Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain
(Particular Books (UK, out 24 October); Zando (US, out 11 March 2025))
Ever wondered what your toothpaste has to do with the fossil fuel boom? Or how many Tour de France cyclists it would take to power a vacuum cleaner?
These might seem like flippant questions to ask in a book about global warming. But World Without End is no ordinary climate science book. Instead of pages of dense text and graphs, it is a graphic novel, the story of the world’s energy challenge told through an extended comic book strip. I said it wasn’t conventional.
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The book is the brainchild of engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici and artist Christophe Blain, both of whom appear in the book as characters engaged in a Socratic dialogue. Jancovici, a climate expert, guides Blain – the curious, often despairing everyman – through the history of fossil fuels, the basics of economics, the science of nuclear power and more. First published in France in 2021 as Le Monde sans fin, it became a surprise bestseller with its sideways take on the biggest crisis of our times.
A guiding theme of the book is that fossil fuels have ushered in a world of energy abundance that made lavish Western consumption patterns an inevitability. There are plenty of neat conceits to help the everyday reader understand complex topics. To illustrate how energy-dense hydrocarbons are, for example, the book converts the energy consumed by fossil fuel-powered machines into “days of slavery”. A transatlantic flight has an energy demand equivalent to 5000 days of slavery. A year’s worth of car travel? 70,000.
Yet the format does, at times, struggle with the weight of information it conveys. No sooner have you wrapped your head around the competing theories of 18th-century economists than you are getting a one-page explainer on atomic energy. Thankfully, Blain’s frenetic art pulls the book back from didacticism. His illustrations are the beating heart of the book, flipping between irreverent humour and stark snapshots of a world creaking under the pressure of our consumption.
I am not sure World Without End‘s prescription for change (in brief, more nuclear power, less economic growth) will please everyone. But when it comes to understanding the crisis we face, boy, is this a powerful book of cartoons.
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