to solve the problem and coming out of their fantastically innovative labs and companies. So it's closely linked also with another word, which became fashionable in the nineties, which is sustainable development and a very liberal way of dealing with environmental issues. The idea behind all this notion is we have to leave the private companies innovate and we should not interfere because I mean we should give incentives, they should participate in the expertise, but in the end, it is the companies that are going to solve the problem. So it's really part of this post-Soviet world where the West had won the Cold War, and we are going to solve this issue with the same tools, capitalism, basically green capitalism, that succeeded so much in the Cold War.
Alan Ware (00:28:03):
Your work critiques, well, the stage theory that we were in the wood age or the coal age or the oil age, that the ages never go away. That history is always with us. And some of these stage theories, especially when you tie it up with a linear view of progress and history, you just keep advancing and you're always on the technological frontier. And so there's a cultural bias to the technological frontier, right? That's where the money and the power is right now. It's AI and Silicon Valley. And so this distorts cultural narratives and cultural power in a way that I think, well, an historian can accentuate the weight of history - the reality of materials, energy, all of the old stuff that comes with us.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:28:47):
I think you're aboslutely right. The success of energy transition comes from our infatuation with innovation and the fact that when we talk about technology, in fact, we're talking about innovation. That's a remark that has been done very forcefully by a British historian of science called David Edgerton wrote a very good book called The Shock of the Old. What he shows is that both in the public sphere but also in historiography, we are obsessed with innovation. And the fact that now it's AIs, I mean some time ago it was GMOs or whatever. We are convinced that it's really the most important thing that is going to completely change the world, as in fact, perhaps it'll change the world, but perhaps not. And we don't really know actually what is changing the world. It's a much more complicated story in any case, than just one innovation or one set of particular innovation.
(00:29:34):
And the other thing is obviously the new does not make the old disappear. It's true for tech, but it is especially true for materials. And that is a remark that was made in 1928 by a US forester, and he was working in New York City looking at skyscrapers that were being built out of concrete, out of steel. But he said, wood will not become obsolete. And he even said, raw materials are never obsolete. And I think it's a very powerful conjecture which has been entirely verified. I mean, if you look at raw materials in the 20th century, despite all the fantastic innovation that we had, all the raw materials or almost all the raw materials have expanded. We consume a wider array of materials, and each material is consumed in greater quantity. There is one exception, sheep wool, which has decreased because of synthetic fibers, nylon, which is not a good news for the environment. But I think it's a very important point to have in mind that the history of materials is very different from the history of tech. The history of tech, there can be change or obsolescence, but the history of materials, not the case. The history of materials is very boring. Everything keeps expanding all the time, basically. It's not very exciting.
Nandita Bajaj (00:30:46):
And that's deeply intertwined with increase in population and consumption and the demand for all these materials, right? Throughout these symbiotic additions of wood, coal, and oil, the world population continued to increase from roughly a billion when coal was initially being used on a large scale to now over 8 billion. And population becomes this symbiotic multiplier that both increases the production and consumption of the materials and also the energy sources, different energy sources over time. And I love that you said it's intellectual fraud, this whole notion of energy transition. And because this magical thinking that we can sustain and even grow the scale of human activity, you see how so many well-informed environmentalists and transition advocates are not willing to confront the need to contract the human enterprise. There is this notion that innovation will basically buy us out of all of the problems that we've created and more technology will fix the problems that previous technology has created. And you see so much of that rhetoric come out of the ecomodernist thinking. They will also say, we need actually more population growth because that drives innovation. The more people there are, the more innovative capacity there is. Therefore not only unlike the environmentalists, are they not confronting the need for contraction, they're actually saying the opposite, that more growth, more innovation, and as you said, a changed world, but not necessarily changed for the better.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:32:28):
I think we have to talk about population, obviously it's part of the problem. Between 1800 and now population has been multiplied by eight, but coal consumption has been multiplied by another order of magnitude and capital has been multiplied by over 150. So there are other factors. I mean, what really matters for the climate is the way you live basically. And the other thing is in Sub-Saharan Africa, population is still increasing rapidly, but CO2 emissions are not very important. In South Asia where population now is more or less stabilized and probably will be decreasing in China, I mean CO2 emissions have grown very, very rapidly. So I mean, the key thing is about the kind of economic system that you have, but it's true that it would be easier to reduce the CO2 emission if we're just 1 billion obviously. I agree that the environmentalist movement, there is no reason why we shouldn't talk about the size of the population. I mean here the key thing is about reproductive rights. It's really about empowerment of women. That's really the key tool, the key lever. I think that's really something that environmentalists should be defending clearly.
Nandita Bajaj (00:33:31):
Yeah, 100%.
Alan Ware (00:33:33):
So this message that, well, transition can happen through new technologies and innovation has certainly been embraced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which assumes all kinds of carbon emissions reduction technologies in the future, many of them highly engineered solutions like having giant fans suck CO2 out of the air and bury it deep underground. So what do you think is the status now of these highly engineered techs?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:33:59):
It's a bit of a touchy subject because the IPCC, I'm talking about the group three, by the way. In the IPCC, there are several groups. Group one is about meteorology. I have almost no expertise on that. Group two is about impact. I don't know much. But group three is about the dynamics of change, basically about the energy transition. It's about what we should do now. And it's true that their reports are extraordinarily technophile. They are pushing very strange technologies. For instance, in the last report, which it's a 2000 page PDF, the word hydrogen is present in 1000 pages and degrowth is present in 20 pages. And carbon capture and storage is also present over a thousand times. So it's very high-tech, and it's not even high-tech, it's kind of rubbish technology sometimes like the CCS, not in the book, but in a later article I studied the history of carbon capture and storage.
(00:34:48):
It's very interesting. So the idea is you put a device out of a chimney of a power plant and you capture the CO2 and you liquefy the CO2 and you inject it under the ground. That consumes, of course, a lot of energy, obviously. Basically for every two or three power plants, you need a third or a fourth power plant just to produce electricity to power the device, and it's very polluting. So it's a bad technology. It's not a good idea. And everybody agreed on that in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, even in the early 2000s. One of the reports of IPCC around the year 2000, they said producing electricity with coal and capturing the CO2 makes electricity more expensive than atomic energy. So there is no point. It's not an interesting technological solution. From the 1990s onwards, the various fossil fuel companies, electricity producers, cement companies, and also steel companies pushed CCS. They set up conferences. They create scientific journals around CCS.
(00:35:51):
So you've got a whole bunch of papers on CCS. How can we do it? How it can be competitive, how it can be fantastic. In 2005, there is a special report from the IPCC group three on CCS just rehearsing all this literature, which is obviously coming from very, very special interests. So in a way, I mean in a very, very serious problem, basically the science summarized by the IPCC was not neutral science at all. And the IPCC kind of give its approval to all this scientific literature, which was deeply problematic. And it's even worse than that because with CCS, you can do something even more fantastic is you produce electricity with biomass just like in the Drax power plant, with trees. You burn trees to produce electricity, then you capture the CO2 and you put the CO2 in the ground. So that creates not only neutral carbon electricity, but carbon negative electricity.
(00:36:43):
And the more you produce electricity, the more you get carbon out of the atmosphere. It has absolutely no economic sense, no environmental sense. And the thing is that solution called bioenergy carbon capture and storage, BECCS, has taken a very important role in the scenarios, in the net zero scenarios. And in the 2014 report of the IPCC, the scenarios estimated that you could store 10 gigatons of CO2 per year after 2050, thanks to BECCS. Ten gigatons. I mean, I told you at the beginning of our discussion that the total wood production in the world is four gigatons. So you need to triple the production of wood in the first place to do that. It is ludicrous. It's completely stupid. Some reports, I mean it was very criticized right at the beginning. It's not a new critique. It's obviously stupid. And one expert explained that to produce this amount of biomass you'll need to rapid tree plantations, like eucalyptus plantations, twice the size of India devoted only to that.
(00:37:44):
So it was really stupid, but the problem is that it was at the foundation of the 2015 Paris Agreement. What made possible the two degrees, the target of two degrees, was these kind of technologies which are non-existent. So I mean, it's not a marginal problem. It's a big problem because this agreement was signed upon false technological promises. And that creates a lot of problems, because of course the government cannot reach carbon neutrality by 2050. I mean there are many problems, but still they've signed the treaty and know that creates a kind of discredit of the policies, of the politicians, of the democracy. I think it's a very serious problem. And the other problem is that to have all these carbon capture technologies, we need public money. They are useless. So it's really about public money. So now we are pumping quite a substantial amount of public money in Europe, and in the US too actually, to these kind of technologies.
(00:38:37):
And for instance, in Britain, the British government recently announced a scheme for carbon capture storage, 20 billion pounds over the next 20 years or 1 billion pounds per year. And this money goes straight into the pocket of petroleum companies because they're the one who can do that, Equinor in particular, the Norwegian company, but Eni the Italian company, Shell. So I mean, we need to have a democratic discussion on all these issues because with 20 billion pounds, we can do very useful things for the climate - you know bike lanes, insulate homes, put heat pumps, I don't know, whatever, but things that are really useful. I mean the climate expertise has been captured by fossil fuel interests. That's a big, big issue.
Alan Ware (00:39:18):
Right, I read recently the Trump administration one subsidy they will be keeping is for carbon capture and storage because of petroleum, major oil gas producing companies. And your work is so useful in showing how cultural narratives - powerful, expensive, delusional cultural narratives can get established, a lot of it based on the power of who's pushing the narrative and what incentives, I suppose they have to believe it and push it for other people. But it's scary how easily societies can get caught in those narratives.
Nandita Bajaj (00:39:53):
Yeah. And we recently wrote a paper called Confronting the UN's Pro-Growth Agenda, where we actually call out similarly how the UN is buckling under a lot of pressure from these special interest forces. And one of the things we cite similar to what you're saying is that the 2022 IPCC climate change mitigation report, it confirms that at least in the last decade, population increase and economic growth were the main drivers of today's greenhouse gas emissions. And yet, by the time they published the summary for policymakers that goes to all of the media outlets, they removed that. And what remained was these weak claims for these low emission technologies like carbon capture technologies. And so the media is basically rehearsing and repeating what they think they're getting from the top body reporting on climate change. And if they are so deeply influenced by these special interest forces, that's extremely problematic.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:40:59):
I don't know exactly what they say about demographic growth, but about economic growth, basically the IPCC has refused to really think about degrowth. Basically, it's a taboo, but it's because it would open up very difficult scientific questions and political questions because of course it's not about degrowth in general, it'll be degrowth in the economy of rich countries. And the key thing is in the way economic climate expenses was framed, it was what they call pareto optimal, which means that nobody can lose. So you cannot reduce the consumption of the wealthiest. So of course that constrain a lot of the expertise, and that's why they are obsessed with high-tech and these kind of fancy technologies pumping CO2 out of the atmosphere. But because of all this tech optimism, we don't have the serious discussion that we should have, which is really yes about how to reduce an economy in a fair way, how by reducing the economy you can increase fairness. So all this question of redistribution at international scale or inside national economies, they're not really on the table, whereas climate should be a powerful force to have this kind of discussion.
Nandita Bajaj (00:41:59):
Totally. Instead, you hear a lot of rhetoric about, well, the energy transition is a given, how can we make it a just energy transition? So they're not even questioning the fallacy of energy transition. And you see that similar rhetoric among many techno-optimists, that we can deploy massive amounts of affordable negative emissions technologies, but at the same time, they talk about achieving decoupling between economic and energy and material use. And despite evidence to the contrary that shows virtually no decoupling, the dominant growth paradigm assumes that technology can both solve, as you've spoken depletion and pollution. Your work shows that raw materials and energy never go out of fashion as you were just saying. What would you say to the techno-optimists and renewable energy transition believers who believe the market prices will incentivize new technologies to emerge and will then innovate and dematerialize the global economy?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:43:04):
Okay, there are three questions I want to, the first one is about the just transition. I just want to come back to this idea of just transition. When you look where it comes from, actually it's also a kind of fossil fuel word. Why? Because it's to say that, oh, if you do a transition too quickly, the poor will suffer more. So you have to delay the transition. Just think about all the poor coal workers. It's really very nice, just transition. Everybody is for just transition. But when you look seriously at what is behind the first text, it's about that. It's about delaying it to make it softer and to make it more progressive. And so it's another kind of delaying tactic.
(00:43:40):
So the question about decoupling, I think it's important, but it's very easy to answer. I mean, to be clear, there is a decoupling between CO2 and GDP. There is technological progress basically. So you need less CO2 to produce a dollar of GDP, and the decoupling is quite strong. I mean between the 1980s and nowadays, you need half of the CO2 that you needed in the 1980s to produce one dollar of GDP now. So the carbon intensity of the global economy has been halved. Did it make the carbon emission decrease? No, but it's really important to see that decoupling is an old story. We have been decoupling for a very, very long time. I just give you one example which shows the importance of an historical look on what is happening nowadays. In the 1910s, 1920s in the rich countries, the industrialists got rid of the steam engines and replaced them with electric motors. Electric motors are much more efficient than steam engines, which are very, very bad. That divided the carbon intensity of industrial force by 10, very huge progress.
(00:44:48):
When nowadays you get rid of a gas power plant and you replace that with a renewable solar or wind power plant, you divide by 10 the carbon intensity of the electricity. So we have been here before. What we're doing is not completely new with solar panels. We are not on the threshold of such a technological revolution that everything is going to be decarbonized in 25 years. This is ludicrous. The other thing about decoupling, as I said about construction, it's not decoupling at all. On the contrary, it's getting more and more carbon intensive because we are using more carbon intensive materials. The same goes with agriculture, another huge sector where emissions are very important. The whole food system is between 20 and 30% of CO2 emissions. It is enormous. I mean, the production, the transportation, the cold chain, all this is carbon intensive. I mean, there is no decoupling.
(00:45:37):
We're using more and more plastic in agriculture nowadays. We're putting more tractors, more fertilizers. So decoupling, it's a very crude way of looking at the problem because part of the decoupling story is about the growth of services, like the financial services. They create a lot of money, but with little CO2. But they depend, I mean, traders needs to eat and they need families. And so it's very artificial. This idea of decoupling, I mean, you have to look at sector by sector, what is happening. And in very important sectors like construction and the food system, decoupling is not very easy to see. I think this is the answer for the techno-optimists. Just look seriously at the things. Basically stop dreaming about fancy technology solving everything. This is very childish in a way.
(00:46:21):
I mean, so one important thing is not to be obsessed with electricity. I mean, electricity is an important problem. It's 40% of the emissions. And it's true that for the electricity production, we've got pretty good technological solutions - solar panels, wind power, that works. But we have to also take into account that 40% of electricity is already decarbonized with hydraulic energy and atomic power plants. So it's not new that we know how to produce electricity without CO2, but once again, electricity is just 40%. There is all the rest, which is going to be far, far more difficult. It's quite easy to answer the techno-optimist. I mean, there are very, very shallow arguments and very weak arguments, and I think either they're naive or they're politically interested.
Nandita Bajaj (00:47:04):
You talked a little bit about how some of this myth of the energy transition also got perpetuated by economists and not just techno-fundamentalists, including an economist who is a Nobel Prize winner, Nordhaus, who said in the seventies that it wasn't worth drastically limiting emissions and incurring the cost because fast breeder reactors would come online shortly. Could you speak to the fallacy of that?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:47:31):
Yeah, William Nordhaus is really the perfect example of what I was explaining earlier, the fact that people that started to work in the 1970s about the energy crisis became the expert of climate change. And it is really the perfect example of that. In 1973, he writes an article after the first oil shock explaining that oil is expensive. It's getting scarcer and scarcer. Does it mean that we have to reduce our consumption of oil? No, because by the year 2000, there will be breeder reactor. So we have to extract the oil now while it's valuable because there is so much technological progress that by the end of the 20th century it might be worth less. So that was his argument in 1973.
(00:48:10):
In 1975, he writes the first ever paper in economics about climate change, and he uses the same reasoning. There is a problem with greenhouse gases. Does it mean that we have to reduce carbon emissions and reduce our economy? No, because by the year 2000, we have the breeder reactor, the fast breeder reactor, which was very popular at the time among all these experts. And it'll be so much easier to do the transition then. So yes, energy transition was really a delaying tactic, I mean in economic theory obviously, and Nordhaus is a very good example of that. But interestingly enough, Nordhaus is in direct contact with the US negotiator in Rio. He's really a big figure in the climate expertise in the early 1990s. He's very influential. And the IPCC group three took time to get rid out of this fallacy. In a report in the 1990s, it explained that, yes, it's better to wait to do the transition because it'll be easier to do it later, taking the Nordhaus argument, right? So he has been very influential, and the fact that he got the Nobel prize in economics is really, I think, a very serious problem for the discipline because by 2050, when it starts to become more and more difficult in many parts of the world, I think we'll have a very severe judgment about all this economic analysis.
Nandita Bajaj (00:49:25):
Yeah, he asserts even that temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees isn't going to be that bad. Some sectors might get affected badly, but we can still continue to grow economically in jobs and innovation. And he really underestimates the seriousness of the climate crisis. As you're saying, billions of people are going to suffer from it.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:49:51):
According to his model, 3.5 degrees that's the optimal temperature, I mean the temperature that would optimize the economic growth and the climate problems basically. So what we should aim at in a way. And the other thing which you mentioned is very important, is basically why very little was done about climate change in the 1990s in the US and in Europe, it's not so much climate skepticism because at that time it was not very strong. It's later that it becomes strong. It was adaptation. When you read the report of the US Government Department of Energy 1979, basically they say, we can't do much. Climate change is inevitable because there is the expansion in Asia, and because all our economy is rooted in coal and oil, we can't do much. Climate change will happen. But for the US we know it's manageable. We are a large country.
(00:50:44):
So for agriculture, which is the most impacted sector, we can move agricultural production where it'll be possible to produce food. And I think there is a very strong part of cynicism in these reports. They openly say that for other countries it'll be much more difficult. And Bangladesh is the country which is very often invoked as being very, very vulnerable to climate change. But they say, we're not going to sacrifice world GDP for Bangladesh. I mean, it's not possible. That will never happen. So there is a very strong confidence in the US elite that the US can cope with a three degree temperature increase and too bad for the poor world, basically. And the other argument is even for the poor world, it's better for them to exploit their oil and coal to develop, and they will become more resilient to climate change. So I think we have to take into account that, I mean, it was this way that the elite thought about the problem. They're not stupid at that time. They knew that climate change was true. I mean, they were actually it's quite basic science. It's old-fashioned science. But they were confident about their capacity to adapt. And I got exactly the same reasoning in Britain in 1989. There is a cabinet meeting organized by Margaret Thatcher and each of the cabinet members says, we can't do much. It's very difficult to decarbonize agriculture. It's extremely difficult to decarbonize transportation, but we'll adapt basically.
Alan Ware (00:52:07):
So transition becomes the adaptation, not so much mitigation. I like how you mentioned transition becomes the ideology of capital in the 21st century, that there are ways to make money off it. And what are you seeing, and you've mentioned a little bit about the IPCC, future energy transition scenarios. What assumptions do they make about the feasibility, desirability of continued economic growth in those documents?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:52:32):
For the moment, but it'll probably change in the next report, there is no scenario including any share of degrowth for any country, even the richest. Just to be clear, it's a growth assumption at the beginning. I mean, basically what they are saying is quite true. I mean, we have to expand renewables. I mean, all this makes complete sense. I mean, it's true that it's really the key to rapid decarbonization of electricity. And then when they talk about the hard to abate sectors, when I mentioned steel, cement, agriculture, plastic, they don't really have solutions or they brandish hydrogen sometimes. I mean, not sometimes, a lot - but in the end it's negative emissions to compensate for the hard to abate sectors. But the hard to abate can be a big chunk of the emissions and the problem. So I don't want to be too critical about these scenarios, but it's true that they rely on technology that will not exist or not at the scale that is required.
Alan Ware (00:53:24):
Yeah. And you've written about the need to create more of a sufficiency norm, of differentiating needs and wants, and look at redistribution.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:53:33):
I mean, sufficiency starts to appear in the report, not so much in the scenarios, but in the report. But it's the first time, I mean it's in 2022, that for the first time you got a significant treatment of this idea of sufficiency, and that creates inside battles in the group three. It should be so obvious, you know, how come that they had to wait six reports and they had to wait 30 years to talk about that. I mean, if they'd been right at the beginning, what we can do to decrease CO2 emission, it's reduce certain sectors that we know we won't be able to decarbonize, like the air traffic, like automobiles. I mean, very obvious things, but no.
Nandita Bajaj (00:54:10):
Totally. And we've mainly been talking about your book More and More and More. We'd love to also just ask you a couple of questions on another book that you wrote, Happy Apocalypse. And you've argued in that book that technological and environmental risks associated with industrialization over the past 250 years didn't happen through ignorance, but that quote, at each point of conflict, ignorance and or disinhibiting knowledge had to be produced in a calculated way. Could you elaborate on that statement?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:54:44):
Yeah, I mean, that's something that really surprised me when I worked on that. It was my PhD, so it's quite old now. But basically I was struck by the fact that the people living around industries, factories, they evoked environment a lot. Environmental issues were not absent. They're extremely present for a very simple reason is that environment was a key medical concept. It was before bacteriology, before microbiology. So the real cause of disease was a change in environment, a change in the air, in the water, in the milieu. And despite that industrialization took place. So I think it's important to have in mind that the story of environment is not like raising awareness or consciousness of the problems. We are not getting more and more intelligent about that. But it's rather how you create this inhibition, I mean, new knowledge that allows you to overpass these kind of fears.
(00:55:39):
And this new knowledge, for instance, was what we call social hygiene or social medicine. The fact that the key factor for health is wealth, the wealthier the population will be, the healthier it'll become. And it is a notion that happened in the 1830s in Paris, actually by specific medical doctors. And they were the one authorizing the industries and the factories. So it was a very powerful argument for the administration to overpass all the complaints, all the judicial trials, serious complaints. I mean, we're talking about a very serious fight inside the Parisian bourgeosie, because part of it was interested in the industry, but the other part, and the majority was interested in rents. And of course factories would devaluate your real estate. So it's a very serious social struggle, which was kind of solved, probably not the right term, by this kind of new knowledge about what is the real cause of disease, what is the real cause of life expectancy? So I think this idea of this disinhibition applies very well to the idea of energy transition. We have built our old civilization around fossil fuels, which are crucial for all sorts of things from food production to transport to everything. But yeah, of course we'll do an energy transition. What are you talking about? I mean, that's exactly the same political function of going on as before, going on despite climate change - taking the plane, having a big car, and so on, because sometime there will be an energy transition. It's really, I think, a powerful tool.
Nandita Bajaj (00:57:11):
And you've talked also within the context of that book is which are the voices that are centered that create this disinhibition? One of the things you talk about, the problem is that historically technology has never been the subject of a shared choice. Some actors have actively brought it into being, and then it has to be regulated. And we're seeing that even now with the hype around AI. It has just been deployed and not too many people are questioning the motivations behind it, who are the people behind it or the destructive nature of the technology. There's just this assumption, well, it's out. We're going to use it and now it's up to us is how can we make it good.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (00:57:55):
That's a key thing because when I was working on the topic in sociology, there was this idea that we are going to build a technological democracy, which means that we'll organize debate around technological choices, which all sounds very nice, but it's certainly not like that in history at least that technological development happens. I mean, you've got a new product, you've got a new way of doing things and problems emerge, and then the government is implied and then there is regulation, but it is too late in a way because when you regulate something that already exists, you never suppress the thing. There is so much capital and people interested in the technology. That's difficult of course, to go against the grain, right? So the fact that regulation is after the event is a very important fact because the regulation, most of the time, of course they try, I mean, I have studied the case of safety norms around steam engine, gas lighting, train technology, regular technologies and so on.
(00:58:50):
Of course, they try to minimize the risk. This is their role, but at the same time, they legitimize the risk. They make the risk acceptable. It's a kind of compromise between people that are going to suffer about the risk and the capitalists and the entrepreneur, and very often, of course, the real experts on the technologies are the entrepreneurs. So of course they play a big role in the regulation. In fact, in the 19th century at least, I've not really studied that about the late 20th century, but I think it's true about late 20th century as well, most of the regulation is very often self-regulation, even if it is the states that create the norm, it's in fact the entrepreneurs that self-regulate themselves. For instance, the chemicals in Europe. I know a colleague who has worked on that basically to measure the effects, to create all the instruments, to have a proper understanding of the effects.
(00:59:37):
All this is very costly, and then to push a rule, you have to follow the problem In the five or decades, the scientists are not going to do that. It's boring. It's not their job. The only one who are able to do that, they are the scientists paid by the industry and the lawyers. So it's very difficult to really regulate something in the industry, which is already existing. And then there are all, of course, all the strategic dimensions. If US does not invest 500 billion in AI, the Chinese will do that, and it's very bad for the US. And in the 19th century got the same thing. So yeah, it's kind of constant thing.
Alan Ware (01:00:12):
So as a final question and putting on your futurologist hat, which might not fit very well as an historian, but we're going to ask you anyway, what do you see as the more probable path for the future of energy use? Say till 2100 or this century?
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (01:00:28):
Okay, so 2100, it's a bit far away. What we have to keep in mind is that for climate reason, it has to go much faster. I mean, what we're talking about, the deadline that climatologists are talking about to stay below three degrees is like 2070. And to be honest, I don't think that there will be such a technological revolution in such a small period of time. For the rich countries, the goal is to become net zero by 2050. So you can reflect that the technology is more or less constant. In 25 years, there won't be such big changes. So the most probable is that we won't reach our targets, and to be honest, it's not my historical hat, just have to look at the forecast made by the International Energy Agency. What they see is a stagnation of CO2 emissions, certainly not a disappearance.
(01:01:22):
Basically, they envision a kind of plateau by 2030, and then it remains at a very high level, which puts us rather to the three degrees Celsius by 2100. So that's the very most probable future. I mean, it's not my historic hat. I mean on this point you have to read the experts basically. I mean, they're not that bad at predicting energy at 25 years distance because most of the investments, they are already being done to know how much oil will be produced in 20 years. You just look at how much is invested now basically in oil exploration and development and so on. So that's the most probable thing is we won't succeed in staying below three degrees obviously. Perhaps there will be strong effects that make that politics will change, but even that is not sure because one of the depressing thing is that in the case of France, there were studies about that there were flooding in Northern France recently and that made people angrier and they tended to vote more for very conservative parties, which are not very pro-environment at all. So it's very unlikely that there will be also kind of very serious degrowth movement to be honest. It's very unlikely.
Alan Ware (01:02:31):
There could be a catastrophic sort of decline through financial collapse or something, right, that reduces emissions.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (01:02:39):
The only thing that reduce emissions for the moment indeed are crisis, but they make very small dents. Quite impressive. When you look at the curve of CO2 emissions all across the 20th century, like the First World War, it makes a very small dent. The economy crisis of '29 makes quite a serious dent. I mean, we're talking about a few percent. The oil crisis of the seventies is like 5%, and it goes back. 2008 is just one or 2%. Covid, at 1.4 billion people were forced to remain in their houses and all that make only a decrease of six or 7%. I can't remember exactly the exact number. So fossil fuels are so central in all the production and that even that doesn't make such a big difference I mean.
Alan Ware (01:03:20):
You mentioned there's kind of no historical analog to the situation we face right now, just partly because of that scale of humanity at 8 billion consuming what we consume.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (01:03:30):
The fact that it's a global problem makes that there is no good historical analogy. I mean, I can give you local examples or national examples, but they're very different from what we're facing. I mean, one famous example is the case of Cuba after the collapse of the USSR. They were used to have cheap oil from USSR and suddenly they had to do a different way because they could not access the world market of oil, and they were under US embargo. So they had to transform their agriculture, of course, use their legs instead of cars and so on, and that had impact on their bodies. I mean between '92 and 2002, in Cuba, they call that the período especial, they lost on average five kilos. I mean, we're talking about serious effects, but it's very different from what we're doing globally and we're not facing an energy crisis. That's really the thing that I want to point out.
Nandita Bajaj (01:04:23):
Well, it's maybe not the highest point in the interview to end, but it is the most honest, most transparent coverage of the unprecedented and complex nature of the scale and scope of the issues that we are facing as a modern globalized civilization. And we are so grateful that you decided to translate your books into English and to make them accessible to more people like us. This has been a sorely missing subject within the environmental movement, and this was an absolutely brilliant and instructive interview. Thank you so much for doing this research and for joining us today.
Alan Ware (01:05:08):
Yes, thank you.
Jean Baptiste Fressoz (01:05:09):
Thank you very much for having me.
Alan Ware (01:05:10):
That's all for this edition of Overshoot. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:05:40):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.