Things may be pretty messy all over, but at least renewable energy is winning the game, right?

What’s particularly surprising is that the IEA’s electricity report is absolutely devastating to the project of decarbonization, but few in the climate community seem alarmed by it, so far. Cold Eye Earth offers the following reason why: the bulk of the discourse in climate journalism is completely offsides now, anchored to the trailing view that we will replace fossil fuels in power with renewables, when it’s now crystal clear we’re not on that course at all. This community seems content to keep making serially failed peak emissions forecasts, while tediously “counting renewables” —all of which looks more like a head-banging incantation, rather than analysis.

Yeah, nope. If you’ve not read that Adam Tooze bit at the London Review of Books, then you probably should.

Big shout out to all my people in STS, social practice theory and adjacent academic fields, who were calling bullshit on “transitions” well over a decade ago. That’s not to say we should be giving up on mitigation strategies—but from here on out, for any player smaller than a state or a multinational, adaptation is pretty much the only game in town worth playing, because it’s the only one that people on the ground are actually gonna notice.

Meanwhile, if you’re doing futures work and still talking about renewables as a swap-out substitute for fossil fuels—and/or, as various people on LinkedIn have been doing this last week, fawning over the latest sci-fi bullshit from the shills at Shell—then I hope you’re getting a day-rate good enough to let you relocate to wherever the oil execs plan on moving to when it all comes on top.

(If you could look into taking Frank Geels with you, that would be great, thanks.)

We’ve known this was coming for longer than I’ve been alive, and we’ve done fuck all of note. Some day soon, you’re gonna run out of other people to blame… and you’re gonna find that some of us have been keeping the receipts.