More and More and More - by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The radical, paradigm-shifting international bestseller that destroys our delusions about energy consumption and will change the way we talk about climate change.

We have long been taught that humanity's relationship with energy is one of progress, with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear--until at some future point everything will be replaced by "green" energy. But the long-held belief in transition and sustainability is completely untrue, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues.

More and More and More demolishes this disastrous fallacy, showing how our industrial age and beyond has in fact been powered by an ever-greater accumulation of each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples from past and present, from the whaling and candle-making industries of the nineteenth century to our post-nuclear age today, Fressoz describes how humanity has gorged on all forms of energy--with whole forests used to prop up coal mines, and fossil fuels remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products we rely on every day. While nations have signed climate agreements aimed at reducing fossil fuels, the sad truth is that the world today burns more wood, coal, and carbon than ever before.

More and More and More forces readers to confront hard truths, including how "transition" was originally promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a way to put off any meaningful change. It offers a clear-eyed understanding of the modern world in all its voracious reality and shines a hard light on the true nature of the enormous challenges eight billion of us face, as we stand at the precipice of planetary crisis.

Review Quotes

"This is where Fressoz's new book is indispensable. In admirable historical and quantitative detail, he shows that we are not in an energy transition, but rather an energy accumulation. So, more and more and more, yes: the more people read this book, the more our chances grow for coping successfully with this fundamental danger." -- Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars

"This is truly a radical and very necessary new history of energy. A rich, unnerving, funny and utterly compelling account, it destabilizes our understanding again and again. With uncanny examples, he makes the invisible obvious, and shows how the obvious was made invisible by forms of understanding in which even climate activists operate. This remarkable material and intellectual history will change our minds about one of the most important challenges humanity currently faces; indeed it gives us a new way of thinking about the profound challenge decarbonization represents." -- David Edgerton, author of The Shock of the Old

"In Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's gripping, surprising pageant of humanity's lust for energy, history doesn't whisper to us, it roars. This is a must-read, urgent reality check for our assumptions about fighting climate change." -- Alan Weisman, author of Hope Dies Last and The World Without Us

"More and More and More, from Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, is a thoroughly engaging book. It's a timely, fascinating and unique take on a topic - climate change and energy consumption - that often lends itself to scholarly and academic discourses. Fressoz's central thesis - that the human species doesn't cleanly move from one energy consumption cycle to the next but, rather, piles them all on top of each other - is a novel construct. I was immediately drawn in." -- Jeff Nesbit, author of This Is the Way the World Ends and Poison Tea