More and More and More

[A] sprightly demolition job – Pilita Clarke * The FT *A densely researched polemic designed to shock – Chris Stokel-Walker * New Scientist *A necessary, eye-opening and frequently gobsmacking book… Removing fossil fuels from the energy mix will require something akin to an amputation. The vivid sense of the scale and complexity of the world’s material and energetic flows provided by this book makes clear what a difficult, and possibly bloody, operation that will have to be * The Economist *We all know the energy transition away from fossil fuels is needed to keep the climate safe. But this eye-opening book shows our understanding of past transitions is delusional. Far from moving definitively from wood to coal to oil and gas, we have continued to binge on all forms of energy. Somehow, this has to stop – Pilita Clark * The FT (Best books of 2024: Environment, Science and Technology) *An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic mainstays of our modern way of life – is without precedent. This is the argument of …Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the scale of what lies ahead, the first thing we have to do is to free ourselves from the ideology of the history of energy transition… Fressoz doesn’t wish to dismiss the possibility of change. The point, rather, is to dereify it… Fressoz has given us a properly materialist history of the 20th century. – Adam Tooze * LRB *In More and More and More, Fressoz demolishes other historians’ work [and] provides a corrective to the lazy thinking that surrounds our current predicament – Henry Sanderson * TLS *This is truly is a radically and very necessary new history of energy. A rich, unnerving, funny and utterly compelling account, it destabilises our understanding again and again. With uncanny examples, he makes the invisible obvious, and shows how the obvious was made invisible by forms of understanding in which even climate activists operate. This remarkable material and intellectual history will change our minds about one of the most important challenges humanity currently faces, indeed it gives us a new way of thinking about the profound challenge decarbonisation represents – David Edgerton * author of The Shock of the Old and The Rise and Fall of the British Nation *

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the author of The Happy Apocalypse and The Shock of the Anthropocene (with C. Bonneuil).