Power Struggle
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Power Struggle
How Coal Powers Your Electric Car // Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
What if everything we believe about “clean energy” is built on a myth?
French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz joins Power Struggle to challenge the dominant narrative of energy transition. From coal in electric cars to the illusion of hydrogen aircraft, Fressoz unpacks how modern societies haven’t replaced fossil fuels — they’ve layered more and more energy on top. This episode questions climate optimism, explores the real drivers of energy growth, and argues why sufficiency — not just innovation — must be part of the path forward.
The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
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There is no shift from coal to oil. It doesn't work like that. Actually, when oil is expanding in the 20th century, it is a very strong stimulus for the consumption of coal, for a very simple reason oil mainly serves to power automobiles, and to build an automobile you need a tremendous amount of coal. In the 1930s you need 7 tons of coal to produce a car. Nowadays, in China, it's around three tons of coal. So coal is a major ingredient of the automobile sector, and all the oil infrastructure is completely dependent on steel and therefore on coal. So we have to get rid of all this narrative, be they political or something else. It doesn't work at all.
Stewart Muir:If you're enjoying Power Struggle, make sure to subscribe, share this episode and leave us a review. It helps us keep fact-based energy conversations going and gets these voices into more ears. My guest today is Jean-Baptiste Versoes, a French historian of science and technology and the author of More and More and More, an all-consuming history of energy. It's a sweeping look at why modern societies can't stop growing. He's a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, and his work has challenged some of the core assumptions behind our energy and climate debates, especially the idea of an energy transition. Instead, frissot argues, we accumulate, we don't transition. Layer upon layer, growth upon growth. Today, we're going to explore why that matters and what it means for anyone trying to build the future of energy. Jean-baptiste, welcome to the show. I've got a question for you. What is energy transition? I?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:think nowadays it means something that will solve the climate issue, that will stop climate change, so something that will allow us to get out of fossil fuels in three or four decades globally. Basically, that is what is understood in the climate debate nowadays. What I think is interesting is that most of the time people referring to energy transition, very often they have a history in mind, but it is a false history. They explain that what we have to do is a new energy transition. Like John Kerry, the US envoy for climate change under the previous American administration, explained that the energy transition is like a new industrial revolution, as if there was something in our history that was similar to what we have to do nowadays facing climate change.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:Industrialization or the industrial revolution is certainly not an energy transition. It is the expansion of all energies and all raw materials. So what I was interested in as a historian is the fact that history and a bad history of energy, a stagist history of energy has played a discrete but central ideological role in the plausibility of an energy transition, as if we were able to shift entirely from a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable or nuclear-based economy globally in three decades. This is meaningless. I mean this is absurd and that's why I was interested by this political use of history and I thought it was important to retell the history of energy in a different way not as a story of successive transitions, which is the classic way of telling history of energy, but as a history of symbiotic expansion of energies and materials together.
Stewart Muir:In French what was the name of the book when it was first published?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:the French title it was called Sans Transition, Une Nouvelle Histoire de. L'energie. And what is that in English? Without Transition, A New History of Energy. And then there was a banner around the book which stated La transition n'aura pas lieu the transition will not happen, will not take place. And I think most of the comments were about the banner, because people were not very happy that an historian would talk about the future. It seemed as a complete intellectual fault. But I think good history, good history of energy, can help us understand what will happen in the next 20 or 30 years.
Stewart Muir:Just to stay with the title. The English language title is different than out transition. It's more and more and more so. It's kind of the other side of how we have energy in our lives. Was that a deliberate decision to not go with the French meaning no?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:it's because sans transition sounds good. In French it's a. There is a pun here In English. It didn't work very well. So a colleague of mine said it's better, more and more and more. It's actually what the book is about, actually, and it's not only about energy, it's about all raw materials, which I think is a very problematic point. I mean, it's not only energy which is cumulative, it's not only energy which is cumulative, it's the consumption of all and every raw material. So yeah, more and more and more describe this dynamic of accumulation and not transition.
Stewart Muir:You have a quote from an American forester in 1928. You have to go to the footnotes to find out the background. By the way, you have the best footnotes I always. I learned in grad school. You start a good book reading the last sentence of every chapter and then read the footnotes. But what was that quotation from the American forester in 1928?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:Basically, he was walking through Manhattan, which was being built with skyscrapers made of concrete, bricks and steel, and he said don't worry, you know, trees will be needed, forests will be needed, because raw materials are never obsolete. And this is a 1928 statement which has been perfectly verified by the following history Along the 20th century, we have consumed a wider array of raw material and each raw material is consumed in greater quantity. So this was a very interesting prediction and it has proven to be completely true. Actually, raw materials are never obsolete despite all the innovations. And I think this is really one of the key arguments of the book is that we tend to confuse history of technology with history of materials. When you think about the dynamics of technology, you can find technologies becoming obsolete. It's not the case with raw materials. The history of technology is made of shifts, of transformation, of big changes. The history of raw materials is much more boring. Everything is expanding all the time, more and more rapidly. Actually.
Stewart Muir:Don't confuse the history of technology with the history of materials. Yeah, exactly, they're two different things. You have Another similar phrase don't confuse the history of technology with the history of innovation.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:Yes, this is a key point.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean this is inspired from a great historian of technology called David Edgerton, who made this point very clear in a book called Shock of the Old, and it is true that when you think about our conversation about technology nowadays, it is always focused on innovation we are talking not about.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:In fact, when you read newspaper and the technology pages of newspaper, they're not about technology. They are about very particular kind of technologies. Most of the time they are about actually IT, artificial intelligence, computers and they confuse all the technology that we use with the technological frontier. But the technological frontier, the innovation, it's a very limited set of technologies and it has had a very, very negative effect on our understanding of the climate challenge, because most of the time when we reflect upon what we should do to solve the climate issue, we're going to talk about innovations, new technologies that are going to decarbonize this or that sector, but you know, innovations is a very limited part of the material world. I mean, what creates climate change is all the accumulation of old techniques and old ways of doings and we have to talk about all these.
Stewart Muir:Let's start at the beginning. You mentioned political history, and in the book you write about the attraction there is for the political history of energy. But that's also, you say, its flaw this tendency to present climate change as a capitalist conspiracy. You're for it, and you also say that getting out of carbon will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism. Yeah, and that is a condition that is probably necessary, but it's not even enough. What is the root of this understanding?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean to understand this idea, you have to know a little bit about the historiography of energy. Basically, since we are talking massively about climate change, there is a new generation of energy historians who have tried to propose a political reading of the history of energy, explaining that, for instance, the shift from coal to oil was a way for capitalists to circumvent the miners and the trade unions of the miners. That were very powerful because they had in their hands the flow of energy in the economy. And, of course, oil is much more, is fluid, is liquid, it's less labor intensive. They believe it's more capital intensive, so it gives more power to the capitalists. So this kind of history is flawed in a very deep way because it's two stages. There is no shift from coal to oil. It doesn't work like that. Actually, when oil is expanding in the 20th century, it is a very strong stimulus for the consumption of coal, for a very simple reason. It is that oil mainly serves to power automobiles. And to build an automobile you need a tremendous amount of coal. In the 1930s you need seven tons of coal to produce a car. Nowadays in China it's around three tons of coal. So coal is a major ingredient of the automobile sector. It is the first actually ingredient of an automobile right, and all the oil infrastructure is completely dependent on steel and therefore on coal. So we have to get rid of all these stages narrative, be they political or something else. It doesn't work at all.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:And it is true that I think framing the climate issue as the kind of end results of capitalism of course capitalism is clearly a driving force for the accumulation of wealth and therefore of emissions. Obviously, I mean it's completely, completely trivial. Nevertheless, getting out of fossil fuels is a much deeper change than just changing the ownership of, of private property. It is probable that if you want to be serious about climate change, you need to transform ownership. I mean you cannot leave just wealthy people decide where they invest because, I mean, extracting oil is lucrative, right, so they're going to do that, obviously.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:But getting out of oil and coal and gas has tremendous impact for all sorts of sectors. Has tremendous impact for all sorts of sectors, like agriculture, for instance. In a socialist system, you need to eat and you will need gas to produce fertilizer, you will need plastic to package the food. So I mean agriculture is completely embedded into a fossil fuel economy. Today, I mean, you wouldn't have the possibility to feed 8 billion people without a massive influx of fossil fuels in the agricultural system.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:And the same goes with concrete. I mean, concrete is a very useful material. It is very widely used because it is cheap, it is convenient. On the other hand, it is used to make very useless things like building huge skyscrapers. So we can imagine, with a change in the economic system there would, there would be less skyscrapers and more useful buildings, hospitals and schools and so on, but nevertheless you would still need the cement you know to produce the bridges, for instance, and these goes on and on and on. So it's so. It's an extremely deep transformation of the material world in an extremely short period of time. It is a kind of, I think, technological fantasy.
Stewart Muir:One of the things you talk about and I think it's great because you bring this to life through your storytelling you must be a great teacher, because you have all these good examples in the book, and one that was talked about a lot when it first came out was the coal mining and wood, the idea that, okay, coal is coming along, so wood will become obsolete because coal is better, it's better fuel, it's more heat, everything.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:What really happened, I mean when you teach the history of industrialization most of the time you say that the industrial revolution is a shift from a wood-based energy system to a coal-based energy system, which is true from a certain point of view, but it is false when you look seriously at materials. For one simple reason to extract coal you need an enormous amount of timber pig props, timber mining, pick props, timber mining to the extent that Britain in the 20th century consumed more wood in the form of pick props than Britain burn in the 18th century. So the more you extract coal, the more you need timber actually. So that I mean when you think about coal you need to think about timber. They are not in competition, they are in symbiosis. And without abundant timber, industrialized countries would have had very little coal. Therefore no steam, no steel, no red waste, et cetera, et cetera. So timber is not like a secondary factor for the energy system of rich countries in the 20th century. It is a central aspect of the history of energy in the 20th century in. It is a central aspect of the history of energy in the 20th century in the industrialized world. Right, and it goes even further than that, actually, the consumption of wood energy in rich countries in the 20th century, despite coal and despite oil, does increase.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:You consume more and more wood today to produce electricity. In Europe, for instance, you consume more and more wood to power the packaging industry, because most of the packaging is based on paper and the paper industry is a huge industrial consumer of energy, the fourth industrial consumer of energy globally. And this symbiosis between energy you know they extend in a, they have far-reaching consequences. In the 20th century you have a growing economy which is fueled by coal and oil. That creates more and more goods. Those goods need to be packaged, so you consume more and more paper, cardboard and the paper industry consumes more and more wood energy. So the more you've got oil and coal, the more you've got wood energy.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:In the paper industry consumed more and more wood energy. So the more you got oil and coal, the more you got wood energy in the paper industry, for instance. You really have to think about the history of energies and material together and they are completely intricated, embedded, connected together. The major drawback in the history of energy, as it is told till today it is that most of the time historians have been interested in the competition between energies, in how energy systems are shifting, how coal displays wood in the tea industry, for instance. But this is just one part of the story. You know, of course energies can be in competition in certain sectors, but globally, what has happened is rather the symbiotic expansion of everything Of everything, except for one thing.
Stewart Muir:You mentioned one commodity in the world that we're using less of. What is it? Sheep wool, because of synthetic fibers, nylons. So everything else has gone up, so it's really an energy addition, not a transition.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:It's more than addition. Sorry, it's more than an addition, because addition gives the impression that you can just. You know the things are separated, that you can take off one bit and replace it by another, but in fact it's completely intricate. You know, there is a very simple example like an electric car. Of course it's better than a petroleum engine car. Nevertheless, to build an electric car you need a tremendous amount of coal. That's why there are three tons of coal in cars in China. So I mean, it's not that they are just adding up on top of each other. The energies are completely intertwined.
Stewart Muir:So what's a better term for me to use than energy addition, if it's more?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:subtle. I mean the word I use is energy synthesis, so that describes quite well what has happened in the 20th century. I hope it will not describe what will happen in the 21st century, but for the moment we are still completely in the energy synthesis.
Stewart Muir:Well, you don't want to see an energy synthesis continue. You called for something much more dramatical, a term that everyone, when they hear it, will probably wince You're calling for an energy amputation.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean I'm not calling for this or that. I just I mean just underline the very, very simple fact that the point is not just to see renewable expand. If it was only that, it would be easy, because you know you can put money on the table to build solar panels or wind turbines. It's not a problem. The problem is to get rid of fossil fuels, which is which is a much, much more difficult thing to do I mean incredibly more difficult and, in a way, capitalism. Capitalism has been good at innovating and putting up new stuff. It has been very bad at taking off things and stuff and energies. I mean history of capitalism. It's, I mean, of course it. It has been told in a Schumpeterian way, inspired by Joseph Schumpeter, as destructive creation, but in fact the destructive part is not that important. I mean, in material terms there has been no destruction, just increase.
Stewart Muir:So you talk a little about some of the different energy forms. You've already mentioned renewables, which means wind and solar, and hydro and geothermal. Maybe there's some others that fit in the bucket. You also talk about hydrogen powered aircraft as a hypothesis, because we don't have them yet. Fusion or a third industrial revolution, whatever that might be. We're also talking at the IPCC about more carbon capture, utilization and storage, ccus. We're talking about anything that will help to either sequester carbon or prevent more carbon from going out into the atmosphere. Is that a pretty good description of the options we have?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:You could add up nuclear to the.
Stewart Muir:Nuclear, not just fusion, but traditional, yeah, traditional nuclear, yeah well the first three, I mean you're.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I think the thing that is missing massively is sufficiency reduction of demands. I mean that's something we have not been talking about it so much, especially in the IPCC report, which I think is a big problem. But if we were serious about climate change and we are not serious about climate change that would be actually a key topic of discussion. What is really useful? What do we really need? What is the welfare associated to this or that CO2 emission? That should be the key topic of discussion, and instead of that we've got discussion about hydrogen airplanes, about CCS, like future technology that will probably not exist even in the far-away future. So that's why I think all this focus on innovation has been a powerful tool for doing nothing, for justifying procrastination. I mean, the case of hydrogen airplane is perfect because when you listen to the expert, they explain why it's not doable. Hydrogen is three times less dense than kerosene, than jet fuel, aviation fuel. So you need huge reservoirs. You need to completely change the shape of airplanes, so you need to change the infrastructure of airports. To produce the hydrogen, you need a tremendous amount of electricity. I mean, for the case of France, I made some very rough calculations to produce the jet fuels that France uses today, you would need the whole nuclear fleet to produce the green hydrogen to produce these jet shells. So I mean, we know that will not happen. There won't be hydrogen airplanes flying sooner, even and later.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:So what is the use of all this blah blah about hydrogen airplane? Frankly, what is it used for? So Airbus is still talking about hydrogen airplane, frankly, what is it used for? So Airbus is still talking about hydrogen airplane, but Boeing has said no, we won't be doing hydrogen airplane. You know, this is rubbish. And this is where history is interesting, because the project of an hydrogen airplane is very old. I found article from 1974 talking about hydrogen airplane. It was Lockheed who was working on a hydrogen airplane and they were pointinged who was working on a hydrogen airplane and they were pointing to problems which are still not resolved today. So I think the use of talking about hydrogen airplane is just to keep planes flying and people taking the plane without worrying too much, just thinking that in a few decades their children will be flying without changing the climate. But this is rubbish, this is a false premise.
Stewart Muir:In 2023, the world gathered in Dubai for the annual climate summit and there was a stock take document that resulted from that. And that is always interesting when you have that, because it means that it has to be unanimous. So all the countries of the world that were there which is basically all the countries of the world 200, call it agreed that if we could do the all of the above solution more natural gas, more hydro, more renewables, more, did I say, nuclear, more carbon capture if we do all of these things, we will be, in the eyes of all humanities, representatives who went to Dubai in November, december 2023 in the right direction. Were they right or wrong?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean I think that shows that the COP are probably not about climate anymore. They've become kind of industrial expo, universal expo, where fossil fuel interests are extremely powerful, so they are more and more criticized. I mean being just a kind of gathering of various interests and the climate movement has been kind of co-opted by the international, the UNO, all the climate system. It has become a kind of ritual in a way. The international community gather together they say we care about the climate change, but it's just for the show.
Stewart Muir:Now you said that transition puts capital on the right side of the climate battle, which is kind of an extension of what you've just said, and you are concerned about this. But I would like to take the devil's advocate position. I would like to say look at all the evidence that investment in energy efficiency, investment in better environmental practices, in better hardware, better regulations, better everything has allowed the world as it exists today to get us moving in the right direction.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean, you're totally right that capitalism innovation has been pretty good at making the economic system more efficient in material ways, but it is not new. I mean there have been huge gains in efficiency in the past and I'm not sure there will be such important gains in the future. Just to give you a few examples In the 1920s the industrialists got rid of their steam engine and they replaced them with electric motors. Suddenly they divided by 10 the carbon intensity of industrial force in the industry. Nowadays, with solar panels, we divide by 10 the carbon intensity of electricity production compared to gas power plants. What I want to say is we have been here before and nowadays we're not on the threshold of a complete change in the material dynamics of capitalism which make it compatible to our climate objective in 20 or 30 years time. This is really an illusion. So I mean what I want to underline.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:My book is certainly not a critique of innovation and technological progress. I mean these things do exist. Industrial processes are getting more and more efficient, but it is far from enough. What we have to do is of another order of magnitude. It's a different nature, and what worries me is that with this idea of energy transition, we cultivate in the general public the illusion that in 20 or 30 years we'll have solved the issue once and for all and the economy will be able to expand for the next following centuries without changing the climate. This is a very deep misunderstanding of what will happen. I mean, the issue of climate change will be with us for the centuries to come and the issue of decreasing carbon emission will be with us for the centuries to come, and the issue of decreasing carbon emission will be with us for the centuries to come. It's not a question of decades. This is clearly false.
Stewart Muir:We see countries that are quite proud of what they call their climate progress, but in most cases they've actually exported those emissions to other countries, to countries like China that are manufacturing goods with high emissions and then exporting them back. I believe in the case of the United Kingdom they actually have double the emissions as a country, if you count that in.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:Half of the emissions of countries like Britain or France comes from the imports of what French people or British people are consuming. So it's a very I mean so it's a very deep illusion when British press is very proud of saying that Britain has got out of coal.
Stewart Muir:It is just true for the electricity production, but it is certainly not true for the British way of life, which is completely dependent on the coal for the production of steel and the coal that goes in the imports to Britain the recent news from Spain on significant blackouts, supposedly connected to their net zero policies, and I don't know if that's true or not Perhaps there's more information to come but it certainly resulted in many, many commentators making that connection and talking about it. What do you make of this discussion? Is Spain, and therefore other countries that are pursuing a rapid adoption of wind? Are they all headed for the same problem of consistency?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I think we don't have yet a serious report about what caused the blackout, so we should not rush to conclusion. I think there is a lot of disinformation about renewable and electricity production. It's probably not that easy to get a completely renewable electric system. To be clear, it's very challenging. I think it is costly, obviously. But I think we should be careful because it is the only place where there is some good news from the technology. It is electricity. I mean the fact that solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper, that wind power is also competitive is the only good news in the technological domain. So I think we should be really careful about not throwing the baby with the water of the bath.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:In the case of France, it is quite clear that all the discourses against renewable are very often connected to the nuclear lobby. So we should be I mean really cautious about all the discussion on energy. Transition is problematic because very often it is about certain lobbies pushing for their solutions. You know it is very impressive that part of the scientific literature is the reflection of this fight between competing lobbies, and that's why it has become difficult to have, you know, kind of honest appraisal of what is really doable with renewable. Can we completely decarbonize the electric system entirely with renewable. It's not very clear where you can have a kind of completely trustworthy source of information on this topic, which is very damaging.
Stewart Muir:Is there a litmus test that a reasonable person could have in their hip pocket for these to tell what's true? How do I know if this is maybe an industrial lobby message that's gotten into things?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I think one of the best sources of information is the annual International Energy Agency report, because they are not about future prospects, they're about what is happening on the ground. So I think it's the best test that every year in October there is a report saying what has happened last year in the energy world. And the very disappointing thing is that every year they hope that, for instance, coal will peak, and every year they postpone the peak of coal For a long time. It was thought that 24 would be the year of the absolute consumption of coal. Now they say it might be before 2030. So I mean and the problem is not only peak, of course, because the date of the peak is not really important what is important is what will happen after the peak. Will it be like a very rapid slope towards zero, or will it be more like a plateau? And the probability is that it will be more like a plateau, and it's what the report of the International Energy Agency is now predicting.
Stewart Muir:We've seen a global shift towards the use of a lower carbon energy solution for a higher carbon one. I'm talking about LNG and natural gas. It's really one of the big global trends, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it was already well underway for a long time. What's your read on this trend?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I'm not really an expert on that so I prefer not to comment on that. For the climate issue, it's probably not a good news because it makes gas more carbon intensive than gas from pipelines. So it's not such a good news because you need to liquefy the gas and then you need to re-treat it again into a gas form. So I mean it's certainly not a good news. It's also a good news of gas because Europe at one point was really paying enormous amounts of money to the US to buy liquefied gas. So it means that there was a very strong incentive to find other sources of energy. And you know it's not what has happened. So I mean it shows a very, very strong dependency of even the most advanced economies to gas. Yes, certainly not an energy of the past. It will grow in the future. It has very strong decades ahead of it.
Stewart Muir:Now we've seen France, which I think is widely known, a country very heavily reliant on nuclear energy, which I think checks the boxes as a positive type of energy for climate. But even France is now importing LNG for natural gas. I believe they just signed a long-term contract with a Middle Eastern country to have shiploads of LNG In Canada. We've seen the Quebec government, which often has an affinity with France for cultural reasons, have an opportunity to send natural gas as LNG to France. That sea voyage is really just a few days and very efficient.
Stewart Muir:Some of the negatives of LNG that you don't want it on the sea for too long because it will produce its energy amount. Long because it will produce its energy amount. But instead of getting it from Canada, france is getting it from a source in the Middle East. Due to instability in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a lot of those LNG cargos are actually coming along the Cape of Good Hope route down the south end of Africa and all the way up. It's a very, very long way to get LNG. Even a progressive climate forward country like France that is proud of its nuclear record is doing this. Why do you think that is?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:It's what I just explained. I mean there is a very strong dependency on gas for various industrial sectors to produce fertilizer, to produce chemicals. I mean gas is not only an energy, it's also a material, a raw material for the chemical industry. But I mean the worst, probably, is that France imports gas from Russia, but not through pipeline but through LNG, so there is a dependency on Russia even after the Ukraine war. So I mean it just demonstrates that there is no easy technological solution in many different sectors and we have to talk about different topics.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:It's not about finding a technological solution. It's about changing profoundly what we consume and the amount we consume. I mean, the example of the Climate Citizen Assembly which was gathered in 2019 in France is a very good example More than 100 citizens taken completely randomly across France and they end up with excellent proposals to reduce CO2 emissions. You know it's about putting vegetarian meals in the canteen at school. It's about increasing bicycle lanes, it's about insulating homes. You know, like serious, serious changes which necessitate money, public money, investment, and there is no magic wand, magic technological wand in the proposal they have come with.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:So, yeah, I think more and more people will agree that we need to have this kind of discussion, because the other way is just relying on technology, and right now what is the most popular technology to reduce CO2 emission is carbon capture and storage.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean, britain has just put on the table more than 20 billion quid in the next decade to finance CCS in the Northern Sea and this money goes straight into the pocket of Equinor, statoil, eni, the Italian company, shell. So it's really money going straight to the pocket of the polluters and this is not going to be accepted. People will complain If you want to do CCS on a massive scale, you need to build a whole new network of pipelines for CO2 across the country. People will not accept that it is public money, public green money, going in the pocket of all companies. That doesn't sound very good and it's not very popular. So I think the more we will have the effect of climate change, the more that we will realize that the technological promises were just empty promises, the more the discussion will shift towards a much more democratic and political discussion about what we should do.
Stewart Muir:That's completely fascinating.
Stewart Muir:You know, from my perspective here in Western Canada, I'm obviously quite well aware of a proposal for carbon capture to be installed in the oil sands in northern Alberta, where the idea is that, look, the oil sands produce a heavy land.
Stewart Muir:It's in very heavy demand in parts of the United States. It's also now going to California by sea and now for the first time in quantities, to China, to Thailand, to India, because of a new pipeline we have. And the industry is saying we, not just one company, but a group of companies, five or six companies have gotten together to say we need a monumental investment, like $30 billion, into a carbon capture process where carbon is captured from the refinery, it's piped to a geological storage site also in Alberta where it can be stored indefinitely. And if they succeed in doing that, then they will have bought a longer life for this incredible resource that exists in Northern Canada. So from that point of view it makes sense. The technology seems to check out. Based on what you've said about carbon capture, I don't think you would be sympathetic to this proposal.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean, carbon capture and storage is a kind of scam. It consumes an enormous amount of energy. It is polluting to capture the CO2 because you need chemical substances to capture the molecules of CO2. That creates other problems. You need an enormous infrastructure to transport the CO2. You need boats, you know, to put the CO2 into the sea, for instance. But the boats, you know we are talking about gigatons of CO2. If it has to be on scale, it means we have to create ex nilo, a kind of new oil infrastructure, but it will not be producing oil, it will be just storing CO2.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:You know, this is really strange. This is really a very, very strange technological proposal. We have to take it as it is. I think it is a bluff, you know, and it shouldn't be taken seriously. There won't be like thousands of boats specializing in transporting liquefied CO2 across the world. It's not true. We won't be building all this massive infrastructure to transport CO2, you know.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:And once again, the energy consumption of capturing CO2 is important. And what strikes me is that more recently I've studied the history of CO2, of carbon capture and storage, and for the 21st years of the climate debate, from the 1980s onward to the year 2000,. It was seen as rubbish, not as a serious proposal, for one simple reason is that if you want to do, for instance, coal electricity with CCS, for every two or three coal power plants you need to construct a third or fourth power plant to produce the electricity to power the CCS equipment right. So it is very inefficient. And around the year, in one of the IPCC reports around the year early 2000, they explained that that would make electricity from coal with CCS more expensive than nuclear electricity. So what is the point? It is meaningless.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:And, interestingly enough, who has pushed CCS? It is clearly the fossil fuel industries coal, oil, steel, concrete, cement and from the 1990s onward they push CCS. There are three governments that really push CCS One is USA, the second is Norway and the third is Canada. And you know, for a long period of time expertise was very critical of this. It was clearly seen as a kind of obvious delaying tactics.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:And around the year in 2005, there is an IPCC report group three report on CCS and suddenly CCS became acceptable. But when you look at the literature that this report used to demonstrate that CCS is doable, it is all coming from the fossil fuel industry. So you've got an interesting case where a technology which seemed completely ludicrous became a green technology thanks to IPCC, group 3, and now is receiving plenty of public money. But, to be frank, I mean to be at scale. We are talking about bigger tons of CO2. We are talking about a quantity of liquefied CO2, which will be equivalent to the quantity of oil that we are extracting and transporting. It took hundreds of billions I mean trillions of dollars to create this oil infrastructure. We won't be investing trillions of dollars into an infrastructure that does not create value.
Stewart Muir:It has provided the oil and gas industry, the emitting industries, with some hope to be able to mitigate something, because it's not the industry that is responsible for demand, it's consumers who consume. That's where demand comes from. The oil and gas industry obviously facilitates that and does so very profitably, but it is not the demand source. And this really comes back to the whole original problem. Here I mean that the path ahead will inevitably lead to humanity giving up the quality of life it has attained only because of energy being available.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I think we have to. Just, we need to have a serious discussion about all these technological promises, and we should not believe the hype about CCS. We should not believe the hype about hydronic airplanes. We should not believe the hype of clean coal or clean cement or clean steel. These are not clean and they won't be clean even in the far-right future. So we have to restrict our technological hope to sectors where technological solutions are available right now at an accessible cost, and it is mainly in the electricity sector. For all the rest, we need to talk about the level of consumption, obviously.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:But I agree with you, it's not just the fossil fuel industry, the whole demand, it's the, it's our civilization which is problematic. I entirely agree with you and it is too comfortable to say that this. You know, climate change, change is just the result of bad people, be they fossil fuel lobbyists or whatever. This is too comfortable for the general public. We are part of the problem, obviously. I mean, because of all these false promises under the banner of energy transition, we don't have the right political discussion of climate change, which is mainly an issue of redistribution.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:I mean, what strikes me is that the biggest issue about climate change is the North-South divide. Basically, you've got climate change which has been produced by industrialized countries, which has very strong effect on the poorest population not on the average rich world poorest population, not on the average rich world, and this is the very strong injustice that we have to address. This is really the key issue about climate change and for that it is completely normal that the rich country talk about degrowth, about what is really useful or not useful, about the differential usefulness of CO2. I mean, obviously, for the case of cement. Let's take the case of cement. Cement is extraordinarily difficult to decarbonize. Cement can be used to do useful stuff.
Stewart Muir:It can be used to do completely useless things, and this is the discussion we need to have Jean-Baptiste, I know you're a father, you're a citizen of France, you're in the biggest city of the country. What gives you hope as you look around, your home and your city and your country?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:Not much for the moment, to be honest, but I think we should not understand climate change as a kind of apocalyptic thing, especially for the wealthiest part of the population in the world. Once again, I mean, since you are mentioning my family, I'm not worried about my kids, it's not the issue. What is really worrying is what will happen for subsistence farmers who are completely dependent on climate for for, for their life, for their livelihood. This is really what. What is at stake. What's at stake is certainly not the Paris or, or Vancouver, or Toronto or whatever.
Stewart Muir:If you could, through your work, your latest book more and more and more, and your future books, if you could change one assumption that everybody could take forward from your work what would that one thing be?
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz:Do not expect the material world to change radically in the next 20 or 30 years. I mean, technology will change, but the material basis of civilization will remain similar. There won't be a massive change suddenly because we need to do something about climate change. This is a very naive vision of the material world.
Stewart Muir:Jean-Baptiste Fersoz, you've joined me today from Paris. Thanks so much for devoting your time and thought and for the work you do. It's been great having you on Power Struggle Thank you very much, Stuart.
