The concept of "energy transition" has become the dominant narrative of climate policy. According to this narrative, all that is needed is to replace fossil fuels with low-carbon energy sources — solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen — while maintaining economic growth. The implicit promise is simple: change the sources of energy, preserve the industrial way of life.
But does this vision hold up under historical and material scrutiny?
The work of historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, combined with insights from thermodynamics and ecological economics, leads to a radically different conclusion: the energy transition as commonly presented is largely an intellectual imposture.
History shows that energy systems do not function according to a logic of substitution but of accumulation. Wood, coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewables develop symbiotically within an ever-expanding industrial metabolism.
The genealogy of an imposture
The transitionist narrative emerged in the United States in the 1970s, in the context of concerns about fossil resource depletion. Researchers linked to the American military-industrial complex developed a vision according to which humanity would naturally move from a "fossil age" to an "atomic age". This narrative served an essential political function: to transform a potential civilizational crisis into a mere technological challenge.
The concept was then institutionalized through bodies like the IIASA and researchers such as Cesare Marchetti, who used S-curve models to present energy systems as competitive markets where new technologies naturally replace old ones. But this approach treated energy as an abstract economic variable, masking the true historical dynamic: the cumulative addition of energy sources.
The historical reality: energies accumulate
One of Fressoz's major contributions is to show that energy history is not a succession of transitions but a symbiotic accumulation. Energies grow together.
Coal did not replace wood
The traditional account claims that coal replaced wood. Historical data shows the opposite. The coal industrialization required enormous quantities of timber: pit props for mines, sleepers for railways, infrastructure. The coal industry rested on an underground forest. Industrial England in the nineteenth century sometimes consumed more wood than pre-industrial England.
Oil did not replace coal
Modern oil industry depends massively on coal. The manufacture of pipelines, refineries and offshore rigs requires steel — which is still largely produced through metallurgical coal. Oil depends on coal.
Renewables follow the same logic
Wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles require steel, cement, copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths. Their extraction, transport and transformation still rely massively on fossil fuels. Renewables do not replace the fossil system: they are superimposed on it.
The thermodynamic dead end of green growth
The economy is not an abstract system. It is a physical process of transforming matter and energy. The work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen profoundly renewed this understanding by applying thermodynamics to economics.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, every energy transformation irreversibly degrades part of the available energy. Each economic activity increases the global entropy of the system. Infinite growth in a finite world is a physical impossibility.
For green growth to be real, absolute decoupling would be required: GDP continuing to grow while total ecological footprint durably declines. But empirical data shows this absolute decoupling does not exist at a global scale. Efficiency gains are systematically offset by increased production volumes, rebound effects and infrastructure expansion. The decoupling observed in rich countries is often merely a geographic displacement of destruction.
The financial lock-in of the fossil system
The major global banks hold hundreds of billions in fossil-linked assets. If serious climate policy required leaving a large share of reserves underground, these assets would abruptly lose their value — becoming stranded assets. The financial system therefore has a structural interest in prolonging fossil exploitation.
Heavy infrastructure — refineries, ports, highways, electrical grids, pipelines — represents decades-long investments. The idea of replacing this system in thirty years while maintaining global growth borders on material denial.
From transition to energy amputation
If energies accumulate rather than replace each other, then genuine decarbonization requires not addition but subtraction. Fossil energies must be physically removed from the economic system. This necessarily implies a reduction in global energy metabolism.
Degrowth is often caricatured as chaotic economic collapse. But there is a fundamental difference between endured recession — an accident within a system designed to grow — and organized degrowth: a political project aimed at voluntarily reducing ecological footprint while preserving fundamental needs. The objective is not to produce less well-being. The objective is to produce less destruction.
Social justice and degrowth
Degrowth can only be politically viable if it is accompanied by a radical reduction in inequality. The wealthiest classes concentrate a disproportionate share of global emissions. A coherent policy must primarily target the most destructive forms of consumption.
The true challenge is no longer unlimited GDP growth, but the robustness of human societies in the face of ecological, energy and climate shocks. This means shifting collective priorities: resilience over maximum efficiency, sobriety over accumulation, cooperation over competition, use value over financial profitability.
Conclusion
Real energy history invalidates the dominant transition narrative. Industrial societies have never replaced one energy with another. They have constantly added new energy layers to an ever-expanding material metabolism.
The belief that renewables would allow maintaining global growth while stabilizing the climate appears increasingly incompatible with physical realities.
The real question is no longer: "How do we pursue growth with a new energy source?" But: "How do we democratically organize the reduction of our material footprint in order to preserve the habitability of the Earth?"
The energy transition may be a myth. But the necessity to slow down is now a matter of physics.
Jean-Christophe Duval