Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. Today
Speaker 1: we are bringing you another interview in our ongoing series
Speaker 1: Drilling Deep, in which we interview the authors of various
Speaker 1: books coming out on climate, the energy transition, the economy
Speaker 1: and politics surrounding those things and all of the above.
Speaker 1: Usually these interviews are being done by Adam Lowenstein, who
Speaker 1: is written all the books and talking to all authors
Speaker 1: for us, and that is true of this episode as well.
Speaker 1: This time Adam spoke with Jean Baptiste Frasso, who's the
Speaker 1: author of More and More and More and All Consuming
Speaker 1: History of Energy. This book is great. It looks at
Speaker 1: how green innovation and decarbonization are not necessarily the same thing.
Speaker 1: In fact, Frasseau points out that it is perfectly readable
Speaker 1: and more importantly accurate to assume that the consumption of oil, gas, coal,
Speaker 1: and even wood will continue to increase right alongside clean energy.
Speaker 1: I've written about this a bunch lots of other people
Speaker 1: have as well. If we only tackle the energy source
Speaker 1: and we don't tackle our behavior or our attitudes towards consumption,
Speaker 1: then yeah, we're going to end up using too many
Speaker 1: critical earth minerals or creating a bunch of environmental problems
Speaker 1: getting lithium or building a bunch of electric SUVs that
Speaker 1: nobody needs. Friseau shows this is the real story of
Speaker 1: humanity's development and consumption of energy. We keep using more
Speaker 1: and more and more of all kinds of it. And
Speaker 1: while the popular narrative is one of substitution oil replacing coal,
Speaker 1: for example, the real is symbiosis. New energy sources do
Speaker 1: not supplant their predecessors, but rather supplement them. If that
Speaker 1: sounds like a radical argument, it's only because the notion
Speaker 1: of energy transition has become so deeply entrenched. In a
Speaker 1: conversation recorded in September, Adam and Freiso discussed how the
Speaker 1: premise of energy transition became widely accepted as true and inevitable,
Speaker 1: why clean energy innovation is not the same thing as decarbonization,
Speaker 1: how the fossil fuel industry helped launder pipe dreams of
Speaker 1: non existent technologies like carbon capture and storage into mainstream
Speaker 1: climate solutions, and much more and more and more. It's
Speaker 1: a really fascinating conversation. I hope you enjoy it as
Speaker 1: much as I did. That interview is coming up right
Speaker 1: after this quick break.
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Speaker 4: So I know the US publication was just last month,
Speaker 4: but the book's been out elsewhere for a while, right,
Speaker 4: and it's become quite successful.
Speaker 3: It's been in France. It has been publishing in France
Speaker 3: in January twenty four O reached October twenty for in
Speaker 3: Britain and in Spain it's more the same. So yeah,
Speaker 3: it's been out for a year more than a year,
Speaker 3: at year and a half.
Speaker 4: How has the reception been in America versus where it
Speaker 4: was published previously.
Speaker 3: I mean there was a really warm reception. I got
Speaker 3: severals and people were interested in this, you know, historical
Speaker 3: outlook on this very consensual but strange notion of energy transition.
Speaker 3: I think in the US the reception for the moment
Speaker 3: has been rather quiet. Perhaps it's because the debate about
Speaker 3: climate change in the US has shifted so much to
Speaker 3: the right and to climato skepticism and all that that
Speaker 3: my book is not really you know, adapted for to
Speaker 3: fight for fighting this debate. It's rather a book which
Speaker 3: helped us to understand what it takes to really get
Speaker 3: carbon neutral, right. So, I mean, that's the big difference
Speaker 3: I think that I noticed between the US and Europe
Speaker 3: from what I hear from people working in finance or
Speaker 3: insurance industry. Basically they say that trump reelection is a backlash.
Speaker 3: Also in European finance, for instance, there were a lot
Speaker 3: of commitment of companies going and net zero, having net
Speaker 3: zero strategies and all this now is being reduced and
Speaker 3: you know, so it has effect and bad effects and
Speaker 3: terrible effects on the rest of the world as well.
Speaker 3: But right, we should not be obsessed with the US.
Speaker 3: I think the US now is just like thirteen or
Speaker 3: fourteen percent of theater emissions. What did I say, is
Speaker 3: what's happening in China basically and in Asia in general,
Speaker 3: and there, I mean, there are some good news about
Speaker 3: the development of solar energy, but there are also bad
Speaker 3: news about deployment of new called power plant at the
Speaker 3: same time. And so my book helps usertand why these
Speaker 3: two phenomena can happen at the same time, Why coal
Speaker 3: and sorrow energy are not necessarily in competition. Why we
Speaker 3: have a far too simplistic vision of energy dynamics where
Speaker 3: new energy replace the old ones. But in fact energies
Speaker 3: are in competition, but they're also in symbiosis. So that's
Speaker 3: really what the book explore, the simbiostic relationship between the
Speaker 3: between energies.
Speaker 4: For me, one of the best things reading a book
Speaker 4: can do is completely shift my understanding of how the
Speaker 4: world is, how the world works, and I think this
Speaker 4: is one of those books. And so I want to
Speaker 4: take a sort of a roundabout approach to getting to
Speaker 4: your core argument, because I think it's very simple on
Speaker 4: one hand, but it's such a fundamental transformation and how
Speaker 4: so many of us see the world and understand how
Speaker 4: we got here that I want to kind of ease
Speaker 4: into it to make sure it's clear for folks. So
Speaker 4: the question I want to start with on that front
Speaker 4: is why humanity is still burning so much wood, Because
Speaker 4: the story we've been told is that there was wood,
Speaker 4: and then there was coal, and then there was oil
Speaker 4: and natural gas, and now we're in the midst of
Speaker 4: a transition to green energy. But one of the most
Speaker 4: transformational parts of the book for me is A, that's
Speaker 4: not the case, and B we're still consuming more than ever.
Speaker 3: In fact, indeed, I mean, the world consumption of foods
Speaker 3: right now is four billion cubic mirrors. About how this
Speaker 3: quantity is burned directly to produce heat, I mean, why
Speaker 3: we burn so much food? First of all, because for
Speaker 3: a big part of the population it is a major
Speaker 3: fuel for the poor in the poor world would remain
Speaker 3: extremely important. But actually wood has also increased in the ritual,
Speaker 3: which is probably more surprising. But for instance, wood energy
Speaker 3: is very important for the paper industry, and the paper
Speaker 3: industry is a huge industrial consumer of energy. The forced
Speaker 3: the fourth largest consumer of energy after I mean, the
Speaker 3: first is steel, the second is cement, the third is
Speaker 3: chemical industry, and the fourth is the paper industry. And
Speaker 3: paper industry is using more and more wood just to
Speaker 3: power its production process. And right now the wood energy
Speaker 3: consuming the paper industry in Europe, for instance, it's more
Speaker 3: or less the same as the solar electricity in Europe.
Speaker 3: So we're talking about, you know, a seriouse amount of
Speaker 3: wood energy here. But in a more general way, I
Speaker 3: think it's important to notice that the more you got oil,
Speaker 3: and once you've got oil, wood is becoming cheaper and
Speaker 3: cheaper because with all you've got chainsaws, lumber trucks, all
Speaker 3: sorts of machines which make wood much cheaper. So you
Speaker 3: can burn more wood because you've got access to more wood.
Speaker 3: And another thing is thanks to oil and gas you
Speaker 3: can produce and pesticide and fertilizer, you can produce much
Speaker 3: much more wood on a certain area. I mean the yields,
Speaker 3: the productivity per acres of plantations of forest plantations has
Speaker 3: increased a lot since the nineteen sixties, especially with the
Speaker 3: production of cucalyptus, which is like a kind of a
Speaker 3: miracle tree. Just to give you an example, in Brazil
Speaker 3: eucalyptus plantation they can reach like forty cubic meter per
Speaker 3: year and actar a forest in Europe would be like
Speaker 3: two or three cubic meter per year per rectar. In
Speaker 3: the early twentieth century, so that there is a radical
Speaker 3: transformation of the production of wood, and that makes that
Speaker 3: food energy has increased. For all these reasons, wood energy
Speaker 3: has increased lots in the nineteen in the twentieth century.
Speaker 4: One of the things that you show in this book
Speaker 4: is that different energy systems different materials are symbiotic. Can
Speaker 4: you describe what that means? And maybe using the relationship
Speaker 4: between coal and oil, I think you say it's one
Speaker 4: of the most important relationships in modern history.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, basically the history of energy has been
Speaker 3: obsessed with substitution, with transition, with competition. How oil displaced
Speaker 3: coal because of course, when you've got diesel engine, you
Speaker 3: can get I mean, you can get rid of old
Speaker 3: steam engines which are particularly inefficient. But it's just one
Speaker 3: part of the story. In general, energies are in symbiosity,
Speaker 3: that they have symbiotic relationship, they're intertwined. And just to
Speaker 3: give you an example about oil and coal. To produce
Speaker 3: a car in the nineteen thirties, Ford Company, we need
Speaker 3: like seven tons of coal to build an automobile because
Speaker 3: they I mean Ford produced its own steel, it produced
Speaker 3: its own electricity, and seven tons of coal. It means
Speaker 3: that at that time, and automobile is just as much
Speaker 3: a coal technology as an oil technology, because at that
Speaker 3: time the tea would burn more or less seven tons
Speaker 3: of oil during its lifetime. And it's even more than
Speaker 3: that because to use an automobile you need roads obviously,
Speaker 3: and to make road you need cement and steel, and
Speaker 3: these two materials are also called dependent. Right. So that's
Speaker 3: why despite the advance of oil, actually you burn more
Speaker 3: and more coal. I mean, there is no opposition at all.
Speaker 3: And then to extract oil you need a lot of
Speaker 3: steel tubes. When I say a lot, it's really tremendous amount.
Speaker 3: Like the US at the beginning of the twenty first
Speaker 3: century US more still to extract oil than the US
Speaker 3: than the whole US economy used in the early nineteen hundreds. Right,
Speaker 3: So there is really a synthetic expansion of both coal
Speaker 3: and oil, and the two go along very well together.
Speaker 3: Once you start to think energy like this, the idea
Speaker 3: of energy transition, of course, starts to become stranger and stranger. Right.
Speaker 3: So the first part of the book is really an
Speaker 3: explanation of why coal, oil, woods and all energies actually
Speaker 3: are completely into twine and growing symbiotically and the second
Speaker 3: part of the book is how come that this idea
Speaker 3: of energy transition became so you know, natural, whereas it
Speaker 3: shouldn't be. It's a really weird, weird notion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's go there actually and talk about where this
Speaker 4: narrative came from. I'm particularly interested in talking about the
Speaker 4: role of industry and the role of intellectuals. Both groups,
Speaker 4: obviously lots of overlap between the two then and now
Speaker 4: are partly responsible. But can you talk about the genesis
Speaker 4: of this narrative which has become so entrenched that a
Speaker 4: lot of us, I think, including me, until I read
Speaker 4: this book, just saw it as again the way things.
Speaker 3: Are, I mean. Or The third thing to note is
Speaker 3: that for a long period of time, nobody talked about
Speaker 3: energy transition because what I just explained was completely self evident.
Speaker 3: For so, they knew that coal would be necessary just
Speaker 3: to produce steel, for instance, like in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 3: American conservationists, you know, they were asking questions such as,
Speaker 3: will there be called in the twenty third or twenty
Speaker 3: fourth century, you know, we should you know, economize call
Speaker 3: because we will need call for a very very long
Speaker 3: period of time in the future. So they did not
Speaker 3: imagine energy system shifting suddenly to another another base. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was not something they had in mind. And then
Speaker 3: there was a small group of scientists experts who started
Speaker 3: to talk about energy transition. Most of them were atomic scientists,
Speaker 3: US atomic scientists who had participated to the man Attan project,
Speaker 3: the creation of the first atomic So.
Speaker 4: We're talking nineteen fifties roughly.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean right after actually Hiroshima and Nagazaki, right
Speaker 3: after that, they start to imagine, you know, what you
Speaker 3: could do with this tremendous invention. In a way, I
Speaker 3: think that for some of them, they felt guilty about
Speaker 3: the atomic bombing of Japanese series, and they wanted to
Speaker 3: explain that what they had done during the war was
Speaker 3: not just this terrible instrument of destruction, but was also
Speaker 3: the key for the long term survival of humanity. It
Speaker 3: was the only energy that you could project in a far,
Speaker 3: far away future. There is a an atomic scientist called
Speaker 3: Alvin Weinberg who was a participant of the to the
Speaker 3: Mandarin project, and then he became a very important character.
Speaker 3: He was the head of Oakridge National Laboratory after the war,
Speaker 3: and in his biography he explicitly explained, I mean he
Speaker 3: said that I became obsessed with the Breeder reactor. It
Speaker 3: is a certain kind of nuclear reactor or fast nutrient
Speaker 3: reactor which basically opens up a kind of unlimited amount
Speaker 3: of energy or I mean energies for not decades of centuries,
Speaker 3: but for millennia. So it's really it really becomes a
Speaker 3: kind of you know, providential technology. And of course when
Speaker 3: you start to think about energy, not indicate centric, but
Speaker 3: in terms of millennia, then you can imagine all sorts
Speaker 3: of things, and you especially imagine the end of fossil fuels.
Speaker 3: There will be an energy transition because fossil fuels are finite,
Speaker 3: there is a limited amount of them under the ground.
Speaker 3: So there will be a future. There will be a
Speaker 3: time when we have exhausted fossil fuels and the world,
Speaker 3: the world will run on atomic energy and hydrogen because
Speaker 3: they know that you need, you know, like a liquid
Speaker 3: to power sheets or boats or or or cars and
Speaker 3: so on. Right, So that that that's that, that's what
Speaker 3: the vision was. But another important character in this respect
Speaker 3: is actually Mayanking Herbert that I don't know how famous
Speaker 3: is in the US, but is really important. Theoretician of
Speaker 3: peak oil in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there are certain online communities I think where he's
Speaker 4: probably quite well known the peak oil crowd.
Speaker 3: So basically in the nineteen fifties he was explaining that
Speaker 3: the US would reach its peak oil production around nineteen seventy. Actually,
Speaker 3: right now, the US I think is producing fifty percent
Speaker 3: more oil than in nineteen seventy because he could not
Speaker 3: see Shelle oil basically coming. So Minking Herbert in nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty five is recruited by the Atomic Energy Commission and
Speaker 3: he becomes like a prominent voice in defense of the
Speaker 3: Breeder reactor. He writes special reports that are read by
Speaker 3: John Figerald Kennedy about the Breeder reactor, and in his
Speaker 3: work he said that, I mean, we have to develop
Speaker 3: this technology because we need to make a transition from oil,
Speaker 3: coal and gas to nuclear energy. The person coined the
Speaker 3: word energy transition is called Harrison Brown, who is also
Speaker 3: an atomic scientist. And actually when he invents this world
Speaker 3: is recycling a technical term of nuclear physics and energy transition.
Speaker 3: Nuclear physics is the change of an electron around its nucleus,
Speaker 3: and it recycles this world to talk about the future
Speaker 3: of energy, So really this is the beginning of energy
Speaker 3: transition as a kind of you know, expert knowledge. It
Speaker 3: comes from this small group of people. Several things to say.
Speaker 3: First of all, the energy transition seen by the atomic
Speaker 3: scientists of the nineteen fifties. You know, it's a very long,
Speaker 3: dury process. It will take not decade the centuries. According
Speaker 3: to min King her Bed, the head of fossil fuel
Speaker 3: at a global level will be in three or four centuries.
Speaker 3: They know that there is still a lot of coal,
Speaker 3: and they also know that in the poor world at
Speaker 3: a make energy we take a lot of time to
Speaker 3: develop obviously, right. What is problematic is that we recycle
Speaker 3: this idea of energy transition to reflect upon climate change,
Speaker 3: because now we have to do the energy transition not
Speaker 3: in three or four centuries, but in three or four decades,
Speaker 3: and we have to do it whereas fossil fuels are
Speaker 3: rather cheap, I mean, oil is not that expensive and
Speaker 3: coal is cheap, so it's a completely different situation. But
Speaker 3: we recycle the same kind of you know, energy futurelogy,
Speaker 3: I think a very wrong energy futurology, which has played
Speaker 3: a detrimental role in our understanding of the enormity of
Speaker 3: the challenge of solving climate change.
Speaker 4: Can you describe briefly what a futureology is and how
Speaker 4: it applies to this discussion.
Speaker 3: Perhaps I would say forecast to be a better word.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure actly I mean of the futureology is
Speaker 3: a vision of the future, a theory about the future,
Speaker 3: what I do in the future, what will happen. So
Speaker 3: it's all this discussion which is, you know, gear at
Speaker 3: imagining what will be the shape of things to come,
Speaker 3: that I call futureology. But it's actually were they use
Speaker 3: at the time, and it was very fashionable in the
Speaker 3: nineteen fifties. Of course, with the atomic age in the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, I mean, futulogy becomes a kind of scientific
Speaker 3: discipline in the in the nineteen sixties, I would say,
Speaker 3: where there is a lot of drurnals that are call
Speaker 3: that are created about technological focusting, about how things technology
Speaker 3: evolve and so on. It is really studied at that period.
Speaker 3: And one of the problem is that most of the
Speaker 3: focusting actually was on technology, the evolution of technologies, and
Speaker 3: it is from this discipline that our understanding of what
Speaker 3: we should do for climate change emerged. The problem is
Speaker 3: that dynamics of technologies are not the same as dynamics
Speaker 3: of materials and energies. I mean, when you talk about technology,
Speaker 3: technologies do become obsolete sometime. Landlines for instance, for telephones,
Speaker 3: you know they are absolute now, But materials are very obsolete.
Speaker 3: It's a very, very trivial thing. But I think it's
Speaker 3: very important to keep that in mind. Despite all the innovations,
Speaker 3: all the new technologies that we got in the twenty
Speaker 3: years and twenty first century, all raw materials have increased.
Speaker 3: That's why, I mean what you just said about how
Speaker 3: come that we burn so much food? Actually you can
Speaker 3: ask the question for every material. It's not just that oil,
Speaker 3: gas and coal are expanding, is that every raw material
Speaker 3: is expanding. There are very few exceptions to this rule.
Speaker 3: One of them is asbestos, which is material which was prohibited.
Speaker 3: I think it's quite interesting to see that prohibition prohibition
Speaker 3: does work. If you want to do something about time change,
Speaker 3: you have to prohibit extraction or consumption. You have to
Speaker 3: really take a decision. You cannot rely on technological obsolescence
Speaker 3: of Passifield. This is really a very it's a losing
Speaker 3: bad basically, it's a losing strategy. The only example of
Speaker 3: a room material that has decreased because of technological obserlizence.
Speaker 3: It is shipwule because it has been displaced by synthetic fibers.
Speaker 3: But it's not a good news Sutch environment, but it
Speaker 3: is one of the very very rare example of such
Speaker 3: a process of material transition. If you wish and chip
Speaker 3: wooll is still consumed, I mean, it does not disappear obviously.
Speaker 3: So once again you cannot overestimate the enormity of what
Speaker 3: we have to do now. It is just I mean,
Speaker 3: we have no historical analogy to what we have to
Speaker 3: do now. We have never done energy transition in the past.
Speaker 3: We don't know how long it takes since we have
Speaker 3: never done an energy transition, and I think it's important
Speaker 3: for people to realize that this is extraordinarily ambitious. It's
Speaker 3: not just a matter of putting some solar panels and windmills.
Speaker 3: It's much deeper than that.
Speaker 4: And I'm just going to plant a flag here for
Speaker 4: us to come back to carbon capture and storage, because
Speaker 4: as you're describing the fact that essentially every energy source
Speaker 4: in the history of humanity has continued to accumulate over time,
Speaker 4: you can see why from the industry's perspective, and also
Speaker 4: from the IPCC or from anyone who would like this
Speaker 4: to be an easier resolution than it requires. Something like
Speaker 4: CCS would be a very seductive option.
Speaker 3: But before we.
Speaker 4: Get to that, I just wanted to see if you
Speaker 4: could talk a bit about how the narrative of the
Speaker 4: energy transition became so persistent and so entrenched, and in
Speaker 4: particular why the fossil fuel industry capitalized on it or
Speaker 4: saw it as such a useful delay tactic.
Speaker 3: To come back to what I was saying before, basically,
Speaker 3: in the nineteen CCS they are just, I mean, a
Speaker 3: small group of people talking about energy transition. There were
Speaker 3: nuclear promoters of nuclear energy or fast freederreactor, a very
Speaker 3: specific kind of technology. But then there was something happened
Speaker 3: to trust the oil shock and the energy crisis. After
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three, the phrase energy crisis became omnipresent, I
Speaker 3: mean was in every on every mouth, in every mouth,
Speaker 3: It was on talk shows on the New York Times,
Speaker 3: So it was really like an obsession, and energy transition
Speaker 3: actually became natural as a solution for the energy crisis.
Speaker 3: If there is one person that has been really important
Speaker 3: to really normalize this idea. It is a US president
Speaker 3: called Jimmy Cutter. On the eighteenth of April nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 3: it gave a very important talk on television where it says,
Speaker 3: I mean, in the part the US has done two
Speaker 3: energy transitions, one from good to cold, seven from coal
Speaker 3: to oil, and we have to do a third energy transition.
Speaker 3: It was a very astute way to sell to the
Speaker 3: US public the increase of the coal industry. I mean,
Speaker 3: Jimmy Carter is now remembered for having put some solar
Speaker 3: panels on the roof of the White House. He supported
Speaker 3: solar energy.
Speaker 4: And that actually sounds pretty appealing right now, Yeah, it
Speaker 4: sounds very appealing, and I think it was probably the
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, he wanted to do something about
Speaker 4: solar energy, but he was also not very naive about
Speaker 4: what we could do with sol.
Speaker 3: Energy in nineteen seventy So actually the main basis of
Speaker 3: his energy policy was call. I mean, all is going
Speaker 3: to become more expensive. We have to dig more call
Speaker 3: in the US. We even need to I mean, according
Speaker 3: to him, to liquify call, to transform call into a
Speaker 3: synthetic fuel. And actually it is really at this particular
Speaker 3: moment in history that climate change emerged as a political
Speaker 3: issue in the US in nineteen seventy nine, you have
Speaker 3: the very first addition by the Senate of climatologists, because
Speaker 3: you got two branches in the Democratic Party. One was
Speaker 3: in favor of the energy policy plan of Jimmy Catur
Speaker 3: and then otherwise very critical. So climate change at the
Speaker 3: beginning was a of argument against this energy policy by
Speaker 3: the president. Anyway, So in nineteen seventy seven, Jimmy Cato
Speaker 3: use this idea of energy transition. It was to make future,
Speaker 3: to make call a peer futuristic. You know, we are
Speaker 3: not in coal mines, which are very poliutaying and so on.
Speaker 3: We are doing an energy transition. That sounds much better, right,
Speaker 3: And actually because right after the speech on TV, the
Speaker 3: New York Times as an article saying that the US
Speaker 3: and the world at the beginning of a new energy
Speaker 3: transition or something like that, you know, So it was
Speaker 3: a PR move basically, that's trute way, and that's to
Speaker 3: a PR move. And shortly after this talk, energy transition
Speaker 3: was taken up by you and O. There was a
Speaker 3: conference on renewable energy in a will be a few
Speaker 3: years later, and energy transition was over the place. It
Speaker 3: is then taken up by the ECD like in Paris
Speaker 3: and international organization, it becomes natural, Okay, everybody's talking about
Speaker 3: energy transition. Interestingly enough, the environmentalist movement, which never talked
Speaker 3: about energy transition before, after the President talked about it,
Speaker 3: started to say, we have to do an energy transition
Speaker 3: to solar energy. So really it's it's really this particular
Speaker 3: time that really energy transition started to emerge. But really,
Speaker 3: once again, at that time, energy transition could mean anything
Speaker 3: like a pipeline in Alaska, it could be more call
Speaker 3: in the US, it could be lequal affection of anything
Speaker 3: that would increase energy sovereignty for the US again the
Speaker 3: Middle East. That was really what the first out output
Speaker 3: of energy transition discourse was really in this context, then
Speaker 3: it was kind of forgotten in the I would say
Speaker 3: that in the nineteen eighty there is a really low
Speaker 3: point about discours around energy transition, and it re emerged
Speaker 3: with climate change. And here it's really an issue about
Speaker 3: the history of science. You got basically the same experts
Speaker 3: what worked on the energy crisis became the experts of
Speaker 3: the climate issue. And that's really why we've recycled this
Speaker 3: wrong vision of energy dynamics from the nineteen seventies up
Speaker 3: to now. That's really because they are the same kind
Speaker 3: of economists, like energy economists fighting the energy crisis. A
Speaker 3: few years later there would be climate economists fighting climate change,
Speaker 3: and they would just recycle the same kind of theories.
Speaker 3: Will have not else. It's probably the most famous one
Speaker 3: Noble in economics for twenty eighteen. It's very clear basically
Speaker 3: energy transition for him was a way to justify it
Speaker 3: was the delay in tactics. In nineteen seventy three, you
Speaker 3: write a paper on the energic crisis explaining that oil
Speaker 3: is becoming more expensive. Should we economize oil conserve oil?
Speaker 3: Not at all. On the contrary, we have to extract
Speaker 3: all right now while it is expensive, because with the
Speaker 3: breeder reactor oil might become obsolete at the end of
Speaker 3: the twentieth century. This is the nineteen seventy three paid
Speaker 3: Two years later, right, he wrote the very first paper
Speaker 3: of climate economics, and he has the same reason. End
Speaker 3: there is an issue about greenhire the effect. Does it
Speaker 3: mean that we have to tighten our belt our energy belt?
Speaker 3: Not at all. It would be so much easier to
Speaker 3: do the energy transition later when we have the Buder reactor,
Speaker 3: so it was really delaying tactics and energy transition was
Speaker 3: really also relying on very strong hope around new clientergy
Speaker 3: at the time.
Speaker 4: You can see how reading your book, the concept of
Speaker 4: the Breeder reactor just becomes a placeholder for future innovation
Speaker 4: that we haven't come up with yet, but we will,
Speaker 4: and therefore we don't need to change what we're doing
Speaker 4: right now exactly.
Speaker 3: William Ordas is also the introducer of a famous race
Speaker 3: called backstop technology. Backstop technology it's a nondefined technology that
Speaker 3: will save the bins in the future basically, So for
Speaker 3: a long time it was Buder reactor and hydrogen. Now
Speaker 3: it's cabon capturn storage. But when you read articles of
Speaker 3: climate economy, they still have the hypothesis we assume there
Speaker 3: is a backstop technology that at one hundred dollars per
Speaker 3: ton of SEO two, you know, can capture SEO too
Speaker 3: or whatever. Right, So it's a very abstract vision of technology,
Speaker 3: very i mean, a deeply wrong vision of technological development.
Speaker 3: But it is still with us today and.
Speaker 4: You can see how it's such a useful narrative for
Speaker 4: the industry. You cite a memo from I think nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty two, which of course it's a maybe it's not
Speaker 4: a memo, but it's a speech, a document of some
Speaker 4: kind from an Exxon executive, and of course it comes
Speaker 4: back to Exxon, because it always does.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's very yeah. Ed what David was
Speaker 3: the chief of Excellent orang a very interesting character. He
Speaker 3: was a science advisor of Nixon before that. And what
Speaker 3: is interesting is that at the time Exon was not climatoscpe.
Speaker 3: They were doing some serious research on climate change, but
Speaker 3: they were transitionists. They were playing the transition book. I mean,
Speaker 3: in this discourse that Excellent gives actually the invitation of
Speaker 3: Jim Hansen, the very famous US climatologist. Edward David explained that,
Speaker 3: of course there is climate change, of course there was
Speaker 3: going Now the fact we all know that this is
Speaker 3: all science not interesting. The interesting question is what will
Speaker 3: confer the climate catastrophe or the energy transition. And it
Speaker 3: was very astute to present the issue like this because
Speaker 3: at that time cammatologists were actually very naive about the
Speaker 3: energy transition. You can read article from the late nineteen
Speaker 3: seventies by climatologists US climatologists explain that climate change will
Speaker 3: have consequences, it would be sensible. I mean, you could
Speaker 3: feel climate change by two thousand, It would have economic
Speaker 3: consequences by twenty twenty, it would be catastrophic by twenty seventy.
Speaker 3: When you write twenty seventy in nineteen seventy, it's in
Speaker 3: science fiction. And so the reasoning goes that, of course
Speaker 3: we have time to do an energy transition in the meantime,
Speaker 3: you know, as if we knew how long it takes.
Speaker 3: And this is not just particular climatologist. The Geneva Conference
Speaker 3: on Climate Change in nineteen seventy nine explicitly the opening
Speaker 3: quote of my book is from the conclusion of this conference.
Speaker 3: They say that climate change really have very serious effect
Speaker 3: by twenty fifty, but that leaves us time to redirect agriculture, industry,
Speaker 3: in the whole economy. Basically, you know, there was a
Speaker 3: really very big yes nafety and trust in technology as well.
Speaker 4: And in the meantime we should continue. We have to
Speaker 4: continue to use fossil fuels, because otherwise, how will we
Speaker 4: have the resources and the energy to allow the free
Speaker 4: market and industry without interference from government to come up
Speaker 4: with the solutions to just as it always has in
Speaker 4: the past, as right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's another I mean connected to this idea.
Speaker 3: I mean, there is the idea of energy transition, which
Speaker 3: very quickly seems kind of empty and not very convincing.
Speaker 3: I mean, you've got several reports from the early nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties in the US showing that they would not be
Speaker 3: an energy transition, that that commachante will happen. The EPA
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty two published a report and I think
Speaker 3: the title was can we delay global warming? Not can
Speaker 3: we stop it? Can we just delay it?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: The National Academy of Science in nineteen eighty three published
Speaker 3: another important report and the title is very clear. It's
Speaker 3: called changing climate. Climate is changing and we have to adapt. Actually, so,
Speaker 3: I think energy transition is a kind of you know,
Speaker 3: a motto, a slogan, But the real issue is can
Speaker 3: we adapt and very quickly? The I mean I've studied
Speaker 3: rather the case of the US, but experts from the
Speaker 3: US were convinced that the US could cope with plus
Speaker 3: two or press through degrees. That's I mean, there would be,
Speaker 3: of course difficulties, but as not such a big deal
Speaker 3: in a way and too bad for the other. I mean,
Speaker 3: they're perfectly aware that from you know, Bengal or other
Speaker 3: countries that would be much more difficult. But the idea
Speaker 3: that you could sacrifice world economic growth for the survival
Speaker 3: or the safety of the poorest part of the world
Speaker 3: population seemed ludicrous. So there was a very strong dose
Speaker 3: of cynicism, of realism in a way, but cynicism as well.
Speaker 4: Can you talk about actually how the notion of economic
Speaker 4: growth intersects with the transition narrative, because then you point
Speaker 4: out at one point that the transition narrative in some
Speaker 4: ways enables the idea of perpetual future growth to go
Speaker 4: unchallenged as kind of to be taken as conventional wisdom.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean basically, the I think most of the
Speaker 3: expertise on climate mitigation it's not so much about you know,
Speaker 3: saving the climate. It's rather about saving economic growth. It's
Speaker 3: about imagining all the transformation most of them are completely
Speaker 3: unrealistic that would allow economic growth to continue or i
Speaker 3: mean business to continue just as before without damaging the climate.
Speaker 3: I mean, when you when you look at the the
Speaker 3: history of the I p c C, and especially the
Speaker 3: third group of the IPCC, which is really the one
Speaker 3: in charge of studying mitigation. UH in the archives you
Speaker 3: can see that for the US government that was really
Speaker 3: its role. The explicity states our our aim is not
Speaker 3: to save the climate. It is to save the economy
Speaker 3: from the consequences of climate which is a different, different
Speaker 3: question and interestingly interestingly enough one I mean the first
Speaker 3: chair of IPCC Group three was called it was openly
Speaker 3: climate or skeptics, is Robert Weinstein. He works in the
Speaker 3: US and you know he doesn't believe in climate change.
Speaker 3: And it takes his order from Johnson Nunu who with
Speaker 3: the chief of staff of George Bush father and basically
Speaker 3: George U Johnson new orders him to play the technology card.
Speaker 3: I mean, do not talk about, you know, the level
Speaker 3: of emission or economic growth or compensation to countries affected
Speaker 3: by climate change. Talk about technology. I mean, the US
Speaker 3: has to bet on technology. And that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3: I mean Robert Ronshein at this very moment we are
Speaker 3: talking about nineteen ninety one nineteen ninety two is also
Speaker 3: the US representative to the Radio Conference on Climate on
Speaker 3: the Environment in general, and for the US delegation makes
Speaker 3: perfect sense, you know, to talk about technology. The US
Speaker 3: at that time was the first dimeter was also the
Speaker 3: first technological power, so it makes sense to play the
Speaker 3: technology card. I mean, it's it's quite straightforward in a way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you can really see the emergent of corporate
Speaker 4: social responsibility what for a time was called ESG or
Speaker 4: stakeholder capitalism, all these different versions of corporations, industry taking
Speaker 4: seriously and working to quote unquote solve the climate crisis.
Speaker 4: You can see how all of these ideas are so
Speaker 4: useful to them. They can say, yes, we're working on
Speaker 4: developing future technologies to save us in the future. You
Speaker 4: distinguish it from climate denial because in a lot of ways,
Speaker 4: climate denial was an old ideology that stopped serving them
Speaker 4: well decades ago. A much more effective and insidious one
Speaker 4: is accepting that there is a problem and saying we're
Speaker 4: working on it in the future. And that becomes a
Speaker 4: delay tactic as you point out that they can deploy
Speaker 4: pretty much indefinitely all the way up to today's corporate sustainability,
Speaker 4: whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 3: I think that's why the discourse of nineteen eighty two
Speaker 3: by Edward David, the guy from Mexican is so interesting
Speaker 3: because it's really like the founding stone of this transition
Speaker 3: is playbook about the I mean, you know, we are
Speaker 3: we're aware, we are concerned, and we're working on it,
Speaker 3: you know, but let us do it. Basically, we are
Speaker 3: the people in charge. We've got the money, we've got
Speaker 3: the NoHo, we have the R and D Department, and
Speaker 3: we will solve it. I mean, this really became central
Speaker 3: at the RIO Conference of nineteen ninety two. The General
Speaker 3: Secretary of the conference was a Canadian called Maurice Strong.
Speaker 3: He was also a US an old businessman story working
Speaker 3: for a Canadian old company, and he was a part
Speaker 3: of all sorts of influential investors and you know, important people.
Speaker 3: And basically his motto was, we need to integrate multinationals.
Speaker 3: Multinationals are the key because they're the one who can
Speaker 3: solve this. Who they create a problem, they will solve
Speaker 3: the issue. And I think it had as it has
Speaker 3: had a significant consequence on the IPCC because when you
Speaker 3: look at the experts working for the IPC Group three,
Speaker 3: you can be struck that there are so many employees
Speaker 3: of all companies, of electrical companies, of automobile industry, there
Speaker 3: are you know, people from the industry. It was really
Speaker 3: what the IPCC was about. Once again, if you go
Speaker 3: back to US archives, the US government in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 3: when the IPCC is created, explicitly says that we need
Speaker 3: to put the government into the loop. When the IPCC
Speaker 3: is created, there was already an international organization and climate
Speaker 3: change which had been set up by the World World
Speaker 3: Metorogical Organization and the UN Environmental Program. They had really
Speaker 3: very big ambitions like reducing bio quarters two emissions in
Speaker 3: twenty years or no even less in fifteen years, which
Speaker 3: seemed completely crazy to the US government, And they say,
Speaker 3: we need to create a new expert body. And the
Speaker 3: important letter in IPCC is the eye. It's inter governmental
Speaker 3: and not international. So what the US and probably Britain
Speaker 3: wanted was to that the government would designate people from
Speaker 3: you know, not just environmental ministries or research ministry, but
Speaker 3: they also wanted people from the agricultural ministry, from the industry,
Speaker 3: from energy ministry and so and so force. And that's
Speaker 3: why we've got so much from I mean expertise coming
Speaker 3: from the industry. And I mean you could say that
Speaker 3: it's kind of conspiracy theory, but when you look at
Speaker 3: the story of CCS, carbon capture. It is quite clear
Speaker 3: that you know, they actually succeeded. And how come there
Speaker 3: is so much about cabin capturing storage in the IPC
Speaker 3: groups through report. How come that carbon neutrality depends on
Speaker 3: so much negative emissions.
Speaker 4: I think with technologies that don't even exist yet, right.
Speaker 3: They exist in a very marginal way, in very specific
Speaker 3: they exist to actually extract more oil. The only place
Speaker 3: where you really captures you two is when you want
Speaker 3: to make what is called enhance oil recovery. Basically you
Speaker 3: inject you two in old oil wells to get more
Speaker 3: more of it, you know, to to put pressure in
Speaker 3: the in the oil walls. The only place where you
Speaker 3: really do cts on a significant scale, like fifty million
Speaker 3: tons per year. But when I'm saying that the IPCC
Speaker 3: Group three the net zero scenario relies really a lot
Speaker 3: on negative emissions, is because they expect ten gigatons of
Speaker 3: carbon capturing storage, not fifty million tones, ten gigatons, ten
Speaker 3: billion tones. You know, it's it's just a crazy number.
Speaker 3: It is completely meaningless in a way. And interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: when you look at the history of CC, I've done
Speaker 3: that in a recent article. It's not in the book
Speaker 3: it's actually an article which just out. For a long
Speaker 3: period of time, CCS was considered as not very serious because,
Speaker 3: I mean, if you want to do electricity from coal
Speaker 3: with CCS, for every two power plants, you need to
Speaker 3: build a third power plant just to produce electricity to
Speaker 3: power the CCS unit. It's a complete waste of NFD
Speaker 3: of money of resort anyway, So it was considered as
Speaker 3: completely ridiculous even by the IPCC in the early two
Speaker 3: thousand and then the oil industry pushed CCS from nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety to onward, saying that's really important technology. We publish
Speaker 3: a lot of papers, we even create journals on CCS,
Speaker 3: you know, like peer review journals. But actually they were
Speaker 3: reflecting the oil industry interest. And in two thousand and
Speaker 3: five the IPCC published a special report on CCS and
Speaker 3: that really changed the statues of the technology. From a
Speaker 3: very abuse technology, it became a central element for carbon neutrality.
Speaker 3: And when you look at the reference of this report,
Speaker 3: most of the reference they come from the old industry,
Speaker 3: all the Fossiphius in general Russia. So I mean that's
Speaker 3: why I think that we have read to understand that
Speaker 3: the expertise on mitigation is co produced with different lobbies.
Speaker 3: It's not like abstract knowledge. It's not like the interested scientists.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's more problematic than that and more interesting
Speaker 3: in a way. You've got groups of industries fighting to
Speaker 3: put their own technologies and they produce papers, which is
Speaker 3: completely natural. It's normal. It's not like a conspiracy. It is,
Speaker 3: you know, how science works in a way it is,
Speaker 3: of course, it depends on funding from companies, especially when
Speaker 3: it is applied science. All the science and hydrogen on
Speaker 3: CCS on kind of farfedge technologies or complex technologies. It
Speaker 3: is really applied science, and it's it's co produced with
Speaker 3: specific industries.
Speaker 4: And then in some ways it it's laundered through the
Speaker 4: IPCC or other organizations institutions that we rightly in a
Speaker 4: lot of ways treat as objective scientific research bodies. And
Speaker 4: then you have CCS go from something along the lines
Speaker 4: of I almost laughed, but laughing to keep from crying
Speaker 4: reading the part in the book about the giant co
Speaker 4: two lakes buried in the ocean or something. CCS is
Speaker 4: sitting alongside those, and then it comes through this laundering
Speaker 4: process and it comes out as basically the plan for
Speaker 4: humanity to save the planet.
Speaker 3: I don't want to really. I mean, in a way,
Speaker 3: the modelers making these ridiculous scenarios, we can pity them
Speaker 3: because we basically ask an impossible task. Right, Well, find
Speaker 3: a scenario where we reach carbon neutrality without touching so
Speaker 3: much the economy. You know, we'll have the same kind
Speaker 3: of world with the same kind of movement, travels, agriculture,
Speaker 3: ands on. But without THEATO. It's an impossible task. And
Speaker 3: of course they want to introduce these ridiculous technologies they
Speaker 3: have only I mean, the only way they can do that.
Speaker 3: But I mean, the problem is that you can read
Speaker 3: it both ways. You can say that. And actually they
Speaker 3: explained that they did that around two thousand and five
Speaker 3: twenty ten, basically to push government to be ambitious, to
Speaker 3: show that carbon neutrality was possible, and in a way,
Speaker 3: the Paris Agreement of twenty fifteen to respect two degree
Speaker 3: warming was really made possible thanks to these scenarios. How
Speaker 3: even if they're absurd, they had this advantage. So but
Speaker 3: that's one positive bready reading. The more negative reading would
Speaker 3: be that they introduce false hopes and a false sense
Speaker 3: of safety. I mean, it gives the impression that you
Speaker 3: got competent engineers that in the end will solve the problem.
Speaker 3: And this is really depoliticizing the issue. It's really like
Speaker 3: infantilizing the population because they are I mean, we have
Speaker 3: been sold you false promises in a way, and I
Speaker 3: think it's it prevented us to have a more political
Speaker 3: discussion or on climate change. I think a more adult
Speaker 3: conversation would be that there will be ZEO two in
Speaker 3: the economy in twenty fifty because there are many sectors
Speaker 3: that we don't really know how to decabanize or not
Speaker 3: a scale. So the key question, the key discussion, democratic
Speaker 3: discussion that we need to have is, I mean, where
Speaker 3: do we put this year to, where do we invest it?
Speaker 3: What is the CEU two that is vital, that is necessary,
Speaker 3: and the CEO two that is about luxualy consumption for instance.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's really something we should be able
Speaker 3: to discuss without being treated as kind of a dangerous
Speaker 3: de grosser or whatever. No, it's just the only reasonable
Speaker 3: way to frame the issue.
Speaker 4: There's something you point out toward the end of the book.
Speaker 4: It was a real mental shift for me. It stems
Speaker 4: from everything that we've talked about here. And from everything
Speaker 4: that you argue in the book leading up to this point.
Speaker 4: It you know that the rise of wind and solar
Speaker 4: power is treated as quote equivalent to the disappearance of
Speaker 4: fossil fuels. And I had always thought of it just
Speaker 4: like that, that the salvation would come in the spread
Speaker 4: of solar panels and turbines around the world. But as
Speaker 4: you point out, green innovation and decarbonization are not the
Speaker 4: same thing at all, and we misunderstand that at our peril.
Speaker 3: I mean, the book is certainly not against renewable energy.
Speaker 3: It's the only right, the only good news in a way,
Speaker 3: the fact that solar panels are cheap and there are
Speaker 3: extensively used in the pool world to diminish a consumption
Speaker 3: of coal. So that's the only good news. But we
Speaker 3: have to recognize that it is a necessary step, but
Speaker 3: it's insufficient. Basically, renewables are interesting technologies to produce electricity,
Speaker 3: but electricity production is just forty percent of emissions. Then
Speaker 3: you've got all the rest where renewable are not that
Speaker 3: interesting and not that usual. I mean, to produce cement, steel, plastic, fertilizer,
Speaker 3: food in general. You know you don't do that with
Speaker 3: sort panels, it's not true. Another way to put it
Speaker 3: is we can talk about a transition in the electricity sector,
Speaker 3: but probably not in the rest of the economy. So
Speaker 3: there is a big difference between putting solar panels and
Speaker 3: windmills and decarbonizing the whole economy, which is much bigger
Speaker 3: than the electricity sector. And one possibility, and probably the
Speaker 3: most probable, is that in the next decades there will
Speaker 3: be more and more so called green electricity that we
Speaker 3: power the world that will remain deeply entrenched in fossil
Speaker 3: fuels for all the rest beat the production of materials
Speaker 3: still is a good example, of course, but also the
Speaker 3: production food. I mean, in the book, I haven't touched
Speaker 3: a panago culture, but it's actually a key, key topic,
Speaker 3: Like between twenty and thirty percent of green house gases
Speaker 3: come from agriculture, where the idea of transition and energy
Speaker 3: transition is probably not very well adapted, you know. So
Speaker 3: I mean we have to realize that. I think one
Speaker 3: important thing is to recognize that we don't know how
Speaker 3: to do that. Nobody has the solution, and we need
Speaker 3: to discuss that in a very you know, clear minded
Speaker 3: way and in a also more political way, because the
Speaker 3: idea of energy transition is at the end of the book.
Speaker 3: I said, this is the ideology of capital in the
Speaker 3: twenty first century. It is obvious when you think about it.
Speaker 3: You know, thanks to energy transition, all big companies they
Speaker 3: are on the right side because they can invest, they
Speaker 3: can innovate and so on. It's it's really a powerful
Speaker 3: tool to depoliticize the issue. And I think a big
Speaker 3: part of the of the KMIC discussion should be on
Speaker 3: about redistribution, the redistribution of the emissions, to whom to
Speaker 3: do what? That should be really a key aspect of
Speaker 3: the discussion, and it isn't. Even in the climate movement.
Speaker 3: It is not so much framed as a as a
Speaker 3: I mean it used to be framed like that actually
Speaker 3: has an equity issue. When you when you look at
Speaker 3: philosophy papers or six papers of the nineteen nineties, I
Speaker 3: mean they will talk about that about luxury emissions and
Speaker 3: vital emissions and how to distinguish between them, and how
Speaker 3: climate change is released on a program of equity and
Speaker 3: and and how unjust it is and no more and
Speaker 3: more the discourse has shifted to a technology it's about
Speaker 3: when your boards are good for cyphils are bad, you know,
Speaker 3: something like that. A very many key and visions of
Speaker 3: the material world, actually technologies are completely intertwined and materially connected.
Speaker 4: One of the points you make towards the end of
Speaker 4: the book is that, and you alluded to it, there
Speaker 4: is the fact that we can't look to history for
Speaker 4: a path towards what we have to do in the future.
Speaker 4: And you can see how the transition is again very
Speaker 4: soothing because from this false history we have a sort
Speaker 4: of a false path forward towards solving this problem without
Speaker 4: any disruption the industry or anyone else. Can you just
Speaker 4: explain that a little bit more of that idea that
Speaker 4: we're what we have to do is unprecedented and if
Speaker 4: we are to look, if we are to figure it out,
Speaker 4: then the place to find out how to do that
Speaker 4: will not be what we've done before. Because it's another
Speaker 4: one of those points that I think sounds really simple
Speaker 4: but is actually quite profound and quite a shift for
Speaker 4: a lot of people, including me.
Speaker 3: Remember Jimmy Cartell saying that we have done two transitions
Speaker 3: in the past, we need to do a third transition.
Speaker 3: It's absurd, of course, because at that time Cole was
Speaker 3: also very important in the nineteen seventies US. Obviously, more
Speaker 3: recently you've got John Kerry, the US and voy for
Speaker 3: Climate Change, explaining that the energy transition is like a
Speaker 3: new industrial evolution, as if there was something from the
Speaker 3: Industrial Revolution analogous to what we have to do. And
Speaker 3: this is not the case at all. It's really what
Speaker 3: I want to emphasize. I mean, we have never done
Speaker 3: an energy transition. Just to give you an example. Most
Speaker 3: of the time, the Industrial Revolution, as it is told
Speaker 3: to students, and how John Carey must have remembered it
Speaker 3: is it is a shift from wood to call. But
Speaker 3: in fact wood energy is increasing in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 3: and it's even worse than that. To extract cold you
Speaker 3: need a lot of fruit, to the point that Britain
Speaker 3: in the twentieth century used more wood in the form
Speaker 3: of simper mining than it had burned in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 3: So just forget about this idea of massive shift in
Speaker 3: the past. The history, the material history of humanity, is
Speaker 3: the history of expansion of everything, the symbiotic expansion of everything.
Speaker 3: That's really what we have done. It doesn't mean that
Speaker 3: I mean technologies improved and were becoming more efficient obviously,
Speaker 3: and for instance, the carbon intensity of the economy from
Speaker 3: the nineteen eighties has been divided by two. So I
Speaker 3: mean there is technological progress, it's not the issue. But
Speaker 3: despite this increasing efficiency, the sew tre emissions keep rising.
Speaker 3: So I mean the thing is believing that with solar
Speaker 3: panels and windmills where on the threshold of a complete
Speaker 3: material evolution is an illusion. And to give you another
Speaker 3: historical example, because I say that history is useless to
Speaker 3: understand what we have to do, but it is useful
Speaker 3: to understand the misunderstanding of what we have to do.
Speaker 3: For instance, in the nineteen twenties, thanks to electricity, industrially
Speaker 3: discarded the old steam engines and replace them with electric
Speaker 3: engines electric motors. Electric motors are extremely efficient compared to
Speaker 3: steam engine. When you do that to divide by ten
Speaker 3: the carbon intensity of industrial force machines, it's an enormous progress. Right.
Speaker 3: That happened in the after World War One, basically in
Speaker 3: the US during World War one and after World War One. Today,
Speaker 3: when you replace a gas power plant with a solar
Speaker 3: panel complex, you divide by ten the carbon intensity of electricity.
Speaker 3: So we have been there before. I mean, solar panels
Speaker 3: and windmills are just part of the history of technological progress.
Speaker 3: They're not a massive shift in the history of the
Speaker 3: material history of humanity. And it's even worse for electric cars.
Speaker 3: Of course they're better than Petroum car, but they're certainly
Speaker 3: not zero emission. This is of course a lie. So
Speaker 3: I mean, I think we have to really understand that
Speaker 3: what climatologists explained that we need to do is really unprecedented.
Speaker 3: I mean, even at a natural scale. It's very difficult
Speaker 3: to see countries really getting out of coal or gas
Speaker 3: or oil, I mean very often. I mean recently papers
Speaker 3: explained that Britain has escaped calls as really exiited call. Actually, no,
Speaker 3: Britain is still using a lot of call for in
Speaker 3: its import the British way of love, or the French
Speaker 3: way of life, or the Norwegian way of life. Those
Speaker 3: countries that don't burn call anymore depends on call because
Speaker 3: we import so many goods and we you steal and
Speaker 3: so on. That depends on call. So once again, I
Speaker 3: mean we have to underline the fact that energy transition
Speaker 3: is really based on a false history. It projects a
Speaker 3: false history onto a very shadowy future.
Speaker 4: You're right, getting out of carbon will be far more
Speaker 4: difficult than getting out of capitalism, and that really puts
Speaker 4: the scale of the challenge if we are seeing reality
Speaker 4: clearly in perspective.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm not going to pretend that I completely
Speaker 3: agnostic about that, but I think getting out of capitalism
Speaker 3: is probably one of, I mean, one step that could
Speaker 3: help to get out of the rules for a very
Speaker 3: simple reason. It's because, I mean, if you if you
Speaker 3: define capitalism by the you know, private property of the
Speaker 3: means of production, then of course it's still very lucrative
Speaker 3: to extract oil, so you know, all will be extracted.
Speaker 3: I mean, so you really need a very strong political
Speaker 3: decision to say we don't invest anymore in these in
Speaker 3: these sectors. So it's a kind of control of capital.
Speaker 3: It's not necessarily like the Bolshevik revolution, but it's really
Speaker 3: a very very serious and stringent control of you know
Speaker 3: what that is authorized, what is accept acceptable. But when
Speaker 3: I say it's more difficult, because you know, you could
Speaker 3: I could easily imagine that and in a way, in
Speaker 3: a way, in many countries the energy sector is nationalized,
Speaker 3: like in France, df is a national company, a British
Speaker 3: call for a long time was a national company in Britain.
Speaker 3: Know it's it's quite common to have a kind of
Speaker 3: public energy providers, but it's very difficult to imagine not
Speaker 3: using all guests anymore into the gates. That's something which
Speaker 3: as an historian, I really have difficulty to imagine, know it.
Speaker 4: John Beptiz, thanks so much for writing this book and
Speaker 4: for this conversation.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Adam for having me.
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Speaker 5: So yeah, you could call it dry, but there's really
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Speaker 5: at Athleticbrewing dot com. Athletic Brewing Company Fit for all
Speaker 5: times