Facts always require interpretation
The facts never speak exactly for themselves, and must be carefully placed in a multidimensional context in our messy complex systems.
In this Reuters article — https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/solar-power-due-overtake-oil-production-investment-first-time-iea-2023-05-25/ we are asked to believe a glossy press release to the effect that our energy world will be soon advancing fast into the long awaited energy transition.
This is what our banking and political elites would like to have us believe, so we don’t kick them out of power over us.
I really hope it is, but there is such a long way to go yet, and the good news also reflects a growing energy cost collapse of our fossil fuel energy systems, which I hope are finally maxed out. Also here is nothing about our massive ecological overshoot and need to collapse from brink of biosphere collapse.
Nice, but let us not spice it up more than necessary. Good that solar is now equivalent to oil in new money investment, but this forgets, that coal and gas are fossil fuels as well. It is the total fossil fuel emissions that are growing our climate catastrophe. For climate’s sake, new investment in them has to be zero, plus they have to be in a state of rapidly decreasing output, or else all the renewable investment in the world is not going to help our biosphere long term centuries outlook.
I suspect the 1.7 x ratio of dollar spending in favour of non-fossil fuels, to including nuclear, EVs, energy efficiency, has a big something to do investors having lower expected returns on fossil fuel investments, and a growing major desperation of being globally tapped out.
Thank god we cannot magically create new untapped fossil fuel resources that would be both economic and socially feasible, otherwise we would still be doing it.
Also EV’s still demand a lot of indirect fossil fuel energy. The rate of ICE engine abandonment is much more important than EV creation.
Given that emissions offsets and GHG gas removal technology is costly and minimal effect, net-zero emissions really implies net zero fossil fuels.
The linked story also lumped renewables with nuclear, EVs and efficiency, to hype up the comparison.
Energy is never limitless. Too much causes us to do harm, because our rationality is limited. We need to be in total energy use degrowth, and to stop doing useless stuff with our energy systems, including war and military spending.
Getting a real rate of decline of fossil fuels extraction is far, far more important for our climate and biosphere future, than the rate of growth of renewable energy. Until that happens we are celebrating the wrong statistics.
Emissions keep accumulating in atmosphere and oceans for the long term, until we have gone full negative emissions, including all those tipping points natural emissions to come.
I expect that climate — resource — planetary boundary collapse puts us on course to a near net-zero human species by 2100, such that we and all our domesticated dependents and food sources which are now about 96% of mammals by weight, are reduced back down to less than 1% of the surviving mammal species. The total survivors will be also much reduced.
We may need to establish Mars colonies on Earth. Then we can hope that Nature still remembers how to evolve back out of severe biosphere balance, from our planetary boundary incursions way past the brink of safety.