Earth Day this year is focused on shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy but the concept of the energy transition is deeply flawed, writes Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.
The global history of energy is not a story of substitution, but of accumulation. There has never been a true “transition” away from coal, oil, or even wood.
In 2024, wood still generated twice as much energy as nuclear power. That same year, despite the growth of renewables, emissions from the electricity sector continued to rise. The thrilling narrative of technological progress often conceals a more monotonous reality: a steady layering of materials and energy sources, rather than their replacement.
Today, car headlights alone consume more oil than the entire global economy did in 1900
Consider the example of lighting. When electricity extinguished the oil lamp in the interwar years, it did not sever lighting’s dependence on oil. Instead, oil-powered turbines in power stations kept the lights on – and today, car headlights alone consume more oil than the entire global economy did in 1900, when oil lamps lit homes around the world. If history teaches us anything, it is that no energy source or material ever became obsolete.
This is not merely a matter of adding new energy sources, but of symbiosis: energy forms grow together, intertwining and reinforcing one another in the fabric of industrial economies. Industrialisation, for instance, was not a simple switch from wood to coal. In early 20th-century Britain, the mining industry alone consumed more timber to support underground galleries than the entire nation burned for heat a century earlier.
And just as coal spurred wood consumption, oil fueled demand for coal – whether to produce steel, build cars or lay road. In turn, oil enabled the mass production of raw materials, including coal and wood, further entrenching their role in the economy.
This same symbiotic logic shapes the history of construction. Rather than witnessing a transition from one material to another, construction has seen the expansion and interweaving of all materials. The extraordinary rise of concrete since 1950 – from 0.5 to 20 billion tonnes annually – did not displace other materials, but instead drove their growth.
Concrete enabled more glass but also more timber and more bricks – two materials it supposedly “replaced”. Half of all concrete is used to create transport infrastructure, which in turn enables the proliferation of buildings; the other half forms the slabs and frames that support layers of glass, brick, wood and steel.
Since the world officially recognised climate change as a global concern with the 1992 creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix has barely shifted, remaining stubbornly above three-quarters.
Wind turbines and solar panels now simply help power a world that remains fundamentally dependent on coal, oil and gas
Even in advanced economies, which have managed to curb emissions, fossil fuels still dominate: in 2024, they accounted for 80 per cent of US energy consumption, 75 per cent in the UK, and around 50 per cent in France and Denmark. Wind turbines and solar panels now simply help power a world that remains fundamentally dependent on coal, oil and gas – for steel, food, concrete, and global transportation by air and sea.
Given this history of accumulation and symbiosis, where did the idea of an “energy transition” originate? Until the 1970s, the term was hardly used. Experts expected shifts in the composition of the energy mix and a possible stabilisation of total consumption, but not the outright disappearance of entire energy sources.
Conservationists, in fact, were more concerned with the long-term depletion of coal reserves than with replacing them. Their time horizons stretched across centuries. In 1915, Herbert Jevons, son of economist William Stanley Jevons, predicted that British coal use would peak around 2100 at 400 million tonnes per year, and then stabilise at 300 million tonnes until 2200. The notion of transition, in the modern sense, was foreign to their thinking.
The term “energy transition” itself comes from nuclear physics, where it describes the shift of an electron between energy states. It was later adopted by advocates of nuclear power, particularly proponents of fast-breeder reactors. These reactors, capable of converting all uranium isotopes into fuel, offered a vision of boundless energy and a solution to fossil fuel depletion. From this vision emerged the language of “transition” – a gradual, centuries-spanning evolution from finite to infinite energy.
The 1970s energy crisis popularised the term even further. By then, “energy transition” had become a flexible slogan, accommodating a variety of visions: from nuclear dreams to coal revival, solar utopias, steady-state economies and environmentalist critiques. Everyone from neo-Malthusians to techno-optimists could rally around it.
Perhaps the strangest twist is how this narrative, born from mid-20th-century anxieties about scarcity and technological promise, was recycled for the climate crisis. When global warming emerged as a political issue in the late 1970s, the same economists and institutions that had navigated the energy crisis retooled their frameworks to address it.
The “energy transition” offers a vision of future transformation that excuses present inaction
The climate challenge demanded something entirely new: not a slow evolution over centuries, but the rapid and total phaseout of fossil fuels within decades, not driven by scarcity, but by the need to limit atmospheric carbon despite the abundance and cheapness of fossil fuels.
The difference between these two crises – energy scarcity versus climate destabilisation – was profound, yet the same intellectual compass guided both. The continuity is striking, but so is the mismatch.
By portraying the future as a sequence of major transitions between energy systems, energy history has served a discrete but central ideological purpose. It lends historical weight and plausibility to the prospect of phasing out fossil fuels within two or three decades – a prospect for which no precedent exists. The allure of the “energy transition” is powerful, offering a vision of future transformation that excuses present inaction.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a science and technology historian based at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is the author of multiple books including More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy and Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk.
The photo is by Andry Sagatelov via Unsplash.
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