Nothing hampers solar, wind, and batteries though; at worst it takes longer to ship the key components from China to Europe around Africa.
For example in reaction to 1973 Arab oil embargo Carter boosted energy efficiency and solar and promoted coal.
" "America indeed is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and my goal as President of the United States is to see on the world energy markets Arab oil replaced with Illinois coal," Carter told miners and employees of the Old Ben Coal Mine No. 25. He also boasted that the country would, "produce more coal in 1980 than has ever before been produced in the United States of America." "
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/29/1158426645/jimmy-carters-envi...
New coal gasification projects in India
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-clears-4-billi...
Fossil fuel is still going strong and will probably stay so for the next 50 years. Like I just learned Taiwan makes most of its energy from coal and LNG and is set to denuclearize, which blew my mind given their cutting edge manufacturing economy, but kinda makes sense when you factor in their geography and geopolitics.
Some highlights:
Driven by record solar growth, low-carbon power generation increased by 887 TWh in 2025, outpacing electricity demand growth of 849 TWh. Solar power alone met 75% of the net increase in electricity demand. Together with wind, the two sources met almost all (99%) demand growth. For the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and only the fifth time this century, fossil generation did not rise, recording a small fall of 38 TWh (-0.2%).
The global fall in fossil generation was driven by a historic reversal in fossil trends in China and India, the largest and third-largest fossil power countries globally. 2025 was the first year this century when fossil generation fell in both countries. In China, it fell by 56 TWh (-0.9%), marking the first decline since 2015.
For the first time in 100 years, renewables (33.8%, 10,730 TWh) overtook coal power (33.0%, 10,476 TWh) in the global electricity mix as continued rapid growth in solar and wind pushed the share of renewables above a third of global generation. Coal power dropped 63 TWh (-0.6%) in 2025, marking the first fall since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Combined with continued electricity demand growth, this meant coal fell below a third of global generation for the first time in history.
This year, oil and gas are projected to fall as a whole, although coal is still expected to grow:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-global-fossil-fuel-emis...
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-em...
Fossil fuels are not used only for electricity production, they are also used for heating (low temp, high temp), feed stock for chemical proceses, combustion engines.
For now.
The majority of solar panels are made in China (85%), and they plan to invade Taiwan in just a few years, possibly as soon as 2027, at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production or defend Taiwan and cut ourselves off from the source of almost all manufactured products, and especially solar panels.
Can you share your sources for that valuable intelligence? Military analysts would really be interested to learn that. Or is that form the same manufactured scaremongering genre as "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons" and "Iraq has WMDs" to justify endless defense spending, military interventions and warmongering.
> at which point either we let them take control of AI chip production
You can't just commandeer semi fabs like you're carjacking a Hyundai for a joyride. Semi fabs need constant parts and on-prem staff and always-on telemetry from ASML & friends to run. If that's gone, you're left with a very expensive warehouse that can't do shit.
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-CHINA/TAIWAN-INVASION/z...
https://www.ft.com/content/36a00ba4-6178-4267-9786-3e0b59abe...
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-taiwan-military-naval-...
> "Iran is 6 weeks away from building nuclear weapons"
It is the breakout time, not the schedule.
It is incredible to me how pervasive the misunderstanding of this statement is!
I've had real-life conversations with project managers just like this:
PM: "How long would this project take?"
Me: "One month."
... two weeks later ...
PM: "How long would the project take to finish?"
Me: "One month."
PM: "You said that two weeks ago! It should only take two weeks to finish!"
Me: "Why would you think that? We never started the project! It wasn't approved. You didn't approve it, personally. The effort is four weeks. If you approve and we start today, it will still take that long to complete."
... two more weeks later ...
PM: "Why isn't the project finished!? You said one month a month ago!"
Me: "... wat?"
That's not the same thing as planning to invade in 2027, though. Militaries can need a capability without an imminent specific plan to actually use it. See the US's amphibious capacity. See nukes.
And why wouldn't they build that type of stuff for self defense? Which country doesn't do self defense? Have you seen how huge China's coast is and how many islands they have to defend?
Firstly, this take is poorly thought out from a facts perspective, needlessly alarmist and mostly just FUD.
The fact is that China has thousands of islands in its territory already. So how else would their military be able to DEFEND those islands WITHOUT "a massive fleet of amphibious landing craft" capable of landing troops and material on islands that they own? It doesn't mean they 100% WILL invade Taiwan just because they have them, like you claim.
Secondly, the three news sources you then quoted are just your typical clickbaity mainstream media with nothing to lose if they are wrong in their alarmist predictions or just blatantly lie like they often do to manipulate people and financial markets, especially given their incentives and ties to politics and the wealthy elite.
So telling people on HN with 100% certainty China will invade Taiwan in the near future just because you read something about China's drills of Taiwan invasion in the MSM, just gets you more egg on your face that nobody can take your takes on this seriously. I'm 100% sure that the US Navy also regularly has drills on nuking China and Russia from their submarines, that doesn't mean they're actually planning to do it anytime soon with no provocation. So please, stop turning what is bland vanilla news into alarmist FUD.
Chinas has hundreds (not thousands) of islands in its territory, which has increased from 287 in 2019 to 431 in 2026. This is not "defense".
> nobody can take your takes on this seriously.
Russia moved mobile crematoriums up to the Ukraine border in February 2022, and people still dismissed the chances of their invasion as vanishingly unlikely.
Dismissing an obvious military buildup from a country that has plainly stated their intentions is an error.
With the argument being ... ?
Your second paragraph assumes China doesn’t have all the espionage necessary, and hasn’t proven their capabilities on their own labs.
Like the Chinese are just sans neocortex or something.
It feels like MAD is eroding, because at one point the reaction to China invading Taiwan would obviously have been a nuclear exchange.
There is no way anyone would nuke China if/when they invade Taiwan the same way nobody nuked Russia when they invaded Ukraine. And Russia is a lot less relevant globally than China.
It'll be another conventional war like the current Russo-Ukrainian one where the west will sanction China and support Taiwan.
During operation a string of solar cells is under a pretty high voltage. It makes sodium ions from the covering glass infiltrate slowly into the silicon, potentially ruining the p-n junction ("potential-induced degradation", PID). Usually an industry-grade panel controller applies a reverse voltage during night time, to drive the sodium ions back from the silicon. A rogue controller might instead apply the same voltage, accelerating PID instead of reverting it (and kill it in several months). A really insidious producer might add a strip of extra sodium-rich material near the normal electric conductors, which would be triggered by voltage higher than normal operation to flood the silicon with sodium (and kill it in several days).
Except you know, all the actual mining and manufacturing of those things, which isn't in the west but mostly in China.
So what if all our oil comes from the middle east?
So what if all our gas comes from Russia?
So what if all chips are made in Taiwan?
So what if all mobile platforms are from the US?
Either way though, you don't have 20 years to get up to speed.
You have 20 years minus one day, as every day elapses.
Existing installed solar capacity is degrading at one day per day.
There is no product on the planet that has a a multi decade warranty with this kind of performance guarantee.
I do hope the US turns around. As I see it, we (western countries) have aligned values and it's better for us all (US included) to stick together.
Sadly, it does not mean that EU or USA grew less dependent on China for solar panels, industrial chemicals, or a lot of other things. OTOH, they did not grow more dependent either.
We could have sovereign control over our energy supply with renewables and electrification. Yay, we become a great sovereign nation free to do whatever we want with our great British energy supply!
But no, the right wing answer is to develop a couple of gas fields in the north sea that would supply a tiny amount of actual energy requirements, and do nothing for prices as it all goes into a global trading platform.
I know the reason, it's hard to say no to all that money from the fossil industry, and walk back decades of indoctrinating your base at their behest. Even if it means making your country energy independent...
Meanwhile, the left in the UK doesn't want to drill (so less money for electrification) while the right in the UK doesn't want to electrify (so less money due to more imports). Why doesn't anyone want to copy the Norwegian model?
- Norway had and still has a lot more oil in their part of the North Sea than the UK does
- Norway has a vastly smaller population than the UK; more than ten times smaller (5.6m versus 69m). Each Norwegian gets 10x more money coming in than they would as UK citizens, just from demographics.
- Norway gambled by having the state directly invest in drilling (Statoil), while UK governments (both Labour in the 1960s and Conservative in the 1970s) refused to invest public money in drilling. Instead they let commercial companies find the money, the government merely licensed and taxed. The reason they did this was that Britain didn't have enough capital available to fund drilling at the time oil was discovered; it was the "sick man of Europe"
- Norway put its oil money into a state pension fund which continues to pay dividends today. Margaret Thatcher spent the oil money on rejuvenating the London Docklands, which admittedly did improve London's standing as the centre of global finance, which is what currently brings in most money for the UK. Perhaps if she didn't do that then financial companies might have moved elsewhere, we don't know that for sure. What we do know is she didn't spend it rejuvenating anywhere else in the country, like Scotland, Wales and Northern England after she shut the coal mines and steel mills and bought in foreign coal and steel.
No, you could not.