Preface. This is about Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book “More and More and More”, an amazing history of energy and explanation of why there never has been an energy transition or will be. We just keep burning more and more and more wood, coal, oil, and natural gas.
Below are just a few excerpts from the 220 pages that most interested me, especially on the ways they were and are still dependent on each other. There are also 88 pages of citations with good evidence backing this all up and so you can do further research on a topic that interests you.
Even the “age of wood” isn’t over. Fressoz explains how we are using more wood for packaging, structures, pallets and more than we did in the past. And nearly two-thirds of Europe’s renewable energy comes from burning wood!
While this is mainly about the history of energy, I write about the future — why renewables cannot replace fossil fuels, which also just add additional “logs” to the fossil fueled bonfire of energy, which continues to grow faster than renewables do — they’ve been 80% or more of total energy use for decades. The main reason renewables cannot replace fossils is that they depend on fossil fuels in every single step of their life cycle (just one of the 68 Reasons why wind turbines cannot replace fossil fuels). Wind and solar require balancing and peak load generation from natural gas. Nor are they cheaper, because their cost does not include the natural gas plants backing them up, energy storage battery systems, and transmission to connect them to the grid. Nor the energy to mine the materials they are made of, which there aren’t enough of. Simon Michaux has shown there are not enough of about a dozen elements to even create the first generation of renewables to replace only 25% of fossil fuels.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, UCSC, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Fressoz JB (2020) More and More and More. An All-Consuming History of Energy. Penguin Books.
Nuclear fission generates twice as much electricity as hydropower, and twice as much as solar and wind power combined (2019 figures). Wood remains an essential source of heat for the poorest third of the world’s population 2.3 billion people who are also the first victims of pollution. But rich countries have also seen their consumption of wood energy increase: the U.S. burns twice as much as it did in 1960, and Europe three times as much as it did at the beginning of the 20th century. But historians are most interested in wood when it seems to disappear: its alleged ousting from the English energy mix in the 19th century has been the cause of more spilled ink than its rise throughout the world since 1950.
The same bias applies to coal: historians have mainly written about the situation in Europe in the nineteenth century, even though this is neither the main place nor moment in coal’s history. The overwhelming majority (95 per cent) of coal was mined after 1900, and most of it was mined outside Europe (86 per cent). Medium-sized Asian powers such as Australia and Indonesia currently extract twice as much coal as the giants of the 1900s such as Britain and the U.S.. In many ways, coal is a new energy. The strongest growth in its history occurred between 1980 and 2010 (+300 per cent), leading to an increase in its share of the global energy mix, to the detriment of oil. It was also in the 2010s that the number of miners reached its peak. Lastly, coal-fired power stations are on average younger (around fifteen years old) than atomic power stations (thirty-two years), and are often much more efficient. Coal was the great energy of the 2000s: it fueled the internet revolution, which is basically just another electron network, just as much as the industrial revolution.
While China plays a central role – each year it burns 15 times more coal than England at its peak and more than France through-out its history – this country is exceptional only in terms of its size. Since 1980, coal consumption has increased tenfold in China, but it has multiplied by 12 in Taiwan, by 11 in Vietnam, by 10 in the Philippines, by 8 in India, by 7 in Turkey, by 6 in South Korea, and even more in other countries.
When Mosaddegh came to power, he nationalized the oil industry. In 1978, it was again the oil workers, 5% of the country’s workforce, who played a key role in the success of the Iranian Revolution. In Saudi Arabia, in the autumn of 1953, 13,000 of the 15,000 workers employed by Aramco went on strike and won better working conditions. Three years later, during the Suez Crisis, strikes broke out in the oil fields of the Middle East. The oil workers became major supporters of Arab nationalism, the Palestinian cause, the Algerian FLN, Gaddafi’s revolution and the Saudi National Reform Front, which was close to communism.
In Europe, it was clearly not a non-existent transition from coal to oil that got the better of the miners and their unions. During the great strike of 1947-48 in the collieries of northern France, the miners were not defeated by oil but by the army, redundancies, and foreign coal. During the strikes, the government brought in a million tonnes of coal a month from the U.S. Just like with coal and perhaps even more than with coal oil gave refinery workers, railway workers, dockers and lorry drivers considerable political power. For example, between the wars, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the powerful truckers’ union common to the U.S. and Canada, had half a million members. In May 1952, at the height of the Korean War, 90,000 oil workers went on strike in the U.S., raising fears about the supply of fuel to the air force.
The desire of historians, to link ‘energy transitions’ to explanations of a political or geopolitical nature is evident in the pages Mitchell devotes to the Marshall Plan. The ‘European Recovery Program’ (ERP) is portrayed as the Trojan Horse of oil in Europe. However, on this well-trodden topic, the conclusions drawn from the archives and statistics are clear: oil was a secondary issue compared to coal. At the end of the war, the shortage of coal was the main bottleneck in the European economy. A senior American official explained that coal had to be supplied at all costs ‘to avoid economic and political chaos… which might adversely affect our national interests’.
The architect of the Marshall Plan was none other than George Kennan, the famous theorist of Soviet containment. A few months before the ERP was revealed, Kennan had drawn up a ‘Coal Plan for Europe showing the crucial role of coal, particularly from the Ruhr, in the industrial revival of the continent. In retrospect, from the standpoint of the 1960s, it is rather the failure to take oil into account that seems surprising. Kennan’s plan provided the matrix for other, more famous plans: Robert Schuman’s in 1950, followed by the European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. Beyond the rosy stories of European integration, the common market in coal had the advantage of protecting governments from their miners, since it was possible, in the event of a strike, to obtain coal from neighbors at set prices. This is one of the reasons why the French trade union the Confédération Générale du Travail, close to the Communist Party, rejected European economic integration.
To support his thesis, Mitchell, following David Painter, cites the figure that 10% of Marshall Plan funds were used to buy oil, which implies that the remaining 90% was spent on other things. In the case of France, after EDF a major coal player – it was Charbonnages de France that received the most aid. In the mid-twentieth century, capitalist countries did not particularly favor oil over coal. On the contrary, at the height of the Cold War, they invested massively to modernize their mines and develop electricity networks that depended on coal. In any case, the importance of the ERP in the rich countries of the continent should not be overestimated. In 1950 and 1951, it accounted for just 1% of the UK’s GNP and 2% of France’s, not enough to trigger a purported transition to oil.
Mitchell also argues that Europe’s oil supply ensured its anchorage in a Western bloc dominated by the U.S. However, after 1947, the U.S. exported almost no oil, and crude from the Middle East was the subject of intense struggles between the various powers. Great Britain was fiercely opposed to US influence in the region.
From derricks to cardboard packaging, from eucalyptus plantations to construction panels, the symbioses of wood and oil played a central role in the world’s energy and economic growth
in the twentieth century.
Wood was first and foremost essential to the emergence of the oil industry. For more than half a century, oil extraction depended entirely on trees. Derricks were made of wood, tanks were made of wood, barrels were made of wood, as were the barges and boats that transported them. The much-vaunted fluidity of oil was for a long time a logistical nightmare, and considerable amounts of wood and labor were used to contain it. In 1864, at Oil Creek in Pennsylvania, crude oil gushed out in such abundance that the drillers erected dykes before letting it flow into the river. The price of a barrel was twenty times that of the oil it contained. The coopers were busy, and barrels from all over the eastern U.S. and even Europe converged on Pennsylvania.
On the Allegheny river, the logistics of oil were identical to those of timber rafting: during the high waters of spring, dykes were opened to transport barges loaded with barrels. According to some historians, this anarchic, wooded phase of the oil industry was merely a parenthesis that was quickly closed by Rockefeller, innovation, steel, and capital. In a recent book on the history of energy infrastructure in the U.S., Christopher Jones writes as follows: ‘by the 1860s oil had left the age of wood as steel tanks, steel pipelines and steel tank cars had replaced wooden barrels, wooden wagons and wooden boats’. That appears to be somewhat precipitous. Until the 1880s, the railways transported oil in vertical wooden tanks. Until the 1930s, the majority of derricks were built primarily from wood. These sturdy structures had to withstand the impact of drilling equipment and typically weighed around 30 tonnes each. At least 810,000 wells were drilled in the U.S. before 1930. Add to this the shacks that housed oil workers and the massive tanks made of wood, it becomes evident how the presence of could induce a great flurry of activity in the logging, cooperage sectors wherever its extraction swill and was underway.
The first oil age marked the heyday of the wooden barrel. As a representative of the American cooperage industry explained to companies and refiners in 1978: you need us and we need you. It is no coincidence that the American cooperage union was founded in 1890 in Titusville, the capital of oil or that the greatest cooper history is called Rockefeller. In the 1880s, his Cleveland cooperage employed 3,000 workers and produced 10,000 barrels a month. This was more than all the cooperages in London’s East End, which at the same time supplied the docks with packaging. During the early 20th century, the consumption of oil entailed an immense demand for barrels, particularly in areas lacking pipelines or railways. Furthermore, barrels played a crucial role in the transportation of refined products, including kerosene, which had long been deemed excessively hazardous for bulk transportation, Given the vast quantities of petroleum products involved, even a modest proportion, when stored, transported or sold in barrels, generated substantial opportunities for the cooperage industry.
Until the 1890s, oil was brought to Europe in barrels. The trans-Atlantic trade alone used more than 30 million barrels. A decade later, steam-powered oil tankers made of steel began traversing the Atlantic, enabling the pumping of crude oil into metal tanks. However, the advent of metal tanks did not mark the obsolescence of wooden oil barrels. In Bristol, in the year 1898, both large metal tanks and wooden barrels coexisted. The preference for wooden barrels persisted due to their lower cost, ease of handling and simpler reparability in comparison to their more expensive, less manageable, and harder-to-repair metal counterparts. At the beginning of the twentieth century in France, countless small distilleries distributed kerosene using a horse, cart and barrel. In the U.S. in the 1905, 10 million barrels a year were still produced to meet the needs of the oil industry, twice as many as were required for all alcoholic beverages, including beer.
The industrialization of the barrel was primarily driven by the demand from oil companies. “The enormous quantities of crude oil supplied by America’, noted one observer, ‘were enough to revolutionize the cooperage industry there.’ French coopers complained about this unfair competition, as oil barrels were often reused for wine. In 1903, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil created a new giga-cooperage, even bigger than the one in Cleveland, the Interstate Cooperage Company in Belhaven, North Carolina. Production exceeded 700,000 barrels a year. These industrial cooperages used chamfering, stave-cutting, strapping and painting machines, some of which no longer exist. In Russia, too, the first industrial cooperages seem to have been created for the needs of oil logistics, in the 1870s in Baku and Chistopol.
During the 1930s, the logistics of oil underwent a transition towards complete metallization. In the U.S., the increased wages and escalating wood prices resulting from the First World War led to the growing competitiveness of metal oil drums. By 1934, the American oil industry utilized 535 million cans (for lamps). By 1942, the transportation of oil by troops had entirely shifted to metal barrels and jerry cans, Oil had ultimately emancipated itself from its reliance on wood, accomplishing this transformation much more rapidly than coal, albeit after nearly a century of dependence. Does this mean that oil no longer consumes wood? No: in a perfect twist to the transitionist narrative, one of the world’s largest producers of charcoal happens to be the French company Vallourec. a leader in steel tubes for the oil industry. Here, wood is used to produce the steel used to extract oil, which in turn is essential for forestry. In 2000, Vallourec acquired its German counterpart Mannesmann, which owned a 230,000-hectare forest in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil to supply charcoal to its steel-making facilities. Vallourec Florestal now produces and consumes 1.2 million cubic meters (m3) of charcoal a year, roughly as much as the entire American steel industry at its peak and four times as much as the entire French steel industry at its peak in the 1860s. The mass of wood harvested by Vallourec (3 million m3/year) probably exceeds the consumption of the world oil industry at the end of the 19th century, when derricks, barrels and tanks were all made of wood. The history of energy symbioses is made up of loops; it is a story without direction, and re-embedding processes are always possible.
Ten years later, British and American experts dispatched to Germany to assess technological advances demolished the lofty claims made by Nazi foresters. Apart from a few interesting adhesives, the chemical transformation of wood had in fact made little progress. As for its use as a source of liquid fuel, it had been marginal compared to the hydrogenation of coal. For ‘economic reasons’, noted the experts, wood had not been used on a large scale as a raw material for chemicals. Indeed, conscription had deprived forestry of its main motor, namely human muscle: in the 1930s, Germany had more than 130,000 professional woodcutters, and many more farmers regularly cut wood.
In the other belligerent countries, there was also a scarcity of lumberjacks, and military demand for timber far from compensated for the collapse of the construction sector. The U.S., the world’s leading forestry power, saw its wood consumption fall by a quarter during the war. In France, despite coal and oil shortages and the famous gasogène cars (wood-gas powered), wood consumption fell under the occupation. Britain, severed from its European suppliers, was compelled to slash its consumption by half and resort to intensive exploitation of its meagre forests. The supply of wood to Britain relied primarily on the transatlantic tonnage allocated by the Admiralty – to such an extent that the concept of floating rafts across the North Atlantic was even considered as a potential solution. In Finland and Sweden, the increase in fire-wood and gas-powered cars did not compensate for the loss of export markets.
Despite statistics all pointing in the same direction, the idea of extraordinary wood consumption during the Second World War continues to linger in historiography. For example, the chapter on environment in the recent Cambridge History of the Second World War states that the war ‘modified forest ecology on a global scale’ and ‘exacerbated depletion from France to Fiji’. This vision is based on apparently impressive figures about wood removals which when put into perspective, prove the opposite of what they were intended to demonstrate. If military strategists were concerned about supply, it is not because war consumes more wood than peace, but because it disrupts the forestry industry. The heavy emphasis in environmental history on military requisitions or on wood as an ersatz material is just another aspect of the standard transitionist narrative. It shows that a massive and obvious phenomenon is not appreciated for what it is: in the 20th century, wood consumption grew with modernization, with the size of an economy fueled by coal and oil. The twentieth century was indeed an ‘age of wood’, not because it replaced oil as the Nazi foresters had hoped, but because it accompanied its rise.
Wood consumption increased in the twentieth century as it played an important part in the huge symbiosis of energy and materials that urbanization represents. Buildings are generally absent from the energy epics of humanity, which focus more on engines than on heat and materials. Yet they consume a third of all energy and produce a third of the world’s CO2 emissions. The share of energy consumption accounted for by buildings is increasing as economies become proportionally less industrial and more service-oriented Similarly, the history of capitalism in the twentieth century may not have adequately acknowledged the significance of the construction industry. According to figures provided by Thomas Piketty, housing alone represents a substantial portion of capital accumulation. In Europe, it accounts for over half of the total, while in the U.S. it comprises a slightly smaller share.
This massive transformation took place under the reign of concrete. Not for nothing has ‘concrete jungle’ become a synonym for urbanization. Concrete is by far the most consumed man-made material in the world. But when it comes to construction, as with energy, the new hasn’t made the old disappear. The extraordinary rise of concrete between 1950 and 2000 (from 0.5 Gt to 10 Gt), far from eradicating other construction materials, has enabled them to grow: glass, of course (by a factor of 9), but also brick (by a factor of 8), even though it competes with it directly. Construction is the biggest consumer of steel (which has grown by a factor of 3) and wood (also by a factor of 3).
Instead of applying several layers of plaster to paneling with a trowel and waiting for it to dry, large factory-made cardboard panels covered with a skim of plaster were simply nailed or placed on rods. American production rose from 200 million to 1 billion square meters between 1945 and 1965, while the number of plasterers halved in the same period
Another example to consider is plywood, where the symbiosis between oil and wood takes place at a molecular level. In the 1930s, in relation to aircraft construction, new formaldehyde-based adhesives were developed. These resins, unlike traditional organic glues, have the ability to penetrate deep into the wood, making it water-proof, resistant to rot, and significantly more rigid. This innovation in plywood production allowed for the creation of stronger and more durable wooden panels that could be used in various construction applications. The combination of oil-derived adhesives and wood revolutionized the capabilities and performance of wood as a versatile construction material.
Plywood opened the construction industry to the chemical industry. During the war, military barracks and workers’ housing on the West Coast served as a testing ground for extensive experimentation in construction techniques. In the decades that followed, the expansion of housing in the U.S. made massive use of new plywood boards: 80% of houses used them, mainly for interior partitions and roof underlays. In fact, a significant proportion of houses, the least expensive, around a quarter of them, even employed plywood on the exterior. American plywood production rose from 1 million to 15 million m3 per year between 1945 and 1965. During the 1960s, the decreasing cost of formaldehyde made it economically viable to use as a binder for sawdust. This development led to the creation of particleboard, a composite material made of plastic and wood. Particle-board gained significant popularity in Europe, where wood was more expensive: consumption rose from 5 million to 20 million m3the 1960s.
Lastly, wood, in the form of kraft paper, was employed as a backing material for rolls of glass wool or polyurethane foams. These insulation materials played a significant role, particularly after the energy crisis of 1973, in reducing the energy intensity of affluent nations.
Like many unrealized futures, the renowned ‘plastic house’ exhibited by Monsanto in 1957 at California’s Tomorrowland amusement park may be tempting to dismiss with a smile. However, the reality is quite different. The plastics industry made early inroads into the realm of construction, and wood was its Trojan Horse. As early as 1942, Monsanto engaged the architect Marcel Breuer to develop its initial ‘plastic house’, which featured plywood extensively from the roof to the floor. Today, despite their toxicity, the various composite wood panels are produced at a rate of 400 million m3 per year, half of which is produced in China.
The Roots of Growth
Finally, it should be noted that this modernization of wood by means of petroleum in turn enabled much more concrete to be poured. In the early stages of concrete construction, a substantial amount of timber was required, almost on a par with structures constructed solely from wood. The early editions of the journal Cement Age featured numerous articles on formwork and showcased photographs of wooden structures that were both spectacular and short-lived. The assembly of formwork, performed plank by plank by carpenters, often incurred higher costs than the actual cement itself. Thanks to oiled plywood and the construction of reusable forms, the ‘wood intensity’ of concrete diminished in the 1930s. But even so, concrete infrastructures consume a lot of wood: between 1950 and 1970, the construction of American motorways required more than 1 million m3 of wood a year. In the 2010s, China was consuming 70 million m3 of plywood a year (18% of global production) to pour several billion tonnes of concrete.
It is regrettable that plywood has replaced plank formwork: one of the merits of the brutalist’ textures favored by architects in the 1960s was precisely that they fixed in the building the traces of this fundamental symbiosis between concrete and wood, between the modern and the supposedly ancient.
Packaging growth
Wood consumption increased in the 20th century for a second reason: the need to package products for an economy fueled by oil and coal. The packaging industry is an essential component of the global economy, and its turnover was estimated at 1 trillion dollars in 2020, more than aviation or the mobile-phone sector. Once again, new materials, in this case plastics, have been added to the old ones, whose flows continued to increase. Despite the 4.9 billion tonnes of plastic that have accumulated in the biosphere since the 1960s, wood remains the first material for packaging. By weight, Europeans and Americans throw away three times boxes in our garbage bins. Torn-open cardboard has joined forces with cardboard to make it waterproof and impact resistant. Similarly, one of the most important developments in contemporary logistics – palletizing, is based on a very cheap wooden object and uses plastic film to hold goods in place.
Let’s take the case of the U.S., for which precise packaging statistics are available. The American historian Susan Strasser speaks of a ‘packaging revolution’, beginning at the end of the 19th century, to describe the transition from a distribution system based on bulk to one based on individual packaging. Branding and advertising play a central role in her story: individual paper or cardboard packaging was chosen because it provided a good support for ink and therefore for commercial communication.
In 1937, the U.S. consumed 16 million tonnes of paper and cardboard (half the world’s production), of which 8 million tonnes were used to package goods. The development of cardboard as a packaging material coincided with the rise of road freight and the automobile, and these two processes are interconnected. For a long time, railway companies’ pricing policies favored wooden barrels and crates, which were reputed to be sturdier. Behind this official reason they were also safeguarding their own interests, as crates and barrels ensured higher turnover. Additionally, railway companies had often made investments in sawmills and crate factories.
Lighter, cardboard boxes, on the other hand, were well suited to being transported by truck. Less robust, they benefited from the fact that road freight did not break the load. The car, for its part, made repeat purchases easier: rather than making occasional trips to the market to buy in bulk and stock up at home, the motorized rural family could now shop more frequently, buying food in smaller quantities, packed in cardboard. Finally, individual packaging made self-service possible, a commercial practice first introduced in the U.S. in 1917. The tempting availability of packaging necessitated vast shelves and larger sales areas, ushering in the reign of the car-accessible supermarket.
More surprisingly, as goods transport has increasingly relied on petroleum and cardboard, it has also led to a growing demand for solid wood. This phenomenon can be attributed to the forklift truck, a seemingly modest yet transformative innovation that has revolutionized load handling over the past half-century. The first models appeared in the U.S. in the 1910s and arrived in Europe with the American Expeditionary Force in 1917. During the Second World War, the American army laid the foundations for a new practice: palletizing loads. The wooden pallet ceased to be merely an accessory for local handling, limited to ports or depots, and instead became the primary method of bulk packaging for long-distance shipments. The initiative seems to have fallen to the Quartermaster Corps – one of the three corps in charge of the American army’s military logistics – whose operations expanded considerably during the conflict: it distributed food to 8 million soldiers.
Palletizing encouraged a new type of industrial architecture: horizontal with more space to facilitate the movement of forklifts. In order to find the land they needed, manufacturers set up operations far from the cities, on sites served by cars and lorries rather than trams or railways. The wooden pallet was one of the many factors contributing to post-war industrial and urban sprawl.
In material terms, a cardboard box weighs one-twentieth up to 50 times its own weight. The history of packaging provides another twentieth of a wooden crate, while a example of the rebound effect: individual lightening leads to overall weight increase. Even though the production of crates and barrels collapsed after 1950, logistics consumed more and more sawn wood. In the U.S., pallet production rose from 62 million to 450 million units between 1960 and 2000. At that time, it consumed 13 million m3of wood, four times more than cooperage at its peak in 1909 and twice as much as crates at their peak in 1950. In addition to pallets, there are packaging card-board boxes (40 million m3at the beginning of the twenty-first century), double the amount of raw wood and far more than all the wood used by all modes of transportation in the U.S. a century earlier. As logistics increasingly relied on metal, petroleum and plastic, it continued to consume more and more wood.
In particular, it built four huge logistics areas designed entirely for forklifts and pallets: a single level, a flat cemented surface and a height defined according to the vertical reach of the forklift. The Clearfield site totals 800,000 sq. m spread over more than 50 warehouses. By way of comparison, Amazon’s largest logistics site is 330,000 sq. m.
It is likely that wood is one of the most transported materials in the world.
The same rebound effect has occurred on a global scale: card-board consumption quadrupled between 1960 and 2000. In recent decades, thanks to digitalization, global consumption of printing paper eventually declined, but the demand for cardboard packaging skyrocketed, partially due to the rise of the internet. With over 200 million tonnes, packaging accounts for half of the world’s paper and cardboard production and consumes approximately 8% of the world’s harvested wood.
Black liquors and green energy
The growing consumption of wood for packaging or construction has had the unexpected consequence of increasing the use of wood in the energy mix of rich countries. This phenomenon went relatively unnoticed because it took place in sawmills, wood-panel factories and paper mills, while at the same time the consumption of firewood in households was falling. In the 1960s, sawmills expanded, modernized and equipped themselves with steam turbines, some of which had a capacity of several megawatts. To make better use of waste, a new fuel appeared in the 1970s: wood pellets. When subjected to high pressure, the lignin contained in wood shavings and sawdust is transformed into a plastic film that simplifies the storage and transport of wood energy. Cheaper than gas or oil, wood-pellet consumption in Europe has tripled between 2010 and 2020, reaching more than 60 million m3for heat and power generation.
Another wood residue played an even more important role: black liquors from the paper industry. Until the 1950s, these lignin-rich liquids were generally poured into rivers, causing major pollution. With the development of environmental standards and the rise in oil prices, paper manufacturers have invested in systems to recover black liquors for heat and electricity. The impact of this seemingly modest technological transformation has been tremendous. Paper ranks as the fourth-largest industrial energy consumer, following cement works, the steel industry and the chemical industry. Since black liquors contain half of the energy found in the wood used for paper production, their recovery has resulted in a threefold increase in wood energy in the U.S. between 1950 and 2000.
The same transformation has also taken place in Europe. In 2018, according to an important study conducted by the EU’s Joint Research Centre, wood continued to be the main source of renewable energy, representing 64% of the total, twice the combined contributions of hydro, solar and wind power. 67 The paper industry’s black liquor alone still accounts for more energy than solar power: 68 Every year, Europe burns just under 200 million m3 of wood for domestic heat and to generate electricity, almost twice as much as a century earlier. To this ‘primary’ wood must be added the equivalent of 250 million m3 of ‘secondary’ wood: residues from the forestry and panel industries, black liquors from the paper industry and ‘post-consumer’ wood (cardboard, paper, demolition wood, etc.). 69 This last item clearly shows the porosity between timber, industrial wood and energy wood. According to the same study, two-thirds of the wood consumed in Europe will sooner or later end up being burned. All in all, it can be estimated that Europe consumed around three times as much wood energy in 2020 as it did a century ago. And all of this, of course, thanks to the rise of fossil fuels.