Stop saying "the clean energy revolution is inevitable"

A little rant on a pet peeve.

The headline is hyperbolic; do what you want. But after my conversation with Bill McKibben last week, I’ve realized I’m not a big fan of the oft-repeated talking point: “The renewable energy revolution is inevitable/unstoppable.”

The phrase has been everywhere since Trump’s re-election. It’s headlined news articles, press releases, and academic papers. Last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres delivered an address alongside a new report on the growth of clean energy, focusing on the theme. “The clean energy future is no longer a promise. It’s a fact,” he said. “No government. No industry. No special interest can stop it.”

There’s a good reason for the statement’s growing popularity: It’s technically true! Renewables—solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy and geothermal—have become astonishingly cheap in the last few years, and batteries to store renewable energy are getting amazing. Today, solar is 41 percent cheaper than fossil fuels, and offshore wind is 53 percent cheaper. That’s despite fossil fuels getting nine times as much government consumption subsidies as renewables. (Global fossil fuel subsidies amounted to $620 billion in 2023, compared to $70 billion for renewables, according to the United Nations.).

Global electricity generation by source, terawatt hours, 1990-2026. Figures for 2025 and 2026 are projections. Source: IEA electricity mid-year update 2025/Carbon Brief

But the statement is also incomplete, so much so that it almost dips into paltering. Because while it’s true that special interests cannot stop the world’s shift toward renewable energy, they can significantly slow it. In fact, special interests in the United States are currently slowing the renewable energy transition to such a degree that, by time the world has largely weaned itself off fossil fuels, unthinkable and irreversible climate catastrophes will have already occurred. It’s as Bill McKibben said in our conversation last week:

Forty years from now, we're going to run the whole world on sun and wind ... But if it takes us anything like 40 years to get there, forget it. The world that we run on sun and wind is going to be broken.

The clean energy revolution is inevitable. But the clean energy revolution that will significantly slow climate change is not. When we proliferate the former statement without clarifying the latter, we risk lulling climate-concerned people into a false sense of security. I don’t know about you, but when I hear that an outcome I desire is inevitable/unstoppable/rolling-along-just-fine-despite-Trump, that doesn’t inspire me to act. Actually, it makes me feel like I don’t need to act at all.

This is the opposite of what we need to preserve a livable planet. The clean energy revolution that will significantly slow climate change will not happen without action—specifically, a mass organizing movement to loosen red tape around solar and wind development in the United States. As Bill explained to me last week, a lot of this organizing can happen at the state and local level, away from Trump land. That’s good news.

I recognize that doesn’t feel as good as hearing that “the renewables revolution is inevitable” and thinking you don’t need to do anything—and I’m sorry to burst that bubble. But I do think one reason journalists, creators, and activists proliferate unintentionally misleading statements like these is because they’re trying to make people feel better, and sometimes, that desire can result in more harm than good. And I get it—we’re all desperately looking for something positive to tell climate-concerned people in this sea of doom that is the second Trump administration. But when you try to soothe people’s nerves about an inherently unnerving situation, you inevitably risk misleading them.

So here’s my alternative to “The clean energy revolution is unstoppable.” The clean energy revolution is unstoppable, but right now it’s being slowed down significantly by a handful of corrupt assholes, and this greed-driven slow-down is going to cause climate chaos, unless a mass movement of people organize to remove policy barriers to renewable energy development. This organizing will be hard and the outcome won’t be guaranteed. But it’s the only way out of this mess.

I know it’s not very pithy, nor is it very soothing. But nothing accurate about climate change is.

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Other stories I’m following:

• Israel has reportedly destroyed Palestine’s only national seed bank. “Destroying a national seed bank is an act of erasure, intended to sever the generational ties between farmers and their land,” the Union of Agricultural Work Committee said in a statement to Yale Environment 360.
  
  Friends of the Earth called Israel’s actions “an escalation of attacks on agricultural practices in Palestine, and comes after the control of water by occupation forces which left farmers in distress. This threatens the biodiversity, history, and living knowledge of the land. The destruction of local adaptive seeds and their propagation will lead to the destruction of climate-adaptive farming practices and push Palestinian agriculture towards water-intensive and corporate-controlled farming models.”
  

• Artificial intelligence is destroying Big Tech’s climate progress. The New York Times reports: “Google’s greenhouse gas emissions rose by 11 percent in 2024 from the year before. Amazon’s were up by 6 percent. Microsoft’s fell slightly but remained 10 percent higher than they were in 2021. Meta’s most recent figures have not yet been made public.”
  

• Microsoft wants to offset its emissions from AI by injecting massive syringes of human and animal poop deep into the Earth’s crust. Anything to avoid limiting consumption these days, the Wall Street Journal reports.
  

• Scientists cited in Trump administration climate change report say the report misrepresents their work. Trump’s Department of Energy released a report last week purporting to provide “a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change.” But nine scientists across several different disciplines told WIRED that the report “mishandled citations of their work by cherry-picking data, misrepresenting findings, drawing erroneous conclusions, or leaving out relevant context.”
  

• Killing EPA climate rule could backfire on industry. E&E News reports: “When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced last week that his agency would move to repeal the foundation of EPA's climate regulations, he claimed it would provide a boon to U.S. industry and eliminate $1 trillion in “hidden taxes.” But analysts and legal experts are less sure. They warn that EPA’s efforts to kill the so-called endangerment finding instead could expose a broad range of industries to more lawsuits — as well as encourage Democratic-led states to bolster their own climate laws.”

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