The stagist illusion: Why new energy sources don’t replace old ones

The popular story of energy evolution — from wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to gas, and now to renewables — offers a compelling image of progress. This “stagist” model imagines energy development as a sequence of stages, each replacing the last in a march toward modernity and efficiency. It is the backbone of how governments and corporations frame “energy transitions” today.

But this view is historically and statistically false.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More dismantles this linear fantasy with historical precision. Rather than displacing one another, energy sources accumulate. Each new form of energy — oil, coal, gas, or solar — is not a clean replacement but an addition. The book’s central argument is this: energy systems are layered, not sequential. Fossil fuels were not adopted by abandoning wood, and renewables are not cutting fossil demand; they are all coexisting in a rising tide of total consumption.

Wood and oil: A forgotten symbiosis

Nowhere is the falsity of the stagist model more clear than in the early oil industry. In a section aptly titled There will be wood, Fressoz highlights how the foundational decades of oil extraction in the United States were entirely dependent on wood. “Wood was first and foremost essential to the emergence of the oil industry,” he writes. For more than 50 years, every major piece of oil infrastructure was built from wood: derricks, barrels, tanks, barges. Even the means of transporting crude relied on wooden boats.

In 1864, oil gushed from wells at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania in such volume that barrels became a bottleneck. A wooden barrel boom followed. By the late 19th century, the cooperage industry exploded. In Titusville, known as the "capital of oil," barrel-making was the engine of oil logistics. Cleveland’s cooperage, run by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, produced over 10,000 barrels a month. The logistics of oil were, in effect, the logistics of wood.

Well into the 1930s, derricks remained mostly wooden. Even as steel tanks emerged, wood held on. A revealing line from the book notes that “the preference for wooden barrels persisted due to their lower cost, ease of handling and simpler reparability.” Rather than fade away, wood adapted — not a stage left behind but a material integrated with the new energy order.

The idea that metal tanks or steel infrastructure signalled a new energy era is misleading. As Fressoz points out, “the advent of metal tanks did not mark the obsolescence of wooden oil barrels.” Even by the 1940s, the U.S. military used more than 1.4 million wooden barrels to transport oil. The oil industry only gradually “emancipated” itself from wood — and even then, the separation was never total.

This undermines a key premise of the stagist view: that one energy mode replaces another. Instead, energy history is filled with hybrid stages, extended overlaps, and durable material dependencies. The persistence of wood alongside coal, oil, and later steel is not an exception — it is the rule.

The modern oil - wood nexus

The symbiosis persists into the present. In a particularly striking passage, Fressoz notes that Vallourec—a major producer of steel tubes for oil drilling — owns a 230,000-hectare forest in Brazil. Why? Because it uses charcoal, made from wood, to produce the steel used in oil extraction. Even today, the oil industry depends on forestry. Vallourec consumes 1.2 million cubic meters of charcoal annually — four times what the entire French steel industry used in its 19th-century peak.

The irony is sharp: wood is still fuelling oil, just less visibly. This recursive logic — where oil depends on steel, and steel depends on wood — breaks the illusion of a neat progression from “primitive” to “modern” fuels. As Fressoz writes, “The history of energy symbioses is made up of loops; it is a story without direction.”

During World War II, the role of wood intensified. Across Europe, wartime shortages of coal and oil did not lead to full substitution but to improvisation. In Germany, wood-gas powered cars (gasogenes) appeared, and the regime promoted a “Wood Age” as an alternative vision of sovereignty. French, British, and American forestry systems were pushed to their limits.

Wood consumption surged, not as a regression but as part of a complex, resource-flexible war economy. Contrary to popular belief, war didn’t shift energy systems to modern alternatives — it widened the resource base. By 1942, the U.S. military was still transporting oil in wooden barrels. Energy didn’t evolve forward; it stretched sideways.

Fressoz goes further, citing the Cambridge History of the Second World War, which noted how the conflict “modified forest ecology on a global scale.” War, rather than phasing out traditional fuels, re-embedded them deeper into modern industrial infrastructure.

Capitalism’s structural demand for wood

Beyond logistics and warfare, wood remained central to the architecture of industrial capitalism. In the 20th century, housing boomed — and with it, the construction sector’s appetite for raw materials. Fressoz cites Thomas Piketty to show that housing alone accounted for a substantial portion of capital accumulation. The vast consumption of wood, concrete, and steel in construction didn’t replace earlier forms of energy or material; it multiplied their use.

The post-1945 housing surge — especially in China, the U.S., and Europe — created insatiable demand for construction inputs. Between 1950 and 2000, global concrete production rose from 0.5 to 10 gigatonnes per year. But as Fressoz shows, other materials didn’t disappear. Wood consumption tripled. Brick rose eightfold. Glass increased by a factor of nine. Modernity didn't eliminate materials — it scaled them all.

The real shape of energy history

The core insight of More and More and More is that energy transitions don’t look like staircases; they look like stacks. Each new source doesn’t cleanly replace the last but sits atop it. The result is accumulation, not substitution.

This matters for today’s energy debates. When policymakers talk of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables, the assumption is often one of replacement. But history teaches otherwise. Without intentional policy limits, the likely outcome is additive: more renewables, yes — but also more coal, oil, and gas. Just as wood never went away, neither will carbon-intensive fuels unless forcibly displaced.

Fressoz’s history challenges our energy imagination. The problem isn’t that we aren’t transitioning fast enough. The problem is that we may not be transitioning at all — just adding more and more and more.

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