Energy Realism

So this was posted yesterday

and my heart sank a bit seeing how excitedly this hyperbole was received by many peers in my corner of the social web.

I have no beef with @squarelyrooted.bsky.social ; every well-intentioned optimist is a friend of mine, and I don't think they intended their statement to go viral like that.

But since it did, and because it seemed to resonate so strongly with a significant number of people, I gotta say my piece. This is merely a retort to the statement, not the person, it just doesn't feel right to paste in an "anonymized" screenshot when we can sense-make together with backlinks.

My response won't be as quippy and it'll take 5 minutes to read, so its odds of reaching a comensurate amount of people are slim .

Still, someone is wrong on the internet and the record needs correcting.

It's this statement in particular that is misleadingly hyperbolic:

we're turbodeploying unlimited free energy

The growth of solar and the other renewables is incredible and I'm here for it, but we just can't go around saying "free, unlimited energy" like that's something we can look forward to in our imminent future.

I'm not an energy expert and I'm bad with stats, but thanks to a knowledge database and community called The Great Simplification I've listened to hundreds such experts talk about what can be summed up as a scholarly discipline of energy realism.

Since Nate Hagens & friends have said all that needs to be said far more intelligently on this matter than I ever could, from here on out I asked the computer to "do my homework for me" by summarizing the TGS thesis into a few counter-points, manually edited for brevity and best-effort source verification.

New energy inputs aren't replacing anything, they're being added on top.

Every energy transition in history has been additive, not subtractive — wood didn't go away when we found coal, coal didn't go away when we found oil0. The current one is no exception so far. The Energy Institute's 2025 Statistical Review found global energy demand and fossil consumption both hit all-time highs in 2024, with clean energy "layered on top of rising demand, not yet replacing conventional sources at scale"0.

Fossil CO₂ emissions hit a record 38.1 billion tonnes in 2025, up 1.1%, driven by growth in all three fossil fuels — coal +0.8%, oil +1%, gas +1.3%0.

Any "turbodeployment" we do today necessarily inreases our burn rate of fossil fuels.

No such thing as "free" energy.

Sunlight is free, capturing it is not. Solar panels, turbines, transmission, and the minerals, steel and concrete to mount them are manufactured, mined, and transported using — right now — a fossil-fuelled industrial base.

The honest term is rebuildables, not renewables: the hardware wears out in ~20–30 years and has to be rebuilt from a finite stock of source materials0.

A clean-energy economy is a more mineral-intensive economy — an EV needs roughly six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, an onshore wind plant nine times a gas plant0.

Electricity is not energy.

Solar overwhelmingly produces electricity, and electricity is only about a fifth of final energy use globally0.

The other ~80% — the heat to make steel and cement, the diesel in long-haul trucking and shipping, the feedstock for ammonia fertilizer that roughly half of humanity's food calories depend on — is still overwhelmingly molecules, not electrons, and far harder to electrify0. Decarbonizing the power sector is the easy fifth of the clean-energy transition.

Efficiency and abundance increase consumption.

Cheaper, more abundant energy doesn't lead to less throughput; historically it leads to more. That's Jevons' paradox, observed since 18650.

The same AI that "does our homework" is now a material new load on the grid, with the IEA projecting data-centre electricity demand to more than double by 20300.

The power sector may genuinely be near or already past ' peak oil '. Fossil power generation is projected to stay essentially flat in 2025 for the first time outside a pandemic, with renewables now meeting most demand growth0, and the IEA's stated-policies view still has total fossil use peaking before 20300.

We can only go from 'flat' to 'declining' if we stop turbodeploying energy-eaters in lockstep with energy-producers.

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The sun's energy is effectively infinite. Our ability to harvest, store, transport, and materialize it into the machine-work that powers civilization is very much not.

If you want the long-form version of this argument, the three best on-ramps are Nate Hagens' original Energy Blindness monologue, the Oil 101 series and his recent conversation with thermodynamicist Tad Patzek , (see the extensive bibliography for further reading).

Why Each American Lives Like a 40-Ton Whale: Power, Overshoot, and Climate - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is joined by earth scientist and thermodynamicist Tad Patzek for a deep dive into the mathematics and physics driving humanity's energetic and material predicament.

Postscript

Imagine this type of ongoing conversation being baked into the microblogging experience. If enough people liked my response, the 2k people who liked the original post could be notified of an update in the discourse.

I'll gladly hear from anyone who can offer a longform (preferably 5-10 mins long) retort-in-kind for what I've put forth.

We can do better than 300-character post battles. The microblog format0 is great for provocative conversation starters, but complex topics demand longer-form deliberation.