Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens
latimes.com
latimes.com
The bar has been set so low that talking about it is seen as success now.
Sometimes I think the only way we'll really make meaningful progress is if we simply run out of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, we're just too good at getting them and too motivated to do so.
Even if these countries are a smaller part of the climate affecting processes, any forward motion is good at this point. They can also help build economies of scale, and take advantage of the myriad economic benefits of renewables that other countries are leaving on the table.
China, The US, and India all turned down invites despite generating 34%, 12%, and 7.6% of global emissions respectively [0]
If the world's 3 largest polluters (even if two of them are heavily investing in GreenTech) who represent ~54% of global emissions are not interested in the conversation, it's all for naught.
None of the attendees are in the position to pressure the big 3 polluters. And it doesn't matter - the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change. It's the poorer or smaller countries that face the brunt of the impact.
And it's only going to get worse. India turned down hosting COP33 in 2028 [1] because India is deciding to to double down on coal [2] as the Iran Crisis has shown China's bet on Coal Gasification that began during the Iraq War [3] was correct.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b...
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[3] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...
China, while having a disproportionate share of the pollution relative to its population, only has that pollution because the West offshored almost the entirety of its manufacturing capacity to China. Is China really at fault for pollution caused creating goods for the West? If China shuts down all export manufacturing overnight, and the West is forced to resume manufacturing for itself, resulting in ~the same global emissions, is that what's necessary to stop blaming China even though there's no shift in demand for manufactured goods or total pollution? Moreover, China is investing more seriously into non-fossil-fuel energy than any country in the West, by far. If you let the West resume its own manufacturing, you would actually end up with higher total emissions, because the West does not take this subject seriously at all.
I think there's an interesting question here. Perhaps having a larger population is indeed a bad thing, and should be considered as such?
(Yes, India's fertility rate, like many other countries, is dropping quickly)
And large countries and blocs like the US, China, EU, India, etc would survive in a world with significant climate crises. So the incentive to change doesn't exist.
And this is why the world will burn.
I have no proposal because to a certain extent you are correct.
That said, investing trillions in GreenTech does nothing when China is still emitting 13 gigatons of CO2, and it takes the next 7 countries combined to reach that number. Additionally, India will likely end up emitting a similar amount as China within a decade as well.
Only the leadership of the US, China, and India can decide on a roadmap on how to reduce CO2 usage globally, and everything else is just rhetoric.
China endured famines for centuries, introduction of nitrogen fertilizers helped to solve this problem.
"The meeting of Mao Zedong and Nixon in 1972 changed drastically the fundamental relation between China and USA. In 1973 China contracted importation of 13 large-scale ammonia plants with 330,000 t/y capacity and urea plants with 500-600,000 t/y capacity with the companies of USA, Japan and Europe."
Perhaps this is for the best? I assume if they did intend they would be mostly saying 'no' to everything?
Now things might get actually accepted by willing participants, which might allow it to snowball and gain traction, which might convince one of those 3 to join at a later date.
Additionally, other major polluters like ASEAN (Indonesia, Vietnam, Phillipines, Malaysia), Russia, the GCC (Saudi Arabia, UAE), and Turkiye turned down the invitation.
[0] - https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPSH@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
Even if India and China went 0 carbon today the world will continue heating due to historic emissions. The US and Europe account for 54% of cumulative CO2 emissions. [1]
Not to mention there would be no conversation without China's manufacturing prowess that has made solar panels and batteries so cheap.
> the larger countries know they can eat the cost of climate change
I'm curious how you think India will "eat the cost" of losing most of its freshwater.[2] And if think you it's feasible to do so (which again, I don't see how), then it's even more important that they develop their economy to "eat the cost" right? You can't fault them for doing everything they can to grow their economy. It's not like anyone else is going 0 carbon either, and they're the most vulnerable large country.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
2. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/himalayas-melting-c...
We aren’t captured by environmental activists that force the poor to shoulder the compliance burden while the rich get to defer and delay.
Though energy output has doubled, as a share coal has dropped in China and the US.
Wouldn’t you expect estimates based on difficult to predict human behavior to change based on new data?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/why-were-the-f...
Don't listen to mc32, they're intentionally confusing the issue. This is the paper they're presumably referencing from last month[1].
The IPCC reports are based on a number of carbon emissions scenarios based on how the world acts: how do countries coordinate, what are the mixes of new electricity generation that come online, how are old fossil fuel plants shut down, what cars are sold, etc. In their reports they simulate multiple scenarios to show what could happen depending on the choices made, since you can't really simulate policy decisions (like presidents paying companies billions to shut down wind projects), wars (ahem), and economic changes.
There were five main scenarios in the IPCC sixth report, from very low to very high GHG emissions.
What was "walked back" is not about climate simulation or feedback loops, but they've retired the very high emissions scenario they developed in the mid 2010s of a world that went all in on heavy economic growth all powered by fossil fuels and little effort toward electrification or decarbonization.
Basically based on renewable energy prices in the years since, electrification, etc, it's just not plausible that the world will grow in that way, so it's no longer worth trying to do simulations based on it.
Note that this was literally called the "very high emissions scenario" in the report, and that's there's still a "high" emissions scenario that will be included in the seventh IPCC report as an upper bound of plausible emissions. A couple of economic models already estimated that we'll likely emit less carbon than the new upper bound high emissions scenario, the same as it was for the very high scenario in the sixth report. Like then, though, it's still worth simulating because it is at least still plausible, and you never know how things will develop sociopolitically (this paper proposes six scenarios from very low to high and a new "high to low" scenario, see section 2.3) .
I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
It might I suppose be fun to catalogue, what are the priorities? Do we kill all the poor people before we decide that maybe we can't afford to keep obligate carnivores as pets? How about the elderly? When do the animals kept for meat go, is that later? At some point I expect there's a backlash, a phase where the populists who insisted that say, if we just murdered everybody with the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religious beliefs or whatever that would fix it - well what if we kill the populists instead? But it won't last, following is in people's nature.
Fossil fuel consumption declines, belatedly, as the human population goes extinct. The mass extinctions eventually settle into a new order. The warm, damp rock is slightly warmer, for a while, and a few non-human niches expand and something else occupies them. And maybe one day an intelligent life eventually wonders why, according to the best available data, in the long depths of pre-history there was a weird climate spike. Huh.
But c’mon now, you’re being wildly overdramatic, and that doesn’t actually help our ability to deal with the threat.
I remember reading
https://www.amazon.com/Hubberts-Peak-Impending-Shortage-Revi...
in the early 2000s which was about the coming peak of conventional oil production and it turned out to be wrong in the sense that we knew in the 1970s that there were huge amounts of oil and gas in tight formations that we didn't know how to exploit. People were trying to figure out how to do that economically and had their breakthrough around the time that book came out so now you drive around some parts of Pennsylvania and boy do you see a lot of natural gas infrastructure.
I remember being in my hippie phase in the late 1990s and having a conversation with a roughneck on the Ithaca Commons who was telling me that the oil industry had a lot of technology that was going to lift the supply constraints that I was concerned about... he didn't tell me all the details but looking back now I'm pretty sure he knew about developments in hydrofracking and might even have been personally involved with them.
Coal for 139 years
Oil for 56 years
Gas for 49 years
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese...
This is a bit simplified because high fossil fuel prices also drive inovations in mining, exploration and could increase known reserves.
It's only a matter of time - likely a few years - before there's a significant wet-bulb heat catastrophe that kills a huge number of people.
For example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
Sugar cane doesn't require replanting every year either, like corn does.
Plants are actually not a good converter of solar energy to chemical energy though. They capture a few percent of it.
Solar cells are able to capture about 10 times that, a much smaller footprint.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
This just doesn't meet up with the day to day reality of your average consumer.
Even your gas station underground tanks aren't airtight. The problem is that the air around us has tons of water vapor in it.
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
ethanol that is distilled forms an azeotrope has a hard time getting past 98% on its own. even if you used advanced techniques and additives, it has a strongly hygroscopic nature, meaning it actively attracts and absorbs water vapor directly from the air.
in other words, it will do everything it can to get back to 98%.
to keep ethanol above 98%, you need airtight seals or "molecular sieves" (zeolite beads) inside the tank to constantly "bead up" and trap any incoming water molecules.
Because that is the overall path (for long-term storable chemical energy, i.e. usable for transport or seasonal energy storage in countries where solar is highly seasonal).
electricity + H20 + N2 -> NH3 + O2
Ammonia can be liquified and stored similar to Propane, it does attack copper and brass.
It can be burned in an internal combustion engine, it's about half as energy dense as hydrocarbons though.
There's a danger to humans from it though, it requires sprinkler systems if there is ever a leak.
I think that a large part of the energy budget in a plant is harvesting and concentrating CO2 from the air. N2 is a lot more abundant in the air.
There is work currently on using giant sodium batteries in these large container ships. That might be more cost effective than the above longer term.
Is there any work on doing that, at a low energy cost? (I mean concentrating CO2, not removing it by weathering rocks?)
Yeah, ships are not really weight constrained, unlike airplanes, really cheap sodium batteries should be feasible.
If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.
[0] - https://usea.org/sites/default/files/022011_Coal-to-oil,%20g...
[1] - https://coal.gov.in/sites/default/files/ncgm/ncgm21-09-21.pd...
Less oil, more wars about it.
I'm weak on recollection as to when PV and wind started their big price plummet, but it was certainly in the 2010s.
It's still not too late for ... everyone.
In particular, I think PHEVs should be an regulated requirement for all consumer (and probably semis, why aren't they hybrids yet just so they can have better acceleration/torque and regen braking) vehicles in ten years, with a 10-year decreasing subsidy for PHEV and a 10-year increasing penalty for car registration and new car purchases of pure ICE.
PHEVs will maximize available battery supply to the most electrification of transport.
I also think home solar+storage should be heavily subsidized, because you don't need to do nearly as much grid adaptation and, keeping with national security, it makes communities much more disaster resilient if homes are somewhat power independent and they can charge a vehicle for trips.
That's the actual plan for Europe. They are planning to start ICE phase-out by 2035, with only limited exceptions where it's impractical (like long-haul cargo or specialized machinery).
I actually don't think that the hybrid timeline could have been accelerated significantly. A lot of foundational technology, such as compact power electronics became accessible only by the early 2000s. Lithium batteries also became commercially viable by then.
Of course that's speculation, and crying overspilled milk
China is also turning coal to synthetic fuels.
" The sector last year turned 276 million tons of coal - equivalent to almost a year of European coal use - into chemicals, oil and gas, according to the China National Petroleum and Chemical Planning Institute"
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
You can imagine the CO2 result of this strategy.
Solar has yet to incorporate likely a fundamental cost drop from perovskites, silicon perovskite multi junction, and fundamental advances in sodium ion battery storage.
And every time you bring up solar wind taking over the majority of a grid, you get the pro-nuclear people ringing their hands over grid stability and the like. I do think of a little bit is that overblown but there's definitely a large structural cost to grid adaptation and issues with industrial power using current battery storage and PV wind economics, especially when you start talking about everybody having a phev or an EV charging.
Residential PV for $5,000 is too expensive for many people in many countries, Pakistan is doing it for much less. Large scale battery storage is too expensive for most countries.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/17/pakistan...
Realistically we can expect 2-3x improvement in solar cell efficiency in coming decades, not much more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency
Pro-solar people like to point out that LCOE of solar is lowest of all forms of electricity generation. At the same time they ignore the increased costs for grid upgrades and grid stabilization (short term stabilization - grid inertia, voltage stabilization, frequency stabilization) (long term stabilization - backup gas/coal power plants). If don't invest enough in grid stabilization and your country has grid that is not connected to other countries, you can get a blackout like in Spain.
On the other hand, blackouts or load shedding are much more common in developing countries and have large economic impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Pakistan_blackout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Pakistan_blackout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Pakistan_blackout
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193
"The costs associated with load shedding have led to an annual GDP reduction of 1 to 1.3% since 2007, with daily economic losses estimated between $85 million and $230 million for the country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis
Just like pro-solar people have their favorite future solar improvements: perovskites, multi junction, battery storage, long term energy storage, etc. Pro-nuclear people have their favorite future nuclear improvements: small modular reactors, ship mounted reactor, generation 4 reactors, breeder reactors recycling nuclear waste.
I say put a carbon tax on all countries (including China, India, US) on all forms of emissions (including mining, refining, manufacturing, transportation, shipping) and let the cheapest technology win.
I would love to see how the industry of China would evolve if China had the same carbon tax as Europe. The same applies to India, US.
https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3307482/c...
The problem with nuclear is that all the fancy designs aren't ready to go, all of them have 10 to 20 year permitting and construction cycles with the inevitable price overruns as well, there aren't enough nuclear industry people anymore...
And really the biggest problem is that you can't Target an economic price 10 to 20 years out. Because wind and solar are dropping still on a constant improvement curve, as is grid storage.
So already price non-competitive nuclear, and you fund a large-scale build out of nuclear reactors, and then in another 10 to 20 years have a bunch of reactors that are now three or four times. Less competitive than they were when you initially started construction.
1. Moving highly radioactive and quite corrosive liquid, without failure and leaks, around is a bit of a headache. Also maintenance of such machines is difficult. These are technical problems, which could be solved.
2. Because many molten salt reactor designs require online reprocessing, this could be a limiting factor in spread of this design. US strongly opposes spread of nuclear fuel manufacturing and nuclear reprocessing technology around the world. In case of Thorium fuel cycle, extraction of the protactinium-233 to make uranium-233 is a real proliferation possibility. These are geopolitical problems, I don't see a solution here.
Personally, I like to have the fission products contained in one small place, fuel rods.
Nuclear can compete with wind energy very well, the costs of wind will decrease only very slowly because the material and labor requirements are quite high for wind power.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr...
For nuclear power to compete with solar, we have look what are the major costs of a nuclear power plants. It's cost of huge amount of high quality labor and quality assurance costs.
"Roughly 1/3rd of the costs are “indirect costs” - engineering services, construction management, administrative overhead"
"One thing that this makes clear is that nuclear plants are very labor intensive to build (with probably at least 50% of the cost from indirect costs and on-site labor)"
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
For decrease of quality assurance costs we have to look at aircraft industry, where large airplanes with high quality can be build. So serial production of a standardized product, build not one, two, tens, but hundreds, thousands of identical products. This allows also to spread the high costs of the manufacturing facility to many products.
For decrease of labor costs we have to look at the solar industry. Automation allowed large decrease of labor costs in solar. Automation should be applied also to nuclear construction, especially automation of constructing the containment building.
Containment building should be generally made smaller, to decrease material costs of concrete and steel. To reach the same level of protection I would propose to move nuclear power reactors deep underground (200-300m), with application of automatic tunnel boring machines.
There have been low output nuclear power plants build underground (like the Ågesta Nuclear Plant in Sweden), but I would propose to move high output nuclear power plants build underground - not SMR. To make this realistic we have move to nuclear core design with high power density and dense working fluid capable of extracting large amount energy, in general small dimensions of the whole power plant. This is contrary to the passively safety of some Gen III+ designs which emphasize low power density that helps with passive cooling.
So the final proposal:
Pool type lead cooled reactor coupled to secondary loop working with supercritical CO2, deep underground with a thin containment, placed in cave drilled using automated tunnel boring machine. The components should be build in factory and designed to be train transportable. The secondary loop is pressurized to supercritical pressure, but the primary pool is at atmospheric pressure so a meltdown should result not in explosive release of fission products, only in an underground radioactive lava blob, a core catcher should be build under the reactor. Even in the worst case of supercritical core explosion, radioactive products should stay contained underground, we know this from underground nuclear weapon tests (so no Chernobyl scenario).
As the main opponent of nuclear power I don't see the wind and solar industry, because wind and solar can't on itself power an industrial country in an economic way (Yes, with no regards to costs you can power industrial country with wind and solar, the German Energiewende plan, the amount of renewable energy support paid by consumers through their power bills is currently around 25 billion euros per year). Battery improvements will help solar power to bridge the day/night cycle in coming decades, and increase solar penetration in places with high solar irradiance. The cost effective long term electricity storage is not solved problem, or to be more precise: the currently most cost effective solution for renewable variability is fossil fuels.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/how-much-does-ger...
As the main opponent of nuclear power I see nuclear proliferation. Lets not fool ourself, nuclear technology is a dual use civilian/military technology. The access to nuclear material, the experience with handling iradiated material can be used to make nuclear weapons. Each nuclear reactor produces materials or can be modified to produce materials for nuclear weapons. Each country capable of manufacturing nuclear fuel can produce materials for nuclear weapons. As much as nuclear power plants are now associated in the minds of general public with risks of radiation, the minds of politicians are focused on possibility of other countries acquiring nuclear weapons. I see many regulations in nuclear power industry that unreasonably increase costs of building nuclear power plants (LNT, ALARA) mainly not as means to save life (coal is much more dangerous), but as means to strengthen nuclear proliferation prevention by preventing more countries building nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons-grade#Weapons-grade_pl...
The most important part is the generation. Making specific types of cars required right now is VERY premature, and will just cause backlash.
Let's focus on just one (main) thing: Clean generation of electricity. The rest will come in due course.
But your 3 to 4 times number is also not real, because the actual number is 2 to 3 - and that's measured at the outlet, if you measure starting from primary power generation they are about 2 times as efficient, not 4.
So I stand by what I said: Electric vehicles are not what matters for clean energy, what matters is power generation.
(for the young'uns this is a reference to the also-senseless Iraq War, which had a follow on effect of distracting from this issue in favor of solipsistic entitlement and the adoption of SUVs. but looking back wistfully, at least the government and media didn't insult us by not even manufacturing a casus belli)
Pumped storage hydro electricity is one of our least ecologically devastating options and we are not even remotely close to exhausting locations we can put them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
There is a hidden upside to all this hydro: it could potentially be upgraded to pumped storage and support a massive expansion of solar and wind. However, no SA country has such a forward-looking energy policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_in...
Venezuela is an unusual case because their economy has been a disaster for the last half decade. And I agree that the data aren't so straightforward.
" Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes increased by +0.7% within 2025."
So we're working on it. Not as fast as we need, but progress is being made.
It's too little too late.
India's CO2 emissions growth rate is around 4% [0], and India's economy is expected to grow at around 6-7% a year for at least the next decade. This means India's contribution alone will grow massively.
And what about other large countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc who are also seeing massive expansions.
Edit: can't reply
The Indian government's "electro-state" transition is predicated on coal expansion [1] - yes at a rate slower than before, but still at a rate that is a net negative for the environment.
This is also why India backed out of hosting COP33 in 2028 [2] - it would have brought this inconvenient truth to the forefront [3]
[0] - https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/india-mul...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/india-withdraws-b...
[3] - https://www.dw.com/en/why-india-walked-away-from-its-bid-to-...
India is taking a shortcut so to say. If climate friendly energy becomes successful in India, it will bbee successful in other countries to. Currently the biggest threat is US forcing people to buy its venezualan and fracking oil.
Chinese burning of coal for electric power generation decreased, but total coal consumption has increased. In China, coal use is shifting from power production to synthetic fuels and chemicals made from coal, the carbon from synthetic fuels will be emitted as CO2. Will this shift happen also in India?
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chines...
China is still building new coal power plants, they will be probably used as backup for solar.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/india
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/solar-surge-halts-fo...
There are many examples across the world where countries are doing very sub optimal things that simply don't make any economical sense. Germany has a lot of industry close to where coal used to be mined that is very energy intensive that is now being powered with expensive gas. Likewise, instead of using electrical heat pumps, most of their buildings still use gas boilers. Worse, they are not even fixing that in new buildings they build.
The UK has lots of wind power. But it prices its electricity based on the highest cost generation on the grid, which is usually gas. So, data centers get built close to London because the electricity isn't any cheaper in Scotland where all the clean renewable power is. And since they have too much of that, they actually just curtail it instead of giving a little discount to the locals (or just pricing it negatively and paying them to consume the power). So, like the Germans, the Scots also use gas for heating their houses.
Germany has a few million apartment blocks. They pretty much all run on gas. There is no plan to fix that. You might have noticed that gas is really expensive and has to be imported in LNG form as of a few years ago. That's costing many billions per year. Even if they would build gas power plants and converted all those buildings to use electrical heat pumps, it would still save billions in less imported gas (heat pumps are amazingly efficient). And of course they have a lot of frequently curtailed wind power as well. Germany is too busy spending money on gas to fix the problem that they need so much gas.
Policy changes could straighten inefficiencies like these out in a relatively short time. But those are controversial because high prices mean high profits for incumbent companies. So governments are dragging their feet and are not doing anything about this. Those big companies are lobbying to protect their profits. And the fossil fuel industry is cheering them along and pitching fantasy schemes about hydrogen to delay their inevitable demise. The public spending on that is insane if you understand how piss poor the economics around hydrogen are. Incentives are completely misaligned, policy prevents a lot of otherwise very rational/economical action, and a lot of that is perpetuated by companies that thrive on the expensive status quo and the politicians they have in their pocket.
The current crisis in the Gulf is probably going to accelerate a lot of policy changes by quite a lot. Nothing like a good crisis to force some changes.
Maybe he has been installed by the renewable energy sector actually to get the whole world onto renewables as soon as possible.
Of course, they had to give up on or delay America’s renewable future, but that may be a small Price to pay, and anyways renewables are growing in the U.S. despite the administration’s frankly insane efforts to block it
Convincing Joe Public to understand yesterday switching to those is in their best interest is also necessary and very hard to do.
Mission Acomplished.
Interruptions of supply cause people to get antsy. They start looking for alternatives. A drought leads to a surge in well-points and bore holes. Rainwater collection goes up. Electricity outages lead to generators, solar and so on, all easily installed at domestic level.
Food shortages lead to more strategic agriculture choices. Oil shortages start to make EVs more attractive. This is the first major interruption in oil supply since the 70s. I start to think the next car I buy will be electric. I already have solar so it makes sense.
The biggest way to change society is to make the perception that supply is precarious or expensive. Long after the drought ends, the lessons remain.
The leading climate-denier voice , who rails against clean energy, has also caused a world-wide understanding of how precarious our oil supply is. That lesson will stick, regardless of your politics.
I've heard a lot of people being critical of wind turbines, calling them ugly and wanting nothing to do with them. After the Ukraine war started I remember driving into town, seeing the five massive wind turbines at the harbour, providing three time the power the city needs, and thinking "not only do they look great, they're also part of our self sufficiency".
The US is a different place, but the hate parts of the US have towards renewable energy is pretty insane. I know the wind isn't always blow, the sun not always shining, but each installation is still one step closer to not being beholden to the whims of some crazy person in a far of land.
By the way, wind turbines off the coast of one of Trump's golf properties in Scotland are the reason he keeps trying to ban wind turbines.
Are they? I mean, that's very much a taste thing. I think they're pretty nifty looking, especially the enormous modern ones with blades longer than airliner wings. Great products of industry and engineering have their own beauty, and these are definitely on the list with stuff like the Great Wall or Hoover Dam, IMHO.
- storage over the 24 hour cycle - storage over yearly cycles - how to fix nitrogen for agriculture - how to make carbon-free metals - how to run the chemical industry without fossil fuels
The good news has been the expansion of solar through markets, the diffusion of innovation, competition, and something like Moore's Law. The bad news is we are reaching the saturation point for the grid being able to absorb solar energy in many places and that's going to stop the growth unless those bottlenecks are overcome.
If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.
Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.
One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].
Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].
[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...
[2]: https://prospect.org/2026/04/29/aftermath-china-electrifying...
[3]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...
[6]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/europe-getting-dangerously-re...
The status of "fossil fuels" isn't crucial to these uses, it's just cheaper. You can just make kerosene, but you wouldn't because you already use fossil fuels for power. However if you have abundant energy without fossil fuels and you want kerosene for some reason you can make it for $$$$
Doesn't China have most of the exotic rare earths and stuff that you need in order to build solar panels and systems? I am not anti-solar, but I also don't think China is some guaranteed-friendly party that the whole world can trust not to wield their power once they have it.
I assume anyone who doesn't immediately recognize their planned takeover of Taiwan next year will have a hard time getting any type of raw materials like that.
Solar panels do not require rare earth elements. Some types of permanent magnets require rare earth elements, and some of those magnets are used in wind turbines, which might be where this confusion comes from since wind turbines and solar panels are frequently mentioned together. (Although even most wind turbines do not use rare earth magnets.)
Crystalline silicon solar panels account for more than 95% of the global solar market. These are mostly made of glass, aluminum, silicon, and polymers. The rarest element typically used in them is silver, for metallic pastes used to form cell contacts. China is a significant but not dominant silver producer. In 2024 it accounted for about 13% of world silver production:
As for rare earths, they aren't as rare as the suppliers would seem to suggest. The difference is that China has invested in rare earth extraction and processing and really nobody else has. Likewise, the solar investment was an intentional policy goal. Imagine where the US might be if the $8T+ spent on the so-called Global War on Terror had been spent on renewable infrastructure instead.
As for China behaving in such a belligerent fashion, I'm sorry but let's just compare. Here's a list of US military actions since 1945 [1] and a history of US-led, backed or supplied regime change [2]. The fearmongering around China is just so... manufactured.
[1]: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2023/04/timeline-of-united-sta...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
And I was corrected about how much we need China for solar panels - though with them being a hugely dominant current producer of the panels themselves, I still think they have moderate leverage. But indeed limited if other countries theoretically can build out a PV industry without China's blessing.
And I'd like to acknowledge the 'drill bit' metaphor. Would still be painful to not be able to replace solar panels that are constantly aging out, but not nearly as painful as losing a portion of oil or gas supply has been lately.
Panels are oil drills, not oil.