July 5, 2026
Net Zero or Net Delusion?
Trouble Transitioning (2025)
Climate ‘transition’ gets roasted as a feel-good story with no real-world blueprint
TLDR: The article argues the green shift is not a repeat of history, because past energy changes added fuels instead of replacing them. In the comments, the mood is dry and skeptical: readers treat the book review like a quiet but devastating receipt against easy climate promises.
The big idea in Trouble Transitioning (2025) is a total vibe check for one of climate politics’ favorite talking points: the comforting story that humanity has smoothly moved from one energy source to the next and can now do the same with fossil fuels. The article says not so fast. Drawing on Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book More and More and More, it argues history was never a clean swap from old fuels to new ones. Instead, societies piled new energy sources on top of the old ones. Translation for normal people: we didn’t quit wood for coal, then quit coal for oil. We kept using all of it, often more than before.
And the community reaction? Honestly, it’s less a comment thread and more a grim little mic drop. The lone commenter, mitchbob, drops a plain review link and lets the article’s central bombshell do the talking: this whole neat, optimistic “transition” story may be closer to PR fairy tale than history lesson. That minimalism somehow makes it feel even sharper, like the internet equivalent of sliding a thick dossier across the table and saying, “Read this.” The mood is skeptical, almost deadpan, with an undercurrent of well, that’s awkward for anyone selling easy 2050 promises. The dark joke hanging over it all is brutal: humanity’s master plan to fix climate change may depend on doing something we’ve literally never done before, at top speed, while still arguing over the script.
Key Points
- •The article says climate policy commonly frames decarbonization as a third major energy transition, after shifts to coal and then to oil and gas.
- •It states that many governments, experts and analysts use historical transition models and technology-adoption curves to interpret the green-energy shift.
- •The article argues that historical energy use was characterized by accumulation of sources rather than one-for-one replacement.
- •It presents Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book *More and More and More* as arguing that a deliberate rapid exit from fossil fuels has no real historical precedent.
- •The article uses railway infrastructure, especially continued reliance on timber sleepers in the US, as an example of how newer energy systems still depended on older material inputs.