Opinion: Not zero — global fossil fuel use is still rising

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It's no surprise fossil fuel use keeps increasing, despite trillions being spent on alternatives. Energy transitions take centuries, not decades

Published Nov 22, 2024  •  Last updated 2 days ago  •  3 minute read

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By Julio Mejia and Elmira Aliakbari

At the Conference of the Parties (COP29) that ends today in Azerbaijan, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global net-zero carbon footprint by 2050. Getting there would require a “fossil fuel phase-out” and “deep decarbonization across the entire value chain,” which seems unlikely to happen. Despite trillions of dollars already spent in pursuit of this target the world’s dependence on fossil fuels remains largely unchanged.

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So, how realistic is net-zero emissions by 2050 — which means either eliminating fossil-fuel generation or offsetting carbon emissions with activities such as planting trees?

This journey began in 1995 when the UN hosted the first COP conference in Berlin, launching a global effort to drive energy transition and decarbonization. That year, according to some estimates, global investment in renewable energy reached US$7 billion. Since then, extraordinary amounts of money and resources have been allocated to the transition away from fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency, between 2015 and 2023 alone, governments and industry spent US$12.3 trillion (in $2023) worldwide on clean energy. That’s over six times the value of the entire Canadian economy in 2023.

Despite this spending, between 1995 and 2023 global fossil fuels consumption increased by 62 per cent, with oil consumption rising 38 per cent, coal 66 per cent and natural gas 90 per cent. And despite the trillions spent on alternatives, the share of global energy provided by fossil fuels declined by only four percentage points, from 85.6 per cent to 81.5 per cent.

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That’s not really a surprise. Major energy transitions are slow and take centuries, not decades. According to a recent study by eminent scholar Vaclav Smil, the first global energy transition — from traditional biomass fuels (including wood and charcoal) to fossil fuels — started more than two centuries ago and remains incomplete. Nearly three billion people in the developing world still depend on charcoal, straw and dried dung for cooking and heating, accounting for about seven per cent of the world’s energy supply as of 2020.

Coal only surpassed wood as the main energy source worldwide around 1900. It took more than 150 years from oil’s first commercial extraction for it to reach 25 per cent of all fossil fuels consumed worldwide. Natural gas didn’t reach this threshold until the end of the 20th century, after 130 years of development.

Now consider the current push by governments to force an energy transition via regulation and spending. In Canada, the Trudeau government has set a target to fully decarbonize electricity generation by 2035 so that all electricity is derived from renewable power sources such as wind and solar. But merely replacing Canada’s existing fossil fuel-based electricity with clean energy sources within the next decade would require building the equivalent of 23 major hydro projects (like British Columbia’s Site C) or 2.3 large-scale nuclear power plants (like Ontario’s Bruce Power).

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The planning and construction of significant electricity generation infrastructure in Canada is, to say the least, a complex and time-consuming process, often plagued by delays, regulatory hurdles and substantial cost overruns. The Site C project took around 43 years from initial feasibility studies in 1971 to environmental certification in 2014. Construction began on the Peace River in northern B.C. in 2015, with completion expected in 2025 at a cost of at least $16 billion. Similarly, Ontario’s Bruce Power plant took nearly two decades to complete, with billions of dollars in cost overruns. Given these immense practical, financial and regulatory challenges, achieving the government’s 2035 target is highly unlikely.

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As politicians have attended one high-profile conference after another and set ambitious targets for a swift energy transition, global reliance on fossil fuels has only increased. As things stand, achieving net-zero by 2050 looks impossible.

Julio Mejia and Elmira Aliakbari are analysts at the Fraser Institute.

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