More and More and More
  • Published: 6 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802067316
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $30.00

More and More and More

An All-Consuming History of Energy

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Jan 2026
EBook
3 Oct 2024
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A radical new history of energy and humanity's insatiable need for resources that will alter how we discuss climate change

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.

The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.

This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.
  • Published: 6 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802067316
  • Imprint: Penguin Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $30.00
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Praise for More and More and More

[A] sprightly demolition job

Pilita Clarke, The FT

A densely researched polemic designed to shock

Chris Stokel-Walker, New Scientist

A necessary, eye-opening and frequently gobsmacking book... Removing fossil fuels from the energy mix will require something akin to an amputation. The vivid sense of the scale and complexity of the world’s material and energetic flows provided by this book makes clear what a difficult, and possibly bloody, operation that will have to be

The Economist

We all know the energy transition away from fossil fuels is needed to keep the climate safe. But this eye-opening book shows our understanding of past transitions is delusional. Far from moving definitively from wood to coal to oil and gas, we have continued to binge on all forms of energy. Somehow, this has to stop

Pilita Clark, The FT (Best books of 2024: Environment, Science and Technology)

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 the argument of …Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the scale of what lies ahead, the first thing we have to do is to free ourselves from the ideology of the history of energy transition… Fressoz doesn’t wish to dismiss the possibility of change. The point, rather, is to dereify it… Fressoz has given us a properly materialist history of the 20th century.

Adam Tooze, LRB

In More and More and More, Fressoz demolishes other historians’ work [and] provides a corrective to the lazy thinking that surrounds our current predicament

Henry Sanderson, TLS