Stop Press, Same News: No energy transition, again

Every year I take a look at the annual energy data published toward the end of June by the Energy Institute in order to ask the big question: Has the energy transition that everyone keeps talking about actually started yet? So far, the answer has always been no. Every year since 1983, total global fossil fuel supply has increased, apart from in 2009 (financial crisis) and 2020 (Covid), when the entire energy system nosedived in relation to those crises before rebooting to the status quo ante. And so we come to the recently published 2025 figures, where the answer is … also no. We used more of every type of primary energy in 2025 than ever before. Yes, more photovoltaics, wind, hydro and nuclear than before, but also more coal, oil and gas were burned in 2025 than in any previous year in human history. Still no transition! I prepared a couple of charts in Excel to show some of the figures, as I’ve done in previous years. But somehow I can’t get them to size properly in WordPress – if…