Net Zero is dead. Thank goodness.

Good news, readers! Despite politicians' best efforts to arrest the use of fossil energy, and their increasing sponsorship (at the cost of trillions of dollars) of unreliable and inefficient 'renewable' energy projects around the globe, despite all this political energy directed against thee fossil fuel still powers the world -- and it is powering ever more of it:

Global fossil fuel consumption is still increasing.... The data show that the much vaunted 'energy transition' off of fossil fuels has yet to get underway.
    "Since 2015, when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, global energy consumption increased by 61.2 exajoules (EJ), which is a bit more that the total 2022 energy consumption of the European Union. This increase is very good news for those who lack access to modern energy services....

The truth is, "Net Zero" activists who claim it's possible to "transition" away from fossil fuels completely by 2050 are deluding themselves.

Achieving net-zero fossil fuels by 2050 requires the deployment of the equivalent of 1 nuclear power plant per day — starting today and continuing every day until 2050.

Crikey, even China isn't building them at that rate. And no-one else is building them at all -- or anything at all of that energy magnitude. (And the energy density of unreliables is simply too poor for their use as a full substitute to be feasible.)

A reminder here for those who are gnashing their teeth about this: Energy multiplies human effort. Without that abundant and reliable energy, modern civilisation is dead. So news that more energy is being put to use by increasing numbers of people is good news.

"But what about the climate?!" I hear from the back of the room. "Don't you believe in climate change." "Climate change" is in an intentionally vague term. (The terminological change from "global cooling" to "global warming" to "climate change" to "climate crisis" has only taken three decades; where can words go next I wonder?)  It doesn't say how much change; whether or not it's a good change; nor whether ot not it's caused by us. At this level of vagueness, everybody "believes" that climate changes.

If by 'climate change' however you mean some human impact on climate, then yes, there is. Some. But, importantly, there is no impending 'climate crisis' before us -- despite what politicians and their activist would like us to believe. 

And most importantly, it is the energy delivered by fossil fuels that enables us to protect ourselves from today's weather emergencies. So much so that even as the world has warmed by ~1 degree over the last century, mostly in the colder parts of the globe, climate disaster deaths have fallen by 98%! Thanks in large part to the energy made available by fossil fuels.  More production, powered by fossil fuels, has made us more safe, not less.

This is not a trivial point. It's something to celebrate, not to damn. As energy activist Alex Epstein argues, 

If we want a world in which all 8 billion of us have the opportunity to flourish -- to live long, prosperous, fulfilling lives -- we need to use more, not less, fossil fuel going forward. 

Those two loaded question above, by the way, and my responses to them, are based on Alex's recent Energy Talking Points, offering advice on how to answer loaded climate questions like these, including these doozies:

Check out all his responses here:  >> 'HOW TO ANSWER LOADED CLIMATE QUESTIONS'