[review] The End of the World, energy miracle and climate drift by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain

With the energy crisis, the graphic essay The End of the World by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain (Amazon link, Fnac link) has been the number one bestseller in books this winter (Christmas 2022), even though the graphic novel was released in October 2021. The war in Ukraine and the explosion in energy prices have happened since then, and many people must have received it as a gift.

I’m just an average reader, not a specialist at all. So my overall opinion will be about the format and how the content is presented, but I’m not an expert to tell you if the information or data is correct. All images are taken from the book. This post is not NOT sponsored.

The book’s fame means that some people are very surprised that it’s a graphic novel, but fear not! For the past 2-3 years, graphic novels for popularization have also been aimed at adults, and their content is very rich. It took me a whole day to read and absorb everything.

The first pages explain the book’s project: the illustrator Christophe Blain suddenly has an awakening (like many of us, I think, in recent years), and step by step, the idea of making a graphic novel with Jean-Marc Jancovici takes shape. A few pages are devoted to introducing the “character” Jean-Marc Jancovici. Everything is fine until Jean-Marc Jancovici is presented as the inventor of the carbon footprint methodology, but for a completely altruistic reason, he doesn’t receive royalties on it.

Half the truth is not the truth. I invite you to look into it. That this “error” or lack of humility is present from the very first pages of the book is a very bad sign. If the author is so wrong about his own bio, what other data might he be “wrong” about?

The rest of the book presents, with a very pedagogical language, for popularization, knowledge about:

• the evolution of energy use since the beginning of humanity
• the energy revolution: when humans understood how to better transform different types of energy
• the different current types of energy. Can we really talk about green energy?
• so that readers understand what the volumes of energy used represent, the notion of “slaves” is used. A French person would need the equivalent of the strength of 600 slaves for their daily needs!!

I think the most important message here is that since the beginning of the use of fossil fuels, coal has still not been replaced by other energies

Power plants continue to be fueled by coal, and I don’t know if people are aware of that. Coal consumption increases CO2 emissions, and the greenhouse effect. But what is the greenhouse effect? There follows a long section on this subject, once again remarkably explained, as well as the contributing factors and, of course, mathematically, how to reduce the greenhouse effect.

What some readers criticize the authors for is a very favorable stance toward nuclear energy. Each type of energy is presented with “pros” and “cons”, but the “pro” ratio is very high for nuclear energy, and very low for alternative energies like wind. I genuinely think that when you work on it your whole life, it’s hard not to be biased. However, it was the illustrator’s role to minimize this bias since he’s been interested for a shorter time, but it seems that isn’t the case here. The bias would have been minimized if there were more pages devoted to the energy mix. I’m not saying it’s negative. I’m very glad there’s a book so favorable to nuclear energy. France has the economic and financial stability, as well as the skills, to have nuclear power plants. You can’t imagine how many countries would have loved to have even just one nuclear power plant in their country!

However, the section on solar energy should have been developed even more. Even in the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, it is given more prominence than that. We can’t exploit it properly yet, we don’t know how with current technologies, but we should, on the contrary, encourage research in that direction, but the author dismisses it with a wave of the hand, much too quickly for my taste.

Some jokes are inserted here and there to lighten the atmosphere. Very concrete and illustrative examples are used regularly to better understand the content. There are solutions or suggestions for solutions scattered here and there, but they are rather timid reflections, because we all know there are no miracle solutions. Thus, the ending is a bit abrupt. “We must believe and act for things that have a chance of happening. Face problems together and agree on the modalities.” That reminds me of meetings at work where we are very motivated to move things forward, and then when there’s a to-do list, if no one follows up with the team, the to-do list falls by the wayside and the task will never be completed.

In short, I learned a lot. I find the graphic novel format pleasant because there’s enough text to understand and dig a little deeper, without being too hard to read for those not used to big books. However, the error made right at the beginning of the graphic novel makes me very wary of everything the author says. As with all topics, you have to read several books to form an opinion, and not just settle for one.

Moreover, the bibliography is non-existent for such a book. Just because it’s a graphic novel doesn’t mean we should do without it. The “L’incroyable histoire de…” collection from Les Arènes does have a bibliography as long as your arm at the end of the volume.

I bought the e-book version, which is best read on a large screen like a tablet, but it will probably be too small for a smartphone screen.
You can buy the e-book versions or the paperback graphic novel here for 28€ (Amazon link, Fnac link).