Really? A few tremors in the Strait of Hormuz and suddenly we are invited—once again, with great theatrical urgency—to reconsider the “true cost” of fossil fuels. As if this conversation hasn’t been staged, rehearsed, and force-fed to the public for the better part of two decades.
Fine. Let’s actually look at costs. Not the curated brochure version. The real one—the one that doesn’t get invited onto panels or squeezed into glossy reports.
Wind and solar, those darlings of the modern virtue economy, have a small but rather inconvenient characteristic: they don’t work when they don’t feel like it. Which means they require a shadow system—conventional power plants—lurking permanently in the background, idling like a fleet of taxis in a city that insists it no longer needs cars. These plants must be ready at a moment’s notice, ramping up and down to compensate for every passing cloud and dying breeze. That kind of flexibility isn’t just technically demanding—it’s ruinously expensive.
And here’s the sleight of hand: this cost is almost never assigned where it belongs. It should sit squarely on the shoulders of so-called renewables, because they are the reason the service exists in the first place. But it doesn’t. Through a careful blend of regulatory gymnastics and accounting creativity, the numbers are massaged, redistributed, and politely hidden behind layers of abstraction. The public, naturally, is presented with a version of reality that has been aggressively sanitized.
But reality itself is less cooperative. It doesn’t vanish just because it’s been excluded from a spreadsheet.
So when the cost of these balancing mechanisms rises—as it inevitably does when energy markets tighten—renewables don’t magically become more competitive. Quite the opposite. Their true cost inflates again, quietly, off the books, while the official narrative continues to insist on their ever-increasing affordability.
Meanwhile, we are told to clutch our pearls over a modest uptick in oil prices, as if this is the decisive moment where the entire fossil fuel paradigm finally collapses under its own weight. It isn’t. Not even close.
Even at today’s elevated levels, oil still looks stubbornly competitive when measured against the actual, fully-loaded cost of “approved” alternatives. You wouldn’t just need a slight premium to change that equation—you’d need something far more dramatic. Think north of 200 dollars per barrel before the comparison even begins to tilt meaningfully. Not the current, rather underwhelming, thirty-dollar bump that has everyone performing their latest round of ritual outrage.
So yes, let them talk. Let them spin their narratives, polish their figures, and congratulate themselves on another successful reframing of reality.
It won’t change the ledger.
And the ledger, unlike the narrative, doesn’t care what anyone believes.