H-Diplo Article Review 1169: Hatton-Proulx on Fressoz, “La 'transition énergétique'"

christopher ball Discussion

H-Diplo Article Review 1169

16 March 2023

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. “La « transition énergétique », de l’utopie atomique au déni climatique : États-Unis, 1945-1980.” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 69:2 (2022): 114-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/rhmc.692.0115.

https://hdiplo.org/to/AR1169
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Lori Maguire | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Review by Clarence Hatton-Proulx, INRS and Sorbonne Université

Energy transition is a concept present everywhere, from political speeches to industry reports to… the title of my own doctoral thesis. It is employed by various actors who mean different things. But where does the concept come from? This is what this article retraces. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz proposes a genealogy and a critique of the concept of energy transition in the United States after the Second World War until the 1980s. Fressoz is a leading figure of French environmental history. Some of his work has been translated into English, notably The Shock of the Anthropocene written with Christophe Bonneuil.[1] But most of his scholarship remains in French, which is unfortunate for non-French speakers;  his contrarian, revisionist, and extremely erudite thinking opens new avenues of research for environmental historians and others.[2] This review is both an attempt to render accessible his most recent work to the Anglophone world as well as to apprehend it critically.

The starting point of this article is the author’s unease with some energy history scholarship. The concept of energy transition is central to this literature. Whereas in popular discourses today it is often synonymous with the decarbonation of the world economy, energy historians sometimes use energy transition to signal a shift in the relative makeup of an energy mix. For example, some argue that oil replaced coal as the world’s major energy source in the second half of the twentieth century and that coal’s relevance declined thereafter.[3] For Fressoz, who calls this view a phasist interpretation of the history of energy and of technology, it is wrong.[4] Looking at the historical evolution of energy production and consumption from an absolute point of view, he argues that there has not been a global energy transition since the Industrial Revolution. We should rather speak of energy accumulation. Wood has not disappeared with coal, coal has not disappeared with oil, and oil has not disappeared with renewable energy. Energy sources are as much in competition as they are in symbiosis. The coal boom in Great Britain stimulated the use of wood in mines—used for planks, props, and posts—and for railways. The development of oil encouraged coal use in the steel industry, which produced tankers, pipelines, refinery equipment, and cars. Without denying some competition between sources, Fressoz reminds us that energy sources are also in situations of codependence, which the concept of energy transition does not always make clear.

If energy transition is an inaccurate concept to qualify the evolution and links between past energy systems, why does it exist? Fressoz’s argument is that it is not a just descriptor of the past because that is not its purpose: it was invented not by historians but by energy forecasters. Boasting industry links, these actors used a partial recounting of energy history to support their view of the future: that the way to solve the climate crisis would be a continuation of the current configuration of energy, technology, and capitalism. The idea of an energy transition stemming from these roots serves as a more subtle form of climate skepticism, which inhibits decisionmakers from truly understanding the dynamics of evolution within energy systems and acting upon them. To reach this conclusion, the article uses diverse materials such as expert reports, visualisations, press articles, internal documents of petroleum companies as well as oral history interviews. From a methodological point of view, it would have been useful if the three oral history interviews Fressoz undertook for this article were properly documented. Although they are mentioned in the introduction as having informed the argument, they are not cited in the text.

The author credits Caltech geo-chemist Harrison Brown with coining the concept of energy transition in 1967. It has an earlier history in the field of physics, which energy historian and geographer Thomas Turnbull recently documented but that is not mentioned here.[5] Brown, an important neo-Malthusian agitator, argued that the increasing scarcity of global resources could lead to a Third World War unless world leaders accelerated their civil nuclear programs.[6] Neo-Malthusianism and the nuclear utopia form the ideological context in which the concept took its contemporary form. Before the 1960s, most energy experts thought that the future of energy would be an extension of the present, as new energy sources would add up to but not replace current energy sources. This went hand in hand with the most common graphic way of representing the temporal evolution of energy mixes: in absolute terms, as stacked curves growing in conjunction with time. But after the end of the Second World War, decisionmakers started to turn to other problems which could menace peace and prosperity, notably fast-paced population growth and resource scarcity, particularly of fossil fuels. They invested resources in futurology and forecasting to attempt to predict and colonize the future.[7]

The energy transition as a concept, inheriting a word and an imaginary from its predecessor the demographic transition, is deeply linked to the American nuclear lobby. In the United States, this lobby is associated with the Atomic Energy Commission, a precursor in the financing of early climate science as well.[8] Nuclear scientists, most of whom have worked on nuclear science during the Second World War, proposed nuclear energy as a remedy to neo-Malthusianism, helping to make up for diminishing resources in the face of a population bomb. Linked with the Atomic Energy Commission, geologist M. King Hubbert predicted in 1962 an oil production peak for the United States in 1970, urging the American government to accelerate federal financing for nuclear energy in order to smooth out the upcoming energy transition.[9] The notion of energy crisis, more severe than energy transition, was invoked in the 1960s by the Atomic Energy Commission, again to agitate for increased funding for its breeder reactors. In an earlier work, Fressoz argued that energy transition as a concept emerged in the 1970s, pushed by the European Economic Community and industrial lobby groups to replace the more alarming term of energy crisis.[10] He appears to have fine-tuned his interpretation in the present article, arguing instead that the concept of an energy crisis emerged through lobbying efforts from the nuclear industry in order to push the federal regulator to loosen its purse strings.

It was really in the 1970s that energy transition gained prominence in popular discourses. In 1977, American President Jimmy Carter pronounced a public speech that epitomizes this phenomenon. Employing a phasist vision of history, he asserted that the United States had gone through two energy transitions, the first from wood to coal and the second from coal to oil. In the context of oil shocks and other energy problems in the country in the 1970s,[11] he called for a third one, made up of sources like solar energy, which gained prominence in the late 1970s. This speech really kicked off the life of energy transition as a concept. For instance, two years later, two Harvard Business School professors, Robert B. Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin—an influential energy expert who would advise many American presidents—published an important report on the energy future of America, which generously used the concept.[12] As it gained a foothold in American discourse, energy experts started graphically representing energy mixes in a new way. Instead of stacking up curves and displaying the evolution of energy systems in an absolute way, they represented them in a relative way, which encouraged a reading that favored the substitution of sources like wood and then coal by petroleum and natural gas. This disguised the fact that, for instance, coal consumption did not vanish after the 1970s in America. The growth of other fossil fuels was such that coal consumption has decreased relatively but increased absolutely since that time.

An important institution in the energy futurology ecosystem is the International Institute of Advanced System Analysis (IIASA), founded in 1972 near Vienna to foster collaboration between experts from the West and the East over the modeling of global problems such as the environment, the energy crisis, and population growth. It is akin to the Club of Rome in its dedication to the computer modelization of complex natural and social phenomena. Its activities have been criticized by scholars like Brian Wynne, a future science and technology studies (STS) pioneer who has spent time there as a researcher and laments the many biases of its models favoring nuclear energy.[13] Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, also working at the IIASA in the 1970s, takes issue with the models for a different reason. In his view, energy models give the misleading impression that energy systems are governable. Looking at historical statistics, he concludes that energy systems are characterized by enormous inertia.[14] In a deterministic way, he draws up logistical curves typical of neo-Malthusian demography and technology prospective to project past rhythms of energy mix change into the future and conclude that this rhythm is extremely slow. In his view tainted by his training as a physicist, energy systems respond to laws of their own which can seldom be challenged by humans. If Fressoz seems to draw inspiration from this conclusion that energy systems change extremely slowly and barely through human intervention, he takes issue with the logistical substitution model, which again overlooks the fact that different energy sources are as much in symbiosis as they are in competition.

The article concludes by referring to the reality schism that affects both climate change and energy transition discourses. As years go by and the climate problem intensifies, the timeframe to complete an energy transition away from fossil fuels tightens and energy futurology becomes more and more bullish. Yet deep and convincing changes to the global aggregate absolute energy system are missing. In 2010, China burned more coal on its own than the whole world in 1980.[15] The twenty-first century is thus as much the century and the age of coal as it is that of wood, natural gas, and oil. These are not relics of the past at all. This article, using an intellectual history approach that furrows through various debates around energy in post-war America, argues that energy transition as a concept obscures our understanding of energy systems past, present, and future. Tracing its roots to futurologists obsessed with global collapse and nuclear salvation, this concept proposes that decisionmakers, through clever resource allocation, had a lasting say over energy systems in the 1960s and 1970s by pushing a nuclear agenda which would solve the problems of fossil fuels, from pollution to scarcity to national sovereignty. Through tweaks to capitalism, energy, and technology, a fast-paced energy transition could be attained. So far, this has not been true, as fossil fuels still dominate the bulk of energy mixes worldwide, a situation which is not showing signs of changing soon.

I have two minor quibbles that do not challenge the general worthiness of the article. The first is the impreciseness of the case study. We go from the 1920s to the 2010s, from America to Austria, from nuclear scientists to politicians. As intellectual histories have a tendency of doing, we go from actor to actor and topic to topic without links between them being always clear, from the actual use of energy transition by historical actors to debates between nuclear and solar communities to arguments over the visualization of historical energy statistics. This article is neither a tight linguistic study of a word à la Benoît Godin with the concept of innovation, for instance,[16] nor is it an in-depth micro study of the evolution of energy forecasting actors and techniques in the United States in relation to changing social and political contexts.[17] It is more Fressoz’s take on the energy history of postwar United States and how this intellectual history should encourage us to think critically about the uses and misuses of the concept of energy transition today. Framed this way, it is an absolute success and a precious article. But the fuzziness of the topic is a bit disconcerting.

My second minor quibble is the overuse of quotation marks to signal Fressoz’s opposition to the use of commonly employed concepts like energy transition, demographic transition, oil peak, energy crisis, and the like. He rightfully points out the limitations of some of these concepts, which are generally acknowledged by energy historians. But academic communities do need a common language to speak of similar phenomena, even if no concept can accurately represent complex social phenomena.[18] These technicalities absolutely do not take away from the novelty and the importance of this article’s arguments and conclusions. It will interest environmental historians and more generally scholars who seek a critical examination of a concept that is both ubiquitous and imprecise.

 

Clarence Hatton-Proulx is a PhD candidate in urban studies and history at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (Montréal, Canada) and Sorbonne Université (Paris, France). His thesis studies the history of energy in Montréal between 1945 and 1980. It focuses on the social and spatial consequences of urban energy transitions towards electricity, gas, and petroleum. He holds a master’s degree in Science and Technology Studies from York University.

 

[1] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (London: Verso, 2016).

[2] See for example his most recent book, written with Fabien Locher: Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher. Les révoltes du ciel. Une histoire du changement climatique, XVe-XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2020).

[3] See for example: Timothy Mitchell. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011).

[4] Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “‘The age’ of et ses problèmes. Du phasisme matériel dans l’écriture de l’histoire,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle. Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848 et des révolutions du XIXe siècle, no 64 (1 juin 2022): 17388.

[5] Thomas Turnbull, “Energy, History, and the Humanities: Against a New Determinism,” History and Technology 37, no 2 (3 avril 2021): 24792, https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2021.1891394.

[6] Harrison Brown, Challenge of Man’s Future (New York: Viking Press, 1954).

[7] Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post Cold War Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Matthew Connelly et al., “‘General, I Have Fought Just as Many Nuclear Wars as You Have’: Forecasts, Future Scenarios, and the Politics of Armageddon,” The American Historical Review 117, no 5 (2012): 143160.

[8] Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).

[9] M. King Hubbert, Energy Resources (Washington: National Academy of Science, 1962)

[10] Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, “Pour une histoire désorientée de l’énergie,” in 25èmes Journées Scientifiques de l’Environnement - L’économie verte en question, edited by Daniel Thevenot, vol. JSE-2014, Journées Scientifiques de l’Environnement (Créteil, France, 2014), https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00956441.

[11] Robert D. Lifset, “A New Understanding of the American Energy Crisis of the 1970s,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 39, no 4 (150) (2014): 2242; Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016).

[12] Robert B. Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin, eds., Energy Future: Report of the Energy Project at the Harvard Business School (New York: Random House, 1979).

[13] Brian Wynne, “The Institutional Context of Science, Models, and Policy: The IIASA Energy Study,” Policy Sciences 17:3 (1984): 277320.

[14] Cesare Marchetti, “On Strategies and Fate,” Physics in Technology 8, no 4 (1977):157-162.

[15] Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “China: Energy Country Profile,” Our World in Data (2023), https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china

[16] Benoît Godin, Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation Over the Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2015).

[17] For such an endeavor comparing France and Germany, see: Stefan Cihan Aykut, “Reassembling Energy Policy: Models, Forecasts, and Policy Change in Germany and France,” Science & Technology Studies 32:4 (13 décembre 2019): 1335, https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.65324.

[18] In another review, I have made a similar reproach to On Barak’s Powering Empire. See: Clarence Hatton-Proulx, “Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization,” Relations internationales 185:1 (2021): 132-133, https://doi.org/10.3917/ri.185.0129