More and More and More
An All-Consuming History of Energy
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Publishing:2nd Oct '25
£10.99
This title is due to be published on 2nd October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£25.00(9780241718896)
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.
The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.
This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.
[A] sprightly demolition job -- Pilita Clarke * The FT *
A densely researched polemic designed to shock -- Chris Stokel-Walker * New Scientist *
A necessary, eye-opening and frequently gobsmacking book... Removing fossil fuels from the energy mix will require something akin to an amputation. The vivid sense of the scale and complexity of the world’s material and energetic flows provided by this book makes clear what a difficult, and possibly bloody, operation that will have to be * The Economist *
We all know the energy transition away from fossil fuels is needed to keep the climate safe. But this eye-opening book shows our understanding of past transitions is delusional. Far from moving definitively from wood to coal to oil and gas, we have continued to binge on all forms of energy. Somehow, this has to stop -- Pilita Clark * The FT (Best books of 2024: Environment, Science and Technology) *
An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic mainstays of our modern way of life – is without precedent. This is the argument of …Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the scale of what lies ahead, the first thing we have to do is to free ourselves from the ideology of the history of energy transition… Fressoz doesn’t wish to dismiss the possibility of change. The point, rather, is to dereify it… Fressoz has given us a properly materialist history of the 20th century. -- Adam Tooze * LRB *
ISBN: 9781802067316
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 35mm
Weight: 500g
400 pages