What the Media Still Won’t Tell You About the Energy Transition
What the Media Still Won’t Tell You About the Energy Transition
Robert Bryce
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Publication Note: The Fire Time Magazine appreciates the opportunity to republish this article, which was originally released on July 15, 2025. It is reprinted with permission from Robert Bryce. Be sure to subscribe to his Substack. Further use, duplication, or distribution is prohibited without the author’s written permission.
“Fossil fuels continue to underpin the energy system, accounting for 87% of the energy mix.”
—The Energy Institute’s preface to the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy.
On July 7, a pair of writers at Heatmap, an online outlet that claims to be covering “the biggest story of our time: climate change,” published an article about land-use conflicts and alt-energy. The article said that about one-fifth of all the counties in the U.S. have restricted “renewables development according to exclusive data” gathered by Heatmap Pro, the outlet’s subscription-only service.
That claim caught my eye because over the past 15 years, I’ve documented more than 1,000 rejections or restrictions of wind, solar, and batteries around the world. The count for the U.S. alone is 829. (For more, see the Renewable Rejection Database.) These land-use conflicts, combined with the lack of new high-voltage transmission capacity, are the binding constraint on the growth of renewable energy. Further, this is not a new story. Land-use conflicts over alt-energy have been raging for nearly two decades.
Despite these facts, the Heatmap reporters seemed shocked to find such stout resistance across rural America. They claimed their “exclusive” findings were newsworthy and that the burgeoning number of local restrictions were “slowing the energy transition.”
Four days later, a writer at Canary Media (an outlet that was created by the Rocky Mountain Institute, focuses on climate change, and gets funding from two giant dark-money NGOs—the Climate Imperative Foundation and the Energy Foundation) declared that despite setbacks in the U.S., “the global energy transition goes on.”
The article went on to claim the world is continuing “to move quickly toward cleaner sources” and that “with or without the U.S., the global energy transition is happening.”
Except it isn’t.
There is no energy transition. Just don’t expect the media to tell you the truth about it.
Of course, I could provide dozens, or even hundreds, of other examples of climate-focused journalists, academics from elite universities (hello, Princeton!), and policymakers making risible claims about our energy future and how the world will soon be fueled by “clean” sources like wind, solar, and batteries, with some nuclear and maybe a bit of hydropower, thrown in for good measure. As I explained two years ago in “The Anti-Industry Industry,” the “energy transition” narrative is relentlessly promoted by the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate-media complex, a multi-billion-dollar-per-year business that includes dozens of NGOs and media outlets that promote anti-hydrocarbon agendas. The World Economic Forum even maintains an “Energy Transition Index.”
But the latest edition of the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy shows that the world runs on hydrocarbons. The new edition, released late last month, includes a much-needed change in the review’s methodology. That change, which I’ll discuss below, shows that alt-energy’s contribution to the global energy mix is far smaller than previously claimed.
I’ve spent the past few days crunching the numbers. Here are eight charts that show the energy transition is fiction.
Before going further, I will readily concede that alt-energy capacity and production are growing. In particular, solar energy is surging. Last year, the amount of electricity generated by solar jumped by 461 terawatt-hours, for an increase of 28%. More than half of that increase happened in China, which now accounts for about 40% of global solar energy production. In addition, wind output grew by 8% last year.
But even with that surge in solar and wind, the numbers in the Statistical Review show that alt-energy still only provides single-digit percentages of the world’s energy needs.
As seen above, just 3% of the world’s energy was supplied by solar and wind in 2024. Furthermore, as seen in the graphic above, coal’s share of the global energy mix hasn’t declined at all since 2000. Instead, it has risen by 2%.
Despite the media’s preferred narrative, solar and wind have only captured tiny slivers of the global energy mix. Those slivers can be seen above in the yellow and green bands on the top right. As I have previously reported, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, global spending on solar and wind between 2004 and 2022 was about $4.1 trillion. In 2023, another $600 billion was spent on solar and wind. And in 2024, another $700 billion was spent on solar and wind. Thus, since 2004, about $5.4 trillion has been spent on solar and wind, and yet they are still only providing 3% of the world’s primary energy.
That 3% share is smaller than what has been published in earlier editions of the Statistical Review. This year, the EI changed how it calculates the contributions from renewables. In prior editions, they used a fossil-fuel equivalent method to estimate primary energy use. That method artificially boosted the size of the contributions made by solar and wind. The EI said it switched its methodology to make it consistent with the UN’s recommendations for energy statistics. In a note in the new report, the EI explained:
Instead of comparing renewable energy to fossil fuels, under the new approach, non-combustible renewable energy such as wind, solar photovoltaic, hydro, ocean, wave etc. become “energy products” in the statistical sense at the point of generation of electricity and their “primary energy equivalent” measured as the gross amount of electricity generated.
The change in methodology did not affect the accounting for hydrocarbons. However, it did result in major reductions in the credit given to hydro and renewables, reducing their total contributions by 25 exajoules (EJ) and 24 EJ, respectively.
What’s surprising is how many respondents preferred natural gas. Among all voters, 26% listed gas as their first preference, behind solar at 38%, but far ahead of nuclear, wind, and coal.
While the change in methodology is important, the new report underscores, again, that the greenhouse gas emissions coming from the U.S. and other Western countries are being swamped by the soaring increases coming from China and India. As shown above, 35% of the world’s population lives in those two countries. And while the two countries each have about 1.4 billion people, China is now using about four times more energy than India. (China used 159 EJ in 2024. India used 39 EJ.) Given that enormous disparity and the rapid growth in India’s economy, there’s no reason to expect India’s emissions to decline for decades to come.
As the emissions from those two countries continue to grow, their share of the global emissions continues to rise, even as the U.S. share declines.
As I reported here in 2023, billionaire media baron Michael Bloomberg is giving $1 billion to anti-hydrocarbon NGOs that want to shut down the entire U.S. coal sector. That’s only part of the billionaire’s radical climate agenda. The billionaire’s “beyond carbon” campaign aims to close all U.S. coal plants, “cut gas plant capacity in half while blocking all new gas plants, and increase U.S. clean energy four-fold, reaching 80 percent of total electricity generation,” by 2030.
As I said, it’s a radical agenda—an agenda that’s entirely out of touch with the realities of the U.S. electric grid. Bloomberg’s scheme also ignores global realities. As seen above, electricity production from the U.S. coal fleet has declined by about two-thirds since 2000. Meanwhile, China’s coal-fired generation has surged nearly sixfold. In addition, China’s coal-fired capacity is expanding. The country now has some 200 gigawatts of new coal plants under construction. Unless or until this changes, Bloomberg’s climate agenda is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Our energy and power systems are always determined by the four imperatives: power density, energy density, cost, and scale. While all four are essential, the chart above puts the scale issue into perspective. Yes, solar and wind are growing. But their contribution is dwarfed by the energy we get from hydrocarbons.
Furthermore, the growth in solar and wind is being dwarfed by the growth in hydrocarbons. As shown above, by itself, global gas use last year grew by 4 EJ. That growth was 1.3 times faster than the growth in wind (1 EJ) and solar (2 EJ) combined. When you add in oil and coal, the growth in hydrocarbons was 8 EJ, or roughly 2.7 times faster than the growth in solar and wind.
Finally, a slide on oil, a substance so energy dense, so cheap, so plentiful, so useful, and so flexible, that if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it.
Last week, OPEC claimed that global oil demand will reach 123 million barrels per day by 2050. In its World Oil Outlook, OPEC said that:
[I]t has become increasingly clear to many policymakers in recent years that the narrative of swiftly phasing out oil and gas has been seen for what it is: unworkable, and a fantasy. Many initial net-zero policies promoted unrealistic timelines or had little regard for energy security, affordability or feasibility (emphasis added).
While critics can claim the cartel is simply talking its book, history shows that despite all the hype about electric vehicles, efficiency, and mass transit, oil demand keeps rising. As seen above, oil use has been increasing steadily by about 1 million barrels per day every year since 2000. Given that history, OPEC’s forecast doesn’t appear unreasonable.
I’ll finish here by repeating what I say in nearly every speaking engagement that I do. The numbers in these charts aren’t my numbers; these are the numbers.
Just don’t expect the media to report on them honestly.
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Robert Bryce
Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, podcaster, film producer, and public speaker. Over the past three decades, his articles have appeared in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, National Review, Field & Stream, and Austin Chronicle. He has given nearly 400 invited or keynote lectures to dozens of groups including the Marine Corps War College, Sydney Institute, Jadavpur University, Northwestern University, and a wide variety of professional associations and corporations. He has also appeared on dozens of TV and radio shows, including NPR, BBC, MSNBC, Fox, Al Jazeera, CNN, and PBS.
