For 30 years, Western leaders have promised that if we sacrificed enough and spent enough, the rest of the world would follow us to a cleaner future. We sacrificed. The world did not follow. The numbers are now impossible to hide.
The Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy shows fossil fuels still supply the vast majority of the world's primary energy, with oil, coal, and natural gas together around 85%. After decades of mandates and subsidies, wind and solar provide only about 3%.
That 3% did not come cheap. Global spending on the so-called energy transition has topped $2 trillion a year and exceeds $10 trillion over the past decade. For all that money, wind and solar moved the world's energy mix by a rounding error, while total demand hit a record near 600 exajoules.
And it buys almost nothing per ton. Where the West actually cuts carbon, the full cost of building intermittent power plus the backup to firm it comes to roughly $1,000 for every ton of carbon dioxide avoided, several times what a ton of CO2 is even worth. We are not buying a cooler planet. We are buying a very expensive pipedream.
The reason is physics, not politics. Wind and solar vanish when the sun sets and the wind stops, so someone must keep the old plants running for the calm, dark hours (most of the time).
Ratepayers pay for two systems and call it progress. Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it plainly: intermittent power is "a parasite on the grid."
Here is what no one in Brussels or Washington wants to say out loud: the West is the only side that agreed to fight with one hand tied behind its back.
From 2015 to 2025, the first decade of the Paris Agreement, European Union energy use declined about 1% a year. That is not an ecological triumph. It is deindustrialization.
Factories closed or moved, and the emissions moved with them. Over the same period, Asia grew its energy use by more than 2% a year, and its economies with it.
No country shows the cost more starkly than Germany. German industry has shed tens of thousands of jobs amid soaring energy costs. Chemical giant BASF opened a major new multi-billion-euro plant in China even as it cut jobs at home in Ludwigshafen.
Its chief executive admitted the obvious: Germany is no longer competitive for energy-intensive production. Its industrial electricity ranks among the priciest in the world, and the country has struggled with recession. That is where the green road ends.
Meanwhile, China, lecturing no one and building everything, commissioned 78 gigawatts of new coal power in 2025, nearly half the entire U.S. coal fleet, built in a single year, and more new coal than India added over the previous decade.
It burns cheap coal to make the very panels and batteries the West mandates itself to buy, and it dominates the supply chains for solar, storage, and critical minerals. Every mandate to go renewable ships our money and our dependence straight to our chief rival.
It gets worse. Energy Foundation China, headquartered in San Francisco but operating mostly inside China, has poured roughly $3.8 million into American organizations promoting the transition, including six-figure grants to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Institute to help phase out coal.
Its president once served as a senior official in China's own climate bureaucracy. Three House committees have opened an investigation, and the Justice Department has been asked to examine possible Foreign Agents Registration Act violations.
Read that again. The nation building coal at record scale is helping pay for the campaign to shut ours down.
None of this is a transition. It is an addition. The world stacks wind and solar on top of ever-growing coal, oil and gas, not replacing them. Since the 1992 United Nations climate framework, global industrial emissions have risen roughly two-thirds. The EU cut hundreds of millions of tons under Paris while the rest of the world added billions. Our sacrifice was erased many times over, almost the moment we made it.
The great majority of humanity wants what we once had: abundant, reliable, affordable energy. They are choosing it; we are choosing the opposite and calling our decline leadership.
The question is no longer whether the transition is working. The data settles that. The question is when Americans will wake up, stop the forced march, and reclaim the cheap and reliable energy that built the modern world in the first place.
