Given how much renewable energy has been promoted, dressed up, coddled, favored and subsidized over the last decade or two, it would be understandable to believe that a green transition is well under way. But don’t be fooled by the foolish. Oil and gas are still king.

Not quite a year ago, the New York Times’ headline screamed that “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.” Another headline from last year, this one on the govtech.com website, told us “California Hits New Record for Renewable Energy Generation.” Just before Christmas, the British Guardian wanted readers to know about “Uruguay’s green power revolution” and how its “rapid shift to wind shows the world how it’s done.”

A decade earlier, that same Guardian said a wonderful “low-carbon future” was just ahead if Britain would stop “subsidizing its coal, oil and gas industries” by $4.2 billion a year.

Subsidies can be a slippery word, especially when used by leftist activists – such as the “journalists” at the Guardian. They’re not always direct government payments, loans or tax advantages targeted at specific industries and sectors. The fossil fuel industry, for example, takes the tax breaks that are available to all businesses. It also drills on federal land – but at a cost. Private companies lease the property, it’s not given to them.

But the darling of government largess is the renewable energy industry, which has been gorging on greater volumes of sumptuous fare at the federal trough than oil and gas companies. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, from 2016 to 2022, “nearly half (46%) of federal energy subsidies were associated with renewable energy.” Over that period, “federal support for renewable energy of all types more than doubled, from $7.4 billion” in fiscal 2016 to $15.6 billion in fiscal 2022.

Meanwhile, oil, gas and coal received less than 15% of federal support, not even a third of what was gifted to renewables, whose total listed above doesn’t “include tens of billions of dollars per year in clean energy tax credits from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act,” says the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal.

Overall global spending on green energy (which in this case includes nuclear – and always should) in 2024 will exceed $2 trillion, twice the $1 trillion in expenditures on fossil fuels.

Given all of this, it would be reasonable to believe that we’re in the midst of a great green revolution in which conventional energy sources are being sidelined. But we’re not.

Take a look at this chart from Robert Bryce, an energy author and journalist whose work becomes more indispensable by the day.

Despite more than $4 trillion in global spending on just wind and solar from 2004 to 2022, hydrocarbon consumption grew 3.4 times faster.

“We are inundated with news reports about climate change and claims that we are in the midst of an energy transition that will eliminate our need for hydrocarbons,” says Bryce, and that “hype has soared during the Biden administration.”

He also points out that in 2023, gas-fired power generation in the U.S. grew 9.5 times faster than wind and solar combined, and that China and India are producing eight times more electricity from coal than the U.S. and they’re both busily building more coal-fired plants.

“We are not in the midst of a major energy transition. Instead, what we are seeing is the media echo chamber at work.”

If a group of nonpartisan, fully objective experts was tasked with developing the cheapest, most reliable and available source of energy, they could come up with no other answer than hydrocarbons. Oil and gas are the past, present and the future.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board