The Eco-Worrier Reviews - More and More and More

MORE AND MORE AND MORE: An All-Consuming History of Energy.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz pp 309. Allen-Lane, a Penguin/Random House imprint.  £25.

Following The Eco-Worrier’s earlier review of Jean-Marc Jancovici’s ‘World Without End’, along comes another thought-provoking book from a French academic. It questions much of the allegedly ‘green’ assumptions of our politicians and economists. The author was previously an historian of science and technology at Imperial College, London, before returning to CNRS, the French national centre for scientific research in Paris.

Fressoz has serious doubts about the official vision of an ‘Energy Transition’, switching near-seamlessly from fossil-fuels to renewable energy. He draws on the earlier history of energy to reveal that no ‘new’ energy source has ever replaced an ‘old’ one to leave it redundant. In complete contrast to today’s plans to switch from energy-dense fossil fuels to the diffuse, low-intensity power of wind and solar, the history of energy has been to adopt ever-more concentrated forms, via coal to oil, then gas and uranium. As the book’s title makes clear, each has been an addition to the existing, ever-growing economic system.

Some energy sources are obviously better suited to specific applications than others. Coal, for example, is central to producing steel from iron ore and for the making of cement. Oil is ideal as a transport fuel, especially for aviation, and so on.

Total energy demand has soared alongside the world’s rise in population from 1 billion when James Watt invented his steam engine 200 years ago, to 8 billion today. Levels of personal energy consumption in the richer countries have accelerated even faster, driven by the insatiable demands of advertising, consumerism and technical novelty.

Taking the UK’s Industrial Revolution as his first example, Fressoz dismantles the near-universal assumption that the access to deep coal seams enabled by Watt’s steam pumping engine marked a historic transition in which coal replaced humanity’s reliance on biomass, namely firewood and charcoal, for creating heat.

He reveals the startling fact that, far from reducing the demand for timber, more wood was used during the 19th century in British coal production than the country burned as fuel throughout the entire 18th century. This is explained by the fact that instead of burning the wood, Britain’s enormous demand for coal as ‘the workshop of the world’ from around 1820 to 1920, created a parallel demand for wooden pit-props. Despite the world’s mines now using metal props, humanity is burning more wood than ever, accounting for 6% of today’s massively expanded global demand for energy.

Although the coal industry has now essentially disappeared from a largely de-industrialised Great Britain, we still import vast quantities of goods which could not be made without burning coal. World consumption is today at a record high, not only for making steel and cement, but for most of the electricity generated in the 21st century’s manufacturing giants such as China and India.

The second so-called ’transition’ was driven by oil’s superiority over coal for fuelling transport. Like the pit-props in coal mines, the earliest oil wells also used vast quantities of timber to make their drilling derricks and the wooden barrels for transporting the oil. However, the oil industry soon transferred its demand for wood to steel for its thousands of miles of oil and gas pipes, drilling rigs, tankers and refineries, all of them made by burning coal. Far from diminishing the demand for coal, it was essential to the ‘transition’ to oil in order to produce yet more steel, aluminium and other metals, to make the oil-fuelled ships, cars, trucks and tractors.

Natural gas, the cleanest form of fossil fuel, has also demanded a global network of pipelines, tankers and compressor-stations made from coal-dependent steel and concrete. Apart from its use as a fuel, perhaps the most vital - and unfortunately polluting – application of natural gas is via the Haber-Bosch process to manufacture plant-food in the form of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

The advent of ‘renewables’ has further increased the demand for coal to produce solar panels and for making the huge amounts of concrete, steel and copper embedded in wind farms, power stations and transmission lines. Fressoz explains that China’s vast new solar and wind farms are often deliberately located in remote coalfields in the country’s west. There, in combination with coal-fired power stations, they can ensure a 24/7 electricity supply, even when the sun isn’t shining or the wind blowing. A web of power lines transfers electricity to the country’s industrial heartlands, 2000km away, to manufacture the goods we import from them.

The ‘Net-Zero’ vision of converting a world of a billion or more cars, plus its trucks and heating systems, to electricity inevitably demands yet more coal to produce not only the extra steel but also battery manufacture, which is itself a highly energy-intensive process.

A further consideration in this vision of a ‘clean’ all-electric world is the global industry of mining and transporting the vital minerals required, from rare earths to copper. Just like agriculture, mining relies on diesel fuel. As the better-quality ores deplete, the quantity of rock which must be mined and crushed to extract, for example, a ton of the copper essential to the ‘clean’ electrified economy, has risen 10-fold in the last 50 years, with a proportionate increase in the amount of diesel fuel demanded to produce each ton. The same law of diminishing returns is also evident in the mining of uranium for nuclear power.

Despite his apparently grim messaging, Fressoz has a wryly Gallic turn of humour. He believes that a world entirely powered by wind, solar and wave-power, aided by energy-storage and perhaps nuclear power is possible, with the proviso that none of these technologies can be either permanent or self-replicating. Every 25-50 years, solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear reactors lose their efficacy and need to be reconstructed, using fossil fuels.

While Frossez is strongly in favour of renewables, he is adamant that their construction, maintenance and replacement will be reliant on coal gas and oil.  This is clearly better than squandering these precious, finite resources by inefficiently burning them directly.  

No politician or economist is acknowledging the huge expansion in electricity supply which will be required by an economy on today’s scale if it is to be based on renewables. Around 30% of today’s global electricity comes from renewables.  But, because only around 20% of total energy consumption is in the form of electricity, renewables today produce just 6% of total energy. Raising this to 60% of global consumption, using renewables,  electric vehicles, batteries and heat pumps, would demand vast quantities of fossil fuels in constructing, maintaining and replacing the infrastructure, batteries and vehicles.

Those same politicians and economists seem unable to grasp the quantities of energy which are implicit in their pursuit of economic growth. 3% growth doubles the energy demand every 25 years.

As others have pointed out, renewables can sustain the economy for a human civilization, but just not THIS economy. Its ever-expanding appetite for more and more energy simply cannot be met by renewables, especially with the ever-growing demand for electricity. Electric cars and heat pumps are now being joined by electricity-hungry AI data centres, arc-furnaces and even crypto-currency miners. In the words of a recent Prime Minister, they are expecting to ‘have our cake and eat it’.

Fressoz’s well-argued book looks beyond individual countries attempting to achieve a blinkered, insular ‘Net Zero’ while ignoring both the global reach of CO2 emissions and the energy embedded in imported goods. Perhaps there is a better way?

According to the International Energy Agency (www.IEA.org), The world’s poorest 10% of people produce just 0.2% of total CO2 emissions, while the wealthiest 10% produce 50%. More specifically, the Stockholm Environment Institute (http://www.sei-international.org/) estimates that the richest 0.1% of those top individual polluters emit 10x as much CO2 as the remaining 9.9% of that 10% segment. Private jets and superyachts appear to correspond uncomfortably closely to lethality for the living world.    

With this in mind, perhaps the final word belongs to the more philosophical author of the previously-reviewed book, Jean-Marc Jancovici. He looks beyond the issue of energy production to its wise consumption. He suggests that the best hope for the future, both in technical and social terms, lies in a society geared instead to sobriete, or in English, ‘moderation’, ‘responsibility’ or ‘restraint’.

By The Eco-Worrier