Peter Clack

Wind and solar 'renewable energy' could prove to be the worst choice of all for Earth's stumbling, asset-draining energy black hole.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

A modern combined-cycle gas plant turns more than 60% of the fuel into electricity - exactly 'when you need it'.

It’s known as 'dispatchable power' — the kind that keeps the lights on at 7pm in a cold July, when everyone’s home and the air-con is roaring.

Nuclear looks worse (on paper): because around a third of the heat becomes electricity. But then you look at the rest of the picture. US nuclear plants run around 90% of the time. A pellet of fuel the size of a fingertip replaces a tonne of coal. The plant sits on a small patch of land for 60 or 80 years. Operating emissions are basically nothing.

So gas wins on speed and cost to build. Nuclear wins on density and how little it has to be touched once it’s running. Both give you firm power and neither cares if the wind drops.

Wind and solar are a different energy product, cheap to run and clean. Lifecycle emissions are low — wind especially. That’s real. But what they don’t do is deliver dense energy 'on demand'.

In the US, solar produces 25% of its nameplate over the year. Wind is closer to a third. The rest of the time you need something else to power your life: gas, batteries, overbuild or long wires.

They also take up a lot of land and a lot of costly, structural overbuild for each kilowatt-hour. And they wear out in 20–30 years. Blades and panels are only partly recycled at this scale. We are about to find out what that looks like as the first big wave of wind farms comes down.

None of this means 'don’t build wind and solar'. It means stop pretending that a megawatt of solar is the same thing as a megawatt of nuclear or gas. One is energy when wind blows and the sun is shining. The other is dense energy whenever it's needed.

Grids that ignore that difference still end up reverting to hydrocarbon energy, usually gas. Then everyone seems surprised.

Energy density - availability on demand — that’s the comparison that actually matters.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

China emits more CO₂ each year than all the world’s advanced economies combined — and has done since 2020.

It also accounted for most of the world's rise in global CO₂ from hydrocarbon fuels this century. China commissioned most of the world’s new coal capacity in 2025 and it runs the world’s largest coal-power system.

Coal remains the backbone of its grid, even as its share of generation has fallen from about 70% a decade ago to around half. At the same time, China dominates the clean-energy supply chain. It makes on the order of 80–90% of the world’s solar modules and a clear majority of wind-turbine components.

In recent years it has installed more wind and solar than the rest of the world put together. Combined, wind-and-solar capacity inside China has overtaken its coal fleet on paper; coal generation still fell only modestly, because the plants remain the back-up.

Simply put, China is the world’s factory, so a meaningful share of its CO₂ is embedded in goods sold to richer countries. That is a large transfer of embodied emissions from richer importers to China. Consumption-based accounts shrink the gap but they do not reverse the annual ranking.

Recent inventories put China around 11–12.5 Gt of fossil and process CO₂ a year, roughly 30% of a global total near 38 Gt — still above the IEA advanced-economy group. An IEA analysis saw China overtaking that group in 2020 and running about 15% higher by 2023.

Growth may have slowed sharply — flat or falling for 18–21 months into 2025–26, on Carbon Brief/CREA analysis — driven by the vast renewable and EV build-out and a property slump.

That does not change who emits the most CO₂ this year.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@awaveglobal Thanks once again...

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Earth is still in an ice age.

That's not a forecast; it's the truth of the present geological state of the world. Year-round ice remains at both poles and about 10–11% of the world’s land area is still covered by glacial ice — more than 15 million square kilometres.

That is roughly one-third of the ice cover during the Last Glacial Maximum 26-20,000 years ago), when glaciers occupied about 25–32% of the land surface.

The Antarctic ice sheet dominates that remainder. It covers nearly 14 million square kilometres (about 8.3% of Earth’s land surface), reaches almost 4.8 kilometres thick, and holds around 90% of the planet’s ice by volume. Greenland holds most of the rest. Together they contain more than 99% of Earth’s land ice, also the world's largest single source of freshwater.

Global mean surface temperature today is around 15°C. Over the last 500 million years, reconstructed global temperatures have ranged from about 11°C (during the last ice age) to 36°C. For most of that time Earth was warmer than now, mostly without permanent polar ice sheets. The long-term pattern is for hothouse climates interrupted by rare icehouse episodes.

We live in one of those icehouse episodes: the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, which began with the glaciation of Antarctica about 34 million years ago. The Quaternary glaciation, with its repeated glacial–interglacial cycles, is the last 2.58 million years of that interval. Human civilisation developed in the current interglacial — a relatively warm pause, not a departure from the ice age itself.

Oceans, not the atmosphere, dominate the physical climate system. Water covers up to 75% of the planet (including lakes and rivers), and the oceans have an average depth of about 3.7 kilometres. They hold the great majority of the surface carbon reservoir and of the retained heat stored in the climate system; the atmosphere holds on the order of 1–2% of each. Forests cover about 31% of land; deserts about 33%. Most of the planet remains sparsely inhabited wilderness.

For four decades public debate has treated a short geological record and computer projections as if they define the planet’s normal state. The longer record is different: polar ice is still vast, the oceans still hold almost all the heat and carbon, and the Holocene warmth we treat as baseline is an interglacial inside an ice age that has already lasted tens of millions of years.

That context does not settle policy. But it means any serious discussion has to start from the planet we actually have, not an assumption that ice at the poles is an anomaly.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@awaveglobal Thanks for this ongoing story of our complex struggles with ourselves.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

China now makes about 86–88% of the world’s solar modules, and an even higher share of the wafers and cells behind them.

It produces roughly three-quarters of lithium-ion batteries and holds about 80% of cell-making capacity. Chinese firms account for around 70% of EV batteries actually installed. They supply the majority of wind-turbine components and, in 2025, about four-fifths of the turbines that went up worldwide. They still pour just over half of the planet’s crude steel.

It is the largest, quietest transfer of industrial capacity in modern history. On manufacturing value added, China has gone from about 6% of the world in 2000 to roughly 27–30% now. It out-produces the next eight countries put together, and the United States, Germany and Japan combined.

America’s share has slipped from the low twenties to the mid-teens; Europe’s from about a quarter to the mid-teens; Japan’s from the low teens to about 5%.

The power behind that machine is still coal. China runs nearly 1,200 coal plants and more than 1,200 GW of coal capacity — about half of everything operating on Earth. In 2025 it commissioned 78 GW of new coal plant, a ten-year high, and another 30 GW in the first half of 2026. That is the old 'six large units a month' in practice. It mines around 4.7–4.8 billion tonnes of coal a year, more than four times second-place India.

Beijing has a carbon-neutrality date — 2060 — and a pledge to peak emissions before 2030. What it has not done is bind its factories to a Western 2050 net-zero timetable, or treat steel mills and battery plants as disposable. Coal is still treated as the dispatchable backbone that lets the rest of the system run.

The West, by contrast, spent two decades talking decarbonisation while offshoring the industries that make the hardware. The result is the joke that dare not speak its name.

The Western green transition now depends, almost end to end, on equipment built in a country that still adds coal capacity by the tens of gigawatts. Solar farms in Europe and America are assembled from Chinese modules. Grid batteries are Chinese cells. A growing share of the turbines are Chinese machines.

The energy source the West has spent a generation demonising is what made that supply chain possible. It should be the loudest industrial and geopolitical story in the Western world.

It barely rates a mention.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@awaveglobal Another great image...

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Dismantling a century of reliable energy infrastructure built on coal, oil and gas is a 'win-or-go-bust' gamble on the future of civilisation.

Those dense hydrocarbon fuels lifted most of humanity out of squalor, filth and short lives. They still supply about 86% of the world’s primary energy. Wind and solar together remain in the mid-single digits—roughly 6%, commonly used in public debate. It's lower still if you count only the energy they actually deliver.

Their narrow share of electricity is larger and rising fast; their actual share of the whole energy system is not. They don't power heavy industry, steel production, cargo shipping, air travel or road transport.

What does 'net zero' actually mean? The price tag is enormous. McKinsey’s well-known estimate puts physical asset spending at about $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050—an average of $9.2 trillion a year, or roughly 7.5% of global GDP across those three decades.

That sounds like a rounding error but it's not. It's more of an interstellar black hole for investment, public finance and living standards.

The political driver of this timetable is still an inner clique circling the United Nations and Secretary-General António Guterres is it's public face. He made the accelerated phase-out of hydrocarbons the central theme of his office. The money has flowed. The decisive shift away from coal, oil and gas has not.

Wind turbines and solar panels typically last 20–30 years. That means a permanently recurring cycle of mining, manufacture, installation, dismantling and disposal.

Decommissioned blades and panels are already becoming an unresolved global waste nightmare. Intermittency has not been solved for the scale an industrial economy requires. The materials intensity of the transition—copper, steel, concrete, rare earths, land—is vast and expensive.

Meanwhile the hydrocarbons that actually run the world are not about to vanish. Proven reserves have been replenished for decades as technology and prices change. Proven coal reserves of around 1.07–1.17 trillion tonnes would last on the order of 130 years at current use. Proven oil reserves of about 1.65–1.7 trillion barrels imply roughly half a century at today’s consumption. Conventional natural-gas reserves suggest a similar multi-decade horizon; adding unconventional gas lengthens it further.

These figures are not a licence for wasting time. They are a reminder that scarcity of fuel is not the emergency.

Rushing into an unproven, high-cost system at this scale carries fatal risks: higher electricity prices, heavier claims on taxpayers, slower modernisation in the Global South, and a Western energy system that is shrinking, smaller, less competitive and less reliable than the one it's meant to replace.

Energy abundance built the modern West. The need for ongoing energy abundance is not a moral defect, it's the foundation for prosperity. Reverting to Medieval windmills and sunlight is a strange way to decide the future of civilisation.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@docmartinhk It's a fundamental hallmark of socialism, to accuse others of lying. Smearing their character is based on failing to have any logical argument.

Socialists despise personal effort and achievement.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

We live inside this ice age. Not the next one. This one.

That's not a reason for complacency about the next hundred years. It's a reason to stop pretending a warm decade will decide the fate of a planet.

When the interglacial finally ends, the pattern from the last million years is clear enough. Northern ice sheets will return and expand across the continents. Global sea level will fall on the order of 100–130 metres. Mid-latitude climates will cool and dry. Forests and deserts will rearrange. That is a glacial, not 'the ice age'. The ice age is the whole package and we are in it.

The current Late Cenozoic icehouse began when Antarctica froze about 34 million years ago. Northern Hemisphere ice sheets began to intensify 2.6 million years ago. The Holocene — the warm interval that let agriculture, cities and us appear — is only the latest interglacial inside a far longer cold regime.

Orbital geometry (Milankovitch cycles) gives the opportunities for ice to grow. Earth’s orbit is currently near a long eccentricity minimum, many models already expect this interglacial to be unusually long even without us — on the order of tens of thousands of years rather than the 10–15 thousand years of some earlier warm intervals.

Estimates show a natural next glacial era around 10–50 thousand years from now, with a number of recent studies favouring something nearer 50 thousands years, and a few who are arguing ice growth could have begun sooner if CO₂ had stayed lower.

None of this makes the next century unimportant. But we seem to think the weather, coasts, food systems and ecosystems all operate on human lifetimes. The crisis framework that treats the warm Holocene climate as permanent is not the end of the real story.

Polar ice still exists over 10% of the world. Sea level is tens of metres lower than it would be on a fully ice-free Earth.

We are still inside it.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@Rainmaking Thanks Kim...

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@LAlexBailey That's it.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@derrick_dao Well said that man.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@HopeEdwardes You read it....

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

While it seems counterintuitive, Earth is still in a long-term geological cooling phase—despite more recent warming.

This actually represents a shorter-term aberration within a far greater, more nuanced geological timescale in the broader context of Earth's history. Current temperatures are not unusually high.

Long-term climate proxies show a multi-millennial cooling trajectory across the late Holocene, from which recent industrial-era warming (roughly 1.1°C to 1.4°C over the past 250 years) has temporarily departed.

Global surface temperatures average around 15°C, still significantly cooler than the Phanerozoic baseline of 18°C to 26°C—warmer conditions that have persisted across hundreds of millions of years.

While atmospheric CO₂ levels have risen in recent centuries—rebounding slightly from extreme geological lows—this increase has driven measurable global satellite greening and expanded agricultural crop yields.

It will take decades of ongoing observation to fully evaluate the implications of the long-term, multi-century equilibrium between atmospheric carbon, plant biomass, and planetary temperature.

Nor is the warming an indicator of planetary instability or even human folly; rather, it reflects the vast variability and physical memory of Earth's climate system over immense timescales. It could also mean that we have reached a cardinal point of becoming modern, a Great Filter issue that raises new fundamental challenges for us as a species.

We are living within the Quaternary Glaciation—a severe 2.58 million-year ice-age pulse within the broader Late Cenozoic Ice Age. Virtually all modern human civilisations developed during the relative warmth of the last 11,700 years of the Holocene interglacial period.

Planetary climate dynamics operate across a resilient, layered system where natural variability remains the eternal baseline. Temperatures and biosphere conditions are driven by a complex combination of orbital variations, land mass and the massive thermal inertia of the deep ocean.

IMAGE: The chart below illustrates the temperature and carbon dioxide scales at play over geological timescales.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@MartinBrampton Warming of 1.1 degrees in 250 years won't destroy the world, only your illusions Martin.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@carsonight It delivers electricity everywhere it doesn't matter.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Hydrocarbons are not ‘dirty electricity’. The political agenda treats them as a moral defect to be stripped out first, then assumes a substitute will appear.

What usually appears is dearer, less reliable energy. Wind and solar generate intermittent electricity. Hydrocarbons supply dense, portable, storable energy — and the reduction chemistry that still makes primary steel.

Primary steel still depends on coal in the blast furnace, not only for heat but as a reductant. Electric-arc furnaces recycle scrap; they do not turn ore into iron. Long-haul aviation and ocean freight need liquid fuels. Batteries cannot fly a jetliner across an ocean. Synthetic e-fuels can, in principle — but they consume several times as much electricity, often five to seven times, to yield one unit of fuel.

Diesel holds on the order of 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. A lithium-ion pack holds a few hundred. A barrel of oil is a few hundred pounds in a tank. Matching that energy in batteries means tonnes of hardware and a ruinous bill. That density is why steel mills, cargo ships and aircraft exist in their present form.

Heat, reduction chemistry, aviation, shipping, fertiliser and most heavy industry need energy that is dense and available on demand — not when the wind is up. Intermittent generation without vast firm backup is not ‘clean power’. It is weather-dependent power.

The West set out to replace coal and gas, and imported the kit and the coal-fired supply chain. The world’s manufacturing of panels, turbines and batteries was moved to China, which runs on cheaper, denser coal.

Rooftop solar is a useful household supplement, but not enough to start a mill, a kiln or a smelter at 7pm on a still winter night. The modern world would grind to a halt if you believed the slogan that renewables can power everything.

To stand in for firm power, wind and solar would have to be built on a physical scale far beyond what existing grids were designed for. That is what is now being attempted. Assets last roughly 20–30 years; then the fleet has to be replaced. Worn blades and spent panels are already a disposal problem.

Any serious energy policy has to keep steel, ships, aircraft, heat, fertiliser and 24-hour industry running. Wind and solar are not a like-for-like replacement for the energy density that built the modern world.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@BTudbubble I know what a battery is. The ones they need haven't been invented yet.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

@SoggyBottom22 Thanks...