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Fossil fuels are yesterday’s news, you know? This is what Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, says recently told the New York Times. In his words, “We are at the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel economy. The US is betting on the wrong horse.” Will Rockstrom’s prediction prove prescient? History says no, and that is not a political statement.
More realistically, naysayers have been questioning the value of fossil fuel extraction for about as long as they have been extracting fossil fuels. Evidence to support this claim can be found in the most famous energy fortune of all, that of John D. Rockefeller. If the skeptics had not outnumbered the optimists by miles, there is no way Rockefeller could have encapsulated what Standard Oil became.
The location of oil has long attracted as much skepticism as the future of the oil industry itself. Think Venezuela. Like energy historian Daniel Yergin explained in the Wall Street Journal just a few weeks ago, an American geologist in 1922 dismissed the country’s oil prospects as a “mirage.” The present and the past are poor predictors of the future.
In 2005, Matthew Simmons was released Twilight in the desert to great acclaim. It predicted the impending and “irreversible decline” of Saudi Arabia as an oil-producing country. Perhaps even more remarkable is that in 2005 the US was not even part of the global energy discussion. As fracking legend Harold Hamm jokes to this day, he couldn’t even replace the fossil fuel-friendly members of the Wall Street Journal editorial board to answer his calls or emails in 2005 about the abundance of oil in North Dakota. “Saudi America,” the most shared editorial in United States history Magazine editorial page, was not published until November 2012.
The uncertainty that has always defined the oil sector, along with even greater uncertainty about the location of oil, casts doubt on Dr. Rockstrom. Yet questions are being raised about the conceit of fossil fuel advocates, who find Rockstrom as ridiculous as he sees them.
Contrary to bombastic ones, skeptics of solar energy and “green energy” more broadly would be wise to tone down their rhetoric about what will shape future energy consumption, just as Rockstrom perhaps should. Past predictions about what lies ahead have not aged well, and there is no reason to suspect that today’s supposed seers have a clearer view of what lies ahead than their predecessors.
How we know this can be found in the proliferation of data centers, something that few saw coming until 2022. It was in October 2020 that the Department of Justice filed suit against Google for its “search engine dominance.” Fast forward to 2026, Google and others described as ‘Big Tech’ are investing literally trillions to invent a technological future that in no way resembles the prospects of less than four years ago.
Which is, or should be, the point. Technological changes that so few saw coming in 2022 have transformed the way we use technology in the years to come, and have even more profoundly changed the energy needs that will drive these unforeseen technological leaps.
It’s a powerful signal that the energy space is ready for change that could perhaps be greater than the change found in a technology sector that increasingly resembles the one that dominated just a few years ago. It requires humility, not only when it comes to the end of fossil fuels, but also about the future replacement of fossil fuels. As history tells us, we just don’t know.
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