Index
Fossil Fuels Aren’t Looking Energetic
20 January 2026
Peter Coffee
It starts out like a thoughtful review of a high-profile TV series, but a New York Times essay on the Paramount+ series “Landman” quickly unfolds into well-researched analysis of the oil-from-underground industry. It opens with a quote from the series in which an industry operator compares his business to a drug cartel, saying that drugs are addictive to people but oil is addictive to the entire world order: “You sell a product that your customers are dependent on,” he says to a drug dealer, adding “It’s the same; our [business] is just bigger.” By the time we get to the bottom of the page, though, the weakening of global petroleum addiction is starting to look like a future that’s now.
“The party’s not ending tomorrow, but it is ending,” is another quote from “Landman” that shows up a few paragraphs later, along with the essayist’s own observation that “many of the fossil fuel workers I’ve interviewed told me they recognized that, despite record production, the industry has been shedding jobs for years…and that they increasingly see green energy jobs as the future and fossil fuels as the past.”
In 2021, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson asserted that “There’s enough solar to power the world more than 300 times over. And wind seven times over.” He directly confronted questions about the need for critical materials to build wind turbines, batteries, and other renewable-energy infrastructure: even the most extreme scenarios for lithium mining, for example, he estimates to require a tiny fraction of the land that’s currently being made unavailable and unhealthy by “1.3 million active oil and gas wells and 3.1 million inactive ones…the entire gas and oil industry and fossil fuel industry in the US takes up 1.3% of the land.” This is, he observes, the proper baseline for comparison of a fossil past to a renewable future.
Trends and ratios like these are not, of course, confined to the United States, and China (for Great Big Example) is accelerating on a renewables path: “China's mostly coal-based thermal power generation fell in 2025 for the first time in 10 years, government data showed yesterday [19 January 2026], as growing renewable generation met growth in electricity demand even as overall power usage hit a record.” In an outlook for China’s energy and climate actions anticipated for the rest of this year, one observer noted that “independent analyses suggest China’s CO2 emissions may have plateaued or even begun to decline in 2025.” Moreover, the scope of this crossing of curves extends well beyond China: “Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025,” reports the web site Electrek, adding an estimate that fossil power production will “stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won’t increase.”
This isn’t about gritting our teeth and paying more for cleaner power. In June of last year, the Levelized Cost of Energy+ study from financial advisory service Lazard calculated that “On an unsubsidized $/MWh basis, renewable energy remains the most cost-competitive form of generation.” The detailed infographic is not licensed for reproduction here, but it’s a free download [PDF] – and The Cool Down helpfully summarizes the key numbers as
Onshore wind is the least costly form of energy, averaging around $50 per megawatt-hour
Utility-scale solar costs, on average, $61 per megawatt-hour
Coal and gas were much higher — coal averaged $119 per megawatt-hour, and gas averaged $77 per megawatt-hour
It’s nice when following the money leads to a better place.