The public discourse on the clean energy transition often presents the move away from fossil fuels as a fait accompli, and its opponents as Luddites standing on the wrong side of history. A closer examination of decarbonisation efforts suggests that beliefs about inevitability are premature, and that technology – rather than regulation and moralising – is the key to success.
There is little question that young people today are more supportive of green policies than their predecessors, at least when it comes to responses to surveys. The increasing political power of pro-environment parties across the western world demonstrates that global youth is willing to go beyond street protests and social-media likes.
At the same time, in per capita terms, many western countries have been successfully decarbonising during the 21st century, with the transition away from coal toward renewable energies playing a critical role. Taken together, these phenomena have spawned an “inevitability” narrative, whereby the net zero train is presented as running at full speed and those who refuse to board will go the way of horseback couriers and elevator operators.
The UN Sustainability Agenda has institutionalised this narrative, resulting in waves of elite civil servants and NGO leaders who firmly subscribe to the green transition dogma. However, at present, people’s actual behavior does not align with the aspiring rhetoric, and an analysis of previous societal transformations helps us understand why.
Historically, transitions that are expensive, exacerbate inequality and require permanent, painful behavioral changes are in no sense inevitable. For such transitions to succeed, costs must be hidden, shifted or subsidised, benefits must be immediate and visible, and coercive institutions must be strong. The green transition fails on all three marks, with its biggest flaw being that it requires people to make a significant and seemingly permanent sacrifice in their living standards.
This is reflected in the existence of a large gap between people’s stated support for clean energy in surveys and voting booths, and their actual behavior when it comes to tolerating higher energy prices. While it might be comforting to think that the only thing stopping us from zero carbon is ossified politicians and greedy corporations, the most important impediment is the huge bill that nobody wants to pay.
In contrast, the key common trait of societal transformations that did succeed is that daily life for the median member of society became easier and cheaper. For example, during the 21st century, all six Arabian Gulf countries underwent waves of women’s empowerment, with a key outcome being large increases in female labour-force participation. For the most part, people’s rhetorical support for such movements was consistent with their actual behavior, since women’s employment increased household income and contributed to fiscal sustainability.
The key lesson, therefore, is that for the clean energy transition to transform from being a fragile dogma to an unstoppable force, it needs to genuinely be cheaper for the average family. In this regard, regulations – such as carbon taxes and pollution caps – can only play a secondary role; the spearhead must be technological improvements that bring down the price of electricity generated by renewable sources.
This requires green campaigners to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee: crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have made energy security a priority, even if it means higher carbon emissions. The international goodwill that underwrote agreements like the Kyoto Protocol has largely evaporated; the world is geopolitically fragmenting, being replaced by a Hobbesian world order, in which there is almost no pressure to realise ambitious climate targets.
As the resources allocated to the clean energy transition diminish, to pay for rapidly rising defense budgets, policymakers must focus their spending on renewable energy research and development. Governments must convince people to decrease their carbon footprint not by appealing to their morality, but by inflating their wallets: purchasing an electrical vehicle or installing a solar panel on your roof must make you richer than the high-carbon alternatives today and better off than you were yesterday, rather than requiring you to sacrifice for the greater good.
The clean energy transition will not succeed because history demands it, nor because critics are shamed into submission. It will succeed only if it aligns with the oldest and most reliable driver of mass social change: self-interest. When clean energy is cheaper, more reliable, and more convenient than fossil fuels, adoption will accelerate regardless of ideology, age cohort, or geopolitical fragmentation.
Until then, insisting on inevitability is not just analytically sloppy – it is politically self-defeating. A serious transition strategy abandons moral grandstanding, stops confusing aspirations with outcomes, and places engineers – not slogans – at the center of climate policy. Only then does inevitability become something earned rather than asserted.
