From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.
For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”
Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.
But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.
That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.
Most of the Statistical Review consists of just spreadsheets of numbers. There are some charts, but relatively few. But the takeaways are too obvious to hide. The big one is this: there is no energy “transition” going on, at least not in the sense that “renewables” are actually supplanting fossil fuels. Yes there is some considerable amount of “renewable” wind and solar electricity generation getting built (with huge government subsidies). But it is not replacing fossil fuel generation. Rather, fossil fuel generation continues to increase, and its share of overall energy production has barely budged.
Here is EI’s June 20 Press Release, which summarizes the five “key stories” that it says emerge from the statistics. The first one is the big one — increasing energy consumption led by increased production and consumption of fossil fuels:
Record global energy consumption, with coal and oil pushing fossil fuels and their emissions to record levels. Global primary energy consumption overall was at a record absolute high, up 2% on the previous year to 620 Exajoules (EJ). Global fossil fuel consumption reached a record high, up 1.5% to 505 EJ (driven by coal up 1.6%, oil up 2% to above 100 million barrels for first time, while gas was flat). As a share of the overall mix they were at 81.5%, marginally down from 82% last year.
And of course, “emissions” continue to rise:
Emissions from energy increased by 2%, exceeding 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time.
No matter how much the federal government or any state threatens to punish you for your sin of fossil fuel use, aggregate global emissions from such use are not going to go down within our lifetimes.
The second “key story” relates to the contribution, or lack thereof, of solar and wind. Here EI engages in some modest spinning to make things look less bad than they are for the solar and wind promoters; but there’s not much they can do:
Solar and wind push global renewable electricity generation to another record level. Renewable generation, excluding hydro, was up 13% to a record high of 4,748 TWh. This growth was driven almost entirely by wind and solar, and accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.
4,748 TWh of renewable generation — wow, that’s a lot! Or is it? Do you notice how they suddenly switched units from Exajoules to Terawatt hours when they changed from talking about fossil fuels to solar and wind. Does anybody around here know the conversion factor? Yes — it’s 277.778 TWh per EJ. That means that the 4,748 TWh of “almost entirely” solar and wind power generated in 2023 came to all of 17.1 EJ, which is just 2.7% of the 620 EJ of world primary energy consumption. Could you have imagined that it could be so little, after decades of over-the-top promotion and trillions of dollars of subsidies?
And pay attention to that line “wind and solar . . . accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.” Does that somehow sound like a transition is happening? It’s the opposite. If wind and solar were actually taking over, they would have to account for 100% of additional generation, plus large further amounts to replace fossil fuel generators. As long as wind and solar account for less than all of additional generation, then fossil fuels are continuing to increase, and there is no “transition” going on at all.
I mentioned that there were relatively few charts in the Review, but some of them are striking. Here is one of my favorites, showing global coal consumption from 1965 to 2023:
Over that period, North America and Europe have cut their consumption almost by half, from almost 40 EJ per year to around 20. But over the same period the consumption in the rest of the world has gone from about 20 EJ to around 140, multiplying by a factor of 7. And don’t be fooled by the apparent leveling off of increases in total consumption in the last several years. That reflects continuing decreases in North America and Europe, which are more than offset by larger increases in the Asia Pacific region.
Robert Bryce at his Substack has many more details from the EI Statistical Review, plus several charts that he has created from the EI data. He is much better at creating charts than I am. The title of Bryce’s article is “Numbers Don’t Lie.” Bryce also has a figure for the amount of government subsidies that have gone to wind and solar generation since 2004: $4.7 trillion. That much money to fund a supposed “transition” that isn’t occurring at all.
The story is going to be effectively the same every year until finally the promoters give up on the wind/solar scam.
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Well, who’d have thought it!
Joe Biden: ” We are going to get rid of fossil fuels”
Hopefully, the electorate gets rid of old Joe.
The earth has been in a CO2 drought for millions of years
Fossil fuels are a temporary blessing, because they make possible the prosperity of the civilizations of the world, plus they increase much needed CO2 ppm to promote flora growth, as proven in greenhouses, where CO2 is maintained at 1000 to 1200 ppm
Based on the debate, Joe is a goner.
He cannot talk rationally about any complicated subject, so he deals in memorized sound bites, which he “enhances”, such as when his uncle was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea, and when he rode the train over the Delaware Bridge that never had any railroad tracks
Democrats cannot believe how much cheating they would have to do to overcome Trump’s lead.
Biden did not get 81 million votes
He was falsely credited with 81 million ballots, many of which were double and triple counted, and many have already been destroyed
Zombie Joe deserves no sympathy, the damage his unelected acolytes have done is incalculable.
The phrase ‘elder abuse’ is going viral on the ethernet and just one more stunning example of how lefties don’t do irony.
His 6 handicap must be on a mini-golf course. !
Or someone else hitting the ball for him… sort of like his presidency.
They might not get the chance after the debate but I think his puppet masters will keep him in place presumably because a non-demented person might have their own ideas and not obey orders. Notwithstanding that, the alternatives are not much better – Commie Kamala, Governor Hair Gel, somebody called Whitmer or Michael Obama.
Trump would have an even bigger landslide
Can’t wait to see the simpleton’s take on the debate. 😉
You ask,
“Why would you vote for a convicted felon.”
“Why would I vote for someone mentally unfit to be tried?”
If last night is any indication, the electorate may not get the chance to get rid of Slow Joe.
Joe Biden is a fossil fool.
Half way through the OP I did a [Ctrl-F] search on “Nuclear” and it came up 0/0.
Graph looks a lot like a map of New York State.
“Most of the Statistical Review consists of just spreadsheets of numbers. There are some charts, but relatively few.”
If the data doesn’t toe the required party line, displaying the data in chart form is the last thing you want to do.
The huge increase in Asia is because that is where a large amount of the “stuff” for consumption in western society is now being manufactured.
Virtue-seeking clowns in the western world are not really reducing their use of fossil fuels, they are just transferring it to Asia
You would think at some point people would realize the use of fossil fuels is a zero sum game for manufacturing anything. When you add shipping to the products the use of fossil fuels only increases.
And of course, much of the drop in coal use in Western once-were-civilisations has been replaced by GAS.
Just read your post. Brilliant.
You only said that because he got there first 😉
Figure transportation and other inefficiencies into account and it’s even worse than that.
If you ever discuss matters with Green activists, as I have, you will be struck by their innumeracy and inability to understand elementary logic.
We do that regularly on that forum
We are all well aware of their incredible incompetence in every field of numeracy and logic.
The West uses it rules-based BS, prints paper dollars and euros, to “pay” for these Asian goods, but that game is over, as more countries join BRICS+ , which has 30 more countries wanting to join
They will set up and control their own finance, banking, insurance, payment, and transportation systems, etc.,
Very nice Francis. I put more stock in Francis than all the CAGW clowns put together.
The slowing of coal growth is probably due to the increases in natural gas usage after fracking was developed and increased natural gas production and companies and utilities switched from coal to natural gas.
“That means that the 4,748 TWh of “almost entirely” solar and wind power generated in 2023 came to all of 17.1 EJ, which is just 2.7% of the 620 EJ of world primary energy consumption. Could you have imagined that it could be so little, after decades of over-the-top promotion and trillions of dollars of subsidies?”
Doing my own research on this, I argued that ‘Peak Renewables’ occurred in Europe in 2017! Those ‘global’ new wind and solar installations were all in China in the last 3 yrs!
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-widens-renewable-energy-supply-lead-with-wind-power-push-2023-03-01/
Also, in 2019, 47GW of spent first wave solar were awaiting decommissioning, after which we had the Covid lockdown, supply chain entanglement, 10 fold rocketing spot nat gas prices (caused, as Obama predicted, by gov campaigns to destroy the O&G and coal industry)
Have those 47GW of spent generators been taken down? Is the 1.5% decline in output per year factored into the stats?
The coal consumption chart shows otherwise. There is a huge transition of coal consumption from developed nations to developing nations.
The only way to make weather energy extractors is to burn coal. They are net energy consumers; requiring more energy to make than they can possibly return in their short operating life. Design life would need to increase ten-fold to get an energy return in a dispatchable power network.
Given the rapid increase in the rate at which wind and solar have been built over the last 2 decades, there are a lot of relatively “young” wind and solar fields. Given that wind and solar have a history of only lasting 20 to 25 years, there are a lot of wind and solar units that in the next 5 to 10 years, are going to start reaching end of life.
Over the next decade, a lot of wind and solar installations will be needed just to replace units that have to be retired.
Which will all need more coal and petroleum,
And more of hazardous waste land fills
Many won’t be “replaced”..
They will be just left to rot and decay because disposal and land fill costs will be too expensive.
Same with solar farms….
A TOXIC mess / disaster in the making. !
Someone (not me) familiar with such things should write an article on the contracts that may, or may not, specify how these major wind facilities will meet their end. Two related examples:
#1: In western Pennsylvania coal and gas areas, there were no plans to make things right with Gaia. That is no longer the case and many of the old coal cuts have been reclaimed, and the abandoned gas wells plugged.
#2: Just west of me (now) there is an old Darrieus wind turbine erected about 40 years ago. The company went broke before it produced, but it still stands. It can be seen using Google Earth Pro “Street View”, from these coordinates:
47.101065, -120.750094
Drag the orange “man” to the road and swing east.
On the horizon to the north there are dozens of modern 3-blade turbines.
Like the Tarong Power Station in Qld.. fed from Meandu mine…
.. which currently has the largest native bush regeneration area in the state,
This bush regeneration is ongoing and has been from its inception.. 🙂
The road to rehabilitation for Meandu Mine – Stanwell
ps.. I use this example because Nit-pick drew attention to it in a previous thread..
Do you know if that style of wind turbine is more deadly or less deadly to birds.
IIRC, they can spin pretty fast.
It’s already happening. I live in North Cornwall, a region blighted by abundant wind turbines. Several of them never turn, whatever the state of the wind, and a few are even without their blades. Why North Cornwall District Council does not demand the dismantlement of these eyesores is beyond me.
New rule.
No permits for new wind and solar, unless old, dysfunctional units are removed and landfilled
Also require a bond be set up that will pay for the decommissioning of the turbines once they are no longer being used. Everyone else has to do it, why not wind and solar.
PS: That counts as yet another subsidy for wind and solar.
They MUST also have a system, paid for by themselves, that allows only dispatchable, well-regulated and synchronised electricity onto the grid.
That means the wind turbine farms would have to install their own gas peaker as part of their cost, and run it through a system that maintained the reference frequency, BEFORE it is injected into the grid.
Unfortunately, it will be many years before the windmills will be removed from our once beautiful landscapes.
You say that like it’s a bad thing? All it means is more rounds of government (taxpayer) subsidies. Some people are gonna get RICH again!
nice motto- “make renewable firms rich again!”- they’ll wear that on their baseball hats
Duh! No crap, sweety.
It is farcical reminiscent of the Ministry of Plenty announcements that production quotas had been overfilled while Winston Smith muses ‘… sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all.’
As a kid in the ’60s- I read the book “1984” which seemed in the inconceivably distant future!
Just an FYI: Just had FB remove a post with a link to this article. My post had a very short summary of the main numbers and then the link if any friends want the details.
YouTube does the same to me when I try to argue with CAGW fools in the comments.
I have found that youtube routinely remove comments with external links. Other youtube vids can usually be linked to, but if you want to refer to a paper that proves your point, tell the reader to search for it by title and author, or give a link to another site without using prefixes and suffixes. For example to refer people to this article:
“Go to the website of “watts up with that” (no spaces) and read the article “this-energy-transition-thing-really-is-not-happening” posted on June 27 2024″
Long winded I know, but it usually beats the auto-censor.
Guess what these numbers mean?
May 2024: 426.90 ppm
May 2023: 424.00 ppm
∆ = 2.9 ppm
Last updated: Jun 05, 2024
Harold the Organic Chemist Says:
The numbers are the concentration of CO2 in dry pure air comprised of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon.
Air with a CO2 concentration of 426.90 ppm by volume has 0.839 grams of CO2 per cubic meter of dry air at STP. If the air contains water vapor, the concentrations of gases are lowered in proportion
to the concentration of the water vapor.
The slight increase of the concentration of CO2 from 2023 to 2024 is due the absorption of most of
the CO2 by the oceans as evidenced by the enormous amount of plants and animals there. A small amount of CO2 is absorbed by the surface waters on land. The plants on land fix large amounts of the CO2 via photosynthesis.
For air at 21 deg. C and 70% RH the concentration of water vapor is 17,780 ppm by volume. This
is 14.3 grams of water vapor per cubic meter air. Water vapor is about 97.7% of the greenhouse
effect these weather conditions. At 20 deg. C the mass of air in1 cubic meter is 1.20 kilograms.
The claim by the IPCC that CO2 is the cause of the recent “global warming” is a lie. The small
amount of C02 in air can only heat up such a large mass of air by only very small amount.
BTW, where did you obtain the concentrations of CO2?
Apologies for “jumping in”, but this one happens to have been in my browser’s “bookmarks” menu for several years now.
URL : https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
Data is for Mauna Loa, but as CO2 is a “well mixed GHG” it’s as good as any (and is the one that goes back furthest in time).
Click on the “Data” tab to get the “monthly mean data” back to March 1958.
It may mix well, but I’d think it takes a while for it to spread around the planet from places where emitted abundantly, like China, to places where there is no emission. Just guessing on that. So there must be variation across the planet.
GML do attempt to calculate a “Global Monthly Mean” for CO2 concentrations on the following webpage.
URL : https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html
Scroll down to read the (detailed !) explanation of their methodology.
If you click on the “Data” (sub-)tab for that page you will remark that the “monthly mean data” files only start in January 1979 and have an extra couple of months of “data collection + quality control” delays (the current text file “only” goes up to March 2024).
Well mixed is not the same as perfectly mixed.
Can those numbers really be accurate to 2 decimal places? Perhaps in the location where measured, but not on a planetary basis.
I wondered about the accuracy also. I doubt that concentration of CO2 can be measured to +/- 10 parts billion.
CO2 is just a molecule. It does not heat up anything
The sun does ALL the heating, 24/7/365.
On a Retained Energy basis, CO2 retains only 0.6% of all retained energy in the atmosphere; water vapor and dry air retain the rest
As I said, heating by CO2 is very small, and we do not have to worry about this.
Vital context at Roger Pielke’s substack: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-environmental-trinity
The Environmental Trinity: A guest post by Jesse H. Ausubel, Director, Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University
Read
Math is hard. And graphs are harder.
Harold the Organic Chemist Asks:
Why is the vertical axis of the figure not “millions of metric tons”? There are many grades of coal with differing energy content.
Somewhere below there’s a question about where CO2 figures come from. See the Keeling curve at the Moana Loa observatory in Hawaii. Notice that 28 COPs from Berlin in 1995 to Dubai last year have had no effect at all on the rise. Look hard at the expanded sawtooth for the last four years and see if the COVID deindustrialisation shows up. It doesn’t. The rise is all natural?
Now, fellers, look at the Wirld In Data and see that what the racist alarmists call ‘traditional biomass’.- dung , local woodland – produces THREE TIMES the global energy than all the panels and windmills in the world, count the number of deaths by lung disease you alarmists and Just Stop Oil mass murderers
The drop caused by the COVID shutdowns were too small and short lived to be visible in such noisy data.
The total amount of fossil fuels that have been burnt over the last hundred years or so is much more than sufficient to have caused the rise in CO2 concentrations over the same period.
To believe that the increase in CO2 is 100% natural is to believe that somehow, the plant life on this planet managed to increase their absorption of CO2 by just enough to absorb the CO2 from fossil fuels, but not by enough to absorb these natural increases.
What are these natural sources?
Do you have any evidence that shows that volcanism has increased by enough to cause this rise?
The charts show that CO2 changes, start some 900 to 1000 years after temperatures change. It’s only been 150 to 200 years since the Little Ice Age ended. Not enough time for that warming to have caused any significant rise in ocean temperatures. Go back 1000 years and we are at the ending of the Medieval Warm Period, and the world was cooling, not warming.
Out of sight, out of mind?
Invisible gases qualify much when you are an alarmist it would seem.
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were far more polluting if you look at actual pollution rather than carbon emissions.
Isn’t the fall in consumption of coal because it is being replaced by gas? 50%+ of UK electricity was produced by coal until steadily wound down by 2015, supposedly to be replaced by wind power, but now instead over 50% is supplied by gas otherwise there would be no stable grid, since wind on average cannot supply more than 30% on average, and often in single digits.
One fossil fuel has just been replaced by another, so the claim that intermittents (aka ‘green’) have replaced fossil fuels is not true.
The transition happened in 2004. From worldindata