TAFT, CA – JULY 22: Oil rigs just south of town extract crude for Chevron at sunrise on July 22, 2008 in Taft, California. Surrounded by the richest oil fields in California, the oil town of 6,700 with a stagnant economy and little room for expansion has drawn up an ambitious plan to annex vast tracts of land reaching east of Interstate 5, 18 miles away, and occupying various poor unincorporated communities to triple its population to about 20,000. With the price of light crude at record highs, Chevron and other companies are scrambling to drill new wells and reopen old wells that were once considered unprofitable. The renewed profits for oilmen in Kern County, where more than 75 percent of all oil produced in California flows, did not immediately translate into increased revenue for Taft. The Taft City Council wants to capitalize on the new oil boom with increased tax revenue from a NASCAR track and future developments near the freeway. In an earlier oil boom, Taft was the site of the 1910 Lakeside Gusher, the largest oil well ever seen in the US, which sent 100,000 barrels a day into a lake of crude. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Fossil fuels are yesterday’s news, got it? So says Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research he said recently the New York Times. In his words, “We are at the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel economy. The US is betting on the wrong horse.” Will Rockstrom’s prediction prove prophetic? History says no, and this is not a political statement.
More realistically, it’s a comment that naysayers have been questioning the value of fossil fuel extraction for as long as they’ve been extracting fossil fuels. Evidence to support this claim can be found in the most famous energy fortune of all, that of John D. Rockefeller. If the skeptics hadn’t outnumbered the optimists by miles, there was no way Rockefeller would have put together what became Standard Oil.
The location of oil has long caused as much skepticism as the future of the oil industry itself. Consider Venezuela. As energy historian Daniel Yergin explained it at Wall Street Journal Just a few weeks ago, an American geologist “dismissed the country’s oil prospects as a ‘mirage’ of 1922. The present and the past are poor predictors of the future.” Energy guides.
In 2005, Matthew Simmons was released Twilight in the desert to great acclaim. He predicted the imminent and “irreversible decline” of Saudi Arabia as an oil-producing nation. Perhaps most notably, in 2005, the US was not even part of the global energy debate. As fracking legend Harold Hamm jokes to this day, he couldn’t even find his fossil fuel-friendly members Wall Street Journal’s editorial board to respond to his calls or e-mails in 2005 regarding the abundance of oil in North Dakota. “Saudi America”, the most shared article in its history of the magazine editorial page, not published until November 2012.
The uncertainty that has always defined the oil sector, along with even greater uncertainty about the location of the oil, calls into question the certainty of Dr. Rockstrom. Just the same, it calls into question the conceit of the pro-fossil fuel crowd who find Rockstrom as ridiculous as he believes them.
Unlike bombastic skeptics, solar and “green energy” skeptics in general would be wise to tone down their rhetoric about what future energy consumption will be like Rockstrom perhaps should. Past predictions of what lies ahead have not aged well, and there is no reason to suspect that today’s supposed soothsayers have a clearer view of what lies ahead than their predecessors.
How we know this can be found in the proliferation of data centers, something few saw coming until 2022. In October 2020, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Google over its “dominance of search engines.” Fast forward to 2026, Google and others described as “Big Tech” are investing literally trillions to find a technological future that looked nothing like the prospect four years ago.
What is the point or should it be. The technological change that so few saw coming in 2022 has changed the way we use technology in the coming years and has even more profoundly changed the energy needs that will fuel these unpredictable technological leaps.
It’s a strong signal that the energy space is poised for change that could perhaps be greater than the change found in a technology sector that looks less and less like it did just a few years ago. It requires humility not only about the twilight of fossil fuels, but also about the would-be replacements of fossil fuels. As history tells us, we just don’t know.
