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The things we call "technologies" are ways of building order in our world. Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people are going to work, communicate, travel, consume and so forth over a very long time. In the processes by which structuring decisions are made, different people are situated differently and possess unequal degrees of power as well as unequal levels of awareness. By far the greatest latitude of choice exists the very first time a particular instrument, system or technique is introduced. Because choices tend to become strongly fixed in material equipment, economic investment and social habit, the original flexibility vanishes for all practical purposes once the initial commitments are made. In that sense technological innovations are similar to legislative acts or political foundings that establish a framework for public order that will endure over many generations. For that reason the same careful attention one would give to the rules, roles and relationships of politics must also be given to such things as the building of highways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant feature on new machines. The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and semiconductors nuts and bolts.

— The whale and the reactor by Langdon Winner (Page 28 - 29)

Transition is the ideology of capital in the twenty-first century. It turns evil into cure, polluting industries into the green industries of the future, and innovation into our lifeline. Transition puts capital on the right side of the climate battle. Thanks to transition, we are talking about trajectories to 2100, electric cars and hydrogen-powered aircraft rather than material consumption levels and distribution. Very complex solutions in the future make it impossible to do simple things now. The seductive power of transition is immense: we all need future changes to justify present procrastination.

— More and more and more by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Page 220)

Transition technologies’ are not immune to rebound effects and ripple effects on other sectors. The climate benefits of renewables depend entirely on how this ‘clean’ electricity is used. In 2023, the world’s largest floating wind farm was inaugurated in the Norwegian Sea: it belongs to Equinor – formerly Statoil – which uses it to power oil platforms. Similarly, in Qatar, Total is investing in a huge photovoltaic plant to ‘green’ gas extraction. In Texas windmills are now providing a large share of the electricity used by oil pumpjacks. Once again, this kind of symbiosis is nothing new: in the 1970s it was American oil companies that launched the solar-panel industry in an effort to diversify, and also because they were looking to power their installations in the Gulf of Mexico.

— More and more and more by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Page 216)

By the end of the 1970s, the idea of the energy transition was becoming commonplace, a discursive umbrella encompassing all possible futures. Promoters of decoupling, of the stationary state, of fast-breeder reactors, of coal or solar power, environmentalists and neo-Malthusians: everyone could find their place in the highly inclusive lexicon of transition

— More and more and more by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Page 167)

The journal Science peddled this argument: environmentalists were responsible for the energy crisis, but they would also be its first victims, because ‘when the air conditioning and televisions stop, the public will say “to hell with the environment, give me abundance”’.6 Talk of the energy crisis was part of the ‘ecological backlash’ that the New York Times noted since the day after the first Earth Day in 1970

— More and more and more by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Page 161)

The nuclear breeder reactor also played a central role in the energy futurologies of the 1970s. Because it could increase the planet’s carrying capacity, the breeder reactor represented the essential way out of the Malthusian trap. An abundance of energy would make it possible to desalinate ocean water, manufacture nitrogen fertilizers and transform vast arid expanses into farmland; it would also make it possible to extract and refine minerals, recycle metals ad infinitum and protect the environment.

— More and more and more by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (Page 151)