Thank you, Rachel for bringing the conversation about energy back around to how we organize society.
We give salaries based on some metric of deservedness (say the market value of labor, a person’s position at a company like the CEO, etc) thus making money a fungible token of ‘deservedness’. Thus in a patriarchal society that devalues ‘women’s work’ the salaries reflect deservedness according to the values of the patriarchy.
If we organize our society around measuring a person’s moral worth as a function of deservedness (aka money) and those that have the most define what is most deserving, then the circular reasoning allows for increasing inequality and objectification of labor. Those who are most ‘undeserving’ get the lowest salaries and can be treated with disdain as wealth is a measure of just how deserving a person or group is.
This is what i want to challenge, Rachel. The whole damn system that uses deservedness as a metric of moral worth.
Psychological studies show that increasing wealth corresponds directly to increased rudeness, cheating, lying, stinginess and feelings that they deserve their wealth.
So long as our society is oriented around these systems, nature is only a commodity to be exploited, like the bodies of the working classes, minorities and women (like the book you will soon be releasing and I am excited to get as soon as it is released!).
More power to you Rachel😉, and you are spot on, the techno binary is frustrating because it perpetuates the status quo. Similarly, North South binary is framed as fairness and compensation for the lack of it… But in truth the only conversation that will give us any chance at all is the one about using less.
Thanks Rachel. The 'green transition' myth just will not go away. It just seems to be unthinkable for so many to believe what the data makes so blindingly obvious. Even Hannah Ritchie, the OWID Deputy Editor, who frankly should know better, is engaged in spreading this nonsense. Is the notion of a low power, degrowth future so scary that this delusion should persist? I don't think so, but evidently I'm in a tiny minority.
Our AI tools can even see the truth:
Hi ChatGPT. Why is the global demand for fossil fuels increasing despite the growth in the use of renewables?
The global demand for fossil fuels is increasing despite the growth of renewables due to a combination of economic, infrastructural, and geopolitical factors. Here's a breakdown of the main reasons:
🔥 1. Rising Global Energy Demand
As developing nations (e.g., India, parts of Africa, Southeast Asia) grow, their energy consumption is surging.
Economic development brings increased industrial activity, transportation needs, and electricity demand.
Renewables are growing, but not fast enough to meet all this new demand — so fossil fuels fill the gap.
🏗️ 2. Infrastructure Lock-In
The global economy is deeply built around fossil fuel infrastructure — pipelines, power plants, vehicles, shipping, etc.
Transitioning these systems takes decades and trillions of dollars.
Many countries still build coal and gas plants because they're faster and cheaper in the short term.
⛽ 3. Transportation Still Dominated by Oil
Over 90% of global transportation (cars, trucks, ships, planes) still runs on oil-based fuels.
Electric vehicle adoption is rising, but it's nowhere near replacing the global car fleet yet.
📉 4. Renewables Are Mostly for Electricity
Solar and wind mainly replace electricity generation.
Electricity is only ~20% of total global energy use — the rest comes from transport, heating, and industry, where fossil fuels still dominate.
🌍 5. Geopolitical and Market Pressures
Fossil fuel-rich countries (like Russia, Saudi Arabia, USA) have strong political and economic incentives to maintain fossil fuel production.
High energy prices (like during or after geopolitical conflicts) incentivize more drilling, not less, to meet short-term demand.
📈 6. Energy Security and Reliability
Fossil fuels are dispatchable (available on demand), unlike wind and solar which are variable.
Until energy storage tech and grid systems improve, many nations rely on fossil fuels for reliability, especially during peak usage.
✅ In Summary:
Factor Explanation
Global demand rising Developing economies need more energy
Infrastructure lock-in Built world still runs on fossil fuels
Transportation reliance Oil dominates mobility
Renewables = electricity only Doesn’t displace total energy demand
Market & geopolitics Fossil fuels are still profitable and strategic
Reliability concerns Fossil fuels offer predictable energy supply
Cheers Rachel. I thought Nafeez's piece was a bit too optimistic and a bit too dismissive.
The "are renewables replacing fossil fuels" question is annoying but your point about coal being primarily replaced by gas is spot on.
I do agree with Nafeez that fossil fuels have been displaced by renewables for the electricity sector in some rich countries. The key question is: can that minor success be replicated globally and quickly, or is it exclusive to rich countries? (and also to what degree you can electrify other energy use, as you point out in the piece electricity use is minor part of our energy use).
Brett Christophers' book has some good points about greater costs of capital in developing countries which to me suggests the national scale success in richer countries can't be easily rolled out without fundamental changes to the economic system.
As Ronald argued, economics follows socio-political dynamics so it is critical to get that bit right first. While there is some sporadic rowing back from the neo-con threat recently I’m not confident that this is a trend and we may not have long before the opportunity to vote for a socially progressive party will be a thing of the past. Be good to have such a party to vote for now. As much as I respect the Greens in the UK I’m not sure they really fit the bill.
"I want to see a future where renewables are part of the energy mix when those minerals have been fairly sourced. I also want to see a build-out of the grid so that countries maintain an energy dependence which will hopefully mitigate resource wars. I want to see a world where our technology and brainpower is deployed to fulfilling the needs of the many, not the wants of the few."
Wouldn't that be great? However, this seems delusional in itself. I'm not sure what "fairly sourced" means but we can be assured that, if a mineral mining industry continues, the desires of the ones doing the mining are the priority and the minerals will be sourced wherever they can be accessed.
Your wants, above, seem to suggest that a kind of modernity can be maintained forever. Modernity needs non-renewable resources and that means it's unsustainable and will end. Endless perfect recycling is impossible, so economies and societies would have to contract (eventually to zero) and they will not resemble those of today. Even if minerals could be net-zero mined, they would still devastate habitats and the refining would continue to poison the biosphere.
There is an underlying "hope" in the writings of many commentators who seem to have a handle on the reality of our predicament, but there is a big resistance to thinking about what it means to live in an unsustainable society and what is really possible in the future. What we want out of the world has no bearing on the laws on nature.
There’s a lot of blind faith in technological ‘disruption’ which doesn’t go any way to solve the underlying inequalities and exploitation. Did you and Nafeez Ahmed disagree when he was on the podcast?
That conversation was 2 years ago! I really enjoyed what he had to say about engineering new energy systems to create energy interdependence, and still think about it.
Rachel, I love your show. You interview some of the best sources, ask great questions, and summarize not only your guests' conclusions but the aggregate of your guests' conclusions amazingly well. However, I beg you to quit publishing your own analysis without an editorial round trip through at least three experts. I can appreciate your sense of time pressure to get your analysis or, in this case, rebuttal of a sleight against your and Nate Hagens' work, but how can I say this? I found your rebuttal to be sloppy, at best.
Nafeez' re-rebuttal addresses many of the points of sloppy analysis that I came up with, so I won't bother with that much detail here. It doesn't help that you fail to cite your charts in a way that allows a reader to check your data. After I noted where your conclusions and your charts fail to correlate (even assuming that your charts reflect real data), I found that Nafeez points to the same failures. Another flaw in your analysis is the mixing of references to electricity and energy, not the same thing. Nafeez is much more careful in separating these.
One point that neither you nor Nafeez addresses is offshoring of heavy industry and the concommitant offshoring of emissions. Another has to do with the exclusion of business-to-business trade from GDP, which means that a reduction in such trade could result in a reduction in emissions, making emissions to GDP ratios somewhat suspect. Given the incomprehensible complexity of global trade, the only "absolute" numbers that are meaningful are global. Any national numbers that appear "absolute" are suspect. That's not to say national absolute decoupling is impossible, but rather that almost any analysis that demonstrates it is open to objections.
The main thing I got out of this posting was links to Nafeez' original review and rebuttle to this posting. As I mentioned earlier, Nafeez makes some glaring omissions, but on the whole, his analysis is considerably tighter than this posting. I write this critique as a supporter and a friend - I want you to do better to support your earnest goals of informing the public.
I am not sure that the EU is a good example for your point. EU fossil energy peaked at 15,000 TWh in 2006 and has since fallen to 10,000 TWh. Non-fossil energy increased from 4000 to c. 5000 TWh in the same period. RE could have been responsible for about half of the decline in fossil energy, the rest being due to energy efficiency and (perhaps) deindustrialisation. Imports & exports of energy/CO2 are also a factor but the estimates for these are unreliable, often disagreeing even as to whether they are positive or negative. Overall: not exactly degrowth, but not too shabby either.
Hi Rachel. We should differentiate clean energy from dirty. Clean energy is fine. Nobody is complaining that the Sun is polluting. Dirty energy needs to be drastically reduced and clean energy supported. Renewables that have a high return on energy investment are the pragmatic way forward. Degrow the dirty. Grow the clean.
All energy is basically "clean", it just depends what the energy is being used for. What will unlimited "clean" energy be used for? The official plan is to keep doing pretty much what we're doing today. And that will just make our situation of ecological overshoot much worse. Emissions will also keep rising.
The only "clean" energy is potential energy, which is to say, energy that is chemically or kinetically stored but not used to perform real work. The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, as energy performs work, entropy increases. Entropy = waste. The waste always involves waste heat, but also involves material transformation, whether that transformation is from highly structured hydrocarbons in fossil "fuels" to CO2, or from copper ore underground in a mountain to an ecologically destroyed pit plus gigantic heaps of tailings.
Techno-optimism isn't interested in "saving the day", it's the public facing PR of rich city-people. They don't care what you or I think. They don't care about finding out how much coal China burned to build their solar panels or batteries. They don't care what happens to solar panels, wind turbine blades or batteries when they fully degrade in 30 years. You try yelling at them. I try reasoning with them. We end up at the same place and we aren't even friends ;)
Don't play their game by looking at U.S. energy use internally, without factoring in Chinese energy inputs. I created some data proxies for real U.S. energy consumption. You can see the chart here: https://depletioncurve.com/2025/04/18/petro-inequality/
Thank you, Rachel for bringing the conversation about energy back around to how we organize society.
We give salaries based on some metric of deservedness (say the market value of labor, a person’s position at a company like the CEO, etc) thus making money a fungible token of ‘deservedness’. Thus in a patriarchal society that devalues ‘women’s work’ the salaries reflect deservedness according to the values of the patriarchy.
If we organize our society around measuring a person’s moral worth as a function of deservedness (aka money) and those that have the most define what is most deserving, then the circular reasoning allows for increasing inequality and objectification of labor. Those who are most ‘undeserving’ get the lowest salaries and can be treated with disdain as wealth is a measure of just how deserving a person or group is.
This is what i want to challenge, Rachel. The whole damn system that uses deservedness as a metric of moral worth.
Psychological studies show that increasing wealth corresponds directly to increased rudeness, cheating, lying, stinginess and feelings that they deserve their wealth.
So long as our society is oriented around these systems, nature is only a commodity to be exploited, like the bodies of the working classes, minorities and women (like the book you will soon be releasing and I am excited to get as soon as it is released!).
Sorry for my rant.
More power to you Rachel😉, and you are spot on, the techno binary is frustrating because it perpetuates the status quo. Similarly, North South binary is framed as fairness and compensation for the lack of it… But in truth the only conversation that will give us any chance at all is the one about using less.
Thanks Rachel. The 'green transition' myth just will not go away. It just seems to be unthinkable for so many to believe what the data makes so blindingly obvious. Even Hannah Ritchie, the OWID Deputy Editor, who frankly should know better, is engaged in spreading this nonsense. Is the notion of a low power, degrowth future so scary that this delusion should persist? I don't think so, but evidently I'm in a tiny minority.
Our AI tools can even see the truth:
Hi ChatGPT. Why is the global demand for fossil fuels increasing despite the growth in the use of renewables?
The global demand for fossil fuels is increasing despite the growth of renewables due to a combination of economic, infrastructural, and geopolitical factors. Here's a breakdown of the main reasons:
🔥 1. Rising Global Energy Demand
As developing nations (e.g., India, parts of Africa, Southeast Asia) grow, their energy consumption is surging.
Economic development brings increased industrial activity, transportation needs, and electricity demand.
Renewables are growing, but not fast enough to meet all this new demand — so fossil fuels fill the gap.
🏗️ 2. Infrastructure Lock-In
The global economy is deeply built around fossil fuel infrastructure — pipelines, power plants, vehicles, shipping, etc.
Transitioning these systems takes decades and trillions of dollars.
Many countries still build coal and gas plants because they're faster and cheaper in the short term.
⛽ 3. Transportation Still Dominated by Oil
Over 90% of global transportation (cars, trucks, ships, planes) still runs on oil-based fuels.
Electric vehicle adoption is rising, but it's nowhere near replacing the global car fleet yet.
📉 4. Renewables Are Mostly for Electricity
Solar and wind mainly replace electricity generation.
Electricity is only ~20% of total global energy use — the rest comes from transport, heating, and industry, where fossil fuels still dominate.
🌍 5. Geopolitical and Market Pressures
Fossil fuel-rich countries (like Russia, Saudi Arabia, USA) have strong political and economic incentives to maintain fossil fuel production.
High energy prices (like during or after geopolitical conflicts) incentivize more drilling, not less, to meet short-term demand.
📈 6. Energy Security and Reliability
Fossil fuels are dispatchable (available on demand), unlike wind and solar which are variable.
Until energy storage tech and grid systems improve, many nations rely on fossil fuels for reliability, especially during peak usage.
✅ In Summary:
Factor Explanation
Global demand rising Developing economies need more energy
Infrastructure lock-in Built world still runs on fossil fuels
Transportation reliance Oil dominates mobility
Renewables = electricity only Doesn’t displace total energy demand
Market & geopolitics Fossil fuels are still profitable and strategic
Reliability concerns Fossil fuels offer predictable energy supply
Everyone wants to find a magic bullet to make the unsustainable, sustainable.
The pitiful aspect for me is that many of the large NGO's are still vomiting up that nonsense.
They also ignore Jevon's paradox.
https://kevinhester.live/2016/05/14/sustainabilitys-place-in-killing-the-living-planet/
I've disliked the word 'sustainable' for over 30 years. My litmus test: How are you doing with solar cooking this sunny day?
It is amazing how many activists don't know how to reduce their anxiety with a lovely sun kissed quiche cooking while they work.
Cheers Rachel. I thought Nafeez's piece was a bit too optimistic and a bit too dismissive.
The "are renewables replacing fossil fuels" question is annoying but your point about coal being primarily replaced by gas is spot on.
I do agree with Nafeez that fossil fuels have been displaced by renewables for the electricity sector in some rich countries. The key question is: can that minor success be replicated globally and quickly, or is it exclusive to rich countries? (and also to what degree you can electrify other energy use, as you point out in the piece electricity use is minor part of our energy use).
Brett Christophers' book has some good points about greater costs of capital in developing countries which to me suggests the national scale success in richer countries can't be easily rolled out without fundamental changes to the economic system.
As Ronald argued, economics follows socio-political dynamics so it is critical to get that bit right first. While there is some sporadic rowing back from the neo-con threat recently I’m not confident that this is a trend and we may not have long before the opportunity to vote for a socially progressive party will be a thing of the past. Be good to have such a party to vote for now. As much as I respect the Greens in the UK I’m not sure they really fit the bill.
Here is Nafeez's response to your article- https://ageoftransformation.org/everything-must-go-how-to-phase-out-fossil-capitalism/
Not quite sure when this ends 🤣 Your response to his response to your response.
Perhaps an interview might be productive.
I'm very grateful for one that both of you are working so hard to excavate the truth!
"I want to see a future where renewables are part of the energy mix when those minerals have been fairly sourced. I also want to see a build-out of the grid so that countries maintain an energy dependence which will hopefully mitigate resource wars. I want to see a world where our technology and brainpower is deployed to fulfilling the needs of the many, not the wants of the few."
Wouldn't that be great? However, this seems delusional in itself. I'm not sure what "fairly sourced" means but we can be assured that, if a mineral mining industry continues, the desires of the ones doing the mining are the priority and the minerals will be sourced wherever they can be accessed.
Your wants, above, seem to suggest that a kind of modernity can be maintained forever. Modernity needs non-renewable resources and that means it's unsustainable and will end. Endless perfect recycling is impossible, so economies and societies would have to contract (eventually to zero) and they will not resemble those of today. Even if minerals could be net-zero mined, they would still devastate habitats and the refining would continue to poison the biosphere.
There is an underlying "hope" in the writings of many commentators who seem to have a handle on the reality of our predicament, but there is a big resistance to thinking about what it means to live in an unsustainable society and what is really possible in the future. What we want out of the world has no bearing on the laws on nature.
There’s a lot of blind faith in technological ‘disruption’ which doesn’t go any way to solve the underlying inequalities and exploitation. Did you and Nafeez Ahmed disagree when he was on the podcast?
That conversation was 2 years ago! I really enjoyed what he had to say about engineering new energy systems to create energy interdependence, and still think about it.
Rachel, I love your show. You interview some of the best sources, ask great questions, and summarize not only your guests' conclusions but the aggregate of your guests' conclusions amazingly well. However, I beg you to quit publishing your own analysis without an editorial round trip through at least three experts. I can appreciate your sense of time pressure to get your analysis or, in this case, rebuttal of a sleight against your and Nate Hagens' work, but how can I say this? I found your rebuttal to be sloppy, at best.
Nafeez' re-rebuttal addresses many of the points of sloppy analysis that I came up with, so I won't bother with that much detail here. It doesn't help that you fail to cite your charts in a way that allows a reader to check your data. After I noted where your conclusions and your charts fail to correlate (even assuming that your charts reflect real data), I found that Nafeez points to the same failures. Another flaw in your analysis is the mixing of references to electricity and energy, not the same thing. Nafeez is much more careful in separating these.
One point that neither you nor Nafeez addresses is offshoring of heavy industry and the concommitant offshoring of emissions. Another has to do with the exclusion of business-to-business trade from GDP, which means that a reduction in such trade could result in a reduction in emissions, making emissions to GDP ratios somewhat suspect. Given the incomprehensible complexity of global trade, the only "absolute" numbers that are meaningful are global. Any national numbers that appear "absolute" are suspect. That's not to say national absolute decoupling is impossible, but rather that almost any analysis that demonstrates it is open to objections.
The main thing I got out of this posting was links to Nafeez' original review and rebuttle to this posting. As I mentioned earlier, Nafeez makes some glaring omissions, but on the whole, his analysis is considerably tighter than this posting. I write this critique as a supporter and a friend - I want you to do better to support your earnest goals of informing the public.
I am not sure that the EU is a good example for your point. EU fossil energy peaked at 15,000 TWh in 2006 and has since fallen to 10,000 TWh. Non-fossil energy increased from 4000 to c. 5000 TWh in the same period. RE could have been responsible for about half of the decline in fossil energy, the rest being due to energy efficiency and (perhaps) deindustrialisation. Imports & exports of energy/CO2 are also a factor but the estimates for these are unreliable, often disagreeing even as to whether they are positive or negative. Overall: not exactly degrowth, but not too shabby either.
Hi Rachel. We should differentiate clean energy from dirty. Clean energy is fine. Nobody is complaining that the Sun is polluting. Dirty energy needs to be drastically reduced and clean energy supported. Renewables that have a high return on energy investment are the pragmatic way forward. Degrow the dirty. Grow the clean.
All energy is basically "clean", it just depends what the energy is being used for. What will unlimited "clean" energy be used for? The official plan is to keep doing pretty much what we're doing today. And that will just make our situation of ecological overshoot much worse. Emissions will also keep rising.
The only "clean" energy is potential energy, which is to say, energy that is chemically or kinetically stored but not used to perform real work. The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, as energy performs work, entropy increases. Entropy = waste. The waste always involves waste heat, but also involves material transformation, whether that transformation is from highly structured hydrocarbons in fossil "fuels" to CO2, or from copper ore underground in a mountain to an ecologically destroyed pit plus gigantic heaps of tailings.
That's a much more elegant way to say it, but yes. I wonder why it's so hard for Nafeez to understand this.
Techno-optimism isn't interested in "saving the day", it's the public facing PR of rich city-people. They don't care what you or I think. They don't care about finding out how much coal China burned to build their solar panels or batteries. They don't care what happens to solar panels, wind turbine blades or batteries when they fully degrade in 30 years. You try yelling at them. I try reasoning with them. We end up at the same place and we aren't even friends ;)
Don't play their game by looking at U.S. energy use internally, without factoring in Chinese energy inputs. I created some data proxies for real U.S. energy consumption. You can see the chart here: https://depletioncurve.com/2025/04/18/petro-inequality/