No, Sorry, the War Doesn’t Mean ‘Renewables’ Will Replace Oil
No, Sorry, the War Doesn’t Mean ‘Renewables’ Will Replace Oil
As war fuels new climate urgency, the numbers show renewables still cannot replace the energy that powers modern civilization.
Right on schedule, the climate activists and their corporate backers are capitalizing on wartime fuel shortages to claim that now, finally, we can get serious about fighting climate change. On March 15, The New York Times weighed in with an article titled “How War in Iran Could Remake the Global Energy Landscape.” Claiming the oil crisis could “spur countries to invest in wind, solar, and other renewables,” the article quotes UN “Climate Chief” Simon Stiell, saying, “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, this is the time.”
This is the same Simon Stiell who, in April 2024, claimed that the energy industry had only two years left “to save the world” by making “dramatic changes in the way it spews heat-trapping emissions, and it has even less time to act to get the finances behind such a massive shift.”
It’s difficult to know where to begin in the face of such ghoulish opportunism. Increasing numbers of credible observers have begun to question the apocalyptic urgency of the climate emergency narrative, but now that refineries are blowing up and ships are sinking in the Persian Gulf, there’s a new compelling reason to accelerate the transition to “renewables.”
So, now that the climate industrial complex discovers new momentum thanks to a catastrophic war, maybe, by the numbers, it’s also time for another reality check.
We can start by acknowledging that there is a direct connection between energy and prosperity. If we accept that premise, then here’s an immutable fact based on data reported in the 2025 edition of the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy: For everyone on earth to have access to half the energy per capita that Americans consume, global energy production will have to more than double.
To document that fact, about a year ago, in an in-depth analysis titled “The Delusions of Davos and Dubai,” I reported per capita gigajoules of energy consumption in the world, comparing Americans to the global average, and related that to total global energy consumption, measured in exajoules. Not much has changed.
Yearly per capita energy use by Americans, according to updated 2024 data, averaged 268 gigajoules. The UN estimates the global population will peak later this century at 10.3 billion people. If every one of them consumed an average of 134 gigajoules—half what Americans consume—the total energy required worldwide to deliver that much energy would be 1,381 exajoules. In 2025, total energy production in the world was 592 exajoules.
When it comes to delivering enough energy to assure prosperity around the world, that’s what we’re up against. Proponents of renewables often also support new technologies to deliver energy more efficiently. They’re right, and that’s why the 1,381 exajoules that we’re going to need someday will amount to half as much energy as Americans consume per person. Can we do even better? Deliver efficiency gains of more than 50 percent? OK. Fine. Let’s set our total global energy production goal at 1,000 exajoules. That’s a good round number, and it’s the minimum amount of energy we’re going to need.
The real question is how, since renewables are evidently our future, will they fill the gap, much less contribute to massive increases in global energy production, if oil, natural gas, and coal are removed from our energy landscape?
Here’s how those exajoules stacked up by fuel source in 2024. Of the 592 exajoules produced (EJs), 199 came from oil, 165 came from coal, and 149 came from natural gas. That constitutes 87 percent of all energy consumed. The share of global energy produced by oil, coal, and gas is rising, not falling. Nuclear energy produced 31 EJs, hydroelectricity produced 16, and “renewables” altogether produced 33 EJs, but five of those were from biofuel.
So let’s imagine we’re going to come up with 1,000 exajoules of energy to power global civilization mid-century, and let’s suppose we’re going to do that without the 513 EJs we currently get from oil, coal, and gas. We can rule out biofuel as a major contributor. There are already over 400,000 square miles of biofuel plantations in the world, where total arable farmland only totals around six million square miles. Biofuel production has devastated rainforests throughout the tropics, from Brazil to Indonesia. Even doubling biofuel production would wreak a catastrophe on the environment and only bring us 10 exajoules out of the 1,000 that are needed. The same goes for hydroelectric energy. It is difficult to imagine even doubling output; most of the best rivers have already been harnessed for hydroelectricity. Figure hydroelectric potential maxes at around 30 EJs. If biofuel and hydroelectricity—both problematic if vastly expanded—could be doubled in capacity, we would still have 960 EJs to go.
That brings us to our remaining wild cards: nuclear, geothermal, solar, and wind. Shall we double our nuclear power output? Or triple it, which was the goal set at the COP28 summit? Let’s be wildly ambitious and anticipate nuclear power becoming common. Small modular reactors, thorium reactors, innovation galore, and voilà, we will have more than quintupled our nuclear output. That means we are now producing 200 EJs per year (160 nuclear, 30 hydroelectric, and 10 biofuel). We still have to go find another 800 EJs of power, and we’re left with geothermal, wind, and solar.
We can debate the scalability of these three sources of energy all we like, but the chances they expand from 28 EJs today to 800 EJs by mid-century are slim. It would require output to expand by 30 times. Do we actually expect to construct 30 times as many wind farms, 30 times as many solar farms, and 30 times as many battery farms as we have today? Let’s not forget that all this conversion to electricity isn’t finished once we successfully generate that much power, even if it were possible. There are the batteries, stationary and mobile, and an entire infrastructure that has run on combustible fuels.
Solutions commonly offered are revealed upon analysis to be glib. Shall we create hydrogen via electrolysis? Then throw away improved efficiency. Electrolysis only extracts, best case, about 70 percent of the electricity in the form of hydrogen. If the hydrogen is then turned back into electricity using a fuel cell, once again, only 70 percent of the energy in the hydrogen turns back into electricity. And, of course, it takes another 10 percent of energy input to compress the hydrogen into usable storage. Worse still, hydrogen can’t be moved through existing pipelines, as the metal becomes brittle from exposure to pure hydrogen. And what about geothermal? Current worldwide electrical production from geothermal is estimated at 0.4 EJs. It has potential, but it has a long way to go.
All these facts are known. Replacing oil, coal, and gas would require a massive surge in mining because clean‑energy technologies use far more mineral resources. Onshore wind farms require about nine times more mineral input per megawatt than gas‑fired plants. Wind, solar, batteries, and grid infrastructure require, for example, lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite, rare earth elements, and copper in quantities that are already stretched. The idea that we can scale our extraction of these minerals by a factor of 30 is absolutely ridiculous.
Anyone confronting these numbers honestly must wonder how proponents of renewable energy can possibly demand that, within only a decade or two, we shall stop using fossil fuels. Perhaps much of the true motivation of the special interests promoting renewables is as old as humanity and is to be expected: a desire for power and profit. There is no credible moral case for renewables, because if they begin to serve more than a niche of the world’s energy needs, they will then inflict environmental harm that rivals or exceeds anything we’ve yet seen from oil, coal, or natural gas.
The math is simple and immutable. Fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere. Someday, somehow, technological innovations will displace them, but it may take centuries. When politicians, pundits, and the marketing arms of renewable developers use the “climate emergency,” or a terrifying war, as their justification to, for example, industrialize the supposedly off-limits California coast with thousands of floating windmills, each of them a thousand feet tall, consuming an obscene amount of resources, costing an obscene amount of money, and wreaking an obscene genocide on cetaceans and other marine life, see them for who they are: either ghoulish opportunists who exploit fear to further their own aggrandizement or innumerate fanatics whose good intentions pave a road to hell.
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