MORE AND MORE AND MORE

A radical new history of energy and humanity s insatiable need for resources that will change the way we talk about climate change Winner of a Nouvel Observateur Award a Fondation pour l écologie politique Award the Prix du jury Turgot and the Prix du Sénat du livre d histoire 2025 Selected as an Economist and Financial Times Book of the Year It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition with wood superseded by coal coal by oil oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources Jean Baptiste Fressoz s devastating but unnervingly entertaining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