According to common sense, there's no doubt about it: after the long millennia of the Wood Age, humanity entered the Coal Age in 1800, then the Electricity and Oil Age in 1900, before moving on to the Atomic Age in 1950 and finally the Renewable Energy Age in the early 2000s. And now, with the announced transition to the hydrogen era in 2050.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Did you know that global wood consumption rose from 2.5 billion tonnes in 1961 to 3.9 billion in 2020? That coal consumption practically doubled between 1960 and 2020, and continues to rise despite all the COP and other nonsense about the green transition? And that the same applies to oil, gas and other conventional primary energy sources such as hydroelectric power? Even nuclear power is on the rise, despite plant closures in Europe. In the global energy mix, 77% of primary energy comes from coal, oil and gas, with wind and solar power providing less than 5% of the total.
In a highly stimulating book, historian of science and the environment Jean-Baptiste Fressoz renews the world history of energy without hiding the ashes under the carpet (Sans transition. Une nouvelle histoire de l'énergie, Ecocène Seuil, 2024). He begins by dismantling "phasism", the mania for periodizing human history in successive stages. In the reality of the material economy, this is not the case.
The advent of coal has multiplied wood consumption, not replaced it. The need for firewood has fallen slightly, but the consumption of props for mines and railroad beams has soared. Today, wood is as much in demand as ever, albeit for other purposes: the manufacture of billions of pallets and millions of tonnes of cardboard packaging and paper, while firewood is back in fashion in the form of pellets and "biomass".
The same applies to other forms of primary energy: gas is used to make fertilizers, coal to make cement and steel, and oil to make various plastics, all of which are exploding in production all over the world, failing to end up in car tanks, central heating systems and the holds of container ships. In this sense, the switch to all-electric is just a joke. Behind the electric bike lies not a solar panel, but a coal-fired power plant and shale oil.
It's all the fault of the scientists who have got into the habit of showing past and future developments in graceful swirls, the famous "S" curves, where we see the consumption of different energy sources slowly take off, swell, peak and then fall again when a new source appears. Or who design beautifully colored tables that add up the different energy categories over time, but don't mention the quantities consumed in absolute figures, which themselves keep swelling over the decades.
At the start of each new cycle, the same smoke and mirrors are used to allay fears of energy shortages and/or carbon(is)ation of the planet, the two panics by no means being mutually exclusive. Yesterday, it was nuclear super-regenerators that were supposed to save the day and prevent us from returning to the cave age. Hundreds of billions have been squandered on them. The same goes for synthetic fuels, which were predicted to have a bright future in the 1980s, but have now been forgotten.
The next smoke and mirrors have already been announced: hydrogen. The race for subsidies is on, and start-ups are on the warpath. The result will be a predictable flop: given the conditions for producing hydrogen, which is rare in nature and therefore made with electricity from fossil fuels, and for using it (liquid hydrogen has to be cooled and stored at -253 degrees), the chances of making it a profitable and environmentally-friendly primary energy source are virtually nil.
As a good historian, the author is careful not to lapse into futurology. But since Cesare Marchetti's research in the 1980s demonstrated the prodigious inertia of energy systems and the near-impossibility of substituting one energy source for another - the capitalist system only manages to add them together, or at best to stabilize them - the chances of achieving an energy transition, or ecological transition as we like to call it, are close to zero.
If we take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, this means that the chances of containing global warming and decarbonizing the world economy are equally slim to none, as all the forces of the system combine, within the IPCC and other energy and climate bodies, to avoid any serious measures by dangling technological solutions - hydrogen, carbon burial, extraterrestrial solar power plants - that are as delusional as they are futile (because they are prodigiously expensive in terms of hidden energy...) and thus justify a procrastination that is likely to cost us all the more if we delay too long. ), justifying a procrastination that is likely to cost us even more the longer we wait.
My personal conclusion is that, rather than wasting our energies fighting global warming and wondering whether its origins are anthropogenic or natural; rather than pretending to limit CO2 emissions and continuing to believe in impossible energy transitions, it's time to accept the implacability of the facts. Our fight will be all the more effective, and the environment will be all the more grateful./MPF/
Guy Mettan, freelance journalist
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