This pattern of normalization is sometimes called, more wonkily, shifting base lines syndrome. Lately I’ve found myself wondering whether warning about future impacts itself contributes to the problem — familiarizing the public with horrifying-seeming possibilities that, when they do come to pass, seem less horrifying for having already been processed. How else can we make sense of the seeming banality, just three months on, of the January firestorms in Los Angeles, which incinerated whole neighborhoods in some of the richest and most well-connected corners of one of the world’s cultural capitals? Were those fires unthinkable, as so many of us suggested, or did the fact that we had imagined some version of them before make it easier to watch them burn their way through reality?
What worries me most at the moment is a final possibility. Perhaps hard-edge climate politics is no longer necessary to achieve a rapid build-out of green energy in an era when we’ve grown less preoccupied with rallying public support and more preoccupied with particular bottlenecks (permitting and interconnection and the limitations of the grid in places like the United States, for instance, or the burdensome costs of capital in poorer parts of the world). But are we sure that without a greater sense of political urgency, new clean infrastructure will lead to meaningful global emissions reductions anytime soon?
Each year, it seems, we get predictions of an imminent emissions peak, and each year we watch emissions grow higher. Particular countries continue their downward slopes, but not globally. In the absence of concerted climate-focused policy, cheap renewable energy and booming demand may be a recipe for adding green energy without retiring the dirty stuff, letting emissions climb as the rollout of renewables continues. That is, not a project of energy transition but, as skeptics sometimes say, energy addition.
This is the central contention of “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy,” by the French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, forthcoming this fall in the United States. The history is bracing for anyone, like me, who has spent the last decade dreaming of decarbonization, partly to hold at bay the fear of what may come without it. For all that hopeful talk of an energy transition, Fressoz argues, the world has never really experienced one, and certainly isn’t now.
“After two centuries of ‘energy transitions,’ humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood,” Fressoz writes. Yes, that’s right: It’s not just that we haven’t moved on from oil, we haven’t even moved on from trees. “Today, around two billion cubic meters of wood are felled each year to be burned, three times more than a century ago.”
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