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).
[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 * 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 *