More and More and More

An All-Consuming History of Energy

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

$55

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Allen Lane
07 January 2025

History; Industrialisation & industrial history; Energy; Energy technology & engineering

A radical new history of energy and humanity's insatiable need for resources that will change the way we talk about climate change

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition- with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.

The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy - with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.

This book reveals an uncomfortable truth- 'transition' was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

By: Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
Imprint: Allen Lane
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 242mm, Width: 162mm, Spine: 31mm
Weight: 519g
ISBN: 9780241718896
ISBN 10: 0241718899
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 07 January 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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).

Reviews for More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy

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 *