Technology is pushing us towards peak emissions faster than politics ever could, Marco Magrini argues
It could go down in history – 2026, the year that marks the peak of the fossil fuel era; an era where humanity engineered the most spectacular explosion of wealth, health and blight, thanks to those hydrocarbon remains of ancient living organisms. It took geological time to build up that treasure chest of solid, liquid and gaseous sources of energy.
Yet just two centuries were enough to burn hundreds of billions of tonnes of coal, more than a trillion barrels of oil and dozens of trillions of cubic metres of gas forever.
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The idea of a ‘peak’ in energy usage conjures up the Peak Oil theory, which once circulated far and wide. It originated with the American geologist Marion King Hubbert, who posited that oil reservoirs would reach a peak of output before a rapid downfall, predicting that – sometime between 1965 and 1971 – this would be the destiny of the US oil industry.
It actually happened in 1971, and such a precise forecast paved the way for catastrophic prophecies of doom about the day the oil supply from Saudi Arabia, holder of the hydrocarbon cornucopia, would stop growing and later fall precipitously, triggering a cascade of societal disasters. ‘You shouldn’t be worrying about climate change’ – a Swedish professor and peak oil champion told me in the early 2000s – ‘as oil will run out very soon.’
As much as Hubbert, he couldn’t foresee the ingenuity (or the greediness, if you wish) of the fossil fuel industry. The ‘supply peak’ never arrived because technology intervened; hydraulic fracturing and deep-sea drilling unlocked vast new resources, to the point that the USA has since regained its supremacy in oil extraction. Instead, we may be close to the opposite summit – peak demand.
‘Global CO2 emissions are expected to peak around 2026, driven by rapid renewable deployment in power and electric vehicle adoption in transport,’ reads a recent report from Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy. The International Energy Agency, which predicts it to happen ‘before 2030’, has anyway identified 2026 as the year renewable electricity generation will officially overtake coal globally – a remarkable milestone in its own.
Shouldn’t we be toasting such a pivotal point in human history? Probably not yet. The famous bell-shaped Hubbert Curve correctly envisioned, for any oil reservoir, an exponential fall in output after reaching its supply peak. The demand peak, on the contrary, is expected to plateau for a long, uncertain time.
In 1865, Victorian economist William Stanley Jevons observed that as steam engines became a lot more efficient, the cost of steam power fell. As a result, engines were put to use in applications previously deemed too expensive. Think of LED lightbulbs. Did their miracle of efficiency result in a huge drop in electricity usage? Not quite, for we started lighting things we never bothered to light before.
As the renewable era is dawning – mostly thanks to the precipitous fall in solar panel prices – we have been squandering hundreds of terrawatt hours of electricity ‘mining’ crypto currencies. And now we’re fuellling a global AI data centre spree that is expected to equal Japan’s total energy consumption in a few years.
The list of factors contributing to a long plateau doesn’t end here. Fossil fuel reserves, and coal in particular, are far from exhausted. Since we lack electric alternatives, planes and ships, as well as steel and cement factories, will rely on fossils for a long time to come.
In Asia, the average age of a coal power plant is around 15 years, yet they are designed to run for 40. Emerging countries are hungry for refrigeration, air conditioning and mobility so, more than decarbonising, their priority will be getting the cheapest source of energy (and oil will become cheaper if demand from the West keeps on falling).
Finally, there’s something that goes well beyond the definition of a paradox: governments are still subsidising fossil fuel consumption, with more than one trillion US dollars in 2022. This applies mostly to petrostates such as Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia, but Europe and the USA aren’t entirely immune.
The plateau will decline more slowly than we can afford; just think that the IPCC called for a 43 per cent decline by 2030 from 2019 levels. Since we live in a technological, thus science-based, civilisation, rational behaviour should be expected. However, as the failure of COP30 in Brazil clearly showed, nations can’t even agree on defining fossil fuels as the primary culprit of the climate crisis.
As we’ve argued many times on these pages, if we’re getting closer to peak carbon emissions it’s more thanks to technological innovation than to the will of nations and multinational enterprises. So, our wish for the New Year is for technology to deliver a lot more breakthroughs.
