Energy Bar: Your Guide to the Transition From Dirty Energy to Clean

The transition from fossil fuels is happening faster than most experts predicted, and in this series, Bluedot Living writer/editor Jim Miller, who has worked as an economist in the environmental field for decades, will guide us through issues and technologies that will shape our energy future for the better. Today, an introduction to energy.

I had a crusty, old professor of economic history in college who said the greatest return on investment has always been in energy — because energy is what humans need to make stuff, to move stuff, to heat stuff, and now, to compute stuff. Energy is a fundamental “input” into the economy, the economy we rely on to improve our lives. Energy is so ubiquitous in our day-to-day life that it’s practically invisible; we don’t see the electrons that flow into our homes, or even the gasoline that goes into (most of) our cars. We look at a chair or a strawberry and we don’t see the energy it took to produce it and transport it to our home.

Since before recorded history, people have burned wood (“biomass” in energy talk) as fuel, and wood remained the primary energy source until the middle of the 1800s, when fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) took over. It’s difficult to understand in our modern times what a seeming miracle fossil fuels were less than 200 years ago. The forests of Europe and eastern North America were rapidly dwindling under unceasing demand for energy. Suddenly people could dig powerful, versatile, seemingly inexhaustible sources of energy out of the ground. My economic history professor shared accounts of people seeing coal fires and crying tears of happiness that they no longer had to chop down forests.

These new sources of energy spawned the industrial revolution, which improved our material lives in every conceivable way. We used amazing amounts of energy, built cities and nations, and provided all the modern wonders we take for granted that would have astonished previous generations. But of course, in sowing the wind of fossil fuels we reaped the whirlwind of terrible air pollution (much of which has been cleaned up, at least in the developed world), and ultimately, climate change (which hasn’t).

Right now, the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the biggest, most positive, and under-reported environmental story. The fact that the energy sector (responsible for the majority of both greenhouse gas emissions and conventional air pollutants) is transitioning to clean power faster than even most experts predicted is hugely encouraging. But the issue is also complex, with a bewildering array of new technologies and a dizzying pace of change.

Think of these Energy Bar pieces as your guide to this energy transition. And make no mistake: the transition is happening, regardless of political currents. Companies are often criticized for thinking short term, but successful companies rely on hard data to make long-term investment decisions, not the week-to-week whims of politicians. Take the recent case of the first Trump administration: Despite Trump’s promise to revive the coal industry, and his antipathy toward renewables, from 2016 to 2020 U.S. coal production fell 13% and coal used to generate electricity in the U.S. fell 38%. Wind power grew 49% and utility-scale solar by 47%; small-scale solar on rooftops grew 221% (U.S. EIA data).

Or consider oil production in the U.S.: While the current president promises to “Drill, baby, drill!,” American oil companies aren’t eager to expand production amid weak global demand growth and healthy supplies, which add up to stable prices and lower profits. On the flip side, the last president passed the biggest climate bill in history and was a green-energy champ, but the U.S. produced more oil in 2024 than ever before, surpassing the previous best year, 2023. In fact the U.S. produces more oil than any country in the world.

So there are limits to the power of politicians to affect the demand for different types of energy, particularly as renewables have become cheaper in many cases than fossil fuels. In fact, there are extremely convincing arguments that the energy transition will be much cheaper than most forecasts, mostly because forecasting is hard and forecasters are forced to use today’s data to predict tomorrow’s reality. But the costs of renewable technologies keep falling, and the pace of installations keeps rising. The result: globally more solar electricity infrastructure was installed in 2024 than all other power sources combined.

The OECD’s International Energy Agency (IEA), which researches and works on energy projects all over the globe, expects the world’s total energy demand to rise by more than 20% by 2050. It is critical that richer countries export renewable energy technologies to less-developed countries (“emerging markets and developing economies” in the preferred parlance of researchers) because that is where the demand for energy is going to grow the fastest. It needs to grow the fastest there, because increased energy consumption is necessary to improve the lives of the world’s poor and reduce global inequalities. Western countries used (mostly) polluting fossil fuels to improve our lives over the last 150 years, creating terrible global inequities. If we want to reduce these inequities, the key will be in growing green energy use for the world’s poor.

One last point: those in Washington (and elsewhere) who are fighting against the energy transition are shoveling against the tide. And while fighting the irresistible force of clean energy economics is futile in the long-term, any delays and backsliding could cost us dearly. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, who has focused his illustrious career on seeing how the patterns of history will impact the future, wrote recently: “In the 21st century, the country that has the smartest, cheapest, and most efficient ecosystem of AI, EVs, smart batteries, and abundant clean electricity will dominate. Just as in the Industrial Age, whoever had the biggest ecosystem of coal, steel, oil, and combustion engines dominated.” China is already way ahead of us in producing green energy technology and electric vehicles, and is rapidly catching up in artificial intelligence.

So what’s next? As I said, forecasters have a hard job, and the future is tough to figure out. That’s definitely true for the energy ecosystem, which is highly complex. In the coming months, I’ll explore some important issues in energy (like the possibility of nuclear fusion and the growing excitement about geothermal), and meet some amazing people who are trying to affect the needed change.

Jim Miller is an environmental economist with three decades of experience in the field. He has worked on energy, housing, transportation, and environmental policy in the private sector, at several different levels of government, and for non-profits.