This essay is based on testimony delivered November 29, 2023, before the Congressional Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing and Critical Materials, House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
It is often useful to contrast rhetoric with reality. The phrase, an “energy transition,” the goal to replace hydrocarbons, has origins that trace back to a 1977 speech by President Jimmy Carter. It was an “address to the nation” that commandeered national media, as is the convention on occasions when presidents seek to deliver momentous news. That address became known, infamously, as the “MEOW” speech because of President Carter framing the “energy challenge” as the “moral equivalent of war.” We find a lot of familiar rhetorical turns of phrase in that speech, not least the urgent need for a putative “energy transition” as being “the greatest challenge that our country will face during our lifetime,” and the need to “act quickly” in order to “have a decent world for our children and our grandchildren.” Back then, the urgency was motivated by the belief the world was running out of oil and natural gas.
Of course, in our time the “energy transition” rhetoric is directed at replacing a now over-abundant supply of those hydrocarbons, specifically in service of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The latter is the latest “greatest challenge” facing humanity. Meanwhile, after a near half-century of transition policies and massive government spending since the MEOW speech, the reality today is that oil, gas, and coal today supply 82% of global energy.
To put that reality into a more recent context, since Y2k we’ve seen over $5 trillion of global spending on wind and solar and similar efforts to avoid hydrocarbons. That did reduce hydrocarbons’ share of world energy, but by just two percentage points. And the quantity, not share, of hydrocarbons consumed globally has increased by an amount equal, in energy-equivalent terms, to adding six Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil output. Those two decades of spending has led to solar and wind combined supplying just under 4% of world energy. For context: burning wood still supplies 10%.
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Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; a partner in Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund.
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