How long can fossil fuel dominance last?

A thousand years later, America’s president seems to be drawing a similar line in the sand, scouring official mentions of climate change, and pausing or banning renewable energy projects.

The US government has a lot of power, but even it may struggle to single-handedly reverse the clean energy shift sought by the previous occupant of the White House, and many other countries and organizations around the world. Can politicians breathe new life into fossil fuels, or will the tide of the energy transition prove unstoppable?

• • •

Longer Than You Think

1. Red lights for green projects. The next few years will see some backsliding. The administration’s flurry of executive orders shows their intentions—delaying permits and licenses to wind power, denying funding to climate research, and defending oil and gas producers. Wind projects are likely to be among the first victims, as the industry was already struggling with cost and grid issues.

2. 2050 was never realistic. Reaching net zero carbon emissions by mid-century wasn’t in the cards even before the election, according to energy analyst and historian Vaclav Smil. Last spring, he published a fascinating paper that dives into the difficulty of replacing billions of gasoline vehicles and gas furnaces, and terawatts of fossil fuel-powered power stations. “On the face of it, this seems to be an impossible task,” he writes. “When the world began to undergo its first energy transition during the nineteenth century, it had to replace about 1.5 billion tons of mostly locally cut and burned wood with coal. . . In 2022, the world produced nearly 8.2 billion tons of coal, almost 4.5 billion tons of crude oil, and 2.8 billion tons of natural gas.”

3. Fossil fuels will have a very long tail. Smil writes that replacing entire fossil-fueled economies with renewables is not like simply switching from landlines to cellphones. Although solar should be the largest source of electricity by 2035, coal and natural gas will continue to supply a large amount of power, according to the International Energy Authority. And more frequent and intense heatwaves will boost demand for air conditioning globally, even more than the growth of AI data centers. ”The gradual nature of energy transitions is an inevitable consequence of the fact that none of them have been just a simple matter of replacing one energy source with another,” writes Smil.

The Writing’s On The Wall

1. You can’t deregulate your way to cheap gas. Declaring an “energy emergency” doesn’t mean that Big Oil will actually produce more, reported the New York Times last week. The price per barrel will need to stay high to persuade oil companies to drill new wells, but that could increase prices at the pump, as would the proposed tariffs targeting Mexico and Canada. “It’s not a burdensome regulatory environment that’s holding back US production,” a commodities analyst told the Times. “It’s because shareholders do not want these companies to drill themselves into unprofitability.”

2. The arc of the energy universe is long but it tends towards low-carbon. Take a look at this chart of global oil demand in the International Energy Authority’s comprehensive forecast from late last year. Higher EV sales bend the curve down but even the most pessimistic scenarios show that a clean energy transition is already slowly underway—particularly in Europe and North America. Citi analysts told Fortune that US policies will fail to hold back progress in transitioning away from high-carbon energy sources. “Clean energy is cheaper, more widely available, and more efficient,” they said. “For advocates of clean energy transition, the power of economics will prevail.”

• • •

What To Keep An Eye On

1. Nuclear power policy. While the new administration has pledged to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for lower carbon energy sources, it does not seem to be especially anti-nuclear. In fact, the Atlantic Council notes that incoming Energy Secretary Chris Wright sat on the board of a nuclear fission start-up and signed a letter in 2023 supporting nuclear energy.

2. Price-tag tipping points. The world hit a milestone point in 2023 when solar out-competed fossil fuels on cost for electricity generation, and another in 2024 when EVs became cheaper to own than gas cars. Tim Lenton, Professor of Climate Change at the University of Exeter, writes that making ammonia for fertilizer without fossil fuels could be the next big positive tipping point. Ammonia currently accounts for 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

3. The punch and counter-punch of tariffs. Bloomberg New Energy Finance has a great summary of the energy transition challenges for 2025. It notes that the US isn’t the only country talking about tariffs, with the EU levying tariffs on Chinese EVs, wind technology and electrolyzers (to make hydrogen). India, Turkey, Brazil and Canada also penalize clean-tech imports. But smart tariffs could even help accelerate low carbon goals.