From our friends at Population Balance, comes their latest podcast with historian and author Jean-Baptiste Fressor.
To get all the ways to listen, click here.

There is no energy transition – only ongoing and symbiotic energy addition. Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, author of More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy, joins us. Highlights include:
- How the symbiotic relationships between wood, coal, and oil have led to increased use of all of them;
- Why decoupling economic growth from energy and materials use is a delusional myth;
- How the energy transition narrative evolved and why it’s an “intellectual scandal” used to delay climate action through faith in techno-driven growth;
- How the IPCC’s focus on economic growth drives the energy transition narrative, downplays degrowth and sufficiency, and relies on unproven techno-fixes, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS);
- How safety norms were invented to secure industrial capital, and how criticisms and objections around technological risks were silenced or overcome to establish technological modernity.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
- Book: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
- Book: Happy Apocalypse: A History of Technological Risk by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
- Book: Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
- Book: The Shock of the Anthropocene:The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
- Book: A Forest Journey by John Perlin
- Book: An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen
- Podcast: OVERSHOOT: “Embracing Limits With Ecospheric Grace” with guest Robert Jensen
- Academic Paper: Confronting the United Nations’ Pro-Growth Agenda: A Call to Reverse Ecological Overshoot by Nandita Bajaj, Eileen Crist, and Kirsten Stade
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