As Prime Minister Mark Carney heads to Brazil for the COP30 climate summit, having just delivered a budget promoting a "green economy," a sobering reality check emerges from global energy data. Despite three decades of international climate negotiations and trillions of dollars invested in clean energy, the world remains overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels.
The Stubborn Dominance of Fossil Fuels
The Canadian government has reaffirmed its commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, a goal shared by many nations. This ambition requires phasing out oil, natural gas, and coal or offsetting their emissions through technologies like carbon capture. However, the numbers tell a different story. From 1995, the year of the first COP summit, to 2024, global fossil fuel consumption surged by more than 64%. Oil use grew by 39%, natural gas by 96%, and coal by 76%.
As of last year, fossil fuels accounted for 80.6% of global energy consumption, a figure only slightly lower than the 85.6% share they held in 1995. This marginal decline occurred despite an estimated US$14.6 trillion in global public and private investment in clean energy from 2015 through 2023 alone.
Canada's Contradictory Energy Reality
The situation in Canada highlights an even greater disconnect between political commitments and on-the-ground results. Despite the federal government spending billions on subsidies for electric vehicles and corporate tax credits for the low-carbon economy, the country's reliance on fossil fuels has grown.
Between 1995 and 2024, fossil fuel consumption in Canada increased by 23%. Over the same period, the share of fossil fuels in Canada's total energy consumption actually rose from 62.0% to 66.3%. This trend underscores the immense challenge of decarbonizing an advanced industrial economy.
Why the Energy Transition is Failing
The monumental effort to transition away from fossil fuels has stumbled for fundamental reasons. Proposed solutions like carbon capture remain developing technologies incapable of large-scale deployment. Offsetting emissions through tree planting would require vast land areas, take decades to become effective, and remain vulnerable to wildfires and drought.
According to energy scholar Vaclav Smil, energy transitions historically take centuries, not decades. Coal only became a major energy source around 1900 after millennia of reliance on biomass. Oil took 150 years after its introduction to account for one-quarter of global fossil fuel consumption, reaching that milestone only in the 1950s.
This historical perspective explains why even longtime supporters of the net-zero agenda, including Bill Gates, are now acknowledging both the vital role of fossil fuels and the failure of efforts to rapidly eliminate them. As world leaders convene for COP30, the data suggests a need for more pragmatic and realistic climate policies that acknowledge the world's continued dependence on the energy sources that power modern civilization.
