I agree that it can. I won't live to see it, and I hope I live 50 years more.

You're living in a fantasy world that doesn't exist.

Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.[1]

[1] https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/record-fossi...

randerson 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn't the world only have about 50 years [0] worth of oil remaining in the ground? Climate change and war aside, it seems like that should be a major reason to accelerate the change to renewables.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

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slashdev 4 days ago | parent [-]

No I don't think so. The oil industry is very good at discovering and developing resources previously thought to be out of reach.

People have been talking about peak oil for decades, as long as I can remember, and it never happened.

I think we're technologically capable of extracting more oil, coal, and gas than we would ever want to. We would cook ourselves with the damage we'd do to the climate. I think that's the real constraint - and I hope we pay attention to it.

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fsterneder 3 days ago | parent [-]

Conventional oil actually peaked around 2005–2006, but the shale oil revolution in the U.S. and technological advances have certainly postponed peak oil itself.

Here comes the kicker, though: we obviously extracted the easy-to-access resources first. While there may be counterexamples, looking at ore grades makes it clear that this is not particular to oil.

What happens next is that the economics of the wells are getting worse, which means we need a higher oil price for them to be viable. This also results in a lower energy return on energy invested (EROI), which reduces the surplus energy available to transform our environment. Consequently, this implies slower growth in the economy. Which I think is pretty obvious in the west and would explain the explosion of debt.

	▲	slashdev 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think your analysis is US-centric. I don't think non-shale oil has peaked yet globally. What you say about the economics getting worse and lower EROI may be true. It certainly seems like common sense. There are some counter-examples though. The inflation adjusted cost of extracting oil from the oil sands in Alberta, Canada has actually decreased over time, not increased. But generally I'd expect increasing cost of extraction to be the norm.

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4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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toomuchtodo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've done my best to educate with facts and citations. Appreciate the discussion regardless. My offer stands to pay for you to talk to a subject matter expert.

Edit (to respond to your edit):

> Global consumption of coal, oil, and natural gas all rose in 2025. We've not even peaked yet.

Do you think global LNG consumption will peak considering a material amount of production has been taken offline for the next five years as of today? If I am an LNG consumer on the global market, am I re-evaluating my options today for the next half decade of energy needs? And we are not even done yet with additional potential attacks on Middle Eastern fossil infrastructure as long as the conflict continues; there are more targets available, and more capacity that could be diminished for the foreseeable future.

Oil and gas prices jump after Iran and Israel attack gasfields - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441351 - March 2026

Iran attack wipes out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says- https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/19/iran-attack-... - March 19th, 2026

From your citation:

> Renewable energy continues to expand rapidly, but not fast enough for a total reduction in fossil fuels. Emissions from burning oil are projected to rise by 1% in 2025, while gas emissions are set to increase by 1.3%, and coal by 0.8%.

These increases are not material in a world where 1TW/year of solar PV is being deployed. Global solar capacity doubles every three years [!!] at current rates. If that rate holds, without accounting for increases of that rate as more PV manufacturing capacity comes online, it will replace all fossil energy globally (not just fossil electricity, all fossil energy use) in under twenty years when you consider the efficiency gains of not burning fuel for energy.

Highlights of the global energy transition in 2025 - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/highlights-of-the-g... - December 17th, 2025

> Solar and wind are now expanding fast enough to meet all new electricity demand, a milestone reached in the first three quarters of 2025. Ember’s analysis published in November shows that these technologies are no longer just catching up; they are outpacing demand growth itself. Together, solar and wind supplied 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of 2025, up from 15.2% over the same period last year, pushing the total share of low-carbon sources to 43%.

> For the first time across a sustained period, renewables, including solar, wind, hydro and smaller sources such as geothermal, generated more electricity than coal. At the heart of this shift is solar, whose growth was more than three times larger than any other source of electricity so far in 2025, confirming its role as the dominant force reshaping the global power system. Another analysis showed that the world is set to add 793 GW of renewable capacity in 2025, up 11% from the 717 GW added in 2024. At this pace, only a modest increase in annual additions is needed for the world to stay on track to triple global renewables by 2030.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-installed-wind...

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024 (66 comments)

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slashdev 4 days ago | parent [-]

We're making great progress, this is true. But we're also still increasing our consumption of fossil fuels.

Let's put a number on it. When do you think we reach 50% of today's consumption of fossil fuels? IEA seems to think it continues to grow until 2050. https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/iea-energy-outlook-2025-9.69...

If that's true, I don't think we reach 50% of current levels by 2100. That's my very non-scientific WAG. I'll be long dead by then. Europe, if they continued drilling in the North Sea and Groningen would have long since exhausted them - a great capital expenditure and investment to bring things back to the original subject of conversation.

What do you think? That would give me a good window into how realistic your view is.

I think where you're going wrong is perhaps not taking into account continued increases in per-capita energy usage worldwide. But of course that will happen, not just because of population growth, not just because of the rest of the world rising slowly towards Western standards of living, but continued technological progress which depends on energy (or at least it has been that way historically.)

Doomberg (the green chicken) correctly observes that when we add a new energy source to the mix, we don't tend to decrease our consumption of previous energy sources.

For example: global wood consumption for energy is at or near all-time high levels, with approximately 2 billion cubic meters (m³) of wood fuel consumed in 2023, up from 1.5 billion m³ in 1961. While the percentage of global energy provided by wood has plummeted from over 90% in the early 19th century to around 3-6% today, the total volume burned has increased, driven by population growth in developing nations and increasing bioenergy use in developed ones.

	▲	nandomrumber 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Those people, and the world in general, would be better off burning natural gas for heating and cooking, rather than wood. But environmentalists in the west deny them that option because they don’t give a fuck about poor people, they can just freeze in the dark or choke on the fumes of whatever plant fibres / dung they can scavenge from the local environment. I don’t know how else to frame it. I spent, more like wasted, two decades of my live in the cult of environmentalism, and they literally just out and say it: some people are going to die in the transition away from fossil fuels, oh well. That’s easy to say when it’s not you who’s going to freeze in the dark.