How a Standing Ovation Replaced Arithmetic—and Why You’ll Be Eating Cold Soup in the Dark
Imagine, if you will, walking into the august halls of power a mere decade ago—Davos, the UN, the G-20—take your pick. You stand before the men and women who fancied themselves masters of the universe and announce, with all the gravitas you can muster:
“Ladies and gentlemen, within eleven years you must cease using fossil fuels altogether. All of them. Oil, coal, gas—the lifeblood of your nations. Switch it off. Now.”
They would have laughed. Not the nervous kind of laugh you hear at funerals when someone says the wrong thing, but the belly laugh of men secure in their dominion. They knew life without fossils was not just difficult—it was inconceivable. Industrial society without hydrocarbons was like a body without blood. A non-starter. And they were comfortable enough to say so out loud, on the record, without the faintest blush of shame.
But today? A 16-year-old child can storm the stage of international conferences, berate presidents and prime ministers, wag her finger like a headmistress catching you smoking in the lavatory, and demand precisely what would have been derided as lunacy a mere decade ago: the total, immediate end of fossil fuels. And what does she receive? A standing ovation.
This post first appeared in 2019, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
So—what changed?
Not physics. Not economics. Not the unforgiving arithmetic of energy systems. Those stubbornly refuse to bend to sentiment. Yes, solar panels have slithered down the cost curve. Wind turbines have grown to Brobdingnagian proportions, blotting the horizon like industrial scarecrows. Batteries have improved, marginally, though each advance comes slower and dearer, chasing diminishing returns like a gambler doubling down at a rigged table. But the limits remain: physics will not be cajoled, bribed, or bullied.
And as for the grid itself—well, Londoners have already had a taste of what’s to come. Blackouts. Flicker power feeding into networks designed for steadiness. South Africa, once a poster child for electrical reliability thanks to coal, now offers “load shedding” as a daily devotional ritual to the gods of bad policy. The future is uneven, unreliable, and increasingly dark.
Wind and solar remain, despite all the hype, a sliver of the energy pie. Electric vehicles are still novelties, status baubles for the guilt-ridden bourgeoisie. Hydrogen cars? Please. If you see one, take a picture—it’ll be rarer than a unicorn grazing on your front lawn.
Let me explain something crucial. An electrical grid is not a toy. It is not a bucket you fill and drain at whim. It is a high-wire act, a perpetual balancing act between supply and demand. Production must equal consumption at all times, to the megawatt. In the past, production was steady, demand was variable, and engineers were maestros of this symphony. Hydropower carried the bassline, coal and gas adjusted the tempo, nuclear hummed in the background, steady as a monk’s chant. Utilities knew the rhythms of their customers as priests know their rosaries.
And they built fat into the system—overcapacity, redundancies, backup plants. This fat is why you, citizen of a developed country, cannot even remember your last prolonged blackout. The system was built to bend without breaking.
Enter renewables, the disrupters, the free riders. They dump their flickering, spasmodic power into the grid without paying for the privilege of stability. They feed when the sun shines, starve when it sets. They howl when the wind blows, sulk when it doesn’t. Each minute their output jiggles and wobbles like a drunk at closing time. This is not stability—it is chaos disguised as virtue.
For a while, the fat absorbed it. But fat is finite. Now the system is stretched, wheezing. And failure is no longer hypothetical—it is manifest.
Renewables were never forced to pay for the stabilizing services they leech off. Why would they? Subsidies are their birthright, applause their sustenance. But make no mistake: they are pushing grids, and by extension societies, to the breaking point. This is not a future scenario. This is happening now.
But indulge me in a thought experiment.
Wave a magic wand. Abolish fossil fuels tomorrow, not gradually but absolutely. Poof—gone. No oil, no coal, no gas. What would follow?
The average person imagines cars stopping, planes grounded, lights dimming. Trivial inconveniences, surely, in exchange for planetary salvation. They never consider that half the material world around them is made of or made with fossil fuels. Their food, their medicines, their clothing, their roads, their homes. The fertilizers that grow their crops, the plastics that package their lives, the pharmaceuticals that keep their children alive—all gone.
Yes, yes, they think China will keep exporting plastic tat and iPhones. Never mind that China burns more coal than the rest of the planet combined, and that its industrial model is fraying at the seams. They don’t see the larger edifice tottering because they are too busy with their Instagram reels.
But let us return to electricity, that fragile heartbeat of modernity. With fossils erased, we are left with renewables and nuclear. But nuclear is hated, starved of investment, throttled by red tape. Hydropower is geographically limited. That leaves wind and solar, and they will destroy the very grids they feed.
The result: not less electricity, but unreliable electricity. Brownouts and blackouts, at random, without warning. The buffer systems of the grid cannot smooth such violent swings. Whatever power exists will be rationed for “essential” uses. Your refrigerator, your shower, your dinner—trivial luxuries. The elites, of course, will remain warm and well-lit. You, however, will shiver. And when your private solar array is requisitioned by the state to feed “the common good,” don’t whimper. You were warned.
Do not scoff. Governments have already barred you from withdrawing your own cash from your own bank. Do you really imagine they will hesitate to seize your electrons? Bidirectional hookups are not for your convenience. They are leashes.
A few countries—France, Slovakia, Hungary—will fare better with nuclear. Austria with its hydro will sit smugly, at least for a while. But electricity will become a weapon, a bargaining chip. Nations will cut interconnections, hoard their kilowatts. Borders will harden around dams and nuclear plants. Communities will form tribal bonds around energy assets. Wars will not be fought for ideology but for megawatts. The global village will shatter into archipelagos of light in an ocean of dark.
Crime will swarm around these oases. Violence by the state and violence by the mob will be indistinguishable. The difference between a soldier guarding a power station and a brigand extorting you at torchpoint will blur.
Meanwhile, the windmills—those proud totems of green virtue—will begin to break. Bearings wear, gearboxes grind, blades crack. Maintenance is constant, costly, and globalized. But the new parochial economy, shrunken and inward, will not produce the parts, nor afford them. Output will fall. Variability will worsen. The decline will accelerate.
Picture life without the techno-culture. No internet, no mobile phones, no television. Night football matches—gone. Concerts—unplugged, literally. Life shrinks to the radius of a candle. Entertainment becomes local, crude, immediate. You will sing your own songs, act your own plays, tell your own stories by the fire. Romantic? Only until the first infection kills your child because the pharmaceutical industry collapsed without hydrocarbons.
And here lies a delicious irony. The activist vanguard—so many young women who believed industrial society had freed them—will discover that in the diminished economy, their independence is a luxury too costly to maintain. Wealth and overcapacity sustain emancipation. Remove them, and society reverts. The very people demanding the end of fossil fuels are sawing through the branch they perch on.
No microwaves. No ice cream. No cosmetics. No hairdryers. The nightlife will be dim, literally and figuratively. You will not have the time or energy for frivolity when survival consumes your waking hours.
Society will stratify. Small elites will live well around the few stable energy sources. The rest will toil. Human “rights,” “emancipation,” “individualism”—these are peacetime luxuries. In a subsistence world, the hierarchy returns with a vengeance. Life will resemble feudalism more than modernity.
Of course, governments will try to save themselves. They will throw money and desperation at nuclear. Five thousand plants, by some estimates, would be needed to replace fossil generation. But time is not on their side, and neither is capital. Economies will already be in freefall.
Will it be medieval? Not quite. But the comforts you know will vanish. Not the zombie apocalypse—something more insidious: the slow suffocation of the coddled classes. The latte-slurping, phone-addled activists will find food rationing, cold showers, and dead batteries infinitely harder to endure than any B-movie apocalypse. Their delicate constitutions cannot survive the simple absence of validation, let alone scarcity.
Stabilization, if it comes, will take more than a decade. By then, society will be so transformed that electricity for non-essentials will feel like a quaint indulgence. Civilization will not have collapsed entirely—but it will no longer be the one you recognize.
And all because we believed that applause could rewrite physics, that sentiment could bully arithmetic, that the tantrums of a child could substitute for the sober recognition of reality.
That is the future we are engineering. And if you think I exaggerate, ask yourself this: when was the last time a blackout was merely a blackout, and not a glimpse of the world to come?
