Energy use: a history not as linear as it seems

The point of view presented by the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in his interview of 2 September can be understood in two opposing ways. The first, fatalistic, asserts the psychological and political impossibility of turning away from an energy resource: so far, people would only have been stacking them, so that "there has never been a real transition in the past". 

This reading of history fits the current mood well, marked by a brutal deconstruction of the very idea of an energy transition. Therefore, what has never existed would have no reason to occur in the future. An argument that runs entirely counter to human history, by the way...

A more nuanced history of energy

The way Jean-Baptiste Fressoz summarizes the history of human use of the various possible energy sources is itself contestable and deserves strong qualification. There are in fact several examples of abandoning certain energy sources in favor of others, invented or improved over time.

Take the case of water power: in the pre-industrial economy, almost every river turned countless mills — for grain, but also for fulling, hammering or forging. Today, even if the direct use of water power has virtually disappeared, it is used to produce electricity. The same goes for windmills, once ubiquitous in windy regions: they are now almost all inactive. Certainly, the power of the wind continues to be exploited, but again indirectly — to produce electricity — if one sets aside the sporting practice of sailing.

As for wood energy, it was indeed supplanted by coal, then by oil, and only recently has it regained a — still modest — place in our energy mix. Moreover, after centuries of overexploitation, our forests were in poor condition at the time coal arrived: because of centuries of livestock grazing or intensive wood cutting for construction, they had severely degraded.

Since the emergence of fossil fuels — and the reduction of agricultural land linked to rural exodus — French forest area has thus doubled in size. Certainly, part of this expansion is due to plantations intended for the pulp industry, like the monoculture of pines in the former marshes of the Landes. In short, history seems less linear than Jean-Baptiste Fressoz suggests.

The past should not guide the future

But that is not the main point. Because there is another reading of the French historian's theses: why would there not have been, until recently, a deliberate discrimination between different forms of energy? Until about half a century ago, almost no one had any objection to the predominance of fossil and fissile sources, seen as reliable, convenient, modern and efficient sources.

It is geopolitical questions and concerns about sustainability that led to considering a sorting of energies. Thus, energy policy emerges as a central public policy, which must integrate all risks: both those weighing on ecological balances and those threatening supply security — and this from a long-term perspective.

Moreover, supporters of nuclear power did in fact have a substitution perspective: in this case replacing fossil fuel with atom-based energy, as Jean-Baptiste Fressoz himself recalls in the interview. That was a first attempt to favor certain modes of energy production over others, invalidating the stacking theory. Except that, given the number of reactors that would be needed to replace fossil fuels, the risks related to such a nuclear proliferation were unacceptable. Another path therefore had to be found: getting out of fossil fuels without tipping into an all-fissile world.

Getting out of fossil fuels is essential

For about thirty years, it has become clear that the world's dominant energies — essentially the different forms of fossil energy, and, much more marginally, nuclear — have three major drawbacks: they are the most toxic to ecological balances; they are not renewable; they generate strong territorial dependencies.

It is this triple deficit that generated the idea of an energy transition, which implies the need to make choices. Specifically, to prioritize energy savings — by two complementary routes: technical optimization and sobriety of uses — and to mobilize renewable sources, available locally and complementary to one another: wood, biomass, water, subsurface and ambient heat, the sun, the wind…

It is this "winning trilogy" that allows us, technically, to avoid continuing to project the still-existing reserves of carbon into the atmosphere, in their solid, liquid and gaseous forms.

Therefore, what should be retained from Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's message regarding the notion of transition is not that it "contributed to legitimizing a collective procrastination in the face of the climate crisis", but rather that "history is unable to help us on these questions" and that, when it comes to inventing the future, "this future has, in reality, no past". The real task is to ensure that this past has no future... The question is thus no longer only technical, but concerns imagination and will.

For if, in the past, humanity did not feel the need to make distinctions between different energy sources, it is now essential to do so: yesterday's recipes and practices cannot guarantee our future. Whether this is easy to do is another story... but we hardly have a choice.

Thus, instead of encouraging fatalism or justifying our hesitations, the analyses of the French historian should push us to promote the reorientations that our time desperately needs. Their ambiguity, however, exposes them to being instrumentalized by forces determined to keep us dependent on fossil fuels ... to which fissile dependency would be added.

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