The World Still Runs on Fossil Fuels, which is a Mighty Fine Thing, Too
Bjorn Lomborg's latest pass through the energy numbers is the sort of sentence that should end a thousand sermons and almost never does. In 2024 the world still drew about four-fifths of its primary energy from coal, oil and gas. On his accounting the share was 80.8 per cent, barely moved from 81.4 per cent in 2000. Absolute use is not fading. It is higher than in 1971 by a huge margin. If you wait for the present slope to deliver a fossil-free planet, you are waiting centuries, not until 2050. Climate Depot filed this as the failure of a movement. That is one reading. The other is simpler: the world is still running on the fuels that can run a world, and that is not an indictment. It is a description of physics meeting eight billion people.
The accounting fights are real and should be admitted up front. The Energy Institute's Statistical Review, depending on year and method, has put the fossil share near 81 per cent under the older substitution approach and closer to 86–87 per cent when renewables are counted as the electricity they actually produce rather than the fossil heat they are imagined to replace. Oil remains the largest single source, around a third of demand; coal and gas take most of the rest. Wind and solar are growing fast from a small base. In 2024 they rose on the order of 16 per cent while total energy demand rose about 2 per cent and fossil use still edged up. That is addition, not replacement. Poor and industrialising countries are not swapping barrels for rooftops. They are adding everything they can get.
Calling that a tragedy requires forgetting what the barrels do. Fossil fuels are not a lifestyle brand. They are dense, storable, transportable energy. A litre of diesel moves a tonne of food. Natural gas turns into electricity when the wind drops and into heat when the temperature drops. Coal still smelts and still keeps the lights on in the parts of Asia where most of the next gigawatts of demand live. Oil is not only cars. It is aviation, shipping, plastics, asphalt, and the Haber–Bosch ammonia that feeds a large fraction of humanity. You can dislike the emissions and still owe the harvest to the feedstock. A politics that treats the fuel as a moral stain and the yield as an entitlement is not serious.
The development case is blunter. The countries that climbed out of subsistence did it on coal and oil first, gas later, nuclear where politics allowed. Africa's energy poverty is not a renewable marketing opportunity. It is hospitals without reliable power, farms without fertiliser and fertiliser plants without gas, and cities that brown out while OECD editorials praise a "transition" that has not arrived in primary energy. India's coal use is not a failure of virtue. It is air-conditioning, industry and a grid that has to work on still nights. China's wind and solar build-out is enormous and still sits on top of a fossil system that grew with it. Telling Lagos or Dhaka to skip the fuels that built Essen and Pittsburgh is not climate policy. It is a demand that other people's living standards wait on a technology curve that has not yet displaced dispatchable supply at planetary scale.
None of this requires pretending that carbon dioxide is imaginary or that local air pollution is a myth. Coal smoke in a megacity is a public-health problem. Methane leaks are sloppy engineering. The answer to both is better combustion, better capture where it pays, more gas where it displaces dirtier coal, more nuclear where electorates will permit it, and more storage if anyone can make it cheap enough to matter in winter. The answer is not a timetable that treats 80 per cent of the energy system as a clerical error. Lomborg's "four to ten centuries" line is a provocation. It is also what you get if you extrapolate a share that has hardly moved while demand keeps rising. Summit communiqués are not a substitute for joules.
There is a reason the share is sticky. Energy systems are capital stock: refineries, pipelines, blast furnaces, ships, aircraft, tractors, petrochemical plants. They last decades. Electricity is only part of the story, and even electricity still needs something that runs when the weather does not cooperate. Intermittent generation can grow at spectacular percentage rates and still lose the race against total demand. That is what the 2024 data say. Record renewables, record fossils, record demand. The pie got bigger. The fossil slice did not vanish. Anyone who calls that "the transition is happening faster than you think" is describing the press release, not the pie.
A grown-up energy policy would start there. Keep the fuels that feed, move and heat people. Clean them up at the margin. Build nuclear instead of treating it as a theological problem. Let solar and wind compete for the bits of the system they actually serve. Stop talking as if a civilisation can be decarbonised by slogan on a schedule that ignores India, aviation and ammonia. The world still runs on fossil fuels because they still do the work. Until something else does the work at the same reliability and price, calling that fact a scandal is just another way of not counting.
