The “Energy Transition” Delusion

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:


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Author
Jonathan Ratner

Jonathan Ratner has been in the trenches of public lands conservation for nearly 25 years. He started out doing forest carnivore work for the Forest Service, BLM, and the Inter-agency Grizzly Bear Study Team, with some Wilderness Rangering on the Pinedale Ranger District. That work lead him directly to deal with the gross corruption within the federal agencies' range program.

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