Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.

Well, enjoyed as much as one can: It’s a sobering read that challenges narratives about energy transition as overly simple—not to downplay the importance of the climate catastrophe but instead to emphasize that more radical steps than “wait for solar to fix everything” (or, I would add, wait for AGI to fix everything) are necessary if we’re going to respond responsibly. It will impact my thinking for quite some time, I imagine.

• More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy
• Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
• Cory Doctorow
• climate catastrophe
• degrowth
• climate change
• energy transition