World Without End (2023)
Jean-Marc Jancovici (1962)
Christophe Blain (1970)
193 pages
The basic facts of the causes of the climate crisis can be fairly easily understood. Even without a technical background, one can grasp the fundamentals of the greenhouse effect and how increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution have led to rapidly rising global average temperatures; understand plots comparing recent such temperature increases to historical values and associated climates; and make connections to current changes in our climate and environment. While complexities and uncertainties introduce variability into forecasts of future impacts, one can understand enough to accept the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community of dire implications for our civilization.
It’s the other side of the issue, however, where the true challenge to our understanding lies: deciding what we can do as a global society to improve our chances of avoiding this bleak future – or at least minimizing the damage. Instead of a single, relatively straightforward physical cause and effect, such as greenhouse gas emissions leading to increasing global mean temperature, determining the most appropriate approach to reducing CO2 emissions requires one to understand complex systems of systems involving the limitations of current technologies and the physical world, as well of our global economic and social structures.
Not recognizing and taking these realities into account, and so acknowledging the full ramifications of the various paths available to address the climate change crisis, can mean being beguiled into supporting or promoting solutions that at first glance seem obvious, but on a deeper level reveal fundamental limitations. Worse, those with a vested interest for or against particular solutions can take information out of context and so – unintentionally or intentionally – mislead the public.
Given the inherent complexities, arriving at a sufficient understanding of what one needs to know about potential approaches for dealing with the situation can seem daunting. Into that breach step Christophe Blain and Jean-Mark Jancovici, with their engaging and timely book World Without End: An Illustrated Guide to the Climate Crisis.
Blain, a graphic novelist, begins by describing how he first became interested in learning more about the climate crisis, including its potential impacts and solutions, eventually leading him to reach out to Jancovici, an engineer who has been working on climate issues since the late 1990’s. Blain presents their discussions in graphic novel format, and through his clear and engaging illustrations and graphics relays what he learned from Jancovici about how humankind has become so profoundly reliant on energy, why this has led to the climate crisis we face, and what constitute the challenges of potential solutions for trying to address it.
In the opening section, Jancovici makes evident through both data and clarifying examples the ubiquitousness of energy consumption in our lives. He notes that we tend to be most sensitive to the direct cost of the energy we get billed for – to heat our homes or fuel our cars – although that generally represents only a small fraction of our income, “in France … between 5 and 7%.” (14) Meanwhile, we too easily overlook the vast and growing set of products and services in our lives that each require the input of energy for their realization – from mining, transporting and refining raw materials, to designing, producing, selling and using the final product. In order to make the full extent of this energy consumption more concrete, he demonstrates to Blain the trail of energy in just our morning routine, from the clothes we put on, to the food we eat, and the products involved in brushing our teeth, as shown below (pages 24 and 25).
Jancovici points out that much (if not nearly all) of what we now take for granted in our lives first became possible only roughly two centuries ago, with the shift from primarily human and animal energy (and some windmills and water wheels) to fossil fuels. These fuels have dramatically increased the amount of energy available to do work, and he demonstrates their significant advantage in producing goods and services by noting that “a worker can produce between 10 and 100 kWh [kilowatt-hours] of mechanical energy per year … [while] just a liter of gas yields the same capacity to transform the environment as 10 to 100 days of hard work for a human.” (28) Again seeking to provide physical insight into these numbers, he illustrates for readers the amount of human effort that would be required to use different everyday devices powered by electricity, as shown in the image shown below, from page 29.
This shift to cheap and abundant energy from fossil fuels – coal in the 1800’s, then eventually also oil and natural gas – enabled the industrial revolution, which fundamentally changed our civilization in ways that have resulted in dramatic “population growth … more hyperbolic than exponential” (49) over the past two hundred years. During that time, the average per-person energy use of this growing population has quadrupled, from about 5,000 kWh of energy per year in the mid-1800’s to now around 22,000 kWh per year and continuing to increase. (This is a global average; in the West it’s significantly higher.)
And such growth in energy use (and population for that matter) is, in fact, an inherent part of our economic system; Jancovici points back to economic theorists of the early 1800’s, who argued that “Natural resources are inexhaustible, because otherwise we would not get them for free. As they cannot be multiplied nor exhausted, they are not the province of economic sciences.” (84) At the time, not only resources but also the available space for production and for disposing of the wastes of production appeared limitless; the primary constraint was the amount of labor available to operate machinery. These assumptions enabled an economic system based on the idea of, and really the demand for, persistent growth. And such thinking continues today – the need for economic growth driving ever more consumption and so ever higher per-person energy use.
In recent decades, however, challenges have appeared to the assumptions supporting such growth. These include, for example, the increasing costs associated with oil production, as the extraction of cheap conventional oil has peaked and so pushed the industry to pursue more expensive options, such as shale oil. And while sources of coal remain plentiful, Jancovici argues that
Scarcity isn’t the most worrisome thing about coal. The real worry here is its potential, as the most carbon-intensive energy, to destroy the climate. We’ll be burnt to a cinder before we have to worry about running out of coal. (102)
With this pointed comment, he shifts to a discussion of the climate crisis, describing the greenhouse gas effect and its implications. His explanation concludes by tying together the ideas in the first half of the book, relating the generation of carbon dioxide to the emissions from our energy sources, the fundamental expectations of our economic system, and the size of the world population. This, then, sets the stage for the central question Blain and Jancovici explore over the remainder of the text: the challenge of deciding how best to address the present climate crisis.
Efficiency has been one commonly championed approach, and Jancovici, while not dismissing its benefits, points out that although machines have become more efficient over the past century, we have dramatically increased the number of them as the population has grown, swamping the improvements. And, as noted earlier, per-person energy use continues to grow, in part due to the spread of modern conveniences to an ever-larger share of the global population. The end effect is that, at this point,
making significant energy savings has nothing to do with turning off the lights or using recyclable coffee cups. All the things we buy during the year, how we get around, what we eat, the size of the house we live in and its heating … that’s what counts. (47)
A key element to addressing the climate crisis involves how we generate energy, for all of these items in our lives, which leads to a discussion about the potential for renewable energy solutions to help reduce future carbon dioxide emissions. For readers who view the deployment of renewable sources such as solar and wind as the best possible path to addressing climate change, Jancovici counters with several concerning realities.
Even ignoring the fact that all the increase in renewables so far has come on top of continued increases in fossil fuel use, one could argue that civilization must simply shift more aggressively to renewable energy sources. Jancovici describes, however, several issues with such a plan.
One is the space required – significant tracts of surface area would need to be covered in some combination of solar panels and wind turbines. Another is that these systems currently require significant amounts of fossil fuels to produce and install.
And finally, and perhaps most critically, since energy from solar and wind won’t be continuously available, a huge amount of dispatchable energy – that is, always instantaneously available – would be required to back them up. Potential options for dispatchable energy are problematic, he notes, especially when considering the need on a national scale: batteries remain unviable at this scale for technical reasons; the amount of hydro that would be required boggles the mind; fossil fuels are effectively the current solution to dispatchable energy but keeping them running doesn’t help the greenhouse gas situation.
In the text, Jancovici effectively walks Blain – and readers – to a particular solution: nuclear energy. He describes his own journey through the science of climate change and exploring the potential solutions among energy sources that do not emit CO2, and his initially reluctant conclusion that only nuclear power can make a significant impact on the drive to reduce CO2 emissions: “it took me years to wrap my head around it and really understand it.” He finds nuclear to ultimately be the most advantageous (or, perhaps, least disadvantageous) solution, based on the complex realities that need considered.
Aside from being a power source that is, unlike solar and wind, always on (‘dispatchable’), other advantages include a lower amount of CO2 emitted in the materials for and construction of the plant compared to a comparable amount of solar or wind, a much higher load factor (the amount of power producible relative to the potential possible), a much smaller footprint, and a much better return in energy for the amount of energy invested to extract the necessary materials from the environment.
Those against nuclear power may acknowledge some or all of these advantages, yet raise concerns about the dangers of a nuclear power plant exploding or of the waste material that results. Jancovici meticulously dispels such concerns, explaining the reality of how nuclear power plants work, especially newer generation designs now used. And these newer designs use significantly less uranium – he estimates that, along with generating much less waste, the world has enough uranium to last “thousands of years.” (149)
The primary impediment to nuclear power remains, of course, having the political will to pursue it in the face of the combined resistance of environmental groups aligned (if unintentionally) with oil and gas interests focused on preventing it. Jancovici describes these challenges for Europe, where France has built a significant number of nuclear power plants (providing ~65-70% of their total energy supply) but faces stiff resistance to nuclear energy from the broader European Community and its regulations.
For me, perhaps the most startling conclusion in the book, dramatically highlighting the importance of considering the entire energy infrastructure as a system, relates to the interaction between nuclear and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Recall Jancovici’s emphasis on the need to match wind and solar with a significant amount of dispatchable power, and his conclusion that the dispatchable source must be nuclear power (to avoid the carbon emissions from fossil fuel plants). Given limited funds to invest, he concludes that it doesn’t even make sense to deploy significant solar and wind energy, as any installed wind and solar will require an equivalent amount of dispatchable nuclear power. Since nuclear power plants require significant capital investment to install and cost to operate, it makes more sense to simply shift to nuclear energy, using wind and solar only to a limited extent where appropriate.
Nuclear power is not, however, a silver bullet:
it can’t replace all fossil fuels. It’s like a reserve parachute. It’ll let us hold on to part of what we have today, but just a part. And it’ll keep the fall from being too brutal. (162)
For, aside from power generation, there exist other significant carbon dioxide sources, from machinery such as mining equipment and heavy trucking that require fossil fuels, to cattle burping methane. As a result, he argues, we cannot avoid rethinking our lifestyles – learning to get by with less. Not giving up everything, he makes clear, or even all of any one thing – just moderating our consumption of goods: “the climate problem is a matter of quantity [and] the solution is also a matter of quantity.” (166)
In World Without End, a graphic novelist and an engineer have come together to collaborate on an engaging and thought-provoking introduction to the challenging and polemical topic of climate change. In a format radically different from other (often excellent) works on the topic, Blain and Jancovici cover the origins, implications and potential solutions to our present climate crisis by combining illustrations and text that communicate the technical details in a clear and readable way. And, while not sugarcoating the decisions that have precipitated the crisis and the challenges we face, their exchange manages to present the daunting reality of our present situation with a bit of humor – softening their message without diluting it.
Other notes and information:
In his discussion about European reaction to nuclear power to this point, Jancovici notes that influential Germany has been shutting down nuclear power plants and so has had to ramp up the use lignite, a relatively dirty form of coal.
One sometimes hears the argument that renewable energy sources have become cheaper than fossil fuel energy, and that this will therefore drive the shift to renewable energy sources. But this comes with a challenge pointed out by, for example, Andreas Malm in his book Fossil Capital (my review linked to at right):
It would be foolhardy … to trust in demand and supply as the mechanisms of the transition. If solar and wind were to become radically cheaper than fossil fuels, demand for the latter might fall – only to induce a corresponding fall in their prices, reviving demand and reestablishing an equilibrium of profligacy. (382, Malm)
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
