There has never been an energy transition

Some sobering truths about energy and the economy.

I want to point out a basic, yet fundamental fact that always seems to get ignored in discussions about renewable energy.

There has never been an energy transition.

Now, that doesn't mean there can't be one, mind you, only that we have never had one in all of human history thus far. I think that’s an important fact that people should know.

The term ‘transition’ implies exchanging of one type of energy for another, but that's not what has happened, historically. The previous sources of energy weren't abandoned. Instead, the newer sources of energy were layered on top of the older ones increasing the total amount of energy available to humanity. You can easily see that by looking at this chart:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution

That's not a transition. A transition would be switching from one source to another while the old one eventually died out. Yet, as the chart shows, no form of energy has ever fully died out, not even traditional sources like biomass (wood, straw, peat, dung, etc.); instead, they have simply plateaued.

People tend to think that, once we started using oil, the remaining coal just stayed in the ground, unwanted and unused. But that's a misconception. In fact, from the chart you can see that the highest coal use of all time is actually today with 44 terawatts.

Liquid fuels were layered on top of this base, and are what made the transportation revolution possible. Liquid fuels are uniquely energy dense and transportable, which makes them ideal for every transportation method, whether cars, trucks, boats, planes or rockets. Coal was indeed used for early transportation methods like railroads and steamships, but liquid fuels combined with better engines did indeed replace them.

But that didn't mean coal use went down!

Instead, oil (and later, natural gas) was added to our newly diversified energy portfolio, allowing us to do all sorts of things we weren't able to do before, such as create the automobile-centic sprawl that we live in today and all of its satellite industries¹. Oh, and air travel, global shipping, and the thousand-mile supply chains that make things like Wal-Mart and Amazon possible. That's where a lot of our "economic growth" has come from. And let's not forget that those giant combines out in the farm fields harvesting the food we eat are also powered by oil, as is much of our farming infrastructure. That's why only two percent of the population today is directly involved in food production in industrialized economies.

In the same way, renewables have not replaced any of these previous energy sources. They've merely allowed us to increase the total energy output by putting additional generation in previously marginal places like farm fields, plains, deserts, and rooftops.

I often hear this phrase from growth optimists, which I believe originally came from a Saudi oil minster: "The stone age didn't end for lack of stones." The implication is that, once a superior technology comes along, the earlier technology is abandoned in favor of the new one which supplants it.

But that's not what has happened!

If we want to be pedantic, the stone age never really ended. We continued to use stone for thousands of years, only for things like buildings, roads, and walls rather than tools. We still have stone quarries. In fact, if you look at total stone extraction around the world, I'm willing to bet that it is far higher today than it was at the onset of the Bronze Age roughly four thousand years ago.

Fatuous statements like the one above only play into people's misconceptions. To be clear, I'm not arguing against optimism—optimism's great and all, but optimism needs to be tempered by reality.

So, by any generally accepted definition of the term, at least so far, there has never been an energy transition, which leads to my statement above.

What would an energy transition look like?

What would an actual energy transition look like?

See that huge, blush-colored wedge colored that represents oil? That would have to not only stop growing, but, in fact, start shrinking, looking basically like a mirror image of itself from 1870 up to now. Meanwhile, the renewable energy sources at the very top of the chart (colored blue, green, and various shades of brown) would have to collectively fan out by the exact same amount in order to take their place.

That's what an actual energy transition would look like. To reiterate the point once again, that's never happened. To date, renewable energy has supplemented our energy usage—it has not replaced anything.

And to create a truly carbon-free economy, the burgundy coal bar would have to shrink as well, which it has never done. So would the natural gas bar, colored green, which has grown significantly since 1950. So, the coal, oil, and natural gas bars, colored blush, green and burgundy, would all collectively have to shrink, and shrink fast to have any hope of heading off anthropogenic climate change.

But it gets worse. Not only would the carbon-free colors at the top—which taken together are basically a sliver—have to grow as fast as the coal, oil and natural gas bars are shrinking, but, in fact, even faster if we want the total amount of energy available to humanity to increase without adding additional carbon to the atmosphere. If that doesn't happen—that is, if renewables can't grow fast enough to offset the hypothetical decline from hydrocarbon sources—then the total amount of energy available to humanity will go into decline.

(Oh, and, by the way, currently the largest of those renewable resources—hydropower—can no longer grow very much because all the best locations for hydropower have already been tapped).

Now, this inevitably leads to a discussion of whether living standards and the economy (which aren't the same thing) can keep growing even if the total amount of energy available is declining. That's beyond the scope of this post. However, I will say that I'm skeptical. While energy and the economy aren't perfectly aligned (people make money off of ideas and services, for example, and not just manufacturing), energy is the lifeblood of the economy. You cannot expect a building to keep standing when the superstructure is crumbling, even if the structure is only 10 percent of the building's total mass. The "decoupling" idea is applicable to some economies, but it's not applicable to global energy use a whole. If you look at global economic growth, it tracks closely with energy consumption. You can make artificial numbers plucked out of the air go up in a database, but it’s debatable whether that translates to actual gains in living standards.

In recent online conversations, you'll often hear that nuclear power will save us! At its core, nuclear energy is simply a fabulously complex way of boiling water, but it doesn't emit carbon, produces radioactive toxic waste, and when it fails entire regions of the planet become uninhabitable. Nuclear power is represented by an emerald stripe in the chart. Hover over it and see just how small it currently is. My question is this: is it realistic that, even if the neutron-heads are right and we go hog-wild building expensive nuclear reactors in every corner of the globe like there's no tomorrow, will that be enough to replace—together with other renewables—the entire coal, oil, natural gas, and biomass usage in this chart? Look at how large those four bars collectively are compared to the rest.

Color me skeptical.

Is it really realistic to electrify all global transportation, everywhere on earth, with no change in our urban arrangements? Passenger cars seem like everything to us Americans stuck in our traffic jams, but currently oil not only powers passenger cars but long-haul trucking, air travel, and container shipping. Can all of those industries switch over to 100% electricity? Everywhere? That's a lot of Teslas! Currently, there is no viable electric air transport—the batteries are simply too heavy. And it's not like container ships can plug into a recharging station on the way from Shenzhen to San Francisco.

Sure, we can come up with alternative ways of moving a car, truck, ship, or airplane, as well as producing food. But without expanding the fundamental energy sources that power those industries, they will inevitably decline, and therefore so will the size of our economy. Unless we change the way these technologies are used, or our current living arrangements, we are in for a world of hurt, even before we factor in climate change.

The Narrative

I've written before about what I call ‘The Narrative’. It's being touted by a new breed of online commentator who is coming out of the woodwork obsessed with the idea of "progress" (as defined by them, or course)². It goes something like this:

"We need to electrify everything. We need to install ground source heat pumps, induction stoves, and on-demand hot water heaters everywhere. We will supersinsulate our houses and use energy recovery ventilation. We'll all run out and buy electric cars which will replace dirty internal combustion engines. We'll computerize everything, build AI, and create the Metaverse. Then, once that's done, we can swap out the dirty, carbon-based electricity sources 1:1 for clean, renewable sources. And, best of all, we don't need to change our current living arrangements one iota! Not only that, but economic growth as we currently define it will not decrease, rather, it will accelerate because solar and wind are cheaper than oil!"

Here's a typical example:

It’s the 2070s. The world is running on clean energy. Everyone has access to sufficient supplies. No one is choking on dirty air. They’re well-fed. There are almost no gasoline cars on the road. Deforestation has come to an end. We use tiny amounts of land to produce food. We’re not killing tens of billions of animals for meat. Wildlife is making a comeback. To many, that seems like a naive utopia. An unachievable goal. But try to explain the world we live in today to someone in the mid-1900s. They’d have struggled to believe it³.

"The world" is running on clean energy. Really, the whole entire world??? Powered by what? Notice how she mentions passenger cars, specifically. Um, do you know that transportation also includes diesel-powered container ships, long-haul trucking, combine harvesters, and air transportation like I described above, right? And the other assertions contain no mention at all of how they will come about, just hand-waving.

It's all so naive and facile. And this is what passes for intellectualism online. I mean, is she trying to convince us or herself?

Here's another gem from neoliberal economist and self-described "techno-optimist" Noah Smith:

Coupled with cheap, energy-dense batteries, even more possibilities open up. No one wants to run a gasoline-powered robot housekeeper inside their home, but a battery-powered one would be fine. Better batteries would make electric cars quick and easy to charge and give them long range. Electric flight and electric shipping might make global trade and travel not just more environmentally friendly but actually cheaper. Drones will get much better too (though you can bet these will be used for military purposes as well as civilian ones). Even flying cars might become electric at some point.

Yay, flying cars are back on track!

It seems like the typical economist misunderstanding of mistaking price signals for indications about the real world. The cost of solar is declining due to scaling up, true, but it's still ultimately a rounding error in our total energy production (Seriously—hover over the red solar bar. Even at full screen, you can barely see it—I'm not even sure it's red). So, of course renewable energy is cheap now, because it has a massive subsidy from all the other energy sources that it's layered on top of⁴!

The mistake economists like Smith make is thinking that when (that is, if) solar power becomes 40 percent of our energy supply the way oil currently is, then it will be just as cheap! That's despite the fact that solar is intermittent and less energy-dense that hydrocarbons. Those limitations can be gotten around by batteries, but it's notable that solar energy can currently take advantage of the "base load" provided by the conventional energy grid. What happens when it's the only source? Will it still be as cheap? And "electric flight" and "electric shipping" are novelties at this point. If these are so much better, then why isn't the industry eagerly adopting them? They're more proof of concept than viable options, something Smith would know if he actually talked to the scientists building them. There's no way they will be as cheap and efficient as the transport options we currently have which underpin globalization, and hence modern capitalism.

Another mistake people make is thinking that electricity is an energy source. Electricity is not an energy source—it has to be produced. Even solid-state methods like solar panels have to be manufactured, and that is usually not done using solar power.

Consider this report from the IEA: World total final consumption by source, 1971-2019. The report lists “electricity” as an energy source in its charts and graphs alongside actual sources like coal, oil, biofuels, natural gas, and "other." It's easy to get this misconception when electricity is touted as a quasi-magical and limitless source of clean energy in the media. Yet, the fact is that, as it stands, most of our electricity comes from "dirty" sources like coal and natural gas. I find it hard to believe that those carbon sources can be entirely unplugged from the grid (as the term 'transition' implies), yet electricity will somehow become cheaper than ever before.

Finally, it needs to be said that: There is no such thing as renewable energy.

All energy sources currently touted as "renewable" in reality will eventually have to be replaced at some point. Solar panels and windmills have a finite lifespan and need to replaced every few decades or so. Ongoing maintenance, repair and upgrading needs to be done for hydropower, geothermal and nuclear energy plants. It's not like we can just install solar farms and windmills everywhere and walk away and live happily ever after. As it stands, renewable energy expansion is underwritten by nonrenewable energy. What happens when (if) it goes away forever?

Conclusions

You'll often hear the media talk about the "energy transition" or the "green energy transition." If such a transition really were to occur, it would be the first time in all of human history.

Now, to be perfectly clear—because I'm sure that this is what people are inevitably going to say—I’m not arguing whether or not such a transition is possible. That's not for me to say, and it’s not the point I’m trying to make. I don't have the knowledge or expertise to make that assertion—in fact, there are some experts who argue that we can do this. I’m not advocating for ‘defeatism’, whatever that means. Nor am I against renewable energy. We should be installing as much renewable energy as possible.

But I do think people ought to know the facts, and the fact is that we have never had an energy transition. So far, the total amount of energy available to humanity has only grown, not declined, as carbon-free energy sources have gradually been added to the mix.

There seems to be a deliberate attempt to tell us that all we have to do is buy electric cars and appliances and all will be well. But I'm skeptical of the idea that, if we were to truly make an energy transition—and not just add on to what we already have—that we can do so without any change in our lifestyles whatsoever. From autocentric urban sprawl, to perfectly climate-controlled buildings year round, to international travel, to massive amounts of waste, to the thousand-mile Caesar salad, it's hard to imagine our current living standards not undergoing some kind of dramatic change.

And I'm also skeptical that we're going to be able to reduce our carbon emissions and head off the worst of climate change under the current paradigm of unceasing economic growth. A real transition will have to take place in the teeth of intensifying storms, mass migrations, novel diseases, places becoming uninsurable, and floods, droughts and wildfires devastating crop yields worldwide leading to inflation as we're already experiencing.

I often see headlines saying things like: Costa Rica has run entirely on 100 percent renewable energy for 300 days, or 54 percent of Portugal's energy comes from renewables. But, what I wonder is, why aren't we seeing it in this chart⁵? Articles like these give the impression that some places have already transitioned, and did so effortlessly without any pain or disruption. But that's not what I'm seeing from the chart, at least not for the world as a whole. I find it hard to believe that our current world wouldn’t look very different if we ever were to truly make such a transition, and that “economic growth” as currently defined would have to be rethought. That’s what the “degrowth” idea is all about, which is something economists and “progress” bloggers are rabidly opposed to. But what is the alternative?

1. In fact, oil is such a good transportation fuel that it outcompeted early electric motors; that is, electric cars lost out because they were inferior to internal combustion engines for transport. Kind of puts the 'electrification revolution' into perspective.

2. The supreme irony is that the chart comes from Our World in Data, which is to "progress" bloggers what the Bible is to believing Christians or the Koran to Muslims, with Hans Rosling their Jesus Christ and Mohammad.

3. That last point is rather tone-deaf. If, for example, you tried to explain to someone living in Detroit in the mid 1900s—that is, in the 1950's—what Detroit looks like today, they would probably think that civilization had collapsed or we had lost a war. This is standard for “progress” bloggers—cosmopolitan elites who see the suffering of their fellow Americans as collateral damage as long as vaccination rates in Africa are going up.

4. Articles touting the "exponential" growth of solar energy typically show graphs where solar is isolated from all other energy sources and limited to a particular narrow time frame—in other words, deliberately divorced from context. As we've seen, solar has been layered on top of all previous energy sources; it has so far not replaced any of them; and is currently a very minor portion of total electricity generation.

5. I wonder if this is just measuring electricity generation. Is nobody driving cars, trucks or boats in Portugal or Costa Rica? Area all their vehicles battery-powered? Do all their buildings have heat pumps? Update: the first article addresses this point and acknowledges that this is the case.