I have rooftop solar panels and an EV. My panels amortize to 7 cents / kilowatt hour over the 30-year life of the panels. I’ve more than recouped my investments already. You burn if you wish. I’m happy having made the transition.
Appreciate the analysis and description of hidden oil subsidies. Very important to make the point now that moving to renewables is better (and cheaper!) energy security. I could do without the analogy to sex workers being abused by pimps. This is: 1) a horrendous thing, and should not be treated as a side comment, 2) it distracts from your argument by being very "jarring." Is there a better consumer analogy that everyone could relate to?, and 3) it seems like a 'miss' on the part of the author as far as appropriateness. Thanks for considering for next time. Abuse of women is a real, every day thing, many of your readers (and supporters!) may be women who have been affected by physical abuse. Submitted respectfully. Not looking for an argument or defensive replies. I am a regular reader of your blog and usually enjoy it. THANKS!
One of these days, one of these oil wars will have the ironic effect of accelerating the transition to renewables. One of these days. One of these oil wars.
Actually, i5 is happening right now with the EU after Trump conned them into lng. Maybe, they'll get it from the USA now but at higher prices. Trump da pimp of da pimps.
Typo in the article "But there’s another hidden subsidty ...". "T" in subsidy. Not the end of the world, but I thought I'd point it out for future releases and such. Very insightful article, thank you!
The current turbulence in oil and gas supply isn’t the world’s first rodeo. It is a very cyclical occurrence. Some countries handle it better than others. In the US, some presidents shout "drill, baby, drill," while others claim oil is the enemy and yet they still support drilling because the price at the pump makes or breaks election chances. It is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Complaining that oil is expensive while continuing to buy larger, less efficient vehicles is the opposite of progress. Failing to close the loopholes that allow this to be the norm only exposes the lack of true leadership.
As for solutions: after the oil shocks of the 1970s, France effectively purged fossil fuels from its electricity production. It took only about 15 years and yielded plenty of co-benefits. If we combine that approach with the modern heat pumps and EV/PHEV batteries we have today, decarbonization is just a step away. It puts the efforts of most other nations to shame. Why not to mention this in post like that? Is “N” word forbidden?
"In the US, some presidents shout 'drill, baby, drill,' while others claim oil is the enemy and yet they still support drilling because the price at the pump makes or breaks election chances. It is a masterclass in hypocrisy."
What others? Biden was mindful enough of politics that he, and bare Democratic majorities in both Legislative houses, enacted the "Inflation Reduction Act" in 2022. VP Harris broke the tie in the Senate. Not a single Republican member of either house voted yea. The IRA contained modest but real incentives for renewable energy development and consumer electrification: gotta start somewhere. The current Kakistocrat-in-Chief gleefully put a stop to all that, and ran roughshod over US environmental protection in general, after winning office by 1.5% of the popular vote on kitchen-table issues; well less than he lost by the last time. It just goes to show you can fool at least half the people, almost all the time!
Meanwhile, the percentage of US voters "alarmed" or "concerned" about climate change now exceeds 50%. It won't take many more broken extreme weather records to turn things around in the next election! Well, that and summary executions of lawful protestors by Presidential myrmidons on camera, or launching wars of his choice, or ...
Andrew, the bad news is the regional war in the Middle East may soon remove 25% of the world's hydrocarbon industry; the good news is the regional war in the Middle East may soon remove 25% of the world's hydrocarbon industry. Could we be witnessing the unfolding of the beginnings of Degrowth, not orderly but chaotic because we didn't plan otherwise?
Replacing one mass-produced industrial product reliant upon massive hydrocarbon inputs with another mass-produced industrial product reliant upon massive hydrocarbon inputs not only does nothing to reduce reliance upon hydrocarbons but exacerbates our ecological overshoot predicament and all of its symptom predicaments.
There are major differences. For one, renewable energy infrastructure structure once installed will produce for decades. As we see again now, not so for fossil fuels. It must be replenished every day.
If the intent is to address impacts upon our environment and its ecological systems then a massive buildout of non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies is a non-starter. It is an attempt to sustain the unsustainable, not protect our biosphere.
Logged in to say exactly this. Happy to see you already covered it. Sadly too many are 'material blind' and do not see that renewables are just adding to the energy stack, not replacing it, and the blind race to do it is likely to accelerate our ecological issues due to the massive (mostly diesel powered) resource extraction required when ore grades are already in decline.
Wind and solar can power a society, just not this one.
[disclosure: disambiguation advice from Gemini 3 on the first paragraph. All semantic content organic, intelligent or otherwise. -MA]
I call Bullshit, Mr. Bull 8^D! You're making 'perfect' the enemy of 'better than it is now'. It's a known tactic of mercenary disinformers on behalf of fossil fuel producers and investors (https://www.disinfo.eu/investigation-and-policy-corner/). Not saying you are one, necessarily. But the intent of this post is to address the social cost of carbon, not primarily all "impacts upon our environment and its ecological systems". Complaints of the futility of decarbonization because we'll still be impacting the environment in other ways, sound suspiciously like doomism, intended to obstruct collective decarbonization. You can agree to disagree, but I think you're trying to fool us.
This isn't an ad hominem argument, because your claims have already been considered and found to lack merit. TCB readers are sophisticated enough to understand that the human population has been unsustainable since the spread of food production after the Pleistocene. Our total impact on the biosphere is heuristically modeled by I=fn(P,A,T), and is open-ended as long as our population and/or per-capita affluence are increasing. But anthropogenic global warming is both the biggest "environmental" impact in history, and the most globally urgent one in the present. And it's critically dependent on T, the technology of energy production.
Based on the explosive growth of renewable energy and storage to date, I, for one, fully expect every economic sector to be decarbonized before the end of this century. Carbon-neutral energy is already price-competitive with fossil carbon for electricity generation and personal transport, utility-scale battery storage is expanding rapidly while LCOE is falling, and alternative energy sources are being developed for aviation, marine shipping, mining and manufacturing, etc.
The problem is therefore entirely political. All that's needed is collective (i.e. government) intervention to take the profit out of selling fossil carbon for all the traffic will bear while socializing the climate-change cost. The "visible hand" of government will then steer the "invisible hand" of the otherwise-free market to zero fossil carbon emissions quickly. Failure to do so will impoverish everyone but carbon capitalists, as the relentlessly rising trend of GMST depresses economic growth globally. A collectively managed, incremental decarbonization pace, OTOH, need not impoverish anyone but fossil fuel investors.
Of course all our other impacts on the biosphere will continue, but at least the climate will be stable! The rest of our impacts are limited and local by comparison, although they should be mitigated by collective intervention in otherwise-"free" markets too: more than they are now, certainly. Because 8-10 billion people all pursuing happiness are bound to have impacts, you know, your aesthetic preferences or mine notwithstanding! But global warming is already taking a human toll in money and tragedy around the world, that will mount as long as atmospheric CO2 does. The post-carbon future must take care of itself. Meanwhile, peak population is approaching. Once P begins to decline, all bets are off.
In the US, collective decarbonization requires only a bare majority of voters to vote Democratic in every election, at least until some Republican candidate publicly repudiates his party's 20-year policy of obstructing decarbonization. In 2024, Trump and his billionaire backers successfully blocked the decarbonization provisions of Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" by 1.5% of the popular vote. It won't take many more headline-grabbing heat waves and flash floods to turn that around!
MA, thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate you engaging with the substance, even if we disagree. I want to focus on your central claim: that because global warming is the most urgent threat, decarbonization must proceed, and all other concerns are secondary distractions—"doomism," as you put it. The article actually provides a perfect lens to see why this "carbon tunnel vision" is itself a problem.
1. The Article Expands, Not Contracts, the Problem: The article brilliantly exposes a massive hidden cost of fossil fuels—the $81 billion annual military subsidy to protect global oil supplies, plus the trillions spent on wars like in Iraq. This isn't just an environmental argument; it's a geopolitical and economic one. It shows that the true cost of a hydrocarbon economy is far greater than the price at the pump or even its climate impact. It's woven into the fabric of our national security state.
2. The "Solution" Ignores These Same Systemic Costs: Here's the critical point: The proposal being offered is to replace one globally entangled, industrial system (fossil fuels) with another (a massive buildout of renewables). But as the article makes clear, the problem with the fossil fuel system isn't just the carbon. It's that it's a massive, industrial, globally-sourced commodity that requires enormous military and economic infrastructure to sustain. A transition to renewables, at the scale and speed envisioned, replicates that same structural problem. It requires a massive, new global industrial supply chain for concrete, steel, rare earth minerals, and composites—all of which, as RLH acknowledges will be the case "for the foreseeable future," are extracted, manufactured, and transported using... hydrocarbons. We are simply swapping one set of dependencies for another, without addressing the core driver: our ecologically oversized, industrially hyper-complex society.
3. Sustaining the Unsustainable: The vision is to use this massive industrial effort to sustain a global population of 8-10 billion people and their pursuit of affluence. The article is right: fossil fuels are our "pimp," creating a terrible, costly dependency. But the proposed solution—a global, high-tech energy grid—still requires a massive "john" (our unsustainable society) to pay for it. It treats the symptom (carbon emissions from one part of the system) while leaving the underlying disease (ecological overshoot) untouched. We are trying to feed the addiction with a different, but still costly, supplier. We are using one industrial product dependent on hydrocarbons to try and "solve" the problem created by another industrial product dependent on hydrocarbons. That's not a solution; it's a substitution within the same unsustainable paradigm.
Your belief that a fully decarbonized economy is inevitable this century is faith-based, not a material reality, given ore grade declines and the sheer scale of the buildout required. The article powerfully shows one way we've sustained the unsustainable. The argument in favour of renewables, for all its passion, proposes we simply find a new, equally complex way to do the same thing, ignoring that the core predicament is our aggregate material throughput, not just its carbon content. That's not "making perfect the enemy of good." That's mistaking a change in fuel for a change in direction.
As I stated, the future. Here’s a perspective that I find informative since I spend my career in the telecom industry. It captures the present reality and sees the opportunities in the scale of what’s needed. Consider - did anyone predict that new car sales in China would shift dramatically from a 6.3% new energy vehicle (NEV) penetration rate in 2020 to over 50% market share by 2025? Talk about scale and opportunity! https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/What-the-Fall-of-the-Telegraph-Says-About-Fossil-Fuels.html
We will have to agree to disagree. It seems that you are attempting to justify/rationalise the continued existence of a globalised, industrial civilisation which an increasing amount of evidence is showing to be the antithesis of a habitable biosphere.
"A missile strike on Iranian oil infrastructure has zero [little !] effect on the cost of generating electricity from a solar panel in Texas or a wind turbine in Iowa" ... but it will increase the value of each kWh to cusomers and the price of electricity, thus support investment.
It is not "zero effect" because higher energy prices will also make steel and other supplies more expensive, and may lead to higher interest rates.
Hello everyone, I also have solar panels (both photo - and heating water tubes), 2 EV and heating pump. Glad to make the change, hope many others will see "the light". Thanks for article, know about fossil fuels subsidies, but not in this scale. Keep informing us, is really need it!
And the current war tally for US human cost is at least 6 lives lost and an unreported number of injuries. Forbes reported on march 3 that the estimated cost as of that date ranged from 2 -3 billion depending on the source they quoted and with estimates of up to 90 billion for the entire operation if the estimates of the Trump administration of 4-5 weeks is actually adhered to.
I have rooftop solar panels and an EV. My panels amortize to 7 cents / kilowatt hour over the 30-year life of the panels. I’ve more than recouped my investments already. You burn if you wish. I’m happy having made the transition.
Appreciate the analysis and description of hidden oil subsidies. Very important to make the point now that moving to renewables is better (and cheaper!) energy security. I could do without the analogy to sex workers being abused by pimps. This is: 1) a horrendous thing, and should not be treated as a side comment, 2) it distracts from your argument by being very "jarring." Is there a better consumer analogy that everyone could relate to?, and 3) it seems like a 'miss' on the part of the author as far as appropriateness. Thanks for considering for next time. Abuse of women is a real, every day thing, many of your readers (and supporters!) may be women who have been affected by physical abuse. Submitted respectfully. Not looking for an argument or defensive replies. I am a regular reader of your blog and usually enjoy it. THANKS!
One of these days, one of these oil wars will have the ironic effect of accelerating the transition to renewables. One of these days. One of these oil wars.
I agree. We just need to make sure that people connect the dots between wars and fossil fuels.
Actually, i5 is happening right now with the EU after Trump conned them into lng. Maybe, they'll get it from the USA now but at higher prices. Trump da pimp of da pimps.
Some goodish news: The Trump Administration just had its first oil&gas lease sale by the Bureau of Land Management and got NO takers.
Former oilman Mr. Global (Matt Randolph) explains why:
"Another Failed Oil Lease Sale in Alaska For Trump"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmJA_di67I0
Spot on Andrew!
And Trump wants to make our country and trading partner countries dependent on our lng and other fossils.
Make America a GHG Armageddon the maghgots shout out.
We all lose with this stupid view that oil is gold. It's worse than fool's gold.
Typo in the article "But there’s another hidden subsidty ...". "T" in subsidy. Not the end of the world, but I thought I'd point it out for future releases and such. Very insightful article, thank you!
The current turbulence in oil and gas supply isn’t the world’s first rodeo. It is a very cyclical occurrence. Some countries handle it better than others. In the US, some presidents shout "drill, baby, drill," while others claim oil is the enemy and yet they still support drilling because the price at the pump makes or breaks election chances. It is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Complaining that oil is expensive while continuing to buy larger, less efficient vehicles is the opposite of progress. Failing to close the loopholes that allow this to be the norm only exposes the lack of true leadership.
As for solutions: after the oil shocks of the 1970s, France effectively purged fossil fuels from its electricity production. It took only about 15 years and yielded plenty of co-benefits. If we combine that approach with the modern heat pumps and EV/PHEV batteries we have today, decarbonization is just a step away. It puts the efforts of most other nations to shame. Why not to mention this in post like that? Is “N” word forbidden?
"In the US, some presidents shout 'drill, baby, drill,' while others claim oil is the enemy and yet they still support drilling because the price at the pump makes or breaks election chances. It is a masterclass in hypocrisy."
What others? Biden was mindful enough of politics that he, and bare Democratic majorities in both Legislative houses, enacted the "Inflation Reduction Act" in 2022. VP Harris broke the tie in the Senate. Not a single Republican member of either house voted yea. The IRA contained modest but real incentives for renewable energy development and consumer electrification: gotta start somewhere. The current Kakistocrat-in-Chief gleefully put a stop to all that, and ran roughshod over US environmental protection in general, after winning office by 1.5% of the popular vote on kitchen-table issues; well less than he lost by the last time. It just goes to show you can fool at least half the people, almost all the time!
Meanwhile, the percentage of US voters "alarmed" or "concerned" about climate change now exceeds 50%. It won't take many more broken extreme weather records to turn things around in the next election! Well, that and summary executions of lawful protestors by Presidential myrmidons on camera, or launching wars of his choice, or ...
Andrew, the bad news is the regional war in the Middle East may soon remove 25% of the world's hydrocarbon industry; the good news is the regional war in the Middle East may soon remove 25% of the world's hydrocarbon industry. Could we be witnessing the unfolding of the beginnings of Degrowth, not orderly but chaotic because we didn't plan otherwise?
Replacing one mass-produced industrial product reliant upon massive hydrocarbon inputs with another mass-produced industrial product reliant upon massive hydrocarbon inputs not only does nothing to reduce reliance upon hydrocarbons but exacerbates our ecological overshoot predicament and all of its symptom predicaments.
There are major differences. For one, renewable energy infrastructure structure once installed will produce for decades. As we see again now, not so for fossil fuels. It must be replenished every day.
If the intent is to address impacts upon our environment and its ecological systems then a massive buildout of non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies is a non-starter. It is an attempt to sustain the unsustainable, not protect our biosphere.
Fossil fuel fluffer boi is not going to look good on your resume.
Please show me where I have supported hydrocarbons...in any of my writing, anywhere.
Your disengenous drivel is not appropriate. Offer your idea of best policy practice or sit down and be quiet.
I know we clashed previously, Mr. Baldwin, but I liked that comment 8^).
Logged in to say exactly this. Happy to see you already covered it. Sadly too many are 'material blind' and do not see that renewables are just adding to the energy stack, not replacing it, and the blind race to do it is likely to accelerate our ecological issues due to the massive (mostly diesel powered) resource extraction required when ore grades are already in decline.
Wind and solar can power a society, just not this one.
In the future, renewable energy infrastructure can and will be produced and installed with less and less hydrocarbon combustion.
That’s hopeful thinking that ignores present reality and perhaps more importantly the scale of what is being proposed.
[last edited 1900 PST Mar 11 2026]
[disclosure: disambiguation advice from Gemini 3 on the first paragraph. All semantic content organic, intelligent or otherwise. -MA]
I call Bullshit, Mr. Bull 8^D! You're making 'perfect' the enemy of 'better than it is now'. It's a known tactic of mercenary disinformers on behalf of fossil fuel producers and investors (https://www.disinfo.eu/investigation-and-policy-corner/). Not saying you are one, necessarily. But the intent of this post is to address the social cost of carbon, not primarily all "impacts upon our environment and its ecological systems". Complaints of the futility of decarbonization because we'll still be impacting the environment in other ways, sound suspiciously like doomism, intended to obstruct collective decarbonization. You can agree to disagree, but I think you're trying to fool us.
This isn't an ad hominem argument, because your claims have already been considered and found to lack merit. TCB readers are sophisticated enough to understand that the human population has been unsustainable since the spread of food production after the Pleistocene. Our total impact on the biosphere is heuristically modeled by I=fn(P,A,T), and is open-ended as long as our population and/or per-capita affluence are increasing. But anthropogenic global warming is both the biggest "environmental" impact in history, and the most globally urgent one in the present. And it's critically dependent on T, the technology of energy production.
Based on the explosive growth of renewable energy and storage to date, I, for one, fully expect every economic sector to be decarbonized before the end of this century. Carbon-neutral energy is already price-competitive with fossil carbon for electricity generation and personal transport, utility-scale battery storage is expanding rapidly while LCOE is falling, and alternative energy sources are being developed for aviation, marine shipping, mining and manufacturing, etc.
The problem is therefore entirely political. All that's needed is collective (i.e. government) intervention to take the profit out of selling fossil carbon for all the traffic will bear while socializing the climate-change cost. The "visible hand" of government will then steer the "invisible hand" of the otherwise-free market to zero fossil carbon emissions quickly. Failure to do so will impoverish everyone but carbon capitalists, as the relentlessly rising trend of GMST depresses economic growth globally. A collectively managed, incremental decarbonization pace, OTOH, need not impoverish anyone but fossil fuel investors.
Of course all our other impacts on the biosphere will continue, but at least the climate will be stable! The rest of our impacts are limited and local by comparison, although they should be mitigated by collective intervention in otherwise-"free" markets too: more than they are now, certainly. Because 8-10 billion people all pursuing happiness are bound to have impacts, you know, your aesthetic preferences or mine notwithstanding! But global warming is already taking a human toll in money and tragedy around the world, that will mount as long as atmospheric CO2 does. The post-carbon future must take care of itself. Meanwhile, peak population is approaching. Once P begins to decline, all bets are off.
In the US, collective decarbonization requires only a bare majority of voters to vote Democratic in every election, at least until some Republican candidate publicly repudiates his party's 20-year policy of obstructing decarbonization. In 2024, Trump and his billionaire backers successfully blocked the decarbonization provisions of Biden's "Inflation Reduction Act" by 1.5% of the popular vote. It won't take many more headline-grabbing heat waves and flash floods to turn that around!
MA, thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate you engaging with the substance, even if we disagree. I want to focus on your central claim: that because global warming is the most urgent threat, decarbonization must proceed, and all other concerns are secondary distractions—"doomism," as you put it. The article actually provides a perfect lens to see why this "carbon tunnel vision" is itself a problem.
1. The Article Expands, Not Contracts, the Problem: The article brilliantly exposes a massive hidden cost of fossil fuels—the $81 billion annual military subsidy to protect global oil supplies, plus the trillions spent on wars like in Iraq. This isn't just an environmental argument; it's a geopolitical and economic one. It shows that the true cost of a hydrocarbon economy is far greater than the price at the pump or even its climate impact. It's woven into the fabric of our national security state.
2. The "Solution" Ignores These Same Systemic Costs: Here's the critical point: The proposal being offered is to replace one globally entangled, industrial system (fossil fuels) with another (a massive buildout of renewables). But as the article makes clear, the problem with the fossil fuel system isn't just the carbon. It's that it's a massive, industrial, globally-sourced commodity that requires enormous military and economic infrastructure to sustain. A transition to renewables, at the scale and speed envisioned, replicates that same structural problem. It requires a massive, new global industrial supply chain for concrete, steel, rare earth minerals, and composites—all of which, as RLH acknowledges will be the case "for the foreseeable future," are extracted, manufactured, and transported using... hydrocarbons. We are simply swapping one set of dependencies for another, without addressing the core driver: our ecologically oversized, industrially hyper-complex society.
3. Sustaining the Unsustainable: The vision is to use this massive industrial effort to sustain a global population of 8-10 billion people and their pursuit of affluence. The article is right: fossil fuels are our "pimp," creating a terrible, costly dependency. But the proposed solution—a global, high-tech energy grid—still requires a massive "john" (our unsustainable society) to pay for it. It treats the symptom (carbon emissions from one part of the system) while leaving the underlying disease (ecological overshoot) untouched. We are trying to feed the addiction with a different, but still costly, supplier. We are using one industrial product dependent on hydrocarbons to try and "solve" the problem created by another industrial product dependent on hydrocarbons. That's not a solution; it's a substitution within the same unsustainable paradigm.
Your belief that a fully decarbonized economy is inevitable this century is faith-based, not a material reality, given ore grade declines and the sheer scale of the buildout required. The article powerfully shows one way we've sustained the unsustainable. The argument in favour of renewables, for all its passion, proposes we simply find a new, equally complex way to do the same thing, ignoring that the core predicament is our aggregate material throughput, not just its carbon content. That's not "making perfect the enemy of good." That's mistaking a change in fuel for a change in direction.
As I stated, the future. Here’s a perspective that I find informative since I spend my career in the telecom industry. It captures the present reality and sees the opportunities in the scale of what’s needed. Consider - did anyone predict that new car sales in China would shift dramatically from a 6.3% new energy vehicle (NEV) penetration rate in 2020 to over 50% market share by 2025? Talk about scale and opportunity! https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/What-the-Fall-of-the-Telegraph-Says-About-Fossil-Fuels.html
We will have to agree to disagree. It seems that you are attempting to justify/rationalise the continued existence of a globalised, industrial civilisation which an increasing amount of evidence is showing to be the antithesis of a habitable biosphere.
"A missile strike on Iranian oil infrastructure has zero [little !] effect on the cost of generating electricity from a solar panel in Texas or a wind turbine in Iowa" ... but it will increase the value of each kWh to cusomers and the price of electricity, thus support investment.
It is not "zero effect" because higher energy prices will also make steel and other supplies more expensive, and may lead to higher interest rates.
Russia's war in Ukraine is also funded with fassil oil and gas receipts.
Iran funds its nuclear program and terrorist groups like Hisbollah and Hamas with oil income.
the dependency on a system that should be phased out has never been more obvious. question is - which countries act first?
Solar and wind will replace fossil.
Thanks Andrew for bumping up these so-called “indirect” fossil fuel subsidies. The more awareness people have of this, the better.
Hello everyone, I also have solar panels (both photo - and heating water tubes), 2 EV and heating pump. Glad to make the change, hope many others will see "the light". Thanks for article, know about fossil fuels subsidies, but not in this scale. Keep informing us, is really need it!
And the current war tally for US human cost is at least 6 lives lost and an unreported number of injuries. Forbes reported on march 3 that the estimated cost as of that date ranged from 2 -3 billion depending on the source they quoted and with estimates of up to 90 billion for the entire operation if the estimates of the Trump administration of 4-5 weeks is actually adhered to.