French historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has offered energy-transition skeptics an appealing historical argument.
In More and More and More, he argues that humanity has never really moved from one energy source to another
Wood was joined by coal, coal by oil, oil by gas and all of them by renewables. Energy sources accumulate rather than replace one another. Global primary-energy charts make the argument look convincing.
Fossil use remains near record levels after trillions in clean-energy investment. Biomass did not disappear when coal arrived,…