Leave Tyrants in the Ground

By unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, we release ourselves from a world of harm.

A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’ | The Tyee

To our peril, there’s been no green revolution. Just green addition to rising fossil fuel use.

The geopolitical fight to come over green energy

The struggle for sustainable energy will soon put China, the US and Europe on a geopolitical collision course. But moving away from fossil fuels is a Herculean task, and a greener politics will not transcend tragedy.

‘The damage is done’: global oil crisis has changed fossil fuel industry for ever, IEA chief says

Exclusive: International Energy Agency’s Fatih Birol, the world’s leading energy economist, also says UK should largely forgo North Sea expansion

Oil and Gas=Peril and Poverty/ Solar and Wind=Prosperity and Protection

2026 has changed the psychological meaning of energy forever

More and More and More

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

The Fossil Fuel System Is Collapsing – and Taking Civilisation’s Safety Net With It

The Iran war is accelerating an irreversible breakdown of a system on which every hospital, harvest and factory depends - and only a rapid transition to energy superabundance can save us, argues Nafeez Ahmed, Divyesh Desai and Sandrine Dixson-Decleve

Carbon Captured

How the fossil fuel industry turned the plan to solve climate change into a plan to save itself

Open Climate Risk – CarbonPlan

Explore fire risk across the contiguous U.S.

Gas-Lit

If it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between fossil-fuel lobbyists and the billionaire press, that’s because there isn’t one.

The climate crisis: a war on the world

The climate crisis is a self-destructive war, with aggressors and victims

A clean break꞉ leaving fossil volatility for clean tech security

Shifting from the vulnerability of fossil fuel dependency toward home-grown manufacturing and more resilient clean tech imports

The fallout from the AI-fuelled dash for gas

A supply crunch in giant turbines for gas-powered plants threatens environmental and geopolitical consequences

Best of times, worst of times: record fossil-fuel profits, inflation and inequality

The 2022 oil and gas crisis resulted in record fossil-fuel profits globally that rehabilitated the oil and gas industry, obstructed the energy transition and contributed to inflation, but their magnitude and beneficiaries have been insufficiently understood. Here we show the size of profits across countries and their distribution across socio-economic groups within the United States, using company income statements, comprehensive ownership data and a network model for propagating profits via shareholdings. We estimate that globally, net income in publicly listed oil and gas companies alone reached US$916 billion in 2022, with the United States the biggest beneficiary with claims on US$301 billion, more than U.S. investments of US$267 billion in the low carbon economy that year. In a network of U.S. shareholdings with 252,433 nodes including privately held U.S. companies, 50 % of profits went to the wealthiest 1 % of individuals, predominantly through direct shareholdings and private company ownership. In contrast the bottom 50 % only received 1 %. The incremental U.S. fossil-fuel profits in 2022 relative to 2021 were enough to increase the disposable income of the wealthiest Americans by several percent and compensate a substantial part of their purchasing power loss from inflation that year, thereby exacerbating inflation inequality. These profits also reinforced existing racial and ethnic inequalities and inequalities between groups with different educational attainments. We discuss how an excess profit tax could be used to both lower inequality and accelerate the energy transition as increasing geopolitical tensions and climate impacts threaten continued volatility in oil and gas markets.