It may not have been clear in this piece, so let me make it clear here: I believe the net-zero transition will ultimately be much easier and cheaper than even today's most optimistic estimates. The reason is that innovation is incredibly powerful, and many groups are working on numerous new technologies, such as novel battery chemistries, that will revolutionize energy in ways that are completely unforeseen.
The energy sources we have now are pretty much the same we had 20 years ago. Only the prices of some of them has come down. But these prices have now flatlined. Since we do not have any new energy source in the pipeline, it seems that the prediction of future energy scenarios is not as uncertain as it was 10 years ago.
Battery prices are still coming down, which will help renewable energy because it allows your time shift the power you generate from those sources. In addition, geopolitical instability will still have a big impact on prices and that’s basically impossible to predict.
Predictions are useful only as inputs into policy decisions. In practice they are not very importance. They, together with models of the harm from CO2 accumulation detrmng the optimal trajectory for a tax n net emissions, but becadue we will need ot ease into that tax, its ultimte level, movenents in the '50's and 60's are not important today Starte with $200 or $600, but START
The thread keeps circling the same divide: optimists who see the transition accelerating and pessimists who see it stalling or failing. Both are forecasts about the energy future, and Andrew's point is that nobody — in either camp — has a good track record predicting that future.
But notice what isn't uncertain. Whatever the emissions trajectory turns out to be, the physics that translates cumulative CO₂ into warming doesn't depend on which forecast wins. And that warming doesn't unwind on any timescale that matters to us — the CO₂ we add persists for centuries to millennia, and the temperature and sea level response keeps playing out long after emissions stop. The energy future is genuinely unknown; the climate consequences of it are not, and they're effectively permanent. That's the asymmetry worth holding onto — it's why the uncertainty in the first half is an argument for acting on the second half, not against it.
Regarding peak oil, conventional oil production did, in fact peak around the time of the craze. It was only the craze of fracking that kept oil production increasing. Fracking may be peaking about now.
Agreed. I was utterly convinced that peak global oil production was going to happen about 20 years ago and that peak natural gas would shortly follow. I wouldn’t describe fracking as a “craze”, but we were all blindsided by it when it happened just in time to avoid societal disruption due to massive cost increases and shortages of oil and gas. And you’re right that the production benefits of fracking now seem to be tailing off, though the (notably unreliable) predictions are that consumption decline over the coming decades will make an inability to produce more, irrelevant.
It’s common knowledge that LCOE is not a realistic measure when applied to intermittent sources such as wind and solar. These sources need backup power, require expensive interconnection, and have been heavily subsidized. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
Edit: you may have an argument if you're referring to LCOE strictly defined. Other measures such as Lazard's 'LCOE+" are being adopted, to incorporate such factors as battery backup capacity. Note that LCOE and its derivatives specify unsubsidized costs.
On the Heatmap site, Dr. Dessler submitted an updated version of this post where he stated:
“I’m using levelized cost of energy as my measure of the cost to produce power from each source. I understand the limitations of LCOE, but for an energy developer, LCOE is the number that counts. Yes, wind and solar are intermittent, but that’s a grid problem. All that matters to the developer is which low-LCOE energy source they can build.”
Interestingly if you read another Heatmap article “limitations of LCOE” which he links above you can see why LCOE is meaningless to evaluate different types of energy when intermittent sources are involved. The author clearly states LCOE is only a meaningful measure to show the cost of a single power source over time.
And yes intermittent power is a grid problem. But guess what. That can be a deal killer for a lot solar and wind projects when the total costs including the grid revisions and additions are considered. Without a well designed and reliable grid it doesn’t matter how much intermittent power gets installed, it will be useless. The mantra to build wind and solar as fast as possible and we’ll worry about the rest later has caused higher electricity prices due to having to deal with too much or not enough power and the costs to connect it. And, there still has to be redundant power for nighttime and when the wind doesn’t blow. And batteries won’t get you there.
These types of statements by credentialed climate scientists are what casts a shadow over whatever they say. This is shown by the recent declaration that RCP 8.5 was killed because solar and wind are so much cheaper now that it significantly changed the scenario basis. It was completely implausible from the start. Spin and half truths only serve to weaken any arguments and beg the question of what the real end game is. If it is saving the planet, it’s not obvious because spreading known inaccuracies doesn’t help anyone except for those with nefarious intentions.
As others have noted, going to Net Very Little seems doable, but going from Net Very Little to Net Zero is when we have to address all of the hardest problems. Meanwhile, increasing natural sources of GHGs (crown wildfires, thawing permafrost), with the removal/reduction of natural sinks (loss of forest, CO2 saturation of warming oceans) means Net Zero is an uphill climb.
Like p**sing in the wind. We can grind down emissions, scale up cdr, but where have all the carbon sinks gone? And how are we gonna stop CH4 from melting tundra? Why do I always REFLECT on this?
FWIW, thawing permafrost results in more GHGs two different ways:
1. Microbes with access to newly-thawed organic matter produce CO2 (from aerobes) and CH4 (from anaerobes).
2. Thawing weakens the hard caps over old existing methane reservoirs, and at some point they blow out at the surface (leaving craters all over the Arctic) and add to the atmosphere.
You often hear the argument that "renewables rely on fossil fuels during manufacturing Inc mining the raw materials" and there is no way around that (at present).
The extreme version of that argument is that there isn't enough fossil fuel LEFT to actually transition the world, anyway.
I think the argument that we need fossil fuels to produce renewables is misleading at best. What we need is energy. Today, at least, most of our energy comes from fossil fuels. However, there is no physical reason why we cannot use renewable energy in place of fossil fuel energy.
I've never heard that we don't have enough fossil fuels for the transition. That sounds crazy to me.
Crazy? Well, the share of primary energy use for fossil fuels, globally, is still around 80%. Of course, exponential growth of renewables may get that proportion down quickly, at some point. However, exponential growth of renewables also means exponential growth of the fossil fuels needed to extract the minerals and build the infrastructure for renewables (the infrastructure is not renewable). If fossil fuels can be substituted for by electricity (and I've read some serious analysis that says this is impossible for all uses, despite your optimism), it seems likely that there will be a point when fossil fuel use is too low to maintain a viable fossil fuel industry, especially as the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels has gone, so extraction becomes uneconomical. Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart. The transition would not be completed, nor would it be necessary, at that point.
The optimistic voices of a transition being possible are, I think, over-optimistic and exclude a serious examination of what is needed and how we manage the depletion of all resources needed to continue an environmentally destructive economy after that.
It's surprising that you haven't come across such analyses from, for example, Simon Michaux and Vaclav Smil, among others. There have also been serious critiques of Mark Jacobson's optimistic scenarios for a 2050 transition (now badly out of date). Even if there is no theoretical barrier to a transition, the practical problems of scaling up mineral extraction may make a 2050 date impossible. If there is a speed up of renewable infrastructure in parallel with existing industrial uses, oil extraction may need to temporarily grow significantly, even as the world is facing an extended period of reduced production.
"If fossil fuels can be substituted for by electricity (and I've read some serious analysis that says this is impossible for all uses, despite your optimism),"
The whole point of Prof. Dessler's post is that technological innovation is unpredictable, making what seems impossible today, easy and cheap tomorrow.
"it seems likely that there will be a point when fossil fuel use is too low to maintain a viable fossil fuel industry, especially as the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels has gone, so extraction becomes uneconomical. Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart. "
It *seems* likely? What nonsense! Our host just got through showing that the cost of carbon-neutral energy generation and storage has been persistently over-estimated! That's because technological and manufacturing innovation has continuously driven down the cost of electrifying energy consumption with renewables: the invisible hand of the global 'free' market at work. All claims that one or another current requirement for fossil carbon is unchangeable, are overconfident.
So no, the global economy is not likely to collapse when nobody is buying fossil fuels anymore! Fossil carbon extraction will cease when there's no profit in it anymore because carbon-neutral alternatives are more economical in every market segment. At worst, the private fortunes of carbon capitalists will decline, along with their political power: socially, a net benefit. But the global marketplace guarantees that if there's a demand for fossil carbon, there will be a supply. As long as *anyone* is willing to pay a high enough price to make extraction profitable, it will be available!
[Edit: I asked Gemini if the second quote by Mr. Roberts is obstructionist. Its reply:
'The obstructionism lies entirely in the fatalism of the second sentence: "Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart."
'In climate discourse, obstructionism isn't just outright climate denial anymore; it is often "doomism" or "systemic fatalism." By framing the end of fossil fuels as an absolute economic apocalypse, the narrative subtly argues that we must prop up the fossil fuel industry indefinitely to survive.'
There are other reasons for oil extraction to cease being profitable, not just the carbon-neutral (whatever that means) alternatives become more economical. As it becomes harder to find and extract the needed oil, the techniques become more complex, with more energy needed to extract it. Surely that's not controversial?
But, of course, optimism that modernity can continue with some magical energy supply that doesn't cause any environmental harm will continue to be the order of the day. It's understandable. No-one wants to live a truly sustainable life-style.
My issue is with "Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart." That's over-the-top alarmism, and calls your motivation into question. The global economy will adapt to the end of cheap oil, at lower net cost than adapting to open-ended global warming. What's your justification for that rhetorical tactic, if not to protect fossil fuel producer profits?
Decarbonizing the global economy will not magically eliminate all environmental harms. All it will do is cap the trend of GMST. But that has to happen if any other "environmental" impact is to be mitigated going forward. And there's nothing hard about "carbon-neutral". It refers to any energy that isn't produced by burning fossil carbon. Burning wood or bagasse doesn't contribute to global warming, because biomass is part of the short-term carbon cycle. Even nuclear power is nominally carbon-neutral.
Lastly, the only truly sustainable lifestyle is one wholly disconnected from the global market. Few indeed want to live entirely off the grid. But the human population hasn't been sustainable since the spread of agriculture allowed us to exceed local natural carrying capacity permanently. Global warming is far from humanity's only destructive impact on the biosphere, but it is the biggest in history, and literally every organism is affected. Mitigating all our other impacts will be futile if GMST keeps rising open-ended.
Meanwhile, peak population is a few decades away, and once our numbers start to decline, no later than the end of this century, all our impacts will begin to be ameliorated: remember "I=PAT"?
Beyond the point of fossil fuel extraction being economical, and, so, stopping, how does the global economy not fall apart? That's if it manages to get to that point.
I certainly agree that a sustainable lifestyle is not compatible with "the grid" or the "global market." Indeed, though I'd never be able to live that way, I haven't yet come across any sustainable way of life other than hunting and gathering (the way all other species live).
Though rising GMST may be the biggest current predicament, just about all the environmental damage humans have done up to this point has nothing to do with GMST. Focusing on one issue to the detriment of all others is not helpful long term.
By the way, simply burning biomass doesn't mean carbon neutral. It depends on the scale and whether that biomass is harvested below the rate of renewal.
AIUI from Matt Randolph (former oilman known as "Mr. Global"), the US is domestically past "peak oil" (i.e., the cheapest-to-extract oil is mostly gone and global oil companies find more profit in the new fields of Guyana, Namibia, Brazil, etc.).
Every solar panel, wind turbine or battery that China makes costs less fossil fuel than the one before. The last few percent of applications represent a small portion of our CO2 emissions, and even then many of applications that people often cited as hard to displace have already had proof-of-concept replacements (that still need to propagate across industries): semi trucks and heavy equipment industries (mining and construction) find that electric motors are cheaper to power and maintain than combustion technology. Before Operation Epic Fuckup, China was transitioning its refineries to produce ·less· diesel due to reduced domestic demand (and produce more multi-use naphtha instead). And even as new coal power plants were being built (with modern efficiency and reduced lung pollution), old coal plants were being shut down. The new coal plants don't even run as much, except during major heat dome demand and/or when long droughts reduce hydropower generation.
As far as mineral extraction is concerned, the materials used by RE are ·recyclable·, as opposed to fossil fuels, which entail extracting, burning, then extracting some more, ad nauseum. Grid batteries* (what I call "slab" batteries) don't have to be optimized for weight, and the new generation use more abundant materials (e.g., iron or sodium).
All the Metals We Mined in 2022 (Not shown: →8.4 tonnes of coal← mined in 2022)
*Watch out for disinformation about the early generation batteries needing child-labor cobalt: We have new chemistries that don't need cobalt at all, and none of them mention that the fossil fuel refineries themselves have been using cobalt forever. Also ignore old stats about the percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, since that was based on little batteries in phones and e-toys, and the large lithium batteries are eagerly reused or recycled.
Dave Borlace's "Just Have a Think" videos summarize current research on climate and energy. In this one he points out the flaw in how comparisons between FF and renewable energy are made, such that gross inefficiencies in combustion technology are overlooked. (I especially like the Sankey charts shown ~4 minutes in.)
"You often hear the argument that 'renewables rely on fossil fuels during manufacturing Inc mining the raw materials' and there is no way around that (at present)."
Well, duh! Those who make that argument seem to think nobody else recognizes that. No one is realistically proposing that the world stop burning all fossil carbon immediately. Decarbonization will happen incrementally over the next couple of decades, but more and more of the energy to build out the carbon-neutral global economy will itself be carbon-neutral. Revenue from the sale of fossil carbon will decline, until eventually nobody buys it because renewables+storage is cheaper in every sector. The only losers will be fossil fuel capitalists left with stranded assets. Even that will probably be negotiated away in decarbonization legislation.
Why is global coal demand rising each year? Why are there nearly 1,000 coal fired power stations being built? And why are power bills in grids that have more than 25% renewables generation rising due to large network costs caused by complexity and big new transmission lines to nowhere?
The switch from coal to gas in the US is a result of fracking of newly discovered gas seams with a lot of back-up gas peaks for unreliable intermittent renewables. That's not confirmation of renewables being the sensible future.
One electricity generator requires no fuel, and the other requires constant refueling and maintenance (coal oil gas) with cost and availability dependent upon geopolitics? Are we counting the subsidy of the military budget, the bulk of which is dedicated to controlling oil and gas fields, pipelines, and shipping routes (for the last 100+ years)? And what about the unimaginable environmental, economic, social, and geopolitical costs of not getting off carbon fuels?
People also forget that a huge amount of fossil fuel is needed to extract new fossil fuel. A deep-sea semi-submersible rig costs billions (a measure of resources needed), and takes years of being supplied by ships and/or helicopters.
The fracking boom merely delayed the reality of the Hubbert curve. It still applies. Now fracking has plateaued and is on course for decline. Fracking and deep sea drilling are industry evidence of declining EROI which will ultimately leave oil in the ground. I could provide you with other analysis.
Solar and wind require mining, their own contribution to overshoot and groundwater pollution in competition with agriculture in drought-ridden regions.
They also require vast amounts of diesel fuel. When there is no diesel, there are no renewables. From mining to transport diesel is required. The word renewable itself is a lie. The resources of our planet are not remotely renewable at the pace we wantonly exploit them.
At best, we could build one generation of so-called renewables.
Solar and wind require mining, their own contribution to overshoot and groundwater pollution in competition with agriculture in drought-ridden regions."
While 1st generation requires materials, solar, wind, batteries are all better than 90% recyclable (often close to 99%). Nor are they in competition with agriculture.
"They also require vast amounts of diesel fuel. When there is no diesel, there are no renewables. From mining to transport diesel is required."
No, what they require is energy to transport and convert. Currently that is fossil fuels. In the future it will be with electricity (such as using BEVs to transport things).
Refuting your argument: "That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" (Hitchen's Razor). Please provide citations for all your claims. Valid sources only.
I have added these articles to my many thousands on overshoot, climate change and energy. Yes, I get it some of the elements of renewables may be recycled. This does not mitigate the destruction of mining though, and its water consumption in a drought-stricken world. Nor does it account for the crimes against humanity routinely exercised against workers in the industry.
Solar and wind are not green nor do they provide the energy density of fossil fuels. I wonder how heavy an EV truck capable of dragging turbines up mountains would have to be, if it's even feasible?
Replacing steel with engineered wood? Shall we cut down more functioning forests in favor of monoculture plantations?
This person has excellent knowledge of how fundamental diesel it to the contemporary economy. It's worth exploring more of his work.
Nope. Since (as our host pointed out above) there's no evidence renewable energy can't be used to make more of itself, the burden is on you to support your claims. Just how do you know that when there is no diesel, there will never be renewables?
It's true that building out renewable supplies and infrastructure will consume resources other than fossil carbon. Decarbonization will only address anthropogenic global warming, leaving all our other ecological impacts unabated. But at least the rising trend of GMST won't be open-ended! Prove me wrong ;^).
You are asking for someone to disprove a negative assumption, which is ridiculous. The burden of proof is on you to cite one example of what you claim is possible (i.e.) "renewable" mining.
No, the burden is on doomers to support their claims to absolute knowledge of the future. They must demonstrate they possess the faculty of precognition. Absent that, Occam's Razor applies; indeed, "Nobody knows the future of energy". We have only self-interested biases, educated hopes, empirical observation, and trained, disciplined intersubjective verification, with which to predict the time trajectory of accumulating global warming cost; and then only within a wide range of contingently believable alternative futures and a large measure of stochasticity, with private and collective human agency a wild card on all scales. Never mind proving Hansen wrong: proof is for mathematics and distilled beverages. Doom before 2050, simply isn't the least hypothesis!
Look at how a mining operation works. Every step of the way at virtually every part of the process fossil fuels are used. So the burden of proof in my opinion lies with the wishful thinkers to point out a single mining operation that doesn't use fossil fuels. Given this reality check, your arguments fall apart.
You're not taking the time dimension into account, nor do you possess precognition, despite your conviction otherwise. Of course fossil fuels will be used while decarbonization of the global economy is underway. But *less and less* with time, as renewables+storage penetrate more and more sectors. And you are clearly underestimating the power of market forces under technological innovation and judicious collective intervention: there is no absolute reason why mining operations cannot eventually be carried out without fossil fuels. The profit motive will find a way!
IOW, *no one expects decarbonization to happen over night!* By the same token, few expect it to take longer than the global economy has before complete collapse. Most would acknowledge that while doom on some time scale is possible, absolute certainty of doom in the foreseeable future has never been supported!
Yes, solar generation and batteries have gotten cheaper. But to imply that this means that a "transition" is under way is pure fallacy. Look at the facts: fossil fuel use continues to climb. Humans will use as much energy as we can, regardless of source. AI data centers will not be powered by intermittent energy sources. The superficial analysis of nuclear power starts and stops with the cost factor, but the truth is nuclear is the only carbon free source of high volume baseload energy.
The authors fail to take into account the grid investment required to operate on solely intermittent "renewables". In the US alone, that cost has been estimated to be at least one and a half TRILLION dollars. Who pays for that? Not going to happen. And that's just the power generation sector.
Fossil fuels are used for the transportation sector. Commercial Airplanes won't be flying on solar power anytime soon. Batteries are expensive and heavy compared to fossil fuels, so they won't be replacing diesel anytime soon, meaning everything from trucking to shipping to mining equipment can't be effectively "transitioned". And even if it could, who pays the cost? Can plastics used for everything be manufactured without fossil fuel? Silicon manufacturing? Pharmaceuticals? Fertilizer?
Cement? Asphalt for paving? The short answer is no, and the demand for all these things is growing.
The bottom line is that our entire civilization is based on fossil fuels. Wind turbines require oil. I could go on. The point is that there isn't and won't be a transition from fossil fuels anytime soon, certainly not before our civilization collapses.
What the authors are loathe to talk about is their gross underestimation of the accelerating climate crisis, as their models have been completely trashed. For that, check out what James Hansen has to say.
OK, Doomer. You just might be right, but where does your certainty come from? Why is it so important for you to rule out all possibility of capping the trend of GMST before 2050 under popular sovereignty within democratic nations? Hansen's just one scientist in a community of peers. His pessimistic estimates of ECS and the sufficiency of net zero are, as yet, a minority view. Why do you insist more conservative experts are fooling themselves? Their models haven't actually been "completely trashed", you know, just continually modified to account for loss of anthropogenic albedo, better-understood feedbacks to CO2 forcing, and new observational data. Their purpose is to enhance our understanding, and project the slope of the GMST trend under specific emissions scenarios. They represent the consensus range of probabilities, which IMHO is plenty alarming already, even if RCP 8.5 is deprecated! Hansen, OTOH, is just one among thousands of trained, mutually disciplined peers. TBH, I'm not convinced his expected warming is wrong, but I'll wait for the consensus to catch up before committing.
In any case, it comes down to the slope of the damage function with time, for the available policy options. I personally do not expect to live beyond 2050. I'm strongly against many geoengineering proposals, on the precautionary principle if nothing else. There are bound to be winners and losers with any of them, and many can be implemented unilaterally by nations or even private actors, without sufficiently global cost-benefit analysis. I'm also strongly opposed to Chinese-style command and control in my own country, but that rapidly-growing 'Communist' economy is now demonstrating the feasibility of rapid, policy-driven decarbonization. I'm putting my hopes on public support for aggressive, democratically chosen interventions, e.g. border carbon-adjustment tariffs, public underwriting of the capital requirements of overhauling grids, accelerated subsidies for renewable energy and storage development, and downstream electrification. Even failing that, with a little luck, I'll at least live out my medically-extended "natural" lifespan in my current modest home. Après moi, le déluge!
I suspect the Trumpian push to not retire coal plants in the US will not materially increase coal generation. American utilities are still building natural gas plants at record pace and while those old coal plants they were originally meant to replace won’t now be officially retired, there’s no mandate to actually operate them. Coal plants just don't fit modern power generation needs and utilities are not stupid. Also transmission constraints often mean that coal and gas in the same geographical area cannot operate at full load simultaneously and so “keeping coal” doesn’t even add much to total generating capacity. So I think it’s likely coal units will mostly just sit idle until a new political regime is in power and they can be demolished.
Excellent article and inspiring to everyone trying to push policy makers towards a clean and affordable future. Surprised you did not mention Wright's Law and the role of doubling production and falling costs into your analysis. Maybe next time??
It may not have been clear in this piece, so let me make it clear here: I believe the net-zero transition will ultimately be much easier and cheaper than even today's most optimistic estimates. The reason is that innovation is incredibly powerful, and many groups are working on numerous new technologies, such as novel battery chemistries, that will revolutionize energy in ways that are completely unforeseen.
A good article in The Economist making the same point: https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2024/11/14/the-energy-transition-will-be-much-cheaper-than-you-think
The energy sources we have now are pretty much the same we had 20 years ago. Only the prices of some of them has come down. But these prices have now flatlined. Since we do not have any new energy source in the pipeline, it seems that the prediction of future energy scenarios is not as uncertain as it was 10 years ago.
Battery prices are still coming down, which will help renewable energy because it allows your time shift the power you generate from those sources. In addition, geopolitical instability will still have a big impact on prices and that’s basically impossible to predict.
Predictions are useful only as inputs into policy decisions. In practice they are not very importance. They, together with models of the harm from CO2 accumulation detrmng the optimal trajectory for a tax n net emissions, but becadue we will need ot ease into that tax, its ultimte level, movenents in the '50's and 60's are not important today Starte with $200 or $600, but START
The thread keeps circling the same divide: optimists who see the transition accelerating and pessimists who see it stalling or failing. Both are forecasts about the energy future, and Andrew's point is that nobody — in either camp — has a good track record predicting that future.
But notice what isn't uncertain. Whatever the emissions trajectory turns out to be, the physics that translates cumulative CO₂ into warming doesn't depend on which forecast wins. And that warming doesn't unwind on any timescale that matters to us — the CO₂ we add persists for centuries to millennia, and the temperature and sea level response keeps playing out long after emissions stop. The energy future is genuinely unknown; the climate consequences of it are not, and they're effectively permanent. That's the asymmetry worth holding onto — it's why the uncertainty in the first half is an argument for acting on the second half, not against it.
Regarding peak oil, conventional oil production did, in fact peak around the time of the craze. It was only the craze of fracking that kept oil production increasing. Fracking may be peaking about now.
Agreed. I was utterly convinced that peak global oil production was going to happen about 20 years ago and that peak natural gas would shortly follow. I wouldn’t describe fracking as a “craze”, but we were all blindsided by it when it happened just in time to avoid societal disruption due to massive cost increases and shortages of oil and gas. And you’re right that the production benefits of fracking now seem to be tailing off, though the (notably unreliable) predictions are that consumption decline over the coming decades will make an inability to produce more, irrelevant.
It’s common knowledge that LCOE is not a realistic measure when applied to intermittent sources such as wind and solar. These sources need backup power, require expensive interconnection, and have been heavily subsidized. It’s an apples to oranges comparison.
If it's common knowledge, how come many recognized experts think LCOE is a realistic measure at current grid participation? (https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus-lcoeplus/)? Why would you assume that if you disagree with the experts, they're the ones fooling themselves?
Edit: you may have an argument if you're referring to LCOE strictly defined. Other measures such as Lazard's 'LCOE+" are being adopted, to incorporate such factors as battery backup capacity. Note that LCOE and its derivatives specify unsubsidized costs.
On the Heatmap site, Dr. Dessler submitted an updated version of this post where he stated:
“I’m using levelized cost of energy as my measure of the cost to produce power from each source. I understand the limitations of LCOE, but for an energy developer, LCOE is the number that counts. Yes, wind and solar are intermittent, but that’s a grid problem. All that matters to the developer is which low-LCOE energy source they can build.”
Interestingly if you read another Heatmap article “limitations of LCOE” which he links above you can see why LCOE is meaningless to evaluate different types of energy when intermittent sources are involved. The author clearly states LCOE is only a meaningful measure to show the cost of a single power source over time.
And yes intermittent power is a grid problem. But guess what. That can be a deal killer for a lot solar and wind projects when the total costs including the grid revisions and additions are considered. Without a well designed and reliable grid it doesn’t matter how much intermittent power gets installed, it will be useless. The mantra to build wind and solar as fast as possible and we’ll worry about the rest later has caused higher electricity prices due to having to deal with too much or not enough power and the costs to connect it. And, there still has to be redundant power for nighttime and when the wind doesn’t blow. And batteries won’t get you there.
These types of statements by credentialed climate scientists are what casts a shadow over whatever they say. This is shown by the recent declaration that RCP 8.5 was killed because solar and wind are so much cheaper now that it significantly changed the scenario basis. It was completely implausible from the start. Spin and half truths only serve to weaken any arguments and beg the question of what the real end game is. If it is saving the planet, it’s not obvious because spreading known inaccuracies doesn’t help anyone except for those with nefarious intentions.
As others have noted, going to Net Very Little seems doable, but going from Net Very Little to Net Zero is when we have to address all of the hardest problems. Meanwhile, increasing natural sources of GHGs (crown wildfires, thawing permafrost), with the removal/reduction of natural sinks (loss of forest, CO2 saturation of warming oceans) means Net Zero is an uphill climb.
Well, Zeke published an explainer in CarbonBrief 5 years ago, about why GMST should stabilize soon after fossil carbon emissions cease (https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-will-global-warming-stop-as-soon-as-net-zero-emissions-are-reached/). He expects natural sinks to draw atmospheric CO2 down at roughly the same rate that long-term feedbacks to historic forcing work to keep GMST elevated. Argue with him, not me.
Per a recent paper, the terrestrial sink has been overestimated due to overestimation of high CO2 levels encouraging plant growth.
"Just Have a Think" covering this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywxdWD6NqE8
Paper:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2514628122
But phytoplankton to the rescue?
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2023/June/oceans-absorb-emissions
With apologies to our host, nobody knows the future of natural CO2 drawdown!
Like p**sing in the wind. We can grind down emissions, scale up cdr, but where have all the carbon sinks gone? And how are we gonna stop CH4 from melting tundra? Why do I always REFLECT on this?
FWIW, thawing permafrost results in more GHGs two different ways:
1. Microbes with access to newly-thawed organic matter produce CO2 (from aerobes) and CH4 (from anaerobes).
2. Thawing weakens the hard caps over old existing methane reservoirs, and at some point they blow out at the surface (leaving craters all over the Arctic) and add to the atmosphere.
And where there are 🔥 below it just accelerates the thaw. Siberia is getting more and more of those open pit craters.
You often hear the argument that "renewables rely on fossil fuels during manufacturing Inc mining the raw materials" and there is no way around that (at present).
The extreme version of that argument is that there isn't enough fossil fuel LEFT to actually transition the world, anyway.
What's your thoughts on that?
I think the argument that we need fossil fuels to produce renewables is misleading at best. What we need is energy. Today, at least, most of our energy comes from fossil fuels. However, there is no physical reason why we cannot use renewable energy in place of fossil fuel energy.
I've never heard that we don't have enough fossil fuels for the transition. That sounds crazy to me.
Crazy? Well, the share of primary energy use for fossil fuels, globally, is still around 80%. Of course, exponential growth of renewables may get that proportion down quickly, at some point. However, exponential growth of renewables also means exponential growth of the fossil fuels needed to extract the minerals and build the infrastructure for renewables (the infrastructure is not renewable). If fossil fuels can be substituted for by electricity (and I've read some serious analysis that says this is impossible for all uses, despite your optimism), it seems likely that there will be a point when fossil fuel use is too low to maintain a viable fossil fuel industry, especially as the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels has gone, so extraction becomes uneconomical. Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart. The transition would not be completed, nor would it be necessary, at that point.
The optimistic voices of a transition being possible are, I think, over-optimistic and exclude a serious examination of what is needed and how we manage the depletion of all resources needed to continue an environmentally destructive economy after that.
Please point me to “serious” analyses you’ve read that says the transition is impossible.
It's surprising that you haven't come across such analyses from, for example, Simon Michaux and Vaclav Smil, among others. There have also been serious critiques of Mark Jacobson's optimistic scenarios for a 2050 transition (now badly out of date). Even if there is no theoretical barrier to a transition, the practical problems of scaling up mineral extraction may make a 2050 date impossible. If there is a speed up of renewable infrastructure in parallel with existing industrial uses, oil extraction may need to temporarily grow significantly, even as the world is facing an extended period of reduced production.
"If fossil fuels can be substituted for by electricity (and I've read some serious analysis that says this is impossible for all uses, despite your optimism),"
The whole point of Prof. Dessler's post is that technological innovation is unpredictable, making what seems impossible today, easy and cheap tomorrow.
"it seems likely that there will be a point when fossil fuel use is too low to maintain a viable fossil fuel industry, especially as the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels has gone, so extraction becomes uneconomical. Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart. "
It *seems* likely? What nonsense! Our host just got through showing that the cost of carbon-neutral energy generation and storage has been persistently over-estimated! That's because technological and manufacturing innovation has continuously driven down the cost of electrifying energy consumption with renewables: the invisible hand of the global 'free' market at work. All claims that one or another current requirement for fossil carbon is unchangeable, are overconfident.
So no, the global economy is not likely to collapse when nobody is buying fossil fuels anymore! Fossil carbon extraction will cease when there's no profit in it anymore because carbon-neutral alternatives are more economical in every market segment. At worst, the private fortunes of carbon capitalists will decline, along with their political power: socially, a net benefit. But the global marketplace guarantees that if there's a demand for fossil carbon, there will be a supply. As long as *anyone* is willing to pay a high enough price to make extraction profitable, it will be available!
[Edit: I asked Gemini if the second quote by Mr. Roberts is obstructionist. Its reply:
'The obstructionism lies entirely in the fatalism of the second sentence: "Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart."
'In climate discourse, obstructionism isn't just outright climate denial anymore; it is often "doomism" or "systemic fatalism." By framing the end of fossil fuels as an absolute economic apocalypse, the narrative subtly argues that we must prop up the fossil fuel industry indefinitely to survive.'
Heh. Couldn't have said it better myself ;^).]
Unpredictability is not our friend.
The "Goldilocks problem" is not utter nonsense. https://www.axios.com/2023/03/02/oil-supply-energy-transition-climate-change?utm_source=chatgpt.com
There are other reasons for oil extraction to cease being profitable, not just the carbon-neutral (whatever that means) alternatives become more economical. As it becomes harder to find and extract the needed oil, the techniques become more complex, with more energy needed to extract it. Surely that's not controversial?
But, of course, optimism that modernity can continue with some magical energy supply that doesn't cause any environmental harm will continue to be the order of the day. It's understandable. No-one wants to live a truly sustainable life-style.
My issue is with "Beyond that point, the global economy falls apart." That's over-the-top alarmism, and calls your motivation into question. The global economy will adapt to the end of cheap oil, at lower net cost than adapting to open-ended global warming. What's your justification for that rhetorical tactic, if not to protect fossil fuel producer profits?
Decarbonizing the global economy will not magically eliminate all environmental harms. All it will do is cap the trend of GMST. But that has to happen if any other "environmental" impact is to be mitigated going forward. And there's nothing hard about "carbon-neutral". It refers to any energy that isn't produced by burning fossil carbon. Burning wood or bagasse doesn't contribute to global warming, because biomass is part of the short-term carbon cycle. Even nuclear power is nominally carbon-neutral.
Lastly, the only truly sustainable lifestyle is one wholly disconnected from the global market. Few indeed want to live entirely off the grid. But the human population hasn't been sustainable since the spread of agriculture allowed us to exceed local natural carrying capacity permanently. Global warming is far from humanity's only destructive impact on the biosphere, but it is the biggest in history, and literally every organism is affected. Mitigating all our other impacts will be futile if GMST keeps rising open-ended.
Meanwhile, peak population is a few decades away, and once our numbers start to decline, no later than the end of this century, all our impacts will begin to be ameliorated: remember "I=PAT"?
Beyond the point of fossil fuel extraction being economical, and, so, stopping, how does the global economy not fall apart? That's if it manages to get to that point.
I certainly agree that a sustainable lifestyle is not compatible with "the grid" or the "global market." Indeed, though I'd never be able to live that way, I haven't yet come across any sustainable way of life other than hunting and gathering (the way all other species live).
Though rising GMST may be the biggest current predicament, just about all the environmental damage humans have done up to this point has nothing to do with GMST. Focusing on one issue to the detriment of all others is not helpful long term.
By the way, simply burning biomass doesn't mean carbon neutral. It depends on the scale and whether that biomass is harvested below the rate of renewal.
Tom Murphy was writing stuff along those lines shortly before the peak oil frenzy subsided.
AIUI from Matt Randolph (former oilman known as "Mr. Global"), the US is domestically past "peak oil" (i.e., the cheapest-to-extract oil is mostly gone and global oil companies find more profit in the new fields of Guyana, Namibia, Brazil, etc.).
It's called bootstrapping.
Every solar panel, wind turbine or battery that China makes costs less fossil fuel than the one before. The last few percent of applications represent a small portion of our CO2 emissions, and even then many of applications that people often cited as hard to displace have already had proof-of-concept replacements (that still need to propagate across industries): semi trucks and heavy equipment industries (mining and construction) find that electric motors are cheaper to power and maintain than combustion technology. Before Operation Epic Fuckup, China was transitioning its refineries to produce ·less· diesel due to reduced domestic demand (and produce more multi-use naphtha instead). And even as new coal power plants were being built (with modern efficiency and reduced lung pollution), old coal plants were being shut down. The new coal plants don't even run as much, except during major heat dome demand and/or when long droughts reduce hydropower generation.
As far as mineral extraction is concerned, the materials used by RE are ·recyclable·, as opposed to fossil fuels, which entail extracting, burning, then extracting some more, ad nauseum. Grid batteries* (what I call "slab" batteries) don't have to be optimized for weight, and the new generation use more abundant materials (e.g., iron or sodium).
All the Metals We Mined in 2022 (Not shown: →8.4 tonnes of coal← mined in 2022)
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-metals-we-mined-in-one-visualization-2/
______________
*Watch out for disinformation about the early generation batteries needing child-labor cobalt: We have new chemistries that don't need cobalt at all, and none of them mention that the fossil fuel refineries themselves have been using cobalt forever. Also ignore old stats about the percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, since that was based on little batteries in phones and e-toys, and the large lithium batteries are eagerly reused or recycled.
Dave Borlace's "Just Have a Think" videos summarize current research on climate and energy. In this one he points out the flaw in how comparisons between FF and renewable energy are made, such that gross inefficiencies in combustion technology are overlooked. (I especially like the Sankey charts shown ~4 minutes in.)
"The Primary Energy Fallacy finally laid to rest"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qokwulKU9Bg
"You often hear the argument that 'renewables rely on fossil fuels during manufacturing Inc mining the raw materials' and there is no way around that (at present)."
Well, duh! Those who make that argument seem to think nobody else recognizes that. No one is realistically proposing that the world stop burning all fossil carbon immediately. Decarbonization will happen incrementally over the next couple of decades, but more and more of the energy to build out the carbon-neutral global economy will itself be carbon-neutral. Revenue from the sale of fossil carbon will decline, until eventually nobody buys it because renewables+storage is cheaper in every sector. The only losers will be fossil fuel capitalists left with stranded assets. Even that will probably be negotiated away in decarbonization legislation.
Energy forecasts fail because they usually model technology as a curve and politics as a footnote.
But energy systems are not just engineering systems.
They are capital systems, permitting systems, grid systems, commodity systems, and voter-tolerance systems.
Coal collapsed faster than expected.
Renewables scaled faster than expected.
Oil demand proved stickier than expected.
Nuclear keeps returning every time people remember grids need reliability.
The lesson is not that forecasting is useless.
The lesson is that energy transitions are path-dependent, political, and full of nonlinear adoption shocks.
Nobody knows the future of energy.
But the people who only model cost curves probably know the least.
Why is global coal demand rising each year? Why are there nearly 1,000 coal fired power stations being built? And why are power bills in grids that have more than 25% renewables generation rising due to large network costs caused by complexity and big new transmission lines to nowhere?
The switch from coal to gas in the US is a result of fracking of newly discovered gas seams with a lot of back-up gas peaks for unreliable intermittent renewables. That's not confirmation of renewables being the sensible future.
Got links?
"Why is global coal demand rising each year?"
According to the IAE, it's not: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/coal.
"why are power bills in grids that have more than 25% renewables generation rising "
According to the MIT Climate Portal, it's not because of their renewables penetration: https://climate.mit.edu/posts/renewables-and-electricity-affordability-untangling-correlation-causation.
We sell coal from Australia all over the world. Australian coal exports keep increasing.
Nice sales pitch. I am not buying yr product.
One electricity generator requires no fuel, and the other requires constant refueling and maintenance (coal oil gas) with cost and availability dependent upon geopolitics? Are we counting the subsidy of the military budget, the bulk of which is dedicated to controlling oil and gas fields, pipelines, and shipping routes (for the last 100+ years)? And what about the unimaginable environmental, economic, social, and geopolitical costs of not getting off carbon fuels?
People also forget that a huge amount of fossil fuel is needed to extract new fossil fuel. A deep-sea semi-submersible rig costs billions (a measure of resources needed), and takes years of being supplied by ships and/or helicopters.
Energy Return on Investment (EROI) peaked in 1999, so more oil is needed to extract oil now (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4687841/)
The fracking boom merely delayed the reality of the Hubbert curve. It still applies. Now fracking has plateaued and is on course for decline. Fracking and deep sea drilling are industry evidence of declining EROI which will ultimately leave oil in the ground. I could provide you with other analysis.
Solar and wind require mining, their own contribution to overshoot and groundwater pollution in competition with agriculture in drought-ridden regions.
They also require vast amounts of diesel fuel. When there is no diesel, there are no renewables. From mining to transport diesel is required. The word renewable itself is a lie. The resources of our planet are not remotely renewable at the pace we wantonly exploit them.
At best, we could build one generation of so-called renewables.
Refute my argument.
Solar and wind require mining, their own contribution to overshoot and groundwater pollution in competition with agriculture in drought-ridden regions."
While 1st generation requires materials, solar, wind, batteries are all better than 90% recyclable (often close to 99%). Nor are they in competition with agriculture.
Batteries:
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicle-batteries-be-recycled
https://www.topspeed.com/what-happens-to-aged-ev-batteries/
https://chargelab.co/blog/ev-battery-recycling
Wind turbines:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/wind-turbine-recycling
https://orsted.com/en/what-we-do/insights/the-fact-file/can-wind-turbines-be-recycled
Solar Panels:
https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
https://solarrecycling.com/how-to-recycle-solar-panels-the-complete-guide/
https://earth911.com/home-garden/recycle-solar-panels/
Interconnect: Copper, steel, and aluminum are all recyclable
Use of old steel for recycling
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/08/26/how-clt-displacement-makes-steel-cement-decarbonization-realistic/
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/06/10/reassessing-steel-how-falling-cement-use-alters-future-projections/
"They also require vast amounts of diesel fuel. When there is no diesel, there are no renewables. From mining to transport diesel is required."
No, what they require is energy to transport and convert. Currently that is fossil fuels. In the future it will be with electricity (such as using BEVs to transport things).
Refuting your argument: "That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" (Hitchen's Razor). Please provide citations for all your claims. Valid sources only.
I have added these articles to my many thousands on overshoot, climate change and energy. Yes, I get it some of the elements of renewables may be recycled. This does not mitigate the destruction of mining though, and its water consumption in a drought-stricken world. Nor does it account for the crimes against humanity routinely exercised against workers in the industry.
Solar and wind are not green nor do they provide the energy density of fossil fuels. I wonder how heavy an EV truck capable of dragging turbines up mountains would have to be, if it's even feasible?
Replacing steel with engineered wood? Shall we cut down more functioning forests in favor of monoculture plantations?
This person has excellent knowledge of how fundamental diesel it to the contemporary economy. It's worth exploring more of his work.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/are-we-sleepwalking-into-a-diesel
These guys are natural resource investors, certainly not tree huggers who have assessed the state of the Permian Basin.
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-permian-basin
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/the-depletion-paradox
The IEA recognizes these declines as well.
https://www.iea.org/news/declines-in-output-from-existing-oil-and-gas-fields-have-gathered-speed-with-implications-for-markets-and-energy-security
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-implications-of-oil-and-gas-field-decline-rates
I also recommend Art Berman's insights, four decades as an oil geologist.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/america-has-plenty-of-oil-just-not-the-right-kind/
"Refute my argument."
Nope. Since (as our host pointed out above) there's no evidence renewable energy can't be used to make more of itself, the burden is on you to support your claims. Just how do you know that when there is no diesel, there will never be renewables?
It's true that building out renewable supplies and infrastructure will consume resources other than fossil carbon. Decarbonization will only address anthropogenic global warming, leaving all our other ecological impacts unabated. But at least the rising trend of GMST won't be open-ended! Prove me wrong ;^).
You are asking for someone to disprove a negative assumption, which is ridiculous. The burden of proof is on you to cite one example of what you claim is possible (i.e.) "renewable" mining.
No, the burden is on doomers to support their claims to absolute knowledge of the future. They must demonstrate they possess the faculty of precognition. Absent that, Occam's Razor applies; indeed, "Nobody knows the future of energy". We have only self-interested biases, educated hopes, empirical observation, and trained, disciplined intersubjective verification, with which to predict the time trajectory of accumulating global warming cost; and then only within a wide range of contingently believable alternative futures and a large measure of stochasticity, with private and collective human agency a wild card on all scales. Never mind proving Hansen wrong: proof is for mathematics and distilled beverages. Doom before 2050, simply isn't the least hypothesis!
Look at how a mining operation works. Every step of the way at virtually every part of the process fossil fuels are used. So the burden of proof in my opinion lies with the wishful thinkers to point out a single mining operation that doesn't use fossil fuels. Given this reality check, your arguments fall apart.
You're not taking the time dimension into account, nor do you possess precognition, despite your conviction otherwise. Of course fossil fuels will be used while decarbonization of the global economy is underway. But *less and less* with time, as renewables+storage penetrate more and more sectors. And you are clearly underestimating the power of market forces under technological innovation and judicious collective intervention: there is no absolute reason why mining operations cannot eventually be carried out without fossil fuels. The profit motive will find a way!
IOW, *no one expects decarbonization to happen over night!* By the same token, few expect it to take longer than the global economy has before complete collapse. Most would acknowledge that while doom on some time scale is possible, absolute certainty of doom in the foreseeable future has never been supported!
It’s just like William Goldman’s classic quote about Hollywood and the film industry- “Nobody knows anything.“
Yes, solar generation and batteries have gotten cheaper. But to imply that this means that a "transition" is under way is pure fallacy. Look at the facts: fossil fuel use continues to climb. Humans will use as much energy as we can, regardless of source. AI data centers will not be powered by intermittent energy sources. The superficial analysis of nuclear power starts and stops with the cost factor, but the truth is nuclear is the only carbon free source of high volume baseload energy.
The authors fail to take into account the grid investment required to operate on solely intermittent "renewables". In the US alone, that cost has been estimated to be at least one and a half TRILLION dollars. Who pays for that? Not going to happen. And that's just the power generation sector.
Fossil fuels are used for the transportation sector. Commercial Airplanes won't be flying on solar power anytime soon. Batteries are expensive and heavy compared to fossil fuels, so they won't be replacing diesel anytime soon, meaning everything from trucking to shipping to mining equipment can't be effectively "transitioned". And even if it could, who pays the cost? Can plastics used for everything be manufactured without fossil fuel? Silicon manufacturing? Pharmaceuticals? Fertilizer?
Cement? Asphalt for paving? The short answer is no, and the demand for all these things is growing.
The bottom line is that our entire civilization is based on fossil fuels. Wind turbines require oil. I could go on. The point is that there isn't and won't be a transition from fossil fuels anytime soon, certainly not before our civilization collapses.
What the authors are loathe to talk about is their gross underestimation of the accelerating climate crisis, as their models have been completely trashed. For that, check out what James Hansen has to say.
OK, Doomer. You just might be right, but where does your certainty come from? Why is it so important for you to rule out all possibility of capping the trend of GMST before 2050 under popular sovereignty within democratic nations? Hansen's just one scientist in a community of peers. His pessimistic estimates of ECS and the sufficiency of net zero are, as yet, a minority view. Why do you insist more conservative experts are fooling themselves? Their models haven't actually been "completely trashed", you know, just continually modified to account for loss of anthropogenic albedo, better-understood feedbacks to CO2 forcing, and new observational data. Their purpose is to enhance our understanding, and project the slope of the GMST trend under specific emissions scenarios. They represent the consensus range of probabilities, which IMHO is plenty alarming already, even if RCP 8.5 is deprecated! Hansen, OTOH, is just one among thousands of trained, mutually disciplined peers. TBH, I'm not convinced his expected warming is wrong, but I'll wait for the consensus to catch up before committing.
In any case, it comes down to the slope of the damage function with time, for the available policy options. I personally do not expect to live beyond 2050. I'm strongly against many geoengineering proposals, on the precautionary principle if nothing else. There are bound to be winners and losers with any of them, and many can be implemented unilaterally by nations or even private actors, without sufficiently global cost-benefit analysis. I'm also strongly opposed to Chinese-style command and control in my own country, but that rapidly-growing 'Communist' economy is now demonstrating the feasibility of rapid, policy-driven decarbonization. I'm putting my hopes on public support for aggressive, democratically chosen interventions, e.g. border carbon-adjustment tariffs, public underwriting of the capital requirements of overhauling grids, accelerated subsidies for renewable energy and storage development, and downstream electrification. Even failing that, with a little luck, I'll at least live out my medically-extended "natural" lifespan in my current modest home. Après moi, le déluge!
I suspect the Trumpian push to not retire coal plants in the US will not materially increase coal generation. American utilities are still building natural gas plants at record pace and while those old coal plants they were originally meant to replace won’t now be officially retired, there’s no mandate to actually operate them. Coal plants just don't fit modern power generation needs and utilities are not stupid. Also transmission constraints often mean that coal and gas in the same geographical area cannot operate at full load simultaneously and so “keeping coal” doesn’t even add much to total generating capacity. So I think it’s likely coal units will mostly just sit idle until a new political regime is in power and they can be demolished.
Excellent article and inspiring to everyone trying to push policy makers towards a clean and affordable future. Surprised you did not mention Wright's Law and the role of doubling production and falling costs into your analysis. Maybe next time??