Can this graphic novel change America's views on climate? It did in France.

Can this graphic novel change America's views on climate? It did in France.




Jean-Marc Jancovici is a rare specimen: a climate and energy nerd who is also something of a rock star. In the early 2000s, the French author and engineering consultant devised a carbon accounting system that is now widely used by companies in Europe to track their greenhouse gas emissions. Around the same time, he began giving lectures on climate change, videos of which went viral in France and eventually attracted the attention of Christophe Blain, a graphic novelist, who invited Jancovici to collaborate on a book.

Le Monde sans Fin, published in October 2021, explains Jancovici’s overarching theses: why fossil fuels will not be easy to abandon, and why and how we must do so anyway. It became the single bestselling book in France in 2022, ultimately selling more than a million copies. The English version, World Without End, was published in the U.S. on March 11.

I recently visited Jancovici in his office in Paris to discuss the book and why it has resonated so strongly with readers. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.



In France, you became popular for sharing information about climate change and energy—what we now might call an influencer. How and when did you take on this role?

By mere chance, basically. I was trained as an engineer. We were focused on telecommunications and IT, and that’s what I’d been doing for, let’s say 10-15 years, between the mid-80s and the late 90s. In the late ‘90s, I became very interested in the topic of climate change. I had no training in environmental sciences whatsoever. I had a background in physics and chemistry, but I didn’t learn anything about climate change during my studies.

But I was curious, I was an independent consultant, so it was easier for me to allocate my time. I decided to devote my time to studying climate change. I spent half my time sending questions to scientists.

Eventually I was asked to give lectures and speak at conferences, which I began to do. And the best way to understand something is to give a course on it. So that’s what I did.

Each time I had a question during a conference to which I didn’t have the answer, I thought, ‘Ah, I should take a look at that.’



So you became very well-known in France.

[Looks at his intern, Julie, who is sitting in on the interview.] Julie can testify. She’s been with me for three days. How many times have we been stopped in the street by somebody? Not that many times.

Julie: At least five.

How did you get involved with World Without End?

In 2008, if my memory is correct, I was asked by an engineering school to give a course on energy and climate change, which I did. That course turned into a video, and Christophe [Blain] saw that video and contacted me, saying that he wanted to write a graphic novel together.



He was already a very famous author. And I always had that idea that it would be nice to do something in the cultural world. I said yes immediately.

The book basically follows the course I gave at the engineering school. The first part explains how fossil fuels have brought us the modern world, and why we love them so much.

Can you talk more about that, and the superhero in the book?






That’s an image I’ve been using for a very long time to picture the superpowers that the world’s fleet of machines is bringing us.

We can lift very heavy loads, run very fast, fly if we want, see very far, transport anything, etc., which is exactly what machines are doing for us. They extract, transform, crush, press, heat, cool, and transport.



The book makes a strong case for nuclear. When did you come to that view?

Pretty early actually. It was very easy to understand that nuclear was a low-carbon energy. Basically, when you do a little physics, you know that splitting a nucleus of uranium in two doesn’t produce carbon dioxide.

I heard, as anybody else, that it was very dangerous. So I began to look by myself, and pretty early I came up with the conclusion that it was not that dangerous. The accident at Fukushima did not cause any additional death due to radioactivity—except maybe one case, which is debated.

More people die from cars, tobacco, drinking, sugar—even staircases. In the US alone, tens of thousands of people die every year from falling in their homes.

From the book I got the impression that you thought renewable energy was almost useless.



No. You see, the book tries to correct misunderstandings. A first misunderstanding is that oil and gas and coal are just energies. We say, no, it’s the modern world. It shaped work, fostered gender equality, increased purchasing power, facilitated globalization, and created modern cities.

The second misunderstanding that we wanted to correct is that nuclear energy is dangerous. It doesn’t mean it’s an almighty power. It just means that it is not that dangerous.

The third misunderstanding that we wanted to correct is that renewables will power an industrial civilization by themselves. They won’t. And I stick to that. Does it mean that we shouldn’t use them at all? No. That’s not what we write in the book. We just write that they have both advantages and inconveniences. And when we first wrote the book, the media was presenting renewable energies as only having good sides.

There is no silver bullet. Renewable energies are not a silver bullet, and nuclear energy is not a silver bullet. We are going to call on the best possible combination of things in order to save the highest possible fraction of what the industrial civilization gave us, knowing that we won’t save everything.

The book was a huge bestseller in France. Why do you think it struck such a chord?



I think that people have been rewarding us for some kind of honesty that we have in the book.

It’s not a book which is naïve on climate change, saying, ‘OK, the problem is fossil fuels. Let’s get rid of fossil fuels, and we get rid of the problem.’

What we have explained in the book is, wait, it’s not that simple, because look at what fossil fuels have brought us. We should get rid of them. But it’s not going to be simple, and we’re going to explain why.

Since the book came out in France, a lot has changed in the world, politically, including the election of Donald Trump and his decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Has that affected your outlook on the future?

My take on Trump is that it doesn’t change anything about the fact that we Europeans have a selfish interest in moving first.



One, because we are running out of fossil fuels, and two because it’s the best bet that we can make. We are mimetic animals. What we do is imitate each other. We should try to run the race in front and figure out ways to be happy with less fossil fuels, with the hope that with time, a growing number of countries will imitate what we do. That’s what I believe.