Green energy will supplement conventional energy rather than replace it

Writing in the London Review of Books, Adam Tooze begins his review of More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz thus:

Any​ hope we have of containing the escalating climate crisis depends on getting to net zero, which will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. 

In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions that have shaped modern history. The first was from organic energy – muscle, wind and water power – to coal. The second was from coal to hydrocarbons (oil and gas). The third transition will be the replacement of fossil fuels by forms of renewable energy. 

The transition narrative is reassuring because it suggests that we have done something like this before. We owe our current affluence to a sequence of industrial revolutions – steam engines, electricity, Fordism, information technology – that go back to the 18th century. Our future affluence will depend on a green industrial revolution, and to judge by the encouraging headlines, it is already well underway. 

The standard estimate is that energy transitions take about half a century; if that were true of the green energy transition, it could still be on schedule for 2050. 

Unfortunately, as both Tooze and the the book he is reviewing argue, the history of human energy use provides little support for this optimistic take.

Tooze writes:

When we look more closely at the historical record, it shows not a neat sequence of energy transitions, but the accumulation of ever more and different types of energy. Economic growth has been based not on progressive shifts from one source of energy to the next, but on their interdependent agglomeration. Using more coal involved using more wood, using more oil consumed more coal, and so on. 

An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic mainstays of our modern way of life – is without precedent.

This is hardly an encouraging conclusion, but I'll leave the last word with the 18th-century bishop and philosopher Joseph Butler:

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?