What Clean Energy Transition?

An atypical optimism reigned at CounterPunch Thursday last, with a lead story bearing the silver-lined header “Oil Wars: Speeding The Transition to Renewable Energy.” In this gladsome piece, John K. White, a physicist and former lecturer at University College Dublin, opined that because the price of oil is now soaring while the price of solar panels is holding steady, the ongoing “rush to renewables will grow,” “more countries will think seriously about speeding the transition from oil to renewables,” and “perhaps we are finally seeing the end of oil.”

“Everywhere,” White assured us, “the world is turning to renewables.”

White seems a good-hearted chap, but there’s a wee problem with his hypothesis, a misconception common among liberals and the left. For we are, alas, in the midst of no transition to renewable energy, certainly no “rush” to carbon-free power, nor anything like the end of oil.

You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Many are the tribunes of the media who tell us we are indeed deep into a momentous transition of the kind described by White. But the cold truth is that by no measure are we weaning off carbon and onto sun, wind, and water.

One chart tells the story. Below, courtesy of Our World in Data, is the bleak totting-up of all the energy that humankind has used over the last two and a quarter centuries.

What is striking about this chart is not merely that carbon-free renewables make up so small a share of the global energy mix—about one-seventh—but that the very modest growth in renewables in late years has done nothing to halt the rise of fossil fuels. In fact, the only carbon-based fuel we are burning less of these days, and very marginally less at that, is traditional biomass, mostly wood. Our burning of coal may—emphasize, may—be approaching a leveling off, but our extraordinary use of that fuel almost certainly won’t dip for years to come, and even then forecasters expect not a plunge but a very long, slow decline across many decades. Meanwhile, oil and gas are going great guns and by any dispassionate forecast (as opposed to the fantasias of government or industry) will keep blazing, year on year, for decades.

In short, while renewables are indeed growing, their growth has not spurred an energy transition. They’ve simply added to our ever-burgeoning energy expansion.

Lest you think I’ve cherry-picked the data, you can find much the same narrative from many other freely available sources. Below, for example, is a comparable chart from the International Energy Agency, which shows (in different units and across a shorter span of time) that we are burning roughly one and half times the carbon-based fuel we were burning just thirty years ago—with no letup at all. Squint and you just might see the minutely increasing slice of renewables sandwiched among all that carbon.

The terrifyingly inconvenient truth that leaps off these graphs is that we are unmistakably barreling, if you’ll forgive the pun, toward our worst-case climate scenario: a rise in global temperatures of 4°C to 5°C (7.2°F to 9.0°F) by century’s end.

But how, you ask, can this possibly be? Isn’t it true, to take just one thread of the energy tapestry, that the burning of coal has fallen in the last two decades by nearly half in the US and to virtually nothing in the UK?

Yes, that’s true. But it’s also not true. What is true is that the coal burned within the territorial confines of the US and UK has fallen by those amounts. But no country’s economy is confined to its own borders, certainly no country as rich as the US or UK. So it is also true that the US and UK are burning just as much coal as ever, only they’re burning most of it in the vast extraterritorial labor camp we know as the Global South, where Keats’s coal-fired “satanic mills” are still churning out the goods that keep western lifestyles afloat.

China burns staggering amounts of coal, and although the growth curve is starting to flatten, it is not decreasing yet. India and Indonesia also burn coal willy-nilly and are forecast to burn ever and ever more for decades. Even once coal finally peaks in China, India, and Indonesia, it will likely make up a sizeable share of their fuel supply until late in the century. The story for oil and gas is even bleaker, with China and India set to burn frightful quantities for many years, just as the US and many other rich countries are expected to do. Nearly everywhere oil and gas are expected to be in the energy mix for most of the century.

You may be asking why, despite the growth in renewables, we keep burning more carbon than ever. The answer is quite simple: We—and here We means both the great mass of individuals and the tiny sliver of capitalist elites who run the world—have used every advance in renewables to consume more rather than less. The solar panels on your roof are all to the good, but the SUV (or two) in the garage of your 3,000-square-foot house, the vacations in Bali and Dalmatia, and the meat and milk thrice daily on your plate make a mockery of those panels. And the equivalent profligacy by corporations is of course immensely worse than any individual decadence.

How is it, then, that we so often hear we’re in the midst of an energy transition—a claim you can find weekly, even daily, in neoliberal bastions like the Times and Guardian? I can think of at least three reasons, two much as you’d expect, the third less known.

The first is that with stakes so horrific—we are talking, after all, about whether decent human existence can even survive, let alone thrive, in a 5°C world—few people care to face the apocalyptic facts.

The second reason is that everyone who gains by fossil-fueled capitalism has a potent incentive to swallow the myth of a well-in-hand transition to clean energy. In the West, that’s nearly everyone. Few Americans are eager to give up their SUVs or cheeseburgers, and few news outlets are keen to forgo the ad revenue from hawkers of those so-called goods. Not that the media outright lie to us about the energy transition. Instead they feed us story after story touting the upside of the energy picture, above all the boom in renewable electricity, which is indeed cause for (small) celebration. What they don’t mention, or mention only fleetingly, is that electricity is but a modest piece of the current energy puzzle and that the great majority of our factories, cars, trucks, planes, ships, and furnaces run on coal, oil, or gas and will for some time.

The third and more occult reason is that almost nobody understands the history of energy transitions—or rather, the complete absence of such transitions. Not once when humans have discovered a new fuel has the happy find led us to abandon the previous fuel. Instead, we’ve kept burning it. You’d hardly know this from conventional histories of energy, which almost always tell a story that goes like this: Once upon a time, humans burned biomass, mostly wood, for heating and cooking, but then coal was discovered and gradually we abandoned wood for coal. Later oil was found, and we began the long but certain transition from coal to oil. Shortly after, we added natural gas to further propel us away from coal. Thus energy historians write of a Wood Age, a Coal Age, an Oil Age, and an Oil and Gas Age. This thinking has seeped into the minds of environmental reporters and, to a degree, the public.

But take a look at that first chart again, and what do you see? Coal didn’t replace wood. Not at all. We just kept burning wood. And when oil came along, oil didn’t replace coal. We kept burning that too. Nor did natural gas ease out coal. And renewables aren’t replacing any of it. We’re just using more of almost everything we can get our hands on.

The story of why we have done so is superbly and soberingly told by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is his More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2025). It’s a bit of a twisting tale, but a big part of the story is that once a fuel becomes widely used in a complex economy, it gets so embedded in everything that it’s hard to eliminate when a new fuel comes along. Another piece of the story is that new fuels create new industries, which are necessarily fueled in part (often a large part) by the old fuels.

Take the appearance of coal toward the end of the so-called Wood Age. When coal first boomed in the mid-1800s, many households nonetheless continued to burn wood because it was either cheaper or more ready to hand. Wood was also essential for mining coal and building the industries that coal begat. Whole forests were logged for the millions of framing timbers that kept mine shafts and tunnels from caving in. Other forests were logged for the billions of sleepers for railroad tracks. (Railroads were famously created by coal and in turn were essential for its widespread diffusion.) When the wooden members of the mines and rails reached the end of their lives, they were pulled, burned for fuel, and replaced by a new batch of timber—the whole cycle starting again.

Today’s story of wood is different only in its particulars, not its outcome. Whole forests are now razed to make the shipping pallets and cardboard boxes vital to global capitalism, and when they reach the end of their lives, they’re often burned for fuel. We’ve also never abandoned wood for home heating and cooking. The wood stoves of today are more efficient than those of yore and make up a much smaller share of heating and cooking than they once did, but because our one billion people in 1800 have become eight billion today, far more people than ever—on the order of two billion or so—use wood for heating or cooking.

A like story can be told for oil and gas. Oil and gas may have supplanted coal for transport and heating in the early twentieth century, but coal is still baked into those industries. To make our multitudinous oil- and gas-powered cars, trucks, trains, ships, furnaces, and boilers requires massive amounts of steel, both for the machines themselves and for the tools and infrastructure they require: the mining equipment to extract the raw materials, the factories to put the pieces together, the railways and bridges to move everything, and on and on. Making high-quality steel requires massive amounts of coal—no electric-powered process is half so good—so as oil- and gas-burning machines have run riot, coal has too.

Of course, much of what now runs on wood, coal, oil, or gas could, with enough political will, run on sun, wind, or water. But not everything could, no time soon anyway. You can power a house with solar panels and batteries, but the steel in those devices will have to be forged for the foreseeable future in a coal-fired steelworks. And while a half-ton battery can power your one-ton car, the physics don’t scale up to getting a fifty-ton passenger jet off the ground or moving a ship with a hundred thousand tons of cargo across an ocean. Someday, hydrogen generated by renewable electricity or another such innovation may power planes, ships, and steelworks, but these technologies are still in their tender youth. We’re decades from the grail of net zero.

I take no joy in reciting these unkind facts, but confront them we must. To perpetuate the delusion that we’re well into a transition to clean energy, that a “rush” to renewables will save the day—is saving the day even now—is to tranquilize ourselves when we desperately need to wake up, raise hell, and put an almighty fear in the moguls orchestrating our destruction. Only then will we stand a chance of upending fossil fuels, reining in our own ecocidal excess, and mitigating the coming climate holocaust.

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