The Energy Transition Myth

The Material-Energetic Symbiosis of Modernity

An economy, as we have seen, is an energy-dissipating structure with a growing metabolism. We also have seen that it is exponentially expanding and has a rigid structural foundation of master materials mass-produced by burning fossil carbon. The modern economic superorganism wasn’t designed, it was the product of institutions with narrow bounded goals of competition and expansion, whether of company, nation or empire. It is inhuman in its scale, vastly outstripping anything possible by either our cognition or labour to maintain, with specialist operations across many nodes and energy slaves dwarfing workers input by orders of magnitude. Three trends are tied together in this process in an intimate and inseparable nexus, growth, metabolism and complexity.

On one side stands the six continent just in time supply chain which all nations are now dependent upon, of increasingly complicated methods of extraction, of mass debt and interconnected financial nodes across material and digital planes. The second is an exponentially growing economy, material throughput, and population. The final is the ever greater energy demand to power the complexity and scale of the human enterprise, and above all to create new lifestyles of a growing global middle class, driven by a shared dream of comfort and abundance well beyond the biophysical limits of our one green-blue home.

In the previous instalment, I explored the materiality of modernity, the rigid infrastructure that underpins it. I focused in particular on Vaclav Smil’s four pillars: fertiliser, steel, plastic, and concrete. Each of these, I argued, present profound challenges to decarbonisation, revealing the extent to which we have built, and now inhabit, a civilisation fundamentally rooted in fossil carbon. The myth of a malleable modernity, one that can be reshaped at will to suit our Faustian ambitions, is a comforting illusion. Dispelling it is necessary, but unfortunately, the bad news doesn’t end there.

There is a second, closely related myth: the notion of a seamless series of energy transitions. According to this view, we simply swap out old energy sources for new ones — wood gave way to coal, coal to oil, oil now to renewables, and we must do the same again in response to the current crisis. This comforting narrative is another facet of the broader mythology of modernity’s malleability. It persists even among energy specialists, including Vaclav Smil, who, while rightly stressing the slowness and complexity of historical transitions, nonetheless accepts the basic framework.

In this post, my focus is on the myth’s historical distortions. The actual difficulties involved in decarbonising a fossil-based global economy will be explored in subsequent sections. But first, this idea of orderly, linear energy succession must be fundamentally dislodged. It rests on a strange and false reading of history, and we would do well to abandon it before entertaining any serious proposals for a way forward.

It is a trivial statistical observation to note that all major materials and energy sources have expanded in the modern era. We burn more wood today than we did in the eighteenth century, in fact, we consume roughly twice as much energy from wood as we do from nuclear power. So much, then, for four centuries of supposed energy transition [1].

The relationship between GDP and the consumption of energy and materials is strikingly tight, with correlation coefficients approaching unity. Due to efficiency gains in energy conversions the correlation between GDP and materials is tighter. Between 1970 and 2010, global extraction of natural resources, including fossil fuels, metals, minerals, biomass and more, rose from 22 to 70 billion tonnes, a more than threefold increase. Over that same period, the world economy, adjusted for inflation, expanded from $18.9 trillion to $65.6 trillion — also just over a factor of 3 [2].

In other words, material throughput has tracked economic growth almost one-to-one. Between 1960 and 2013, global GDP per capita increased by 202 percent, while material consumption, measured across a selected basket of 98 key resources, rose by 201 percent [3]. Various indicators have been proposed to support the idea of “dematerialisation,” but the clearest metric, an absolute reduction in material use, remains exceedingly rare. Where it does occur, it is typically the result of regulatory bans or moral prohibitions — not technological progress. This is evident in cases such as beryllium, mercury, asbestos, thallium, and whale oil, all phased out due to health risks or ethical concerns. The only notable instance of a sustained absolute decline driven by technological substitution is that of sheep’s wool, which has been largely replaced by synthetic fibres, hardly a triumph for the environment, given the petrochemical basis and ecological impact of plastics.

Relative dematerialisation refers to a decline in material use per unit of GDP, in other words, needing less of a given resource for each dollar of economic output, often due to improved efficiency or substitution. A slightly stronger measure is a per capita decrease in material consumption. Yet both of these metrics can be easily overwhelmed: the former by rising GDP, the latter by population growth.

Take the example of wood-based materials. From 1960 to 2013, wood’s relative share of total material use declined from 70 percent to 36 percent, a figure often cited to suggest progress. But in absolute terms, global wood use increased by 53 percent, from 4.8 to 7.37 billion tonnes. Per capita use did decline, from 1.58 to 1.03 tonnes per person, indicating that substitution and efficiency gains have indeed played a role. But if one only looks at the shrinking relative share — as many charts and reports do — the result is a misleading picture. The material is still growing in total use, and that’s what matters for planetary impact.

In practice, relative dematerialisation is often less impressive than it appears. From the planet’s perspective, only the absolute scale of extraction and consumption matters, not how efficiently it’s achieved per person or per dollar. Worse still, the narrative of relative decline can obscure the deeper structural realities: many materials are interlinked, forming complex symbiotic relationships. Even if one appears to shrink in relative terms, it may remain essential to the wider metabolic system of the economy.

The story of materials, then, is — at first glance — a rather dry one: a steady pattern of rising consumption across the board. Efficiency gains have certainly occurred, but never at a scale or speed sufficient to offset the pressures of demographic and economic growth. Nearly a century ago, an American forester reflected on this reality. Standing in the shadow of the new steel-and-concrete skyscrapers of modernity, he remained calm, unimpressed by the spectacle of his supposed obsolescence. “Raw materials are never obsolete,” he declared [4]. So far, history has offered few — if any — meaningful counterexamples to this striking conjecture.

In the history of technology, substitution is a central theme. It’s a story of old technologies being replaced by new ones, of tools and systems rendered obsolete by innovation. Perhaps this reflects a broader cultural obsession with the new: we prioritise novelty over maintenance, invention over continued use, often underestimating the persistence and resilience of older technologies that remain deeply embedded in our lives. Still, technological change does occur. Innovations regularly disrupt industries, render older methods uneconomical, and drive established firms into bankruptcy. This is the essence of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.”

But when this framework is transposed onto the world of materials, it becomes almost entirely misleading. The idea that materials “compete” in the way technologies do — that one resource triumphs and displaces another in some Darwinian struggle — is a profound category error. In reality, materials rarely become obsolete. They accumulate, interlock, and co-evolve within industrial systems. The notion of creative destruction simply doesn’t apply.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, in his recent fantastic book More and More and More, traces the history of material and energy symbiosis. One of the problems he identifies is that much of the history of energies and materials has been subject to the siloing of academic specialisation. But material and energetic history is at its most interesting and illuminating not when one focuses on a single material or energy source in isolation, but rather on the intersections and connections between them—because it is through these linkages that new systems of material infrastructure emerge, enabling fresh waves of growth. And often materials and energies which seem extremely different in applications and properties have relationships of deep mutual dependence.

Fressoz focuses primarily, although not exclusively, on three such symbiotic relationships: first, between coal and wood; then between coal and oil; and finally between wood and oil. In the second half of the book, he traces the strange conceptual history of the notion of an “energy transition”— from its origins in nuclear futurism, to its significant popularisation during the energy crises of the late 1970s, to its current status as a technophile banality, often invoked more for the purposes of procrastination than meeting our urgent requirements for the problems we face today.

Coal and Wood

Coal and wood is an excellent place to start, because there exists today a pervasive myth that industrialisation itself was essentially an energy transition from wood to coal. This misconception stems from placing the two side by side in energy charts and noting that, by 1900, biomass energy had become negligible compared to coal. But as we’ve already seen, from an ecological perspective, only absolute quantities matter, and wood use in fact continued to accumulate. More importantly, and more profoundly, the rise of coal was not a clean break from wood, but something fundamentally dependent upon it. The industrial age did not replace wood with coal: it was built with and through it. And that’s a story we’ve almost entirely forgotten:

The bourgeoisie who ventured into the mines often insisted on the surprising smell that reigned there: a smell of softwood and sawn timber, the smell of the millions of pit props that supported the galleries. In the open air, before the slag heaps marked the landscape in the twentieth century, it was the enormous reserves of timber that signalled the presence of the mines.4 In a remarkable book entitled La vie souterraine, the French mining engineer Louis Simonin described the fauna and flora of the galleries, such as the strange luminescent mushrooms that thrived in their moist heat.5 Lewis Mumford described coal mines as ‘the first completely inorganic environment created by man’.6 Most likely, he never set foot in one. At the same time, George Orwell, who visited the mines of Wigan in the north of England, reported how exhausting his excursion had been, more than a kilometre underground before reaching the coal face: he had to bend at every step to avoid hitting a wooden beam.7 And yet historians have preferred to follow Mumford rather than Orwell. The shortcut of coal as ‘mineral energy’, the cliché of coal as a way out of an ‘organic economy’, has prevailed. [5]

Pit props were needed at vast scales throughout the nineteenth century and well into the second half of the twentieth, in most cases essential for supporting the galleries of coal mines and underground mining more broadly. In the case of coal, it seems highly dubious to classify this as “construction” timber; rather, it should be understood for what it was — wood used directly in the extraction of energy. Not only that, but the volume of wood used for pit props exceeded the total wood consumption of earlier centuries. According to Paul Warde, England and Wales at their eighteenth-century peak used around 3.6 million cubic metres of wood per year, primarily as firewood [6].

By contrast, in a typical year around the beginning of the twentieth century, the amount of wood used just for pit props in Britain ranged from three to four and a half million cubic metres [7]. Britain is, of course, something of an exception (its mining history far outweighs its forestry) but similar trends can be observed elsewhere. In France, for example, the use of pit props expanded fiftyfold over the course of industrialisation in the nineteenth century[8].

Workers were often not paid for the essential timbering work, after all, it was the coal that made money, while the wood merely kept the operation from collapsing, quite literally. Cave-ins were a constant, deadly threat. Props had to be regularly inspected, replaced, and reinforced. A miner needed to be skilled not only in extraction but in working with wood, and the ability to recognise the subtle sound of straining or splintering timber could mean the difference between survival and mutilation or death. As Mousseron, a French poet and miner said “Bon mineur sait carpinter”. Payment for timbering, or “timberage,” was a long-standing source of conflict and a recurring cause of strikes. It lies at the heart of the fictional strike in Zola’s Germinal, and also underpinned real-world events, most notably the Ludlow strike, in which miners protesting conditions and unpaid timber work were massacred by forces linked to Rockefeller.

Coal, of course, powering the steamship and the railway, was undoubtedly an agent of globalisation, yet it is often imagined as a resource bound up with national sovereignty. This is patently false. Belgium in the 1930s used half of its annual timber supply for the mining sector, yet still had to import 800,000 cubic metres of wood each year — more than the country’s entire forest output. Surprisingly, this timber was sourced primarily from the Nordic countries rather than from Belgium’s vast Congo colony [9].

In Britain, around 20 to 30 percent of all imported timber was destined for mining, and this out of a total timber supply that was 96 percent imported [10]. British pit props came predominantly from the Baltic region, Portugal, and southern France — most famously from the Landes plantation. This dependency was well recognised at the time. In fact, timber imports into Britain in this period were occasionally larger than those of oil, and even, in certain years, larger than coal. The cultural visibility of this reliance is evident in contemporary works such as The Pit Prop Syndicate (1922), a crime thriller by Freeman Wills Crofts. The novel revolves around a timber smuggling operation under the cover of pit prop imports set in Landes, an entertaining but revealing reflection of just how central timber was to Britain’s industrial metabolism.

Britain in 1934 signed the “props for coal” agreement, securing essential strategic timber in exchange for supplying French industry with British coal. A significant part of the Second World War’s resource struggle revolved around wood [11], and in its aftermath, much of the economic chaos in Europe stemmed from disruption in the timber trade. Sweden, deprived of foreign coal, resorted to burning its own forests, which in turn led to shortages of pit props for mining in Britain and Germany [12]. France, attempting to assert a measure of postwar sovereignty through increased domestic coal mining, soon ran into major strikes due to poor conditions. It quickly abandoned the “patriotic miner” ideal and turned to importing one million tonnes of American coal per month [13].

(Unloading of pit props in Cardiff, 1936)

The collective European recovery in coal and timber trade was coordinated by the London-based European Coal Organisation, an effort that laid the groundwork for postwar European economic cooperation. The European Economic Community (EEC), which eventually evolved into the European Union, has a fascinating genealogy: it originated from the European Coal and Steel Community, which itself grew out of the International Authority of the Ruhr — Germany’s coal-rich industrial heartland, which needed to be reintegrated into a broader commercial system for any real recovery to occur. George Kennan, more famous for his doctrine of Soviet containment, wasn’t part of a conspiracy to make Europe dependent on American oil; rather, he authored a “coal plan for Europe” designed to solve these immense logistical challenges [14]. Timber and coal, closely linked until the postwar years, were so foundational that their symbiosis played an enormous role in the origins of the EU.

China, India, and Indonesia — the contemporary coal giants — did not become dominant players until after wood had largely become obsolete in coal mining. But in earlier industrial powers like the United States and the Soviet Union, wood remained essential well into the twentieth century. In the U.S., timber for mining could be transported from as far away as Oregon, even passing through the Panama Canal to reach Pennsylvania coalfields, though more commonly, it came from plantations in North Carolina and Virginia [15]. In the Soviet Union, the Lenin Canal, completed in 1952, connected the Donbas coalfields with the central Russian forests. Rebuilding and expanding this logistical infrastructure was a major focus of the Fourth Five-Year Plan (1946–1950) [16]. The Soviets were the last major country in the world to continue using pit props due to the unique conditions of the Donbas mines and their abundance of wood, reaching 24 million cubic metres a year by the 1960s, but opencast mines elsewhere and innovation in hydraulic and steel roofing eventually meant they were phased out everywhere.

But the symbiosis of wood and coal doesn’t end with this one example. First of all, steam and coal aren’t synonymous, a vast amount of wood was still used to power steam engines well into the twentieth century. Wood consumption spiralled worldwide as steam technologies were deployed in areas regardless of their access to local coal infrastructure. Even in regions advanced enough to avoid using wood to fuel their railways, which many weren’t until shockingly late, the railways themselves still relied heavily on timber. Railway sleepers were made of wood and consumed massive volumes. In the late nineteenth century, railways used about six times as much wood as iron in mass [17], with French railways alone requiring 2.5 million sleepers a year [18], and American railways using 120 million, equivalent to 10 percent of all U.S. timber consumption, or roughly 20 million cubic metres of wood annually [19]. Sleepers also had to be replaced frequently due to degradation, adding to the ongoing demand.

Moreover, the broader infrastructure of rail — bridges, stations, and platforms — was overwhelmingly built from wood. Even where steel was used, it was often produced with charcoal rather than coal until surprisingly late; in most countries, not until after the First World War. In fact, there was a second charcoal peak in many parts of the Global South much later than one might expect. The Brazilian steel industry, for example, consumed 24 million cubic metres of wood, 25 times higher than the American charcoal peak and 80 times higher than the French one [20].

Before the petroleum age, wood derivatives were on a sharp upward trend: formaldehyde and early plastics, including synthetic fibres and cellophane, could all be derived from wood. Even today, silicon for modern solar panels is often produced using charcoal in addition to coking coal, in an effort to appear more “green” [21]. In Yunnan, China, for instance, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of charcoal are illegally imported each year to supply a major silicon refining centre. Supposedly obsolete materials are still present everywhere, often where one least expects them. Wood was a fundamental component of industrialisation, and in many ways, it remains so.

Across the whole of the West in the nineteenth century, wood use spiralled to extraordinarily high levels. It rose alongside bricks in construction, typically the largest single category of consumption, but its reach extended far beyond. Whether in transport, packaging (wooden barrels and crates), paper, mining, or construction, wood remained foundational. As already noted, its use as direct energy persisted and even grew overall, with substantial lags in its replacement for fuel and industrial applications.

Coal symbiotically worked with wood. Coal was physically held up by timber props in the mines; it powered the railways whose sleepers and trestles were made of wood; it fuelled the steamships transporting industrial goods — many of which were crated, palletised, or otherwise packaged in wood. The housing of coal-fired machinery was typically timber-framed. The early telegraph systems that linked coal-rich industrial centres ran on poles made from wood. In short, the infrastructure that coal enabled was structurally and logistically entangled with wood.

The facts speak for themselves: Britain sextupled its wood consumption, mostly through imports, at twice the rate of population growth [22]. The United States increased its timber use a hundredfold [23]. And the same story plays out across much of Europe: a material still deeply embedded in the bones of industrial modernity.

Thus, the oft-repeated story that coal “saved the forests” is, in many respects, nonsense. By the end of the nineteenth century, the massive expansion of industrialisation was actively consuming and burying forests at an extraordinary pace. At that time, no one was particularly worried about depleting coal reserves, the real anxiety was the destruction of forests upon which economies still fundamentally depended. It seemed only a matter of decades before Waldsterben — forest death — would become a reality. Theodore Roosevelt identified this as a central challenge for continued American growth [24].

Forest railways, now largely forgotten, were an enormous part of this story. These unofficial and often temporary networks may have been larger in extent than the formal rail systems. Railways were not only enormous consumers of timber themselves— for sleepers, trestles, bridges, and rolling stock — but also enabled the transport of felled wood on an industrial scale. In many regions, wood remained the single largest category of freight well into the twentieth century.

So, what happened? How were the forests “saved”? In the end, it was thanks to coal, but not at the outset of industrialisation. It was only later, and indirectly, through a little-known invention that fundamentally altered the fate of railway timber: creosote.

In 1838, the British engineer John Bethell filed a patent for the preservation of wood using creosote, a substance derived from the distillation of coal. This product was far superior to copper, zinc or arsenic salts, which were used for the same purpose: creosote does not dissolve in water, it makes wood impermeable, rot-proof and therefore much more durable. One engineer raved about this technique, which ‘transformed timber into poison’.51 The economic, ecological and historical importance of creosote cannot be overestimated: instead of lasting a few years, railway sleepers could now stay in place for several decades. Creosoting was carried out on an industrial scale: the wood, placed in an autoclave, was subjected to a vacuum before being immersed in a bath of creosote under pressure and at high temperature. At the Bethell factory near Greenwich, around 100 kilos of creosote were injected per tonne of timber, turning it into a composite material. From the 1850s, British and Indian railway sleepers were systematically creosoted. The process spread rapidly in Europe, and later in the United States, which helps explain the enormous quantities of sleepers used by American railways at the end of the century.52 By making wood more durable, coal helped to satisfy the demand it had created. Creosote was undoubtedly one of the most important tools of forest conservation in the twentieth century. One journalist was enthusiastic: thanks to the creosoting of wood, forests would once again cover the planet.53 More modestly, at the cost of a long-lasting pollution, creosote made it possible to contain the disaster that coal was causing in the forests. [25]

The story of modernity was not one of a smooth “energy transition,” but rather an explosive addition of fossil carbon. It marked the invention of the megamachine and the progressive increase in the efficiency of energy conversions over time. Contrary to common narratives, it was not a clean break from the organic to the inorganic, nor the creation of a fundamentally new or alien environment. Wood remained central throughout. Coal did not replace wood but worked in deep symbiosis with it to exponentially expand the scale of the human enterprise.

With the partial exceptions of the imperial superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — this was not a story of national self-sufficiency. It was a story of growing interdependence and increasing systemic complexity. Modernity’s defining feature is not the displacement of old materials and practices, but rather the runaway growth of all of them. Everything scaled up: energy, materials, population, infrastructure, national and international. The uniqueness of modernity lies in the speed and totality with which we overcame all the negative feedback loops which kept us in check beforehand, and to improvise and extend the system when it seemed to run into any new ones.

Society has a metabolism, an underlying structure that dissipates energy, but energy is never used in isolation. It is converted, directed, and put to work through material systems. Energy is used for purposes: to extract, to transport, to construct, to package, to shelter. And all of these purposes rely on specific materials, each with distinct properties and varying degrees of abundance. Without materials, energy lacks utility.

What makes Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More so impressive is the meticulous attention he gives to these often overlooked dimensions of modern life, the mundane, the forgotten, the logistical. Every so-called revolutionary breakthrough rests on tonnes of logistical infrastructure and material dependencies that remain invisible unless one has been practically involved with them. There is no clean break between eras, only layering, complication, and entanglement.

The three trends that define modernity, the unprecedented rise in complexity, scale, and energetic metabolism, are all bound up in the material relationships that support them. Expanding logistics require more energy; more energy enables larger logistics; larger networks require more materials, which in turn drive growth. Cheap energy may well be the root condition for this spiral, but its consequences radiate outward through every artery of the system, always material, always entangled, always growing.

Coal and Oil

Oil is the lifeblood of modern civilisation. Its consumption correlates tightly with a country’s Gross Domestic Product, more so than nearly any other single variable. But did oil displace coal? Not at all. The basic picture is straightforward: the machines and infrastructure of modernity are primarily built with steel — smelted using coal — and powered by oil. This reveals a material symbiosis: coal as the manufacturing substrate, steel for its versatility and structural strength, and oil for its exceptional energy density and liquid mobility.

Among the various symbioses discussed, this one is by far the most central to modernity. Demonstrating this is not difficult. Both coal and oil remain near their historical peaks today. Around 1.8 billion tonnes of oil are transported globally each year, alongside 1.4 billion tonnes of coal, most of it concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region.

It’s often remarked that oil’s primary advantage lies in its supreme ease of transportation and mobility, thanks to its liquid form. While this quality has allowed oil to be used in a wide array of applications, it was, in the early days, a logistical headache — prone to leakage, flammability, and a host of operational problems. In the first half of the twentieth century, numerous reports questioned whether oil would displace coal, and almost all concluded — correctly — that it wouldn’t.

In the 1930s, France’s Génie civil estimated that manufacturing a single car required roughly seven tonnes of coal — about as much coal as the car would consume in petroleum over its operational life [26]. Ford came to a very similar conclusion in 1941 [27]. The car, then, was just as much a coal technology as it was an oil one. Today, in China — where the vast majority of electric vehicles are produced, it still takes coal to manufacture a car, and the electricity that powers it is largely supplied by a coal-dominated grid, leading to its lifetime assessment of coal use being more than double its weight [28]. The automotive industry today consumes 15 percent of the world’s steel and they tend to prefer the lack of impurities in primary steel made using coal compared to recycled scrap which you can make using a potentially green electric arc furnace [29].

But the connection runs far deeper than the fact that the flagship petroleum technology, the automobile, has always been intertwined with coal. The very infrastructure of oil itself is inseparable from coal. Tankers, refineries, pipelines, storage tanks, drilling platforms, all are built primarily from steel, a material whose production remains overwhelmingly reliant on coal. Even in its physical embodiment, the oil system is underpinned by coal. The supposed rivalry between the two is better understood as a deep structural symbiosis, manifesting in the basic hardware of the fossil fuel age:

In 1934, the chief engineer of the Anglo-Iranian Company made a more complete calculation: in Great Britain between 1918 and 1934, the oil infrastructure – refineries, tanks, tankers, etc. – and the car fleet had together required 13 million tonnes of steel, which in turn required 53 million tonnes of coal. Given that Great Britain consumed only 21 million tonnes of oil over the same period, he concluded that each tonne of oil generated an induced consumption of 2.5 tonnes of coal.10 [30]

By the 1930s, the United States was already consuming over 2 million tonnes of steel tubing annually [31]. This category, known as Oil Country Tubular Goods (OCTG), refers to the steel pipes used in the drilling and transportation of oil and gas. By 2010, U.S. consumption of OCTG had risen to seven million tonnes, meaning that the oil and gas industry alone was consuming more steel than the entire U.S. economy did at the end of the nineteenth century [32].

This trend has continued upward as oil becomes increasingly difficult to extract — from deep-sea drilling to shale formations and oil sands. The steel infrastructure is also wearing out faster: the easy, low-sulphur oil is mostly gone, and what remains is more corrosive, requiring more frequent replacement of components. Today, there are over two million kilometres of oil and gas pipelines across the globe, up from two thousand at the dawn of the twentieth century. The world’s 700 refineries each contain, on average, 3,200 kilometres of internal piping. Thousands of supertankers and vast fields of steel silos hold billions of barrels of strategic oil reserves.

And of course, one couldn’t drive the trucks, cars, and planes, or burn the oil, without roads, bridges, and airport runways. These are built from concrete, reinforced with rebar, and underpinned by steel infrastructure. Which, inevitably, brings us back to our old friend: coal. Cement doesn’t strictly require coal, but according to both the IEA and major cement manufacturers, between 70 and 90 percent of it is still produced using coal, with petroleum coke, burning tyres and other very clean things being the favourite alternatives [33]. The expansion of road networks is one of the most extraordinary feats of the twentieth century. Today, human-made structures now outweigh the total biomass of all life on Earth — billions and billions of tonnes that must also be maintained. To put it into perspective, in Europe alone, roads account for 39 billion tonnes of material stock, while buildings make up 35 billion [34].

In other words, the movement, storage, and extraction of oil has always been, and remains, deeply entangled with coal. The machines powered by petroleum today are embedded within systems of infrastructure and industrial production that are still, at their core, dependent on coal. The arteries, fuel, and bones of the twentieth century were constructed through the symbiosis of coal and oil. Synthetic oil is most famously remembered for powering the Luftwaffe, but today we consume three times as much of it, produced via coal liquefaction by SASOL in South Africa [35]. This process occurs within the largest building in the country, a facility that emits more carbon than some entire nations. China, in pursuit of national sovereignty through a strategy echoing the autarkic techno-nationalism of apartheid South Africa, has also embraced coal liquefaction to fuel a significant portion of its mining sector, now surpassing South Africa as the world’s leading producer of this dirtiest of fuels. In addition, China uses coal to produce fuel methanol, both of which are used not only in mining but also in transport and other industrial sectors [36].

Modern coal mining no longer relies on pit props. It is heavily electrified, highly automated, and astonishingly efficient. Coal can now be pulverised and transported through pipelines, and extracted using electricity-intensive shearers and rotary machines. These technologies, largely developed by British and European engineering firms during the twilight of Europe’s geological coal peak, led to huge productivity gains. Though often forgotten today, they were eagerly adopted by the United States and, above all, China—cementing their importance in the modern industrial landscape.

Coal is far from a nineteenth-century phenomenon. In the United States, coal consumption increased by 432 percent between 1960 and 2010 [37]. Today, China alone produces 4.8 billion tonnes of coal annually and imports even more, mostly from slightly more energy-dense Australian mines [38]. What’s more, coal has become increasingly entangled with oil. The dramatic rise of opencast mining over underground methods reflects this: enormous rotary machines, powered by petrol and detonating ammonium nitrate made from natural gas feedstocks, are now capable of reshaping entire landscapes. They quite literally move mountains to reach the black gold. If there is one image that encapsulates the essence of modernity, it is this synthesis of all forms of fossil carbon:

In today’s strip mines, the energy that literally moves mountains comes from oil. At its peak in the 2000s, American strip mining consumed 2.7 million tonnes of ANFO, a mixture of ammonium nitrate and petrol, every year – roughly as much explosive as all the Allied bombs in the Second World War. Then come the excavators to clear the ground and remove the coal. Finally, special mining dumpers bring the coal up from the pits. These machines burn 1,500 tonnes of diesel a year, or as much energy per minute as the daily consumption of an American household. In surface mines, it takes between 1 and 2.5 litres of diesel to extract one tonne of coal.79 [39]

It’s not just that oil hasn’t replaced coal, or that coal lingers on as some outdated residue awaiting replacement by newer hydrocarbons. Rather, it’s that the histories of these two energy sources are unintelligible without each other. The rise of the human enterprise over the past few centuries has not been a story of substitution, but of accumulation, of adding materials and learning to use them in tandem to drive further growth.

Jevons’ Paradox sits at the centre of this dynamic: while we have made extraordinary efficiency gains, they have never offset the exponential expansion of population and economic activity. A modern iPhone contains over sixty different metals, used with such precision and in such small quantities that extracting, for example, the three dollars’ worth of gold inside would cost more than the gold itself is worth. A modern tyre contains more material types than an entire car did a century ago. This material complexity, though efficient in design, makes meaningful recycling all but impossible. And while an iPhone may be far smaller than a 1960s computer, their sheer proliferation means their collective weight now far surpasses those earlier machines. Miniaturisation has not brought dematerialisation. Thus far, this trend remains unbeaten.

Creole technologies and strange loops

David Edgerton coined the term creole technologies to describe the improvised, often unplanned reuses of materials and technologies in the Global South. One early example is the bidonville, originally North African: makeshift houses constructed from flattened oil drums. Plastic bags, notoriously, served as disposable latrines. These ad hoc adaptations were central to the rapid and chaotic urbanisation of the twentieth century, especially in Africa, South and Central America, India, and China.

But unlike the European “slum,” which typically refers to a neglected part of a pre-existing urban fabric, what emerged in these regions was something else entirely: sprawling, improvised cities built from the detritus of industrial modernity. This vast expansion of informal urbanisation underpinned much of the 20th century’s population boom, forming what could be called a parallel civilisation, not only outside of the West, but also apart from the state-sanctioned development projects of local kleptocratic elites.

While some countries have had varying degrees of success in addressing this phenomenon and providing stable housing, the material reality of these slums, and the improvisational material culture that sustains them, remains deeply underexamined. This leads to a neglect of major material trends, precisely because these improvisations fall outside the bounds of formal economic and industrial analysis. One striking example is the extraordinary rise in charcoal use for heating and cooking. While we often think of charcoal as a middle-class barbecue luxury, this is simply not the case. Paris in the 1860s burned 100,000 tonnes of charcoal [40]; Kinshasa today burns 2.15 million tonnes annually [41]. These are megacities operating under a completely different kind of developmental logic.

Here, wood has a symbiotic relationship with oil: farmers chop down rainforests or other wooded areas, supplying charcoal to people in cities using trucks, buses, or pickups. From there, merchants physically carry, cycle, or ride motorbikes to distribute it — usually capturing most of the added value. As a result, charcoal consumption in Africa has risen sevenfold since 1960 from 5 to 35 million tonnes [42].

Oil and wood have a long, intertwined history, one I’ll summarise briefly. In the early days, the two were in clear symbiosis: oil was stored and transported in wooden barrels, giving rise to a substantial cooperage industry. Oil derricks themselves were made of wood, and, as previously noted, the eventual shift to steel infrastructure would initially have been fuelled by charcoal. By the 1930s, wood had largely been displaced in oil infrastructure, a textbook case of metallisation.

But the story doesn’t end there. In fact, modern oil-based technologies have enabled a new phase in wood extraction and use. Chainsaws and diesel-powered trucks make logging far easier, while fertilisers derived from natural gas feedstocks increase forestry yields, making wood more accessible on a global scale. Extremely dense plantations — eucalyptus being a favourite — are grown, cut, and rotated in fast succession. Fertiliser requirements for these plantations are not far off from monoculture cereal agriculture. Far from being renewable, modern forestry depends on a vast and continuous supply of non-renewable natural gas, oil, and phosphorus mining.

Intensively forested plantations have increased to 130 million hectares — up 55 percent since 1990 [43]. Less intensive, but still planted, forestry has risen from 170 to 294 million hectares over the same period. All of this, of course, is not good news for the environment. It leads to biogeochemical flow pollution, significant carbon emissions, and the loss of biodiversity in these areas, all while primary forests and crucial carbon sinks continue to be cleared for agriculture and other purposes. This makes the net-zero-by-2050 plans premised on “biomass energy” somewhat ridiculous.

Meanwhile, construction wood use has risen significantly, supported by petrochemical treatments that produce engineered materials like plasterboard and plywood. Once again, despite appearances, there has been a strange loop: wood, which had dropped off, has come back even stronger in a new symbiotic relationship with oil.

Additionally, the explosion of global shipping and e-commerce, especially the rise of companies like Amazon, has caused a massive increase in paper-based packaging, primarily cardboard. This has more than offset the supposed reduction in paper consumption due to digitisation, cardboard consumption quadrupled between 1960 and 2000 [44]. And in the logistics sector, the continued use of hardwood pallets for forklifts ensures that wood remains essential to global packaging and transport systems, pallets can’t be underestimated because between 1960 and 2000 they rose from 62 to 450 million units, by the end of which pallets consumed 13 million cubic metres of wood, which is four times higher than peak barrel production in 1909 and twice as high as peak crate in 1950 [45].

In 2020 wood energy derived from black liquors from paper mills accounted for double the amount of energy as solar panels [46] which despite large amounts of reliance on fossil carbon is of course perfectly “green” by a bureaucratic miracle. Wood pallet for energy in Europe tripled to 60 million cubic metres from 2010 to 2020 [47]. This technology goes back to the 1970s and it’s a new version of the very old idea of burning wood. Fressoz takes a graph from the IEA for America and Eurostat for Europe to show that remarkable for hundreds of years of energy transition it’s in fact burning wood, pellets and residues which is the biggest renewable energy source, higher than hydraulic, wind and solar.

The absurdity of using wood to substitute for the infrastructure of a fossil carbon civilisation is exposed by Fressoz through the striking example of the Drax plant in Britain. Opened in 1974 as a coal-fired power station using Yorkshire coal, it was privatised in the 1990s and began importing fuel from across the world. Then, in a fantastic example of greenwashing, it was converted—under heavy public subsidy—into a “biomass” plant, with biomass serving as a simple euphemism for wood. Massive volumes of wood pellets are imported from the United States and Canada, travelling from crushers to trucks, then across the Atlantic in diesel-powered ships, sourced from forestry plantations that rely on Haber–Bosch fertiliser made from natural gas and mined phosphorus. All of it is eventually burned, emitting vast amounts of CO₂. The entire process is saturated with oil from wall to wall.

In 2021 alone, Drax burned 8 million tonnes of wood pellets—more than the UK’s entire native forest production—only to provide a mere 1.5 percent of our energy [48]. It is a case study in the folly of attempting to substitute an energy-dense fuel with a vastly less dense one. The scale of destruction required for such a paltry output exposes one of the most futile and deceptive operations in recent energy history. We don’t count things which obviously are deeply carbon intensive, we don’t count imports, we focus on hopeless technological dead ends like Carbon Capture and storage, wasting taxpayer money and isolating normal voters into the hands of the merchants of doubt, and celebrate a job well done for the climate.

The rise of wood, then, has been both a first- and third-world phenomenon. It has played a role in primary energy, construction, packaging, heating, cooking, and many other essential uses. While its growth hasn’t been as dramatic as other material families—plastics have increased by 4,400 percent, rocks by 1,050 percent, semimetals by 690 percent, and minerals by 670 percent—the wood family has still grown by 53 percent [49]. What makes wood so central in Fressoz’s analysis, and why he emphasises its symbiotic relationships, is precisely because it is so often regarded as archaic. But it absolutely isn’t.

To summarise: the history of modern techno-industrial civilisation has not been one of substitutions, but of rapid, large-scale accumulation. Archaic materials have risen alongside new ones, enabling growth through relationships of mutual and reciprocal logistical dependence—each requiring a vast metabolic throughput of energy. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a story of “transition.”

Rather than a dull tale of mere addition, the reality is far more dynamic: when substitutions do occur, they often trigger rebounds, loops, and unexpected recyclings. Materials that once worked in close symbiosis frequently re-emerge in new roles and configurations. It is also a story of escalating complexity. As material interdependencies become more intricate, they demand longer and more elaborate logistics, which in turn drive further growth and globalisation.

This increasing complexity produces a global supply chain that is fragile, hyper-efficient, and just-in-time, while also making recycling ever more difficult, materials are now so intricately bundled that they are hard to separate and recover. At the centre of it all is fossil carbon, which acts as a logistical as well as energetic keystone.

The problems facing any so-called green transition should now be abundantly clear to the attentive reader, particularly when it comes to the material dependencies and contradictions within celebrated “green” technologies. That said, this piece has been a historical corrective first and foremost, and so, for now, that is where I’ll leave things.

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