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After four years of preparations, in the summer of 1981 Nairobi hosted the United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy. A diplomatic exercise bringing together more than one-hundred governments from North and South and East and West, the conference did not produce either startling or binding decisions. However, the characteristics of the meeting were also such that the conference’s final Programme of Action can be seen as a sort of summa of official thinking about energy at the beginning of the 1980s. After briefly presenting the making and the outcomes of the Nairobi conference, the article focuses on both the novelty and the limitations of the language of “energy transition” that was adopted on the occasion.