The “Energy Transition”, from Atomic Utopia to Climate Denial: United States, 1945-1980

The oil companies’ strategies for producing ignorance have already been the subject of important historical works. This article contributes to this question but with a different perspective. It focuses less on climate scepticism than on a more subtle, more acceptable and therefore much more general form of climate denial: the futurology of the “energy transition”, in which the history of energy has played a fundamental role. First, I describe the intellectual space, straddling atomic utopia and neo-Malthusianism, in which the idea of energy transition emerged in the 1950s. Then I focus on the work of Cesare Marchetti, an atomic scientist who, in 1974, applied the logistic model (or S-curve) to the analysis of the evolution of the global energy mix. Finally, I show the considerable influence of this logistical modelling within the Carter administration, among Exxon executives and climate scientists of the 1980s. Yet it is precisely this assumption that is problematic: considering energies, like technologies, as distinct and competing entities, when in fact they entertain relationships which are both competitive and symbiotic.