There is no “return” of oil, gas, or coal.
They never left.
Not for a second.
Not even during the height of the green delirium when politicians posed heroically beside wind turbines as though they had personally defeated thermodynamics.
The reality is almost comical in its perversity:
Without massive support from oil, gas, and coal, the entire green edifice would collapse almost overnight.
Not metaphorically.
Physically.
Because the modern renewable fantasy is not an independent energy system.
It is a parasite attached to a conventional one.
Wind and solar do not stabilize themselves.
They require balancing energy.
Fast.
Reliable.
Constantly available.
When the wind slows or clouds roll in, somebody must instantly compensate or the grid destabilizes.
That “somebody” is usually gas.
Sometimes coal.
Occasionally hydro or nuclear where fortunate geography or old sanity still exists.
But mostly hydrocarbons quietly standing behind the curtain like exhausted stagehands keeping the performance alive while actors soak up applause under the spotlight.
And this balancing service is not optional.
It is foundational.
No amount of political chanting alters the physics of intermittency.
Electric grids are among the most complex machines humanity has ever constructed.
They demand stability to fractions of a second.
They do not care about ideology.
Frequency drift does not negotiate with activists.
Voltage instability does not respond to hashtags.
Reality remains stubborn that way.
But the dependence runs even deeper.
Coal, gas, and oil are not merely backup systems.
They are embedded in the birth process of the so-called alternatives themselves.
Coal fires the furnaces producing cement.
Steel production remains heavily dependent on coal and gas.
Mining equipment runs on diesel.
Transport ships burn hydrocarbons.
The giant blades of wind turbines.
The solar panels.
The batteries.
The transmission systems.
The strange cocktail of rare and exotic metals modern “green” infrastructure requires—
all of it arrives carrying an enormous fossil-fuel backpack.
A backpack that enthusiasts prefer not to discuss too loudly.
Because once one begins tracing the energy chain honestly, the narrative becomes considerably less cinematic.
And here comes the deeply uncomfortable part:
Much of this infrastructure may never energetically repay what it consumed during its own creation and maintenance.
Not fully.
Not honestly accounted.
Certainly not when balancing systems, replacement cycles, storage requirements, transmission expansion, and resource extraction are included in the ledger without creative accounting tricks.
This is the great hidden dependency of the modern energy transition.
The system advertised as replacing hydrocarbons is, in reality, profoundly dependent upon them.
Which makes the rhetoric increasingly surreal.
Oil, gas, and coal are simultaneously condemned publicly while being indispensable operationally.
Civilization denounces the very pillars currently preventing its collapse.
There is something almost religious about it.
Like medieval peasants cursing the horse while still needing it to pull the plow.
Now, I occasionally entertain a rather dark thought experiment.
What if all three vanished for a single year?
No oil.
No gas.
No coal.
Just twelve months.
One honest year of ideological purity.
No balancing energy.
No diesel logistics.
No industrial heat.
No fertilizer chains.
No bulk transport.
No modern aviation.
No backup generation.
No thermal power stabilizing the grid while wind turbines perform interpretive dance routines during calm weather.
The result would not be enlightenment.
It would be catastrophe.
The most miserable year living memory could produce.
Modern societies would discover very quickly how thin the membrane separating civilization from dysfunction actually is.
The climate narrative, at least in its current absolutist form, would likely evaporate under the pressure of immediate material reality.
Because nothing clarifies priorities faster than sustained scarcity.
People tolerate abstraction only while abundance cushions them.
Once survival enters the room, ideological luxuries tend to lose their charm with astonishing speed.
And yet, despite all the hostility directed at them, the old fuels continue working.
Quietly.
Without fanfare.
Oil flows.
Gas stabilizes.
Coal burns in the background carrying far more of the modern world than polite society likes admitting.
The irony is exquisite.
The same civilization that endlessly condemns hydrocarbons would descend into chaos without them.
The same activists demanding immediate abolition rely utterly on systems powered, transported, manufactured, and stabilized by the very fuels they denounce.
It is less an energy transition than a giant exercise in selective blindness.
Now, to be clear, none of this means technology stands still forever.
Energy systems evolve.
They always have.
But evolution requires realism.
Engineering.
Trade-offs.
Patience.
Not moral hysteria.
Not fantasy accounting.
And certainly not the childish belief that complex industrial civilizations can run on intermittent flows unsupported by dense, reliable energy sources.
Until something truly superior exists at scale—not promised, not subsidized, not hypothetically modeled, but operationally superior—the old triumvirate remains indispensable.
Oil.
Gas.
Coal.
The unloved machinery humming beneath the floorboards of modern civilization while fashionable people pretend otherwise.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/06/the-return-of-cong-coal-oil-nuclear-gas/