In his March 4 address to Congress, President Trump proclaimed that he had “terminated the ridiculous Green New Scam,” referring to assorted Biden-era Green New Deal policies directed at an “energy transition.” The weekend before, the Wall Street Journal featured a lengthy essay with a title seemingly calibrated to pre-bunk Trump’s expected remarks: “The Clean Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable.” The authors, two Oxford professors, asserted that the “clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop,” and that “large segments of fossil fuel demand will permanently disappear . . . in the next two decades.” Two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal featured another op-ed, this one coauthored by former vice president Al Gore, proclaiming the “energy transition is inevitable.”
So, which is it? Inevitable or a “scam?”
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We find a useful referee in this war of words with the recently released Eye on the Market 15th Annual Energy Paper by Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy. As this 70-slide, deep-dive report pointedly notes, “after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year [emphasis added].” One does not need a mathematics degree to understand that such anemic growth rates are not the hallmarks of an “unstoppable” juggernaut. Hence, Cembalest’s bottom line: “Growth in fossil fuel consumption is slowing but no clear sign of a peak on a global basis.” That is to say, no “energy transition” is in sight.
For the transitionists, this is just proof that we need more spending and more aggressive mandates. Set aside whether any political appetite exists for either more such inflationary spending or more intrusive energy diktats. The fundamental question is whether any energy transition is even possible—or even whether such has ever happened.
The transition narrative is tenacious. Even Cembalest uses the word 41 times in his report. While the idea of an energy transition anchors the raison d’être for green and climate-advocacy groups, it also gets bandied about constantly in popular media, as well as in virtually all the statements from major energy companies, electric utilities, energy analysts, and investment banks. Among myriad examples, the week after Trump’s congressional address, The Economist hosted an Energy Transition Summit, and Reuters holds its Energy Transition North America conference this fall in Houston.
Underlying the narrative is the implicit—and often explicit—conviction that the long and now “accelerating” march of technology means that ancient energy sources, like fossil fuels, are inevitably being replaced by newer ones. We are reminded, constantly, of analogous tech transitions such as landline-to-cellphone or horses-to-cars. But such analogies are category errors. Technological progress more often changes—rather than replaces—how we access, move, and manipulate materials. We still use ancient materials like wood, stone, concrete, and glass, and at far greater scale than any time in history. Indeed, the facts show that no energy transition of any kind has ever occurred in history (with one minor exception, which we’ll get to).
Humanity has used the same six primary energy sources for millennia. In reductionist terms, these are: grains, animal fats, wood, water, wind, and fossil fuels. The world today uses more of all of these categories than ever before.
Of course, we have seen reductions in the share of energy supplied by these sources, but that’s not what the transitionists mean. To illustrate the fatuousness of the central idea of an “energy transition” that eliminates the use of any of these sources, consider some history.
Grains have long fueled the biological “machines” of human civilization, the various beasts of burden—and, tragically, slave labor—used in farming, industry, and transportation. Sadly, civilization hasn’t even transitioned away from slavery, not least in the case of African mining, as documented in the book Cobalt Red. If the Global Slavery Index is correct, more humans are mired in forced labor now than at any time in history. Likewise, the world today uses more “working animals” than ever—some 200 million, fueled by grain.
Even in the U.S., despite far fewer grain-fueled working animals (mainly in boutique applications like policing or entertainment), the tonnage of grain used to fuel transportation is now 300 percent greater than during America’s peak horse era. This is the result of the ill-advised 10 percent grain-ethanol mandate for gasoline.
Since ancient times, humans have used the fat from slaughtered animals, rendered as oils or tallow for illumination, including candle-making. Today, global biofuels production (biodiesel) is about 1,000 times greater than two centuries ago. While that production is now dominated by plant oils (especially soybean and Jatropha), roughly 100 times more animal fats are used today for fuel as during the peak whale-harvesting era. Abandoning whale oil is history’s one clear exception to the no-energy-transitions rule.
Whales were saved by advances in chemical science and the invention, circa 1840, of coal-to-kerosene synthesis (well before the modern oil era began). As inefficient as this early process was, it meant that one ton of coal could yield as much oil as harvesting three tons of whales. This staggeringly more cost-effective chemical process collapsed the value of harvesting whales.
As for wood, the amount burned for energy today is greater than at any time in history. Overall, burning wood supplies the world with twice as much energy as do all the world’s solar and wind machines combined. Even in the U.S., use of wood for fuel is greater now than a century ago. A wood transition? Not yet.
The use of watermills for industrial grinding of grains dates back to ancient Greece. It soared during the Middle Ages, when an estimated 500,000 watermills operated in Europe. But that was hardly peak waterpower. Global hydro dams today produce roughly 500 times more energy.
Windmills, similarly, didn’t peak in the past, though there were, by most counts, 200,000 of them in the Middle Ages, as well as tens of thousands of wind-powered vessels, a.k.a. sailing ships, by the nineteenth century. Global wind turbines harvest at least fifty-fold more wind energy than at any time in history.
Finally, there are the reviled fossil fuels. Despite the epic expansions in all of the above itemized fuel sources, the fossil fuels supply over 80 percent of all global needs today. Their use, however, is hardly new. Archeologists date coal use back to the Paleolithic era. The ancients also used hydrocarbon tars and pitch for heat and lighting (and warfighting). But the world obviously uses far more coal, oil, and natural gas than at any time in history. Indeed, the world today uses more of every kind of energy deployed since the dawn of civilization (with the notable exceptions of whale oil).
There’s never been an energy transition.
Notably missing from this historical account is the relatively recent discovery of atomic phenomena: the energy released in splitting an atom’s nucleus (first demonstrated in 1939) and the energy from the photoelectric effect, using the atom’s orbital electrons (first demonstrated in 1954). Both sources will doubtless see extraordinary expansion in the coming decades and centuries, but the pattern of adding to, rather than replacing, other energy sources will continue. (Though we should hope that the use of animals, and especially pray that the use of slave labor, will decline.)
The Trump administration is shining a welcome light on the inflationary, unproductive, and even socially destructive magnitude of spending in pursuit of the unachievable that has been marbled into legislation and federal programs. History will likely record the elimination of government largesse in pursuit of an impossible energy transition as a kind of transition itself.
Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images
