While the legacy media often reports that the world is rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, a new report from J.P. Morgan shows that narrative is simply not correct. Since 2010, $9 trillion has been spent globally on wind, solar, electric vehicles energy storage, electrification and power grids, but despite this expensive effort — mostly at taxpayer expense — the share of final energy consumption by carbon-free energy sources is advancing by approximately a scant 0.3% to 0.6% per year.
Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan, explains in “Heliocentrism,” the 15th annual energy paper by the investment firm, that the reason fossil fuels remain the dominant source of energy is that modern prosperity is tied to certain kinds of industrial products, including chemicals, steel, cement, food and paper. Approximately 80% of the energy inputs for these products are fossil fuels. JPMorgan Chase is the world’s fifth largest bank by total assets, with $3.9 trillion as of 2023.
“As things stand now, modern prosperity is highly reliant on fossil fuels,” Cembalest said in a podcast on the report. Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., retired professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, estimates on his “The Honest Broker” Substack that at the current pace, the world will not be carbon free until sometime after the year 2200.
“There’s a lot of people that are so focused on the growth in solar power that they believe that solar power, typically bolted on with some energy storage, can represent the dominant share of where we get our energy from,” Cembalest said.
Solar accounts for approximately 6% of global electricity generation. However, electricity is only about 33% of the total energy people consume, according to the paper, and by some estimates it’s only about 20%. Translating all that solar power to a share of final energy consumption, which includes all forms of energy, solar is only 2% of total final energy and will grow to 4% to 5% by the end of the decade.
“While that’s impressive growth from a low base, we obviously need to be more focused on the other 95% of where we’re going to get our final energy consumption from and rather than just the solar on its own,” Cembalest said.
The term ‘fossil fuel’ is outdated, but good article otherwise. A very large part of ‘renewable energy’ is fueled by tax-funded scams. ABN
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