The world is poised to pivot to alternatives in a big way because its energy needs cannot be held hostage to the whims of a rogue president and a murderous regime
This article posits a future that is technically not possible. Fossil fuels today make up 80% of the global total energy supply.
Uses not electrifiable in the foreseeable future (steel, concrete, ammonia, mining, heavy transportation, non-energy such as asphalt) total ~40% of the global energy supply and thus 50% of the fossil fuel supply.
Most of these require extreme heat. Energy-dense, combustible fuels are the only thermodynamically practical source of such heat.
All one can accomplish by driving down fossil fuel use in one country is de-industrialization, as we are seeing across Europe. But what this does is to push fossil-fuel use for the above purposes into countries that care much less about consequences.
To find more details, search on “statistical distribution of uses of energy globally” citations to Our World in Data and the IEA. To get full context, read “The Way the World Really Works” by Vaclav Smil.
To see why what will actually happen will be decades of increasing oil use, read the Substack by Arjun Murphy.
There is a great deal in this article that is factually wrong. I am disappointed in the Unpopulist for publishing it.
Electricity represents only about a quarter of total global energy consumption. The rest is heat, transport, and industrial processes that are harder to decarbonize. However, electricity is the platform on which all other sectors electrify. A grid that runs on clean energy for twelve hours a day makes every electric vehicle charged in those hours a zero-emissions vehicle, every heat pump running in those hours a zero-emissions heating system, every industrial process electrified in those hours a step away from fossil fuels.
"The war has shown just how much of the world’s economy now turns on the unchecked decisions of individual men."
This is the inevitable result of big government concentrating total power in the hands of central planners. This is precisely the dystopian reality that left-wing political ideas have engineered.
"An American president who could start the war without asking Congress, and a Tehran regime that could respond by putting a fifth of the world’s oil beyond anyone’s reach."
The American President didn't start this war. Iran initiated this conflict back in 1979, and the inability of the US to secure a decisive victory is just another glaring symptom of the true crisis facing the West: a complete lack of competent political professionals.
"The largest oil and gas supply disruption in history is far from over, but its strongest legacy might well end the dominance of fossil fuels."
As any functional adult should be able to tell you, eliminating fossil fuels would cause the death of billions of people. Demanding an end to fossil fuels is MAGA-level delusion.
Describing the highly subsidized, unreliable products of solar and wind as "clean"—while celebrating the authoritarian policies forcing these waste products on us as "market forces"—is a spectacularly broken take.
In short, you cannot complain about a global economy turning on the unchecked decisions of individual men while actively advocating for exactly that type of central planning.
It is baffling how such a confused, pro-authoritarian piece got published on a platform that claims to be "liberal."
I'll add to it and say that the reason the American economy is faltering is because for decades people thought it was a good idea to farm out ALL production to enemy countries and to rely on energy from enemy countries.
Even a grade school student could see the problem with these decisions and how it would eventually backfire.
Now that the US has secured oil from Venezuela, the single largest supply on earth, they can decouple from the 'Wild West' that is the Middle East.
Now if only Canada would play nice, but Canada is a fallen country as far as I'm concerned. Like a scorned partner, they are chumming up with China of all countries. Unreal.
Actually the US/UK initiated this conflict in 1953. Interestingly the neocons would like to see the US use the same methods to topple the current regime in Iran by paying for protests, bribing officials, and spreading fake news.
Trump's delusional war/not war was at least direct in its hope of toppling the regime and plundering Iranian resources to profit western oligarchs which was its real purpose to start with. Saving Israel from nuclear annihilation was a plausible excuse.
The "Hormuz Crisis" is just an unintended consequence of the US failure to invade Iran in order to secure the strait immediately upon commencing the war. Such are the poor choices of an inept administration and our dilettante military leadership.
The market aspect of this indeed will translate into political challenges. Feel good, save the planet, net-zero ideology has fed the bank accounts of professional environmentalists and made politicians look virtuous but have clearly not made a dent on climate change. When citizens get angry enough about energy costs and renewables have reached their limited capacity to economically supply demand, then governments will surrender to fossil fuel dependency because the demand for less expensive energy will outweigh the political interest in clean energy. Cheaper energy will be more important than cleaner energy.
Distorting the market is also distorting evolution and the adaptive strategies which guarantees the survival of all species. We flatter ourselves with the idea of being able to avoid or control extinction level processes and events (like stopping an asteroid from crashing into the earth!) but the universe decided long ago the physical parameters that determine where life will be, how it will live and how it will die. There just is no teleological end point.
In 1953, Iran nationalized Western property. An act of war against the West. Had the US and UK possessed a competent foreign policy rooted in the defense of individual and property rights, and had they dealt with Iran decisively then, the 1979 Islamic Revolution would never have occurred.
Had we responded properly in 1979, the subsequent decades of Middle Eastern terrorism—including 9/11—would have been entirely averted. And so on.
The same goes for Israel's constant appeasement of its monstrous enemies.
The West is paralyzed by a profound crisis of political expertise. We have completely lost our grip on the fundamental purpose of government, whether in domestic affairs or foreign policy.
Our political mainstream is entirely overrun by professionals whose understanding of reality is on the level of advocates of flat-earth theory.
"Even before the Iran shock, market forces were driving the energy transition without waiting for anyone’s permission. Globally, renewables accounted for 85.6% of all new power capacity added in 2025."
Market forces? Seriously? It's GOVERNMENT force that has driven this activity. Government has forcibly diverted economically justifiable investment in energy (ie fossil fuels) and capital into uneconomic, virtue signalling unreliable (ie green) energy projects that are actively reducing industrial capacity and security wherever they are implemented.
"Over 90% of new renewable projects are now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives."
C'mon... what's the source and context for making such an outrageous statement?
There are certainly many political conclusions one can make regarding who has the power of influence and decision making that can affect the entire world. But in regards to energy, the only correct conclusion is that fossil fuels are far more important, valuable and worthy of increased production and protection than people like you will admit.
This is one of the most absurd articles I have read in this publication.
The cost of energy in Europe is causing significant political pressure on governments. The voting public sees Donald Trump as solely responsible for the economic pain they are experiencing. How their governments are responding to Trump is becoming an issue for politicians. They see stopping Trump and ending his war as vital to their political survival. If they are seen as enabling Trump to unilaterally decimate their economies voters will revolt further to the right or left. The left will promise to stand up to Trump and the right will claim they have power to moderate Trump because he sees them as allies.
At this point Europeans don't care whether the energy is clean or not. Renewable sources remain a preferred option but whatever reduces the immediate economic pressure is fine. Expanding renewables as far as possible is common sense. But the notion that renewables will ever free anyone from fossil fuel dependency is pure fantasy.
The short term "solution" is for consumers to maximize energy conservation with an eye to lowering costs, rationing themselves according to their economic means. With the expansion of energy consuming industries consumers also will have to accustom themselves to scheduled rolling blackouts in order to assure that industries have uninterrupted electricity at discount prices. or pay even higher rates for the limited electrical supply.
Jimmy Carter's advice to turn off lights, lower the thermostat and put on a sweater will become standard for everyone.
It has just occurred to me that considering how fanatic Iran’s regime is they could close the SoH for the purpose of forcing their way of life upon others, ie., convert to their form of Islam, force women & girls to follow what they believe they should behave, & be treated, etc.
Plus, the owners find sucking up all the power (and water) cheaply is an excellent flex for the omniscient panopticon they are building. It makes them…giggle…when entire towns lose water supplies
Golf courses, lawns, and especially agriculture use more water than data centers. Datacenters are one of the greatest innovations in human history. Lawns are just people trying to wax fantastic about the rolling hills of Scotland.
Who ever thought Phoenix and Las Vegas (and developing a lot of southern California) were good ideas? In Florida we are having people move out of state because they can no longer afford home and flood insurance because of the multi-million dollar mansions built along the oceanfront. Humans have been nomadic for a long time and probably will become more so as more and more places become unlivable or unaffordable.
“The United States did not become a net oil and gas exporter until 2019. When independence finally arrived, it came not from a plan out of Washington but from a price-driven shale boom no bureaucrat ordered up.…”
The US is not and has never been crude oil independent.
Current US crude oil production is about 13.4 million barrels per day.
Current US refinery capacity and refined product consumption is 18.5 million barrels.
Refined transportation fuels derived from that refining are approximately 13.6 million barrels per day. (The total refining capacity is required to produce this amount of those fuels). The majority consumed in the US.
Hydraulic fracturing and shale made the US natural gas independent but even that has presented export limitations due to energy intensive compression and transport considerations in the supply chain. It is one reason that US production of intermediates, derived from natural gas, like ethylene, ammonia, methanol, and hydrogen have increased.
The crude import export markets exist not only for the purposes of refining optimization but also for profit taking.
You forget that there are now many many interested parties to make sure this never happens again. Remember the enemy has a say. The enemies of the Iranian and American governments will have a say.
This article posits a future that is technically not possible. Fossil fuels today make up 80% of the global total energy supply.
Uses not electrifiable in the foreseeable future (steel, concrete, ammonia, mining, heavy transportation, non-energy such as asphalt) total ~40% of the global energy supply and thus 50% of the fossil fuel supply.
Most of these require extreme heat. Energy-dense, combustible fuels are the only thermodynamically practical source of such heat.
All one can accomplish by driving down fossil fuel use in one country is de-industrialization, as we are seeing across Europe. But what this does is to push fossil-fuel use for the above purposes into countries that care much less about consequences.
To find more details, search on “statistical distribution of uses of energy globally” citations to Our World in Data and the IEA. To get full context, read “The Way the World Really Works” by Vaclav Smil.
To see why what will actually happen will be decades of increasing oil use, read the Substack by Arjun Murphy.
There is a great deal in this article that is factually wrong. I am disappointed in the Unpopulist for publishing it.
Electricity represents only about a quarter of total global energy consumption. The rest is heat, transport, and industrial processes that are harder to decarbonize. However, electricity is the platform on which all other sectors electrify. A grid that runs on clean energy for twelve hours a day makes every electric vehicle charged in those hours a zero-emissions vehicle, every heat pump running in those hours a zero-emissions heating system, every industrial process electrified in those hours a step away from fossil fuels.
At what cost relative to fossil fuels? At what reliability level relative to fossil fuels?
Or are those non-factors in your argument?
"The war has shown just how much of the world’s economy now turns on the unchecked decisions of individual men."
This is the inevitable result of big government concentrating total power in the hands of central planners. This is precisely the dystopian reality that left-wing political ideas have engineered.
"An American president who could start the war without asking Congress, and a Tehran regime that could respond by putting a fifth of the world’s oil beyond anyone’s reach."
The American President didn't start this war. Iran initiated this conflict back in 1979, and the inability of the US to secure a decisive victory is just another glaring symptom of the true crisis facing the West: a complete lack of competent political professionals.
"The largest oil and gas supply disruption in history is far from over, but its strongest legacy might well end the dominance of fossil fuels."
As any functional adult should be able to tell you, eliminating fossil fuels would cause the death of billions of people. Demanding an end to fossil fuels is MAGA-level delusion.
Describing the highly subsidized, unreliable products of solar and wind as "clean"—while celebrating the authoritarian policies forcing these waste products on us as "market forces"—is a spectacularly broken take.
In short, you cannot complain about a global economy turning on the unchecked decisions of individual men while actively advocating for exactly that type of central planning.
It is baffling how such a confused, pro-authoritarian piece got published on a platform that claims to be "liberal."
What a great post. I couldn't agree more.
I'll add to it and say that the reason the American economy is faltering is because for decades people thought it was a good idea to farm out ALL production to enemy countries and to rely on energy from enemy countries.
Even a grade school student could see the problem with these decisions and how it would eventually backfire.
Now that the US has secured oil from Venezuela, the single largest supply on earth, they can decouple from the 'Wild West' that is the Middle East.
Now if only Canada would play nice, but Canada is a fallen country as far as I'm concerned. Like a scorned partner, they are chumming up with China of all countries. Unreal.
Actually the US/UK initiated this conflict in 1953. Interestingly the neocons would like to see the US use the same methods to topple the current regime in Iran by paying for protests, bribing officials, and spreading fake news.
Trump's delusional war/not war was at least direct in its hope of toppling the regime and plundering Iranian resources to profit western oligarchs which was its real purpose to start with. Saving Israel from nuclear annihilation was a plausible excuse.
The "Hormuz Crisis" is just an unintended consequence of the US failure to invade Iran in order to secure the strait immediately upon commencing the war. Such are the poor choices of an inept administration and our dilettante military leadership.
The market aspect of this indeed will translate into political challenges. Feel good, save the planet, net-zero ideology has fed the bank accounts of professional environmentalists and made politicians look virtuous but have clearly not made a dent on climate change. When citizens get angry enough about energy costs and renewables have reached their limited capacity to economically supply demand, then governments will surrender to fossil fuel dependency because the demand for less expensive energy will outweigh the political interest in clean energy. Cheaper energy will be more important than cleaner energy.
Distorting the market is also distorting evolution and the adaptive strategies which guarantees the survival of all species. We flatter ourselves with the idea of being able to avoid or control extinction level processes and events (like stopping an asteroid from crashing into the earth!) but the universe decided long ago the physical parameters that determine where life will be, how it will live and how it will die. There just is no teleological end point.
In 1953, Iran nationalized Western property. An act of war against the West. Had the US and UK possessed a competent foreign policy rooted in the defense of individual and property rights, and had they dealt with Iran decisively then, the 1979 Islamic Revolution would never have occurred.
Had we responded properly in 1979, the subsequent decades of Middle Eastern terrorism—including 9/11—would have been entirely averted. And so on.
The same goes for Israel's constant appeasement of its monstrous enemies.
The West is paralyzed by a profound crisis of political expertise. We have completely lost our grip on the fundamental purpose of government, whether in domestic affairs or foreign policy.
Our political mainstream is entirely overrun by professionals whose understanding of reality is on the level of advocates of flat-earth theory.
"Even before the Iran shock, market forces were driving the energy transition without waiting for anyone’s permission. Globally, renewables accounted for 85.6% of all new power capacity added in 2025."
Market forces? Seriously? It's GOVERNMENT force that has driven this activity. Government has forcibly diverted economically justifiable investment in energy (ie fossil fuels) and capital into uneconomic, virtue signalling unreliable (ie green) energy projects that are actively reducing industrial capacity and security wherever they are implemented.
"Over 90% of new renewable projects are now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives."
C'mon... what's the source and context for making such an outrageous statement?
There are certainly many political conclusions one can make regarding who has the power of influence and decision making that can affect the entire world. But in regards to energy, the only correct conclusion is that fossil fuels are far more important, valuable and worthy of increased production and protection than people like you will admit.
This is one of the most absurd articles I have read in this publication.
The cost of energy in Europe is causing significant political pressure on governments. The voting public sees Donald Trump as solely responsible for the economic pain they are experiencing. How their governments are responding to Trump is becoming an issue for politicians. They see stopping Trump and ending his war as vital to their political survival. If they are seen as enabling Trump to unilaterally decimate their economies voters will revolt further to the right or left. The left will promise to stand up to Trump and the right will claim they have power to moderate Trump because he sees them as allies.
At this point Europeans don't care whether the energy is clean or not. Renewable sources remain a preferred option but whatever reduces the immediate economic pressure is fine. Expanding renewables as far as possible is common sense. But the notion that renewables will ever free anyone from fossil fuel dependency is pure fantasy.
The short term "solution" is for consumers to maximize energy conservation with an eye to lowering costs, rationing themselves according to their economic means. With the expansion of energy consuming industries consumers also will have to accustom themselves to scheduled rolling blackouts in order to assure that industries have uninterrupted electricity at discount prices. or pay even higher rates for the limited electrical supply.
Jimmy Carter's advice to turn off lights, lower the thermostat and put on a sweater will become standard for everyone.
Funny, but…how much “consultation” did OUR President do with “democratic processes before starting this trillion dollar débâcle?
It has just occurred to me that considering how fanatic Iran’s regime is they could close the SoH for the purpose of forcing their way of life upon others, ie., convert to their form of Islam, force women & girls to follow what they believe they should behave, & be treated, etc.
Also, Dear Leader has now announced HE will be charging a toll for shipping .
Why aren't hyperscaler data centers running purely off solar, wind, and batteries? Are the stupid?
Because solar, wind and batteries cannot provide on demand electricity and so can't run anything. These products are unfit for purpose.
Plus, the owners find sucking up all the power (and water) cheaply is an excellent flex for the omniscient panopticon they are building. It makes them…giggle…when entire towns lose water supplies
Golf courses, lawns, and especially agriculture use more water than data centers. Datacenters are one of the greatest innovations in human history. Lawns are just people trying to wax fantastic about the rolling hills of Scotland.
Who ever thought Phoenix and Las Vegas (and developing a lot of southern California) were good ideas? In Florida we are having people move out of state because they can no longer afford home and flood insurance because of the multi-million dollar mansions built along the oceanfront. Humans have been nomadic for a long time and probably will become more so as more and more places become unlivable or unaffordable.
Let the market sort it out instead of the feds shouldering the cost of rebuilding vacation homes on the Florida coastline.
“The United States did not become a net oil and gas exporter until 2019. When independence finally arrived, it came not from a plan out of Washington but from a price-driven shale boom no bureaucrat ordered up.…”
The US is not and has never been crude oil independent.
Current US crude oil production is about 13.4 million barrels per day.
Current US refinery capacity and refined product consumption is 18.5 million barrels.
Refined transportation fuels derived from that refining are approximately 13.6 million barrels per day. (The total refining capacity is required to produce this amount of those fuels). The majority consumed in the US.
Hydraulic fracturing and shale made the US natural gas independent but even that has presented export limitations due to energy intensive compression and transport considerations in the supply chain. It is one reason that US production of intermediates, derived from natural gas, like ethylene, ammonia, methanol, and hydrogen have increased.
The crude import export markets exist not only for the purposes of refining optimization but also for profit taking.
You forget that there are now many many interested parties to make sure this never happens again. Remember the enemy has a say. The enemies of the Iranian and American governments will have a say.