For the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the green transition was supposed to be the future—a planetary solution to the spiralling effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Today, many cling to that vision, hoping that green energy investment to date has created enough momentum to carry us through what is hoped to be ‘temporary resurgence’ in fossil energy support – but is this really the case?

To imagine a future is to tell a story about the past and its relationship to our present: it is a question of narrative—so argues Jamaican anthropologist David Scott in his classic work Conscripts of Modernity (2004). Caribbean revolutionaries of the anticolonial period, Scott suggests, understood politics in terms of a ‘romance’ narrative, in which history forms a ‘steadily rising curve’ through which ‘our pasts can be left behind and new futures leaped into’.[1] This, for Scott, was the predominant political narrative in the era of decolonisation, when independence was a future to be leapt towards through the untold possibilities of the new nation.

For decades, the idea of the green transition has formed a similarly dominant romance for climate policy and environmental activism. This romance generally tells the tale of three centuries of technological revolution, in which capitalist economies were transformed from a basis in muscle, wind and water power to coal in the nineteenth century and oil and gas in the twentieth century. Each new energy source displaced the last, the story goes, as innovations drove down costs and improved efficiency. In this telling, the green transition is merely the latest in a sequential history of energy revolutions. As technological advances lower the cost of renewables below that of hydrocarbons – something that has already been achieved by wind and solar – they will ultimately displace fossil fuels as the basis of the global economy.

By the late-2010s, a pro-transition consensus coalesced as activists and NGOs applied pressure on governments, who legislated a tranche of mid-century net zero commitments, alongside incentives to stimulate renewable energy development. Even fossil energy companies spent millions on renewable research, albeit while lobbying tirelessly to slow this transition, and persisting with new fossil investments that dwarfed their renewable commitments.

Months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, that consensus hangs in the balance. Trump has followed up on his campaign promise to ‘unleash American energy dominance’ with efforts to supercharge fossil fuel output and drive down oil prices. His administration is tearing up Biden-era incentives supporting renewable energy, while dismantling environmental regulations in an attempt to stimulate domestic oil and gas production. The effects of this priority shift have rippled around the world, with climate commitments displaced by military spending following a simultaneous weakening of US security guarantees. Mainstream political parties around the world are retreating on climate – in the UK, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has stated her opposition to the country’s 2050 net zero goal, which her own party signed into law a few years earlier. After years of espousing a transition narrative to investors and regulators, fossil fuel companies are once again dismantling renewable energy programs and shifting to carbon offsets to meet climate commitments. In an exultant speech at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston in March 2025, the CEO of Aramco celebrated the end of the ‘transition fiction’. ‘Today,’ he announced, ‘we can feel the winds of history in our industry’s sails again.’

Yet proponents of the green transition romance remain largely untroubled. Citing the sheer intensity of global green investment, as well as breakthroughs in the affordability and effectiveness of renewable energy, liberal commentators have rallied around the notion that the momentum behind the transition has ultimately rendered it unstoppable. Positioning Trump as a historical anachronism, they have insisted, in John Kerry’s bullish words, that ‘this transition is happening’ – the fossil industry is ‘on the wrong side of history’.

But what if, rather than clinging to the romance of an inevitable transition, we took this opportunity to re-examine its effectiveness as a political narrative for decarbonisation? It is true that advances in renewable energy are taking place at an unprecedented rate. The cost of solar panels is falling faster year on year. China, the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter, is accelerating its decarbonisation program, while exporting cheap electric vehicles overseas. Regions around the world now boast high proportions of renewables in their energy systems: 50% in Europe, 27% in North America, with individual countries such as Norway (98%), Costa Rica (98%) and Brazil (89%) faring even better.

Yet despite the exponential growth of green energy output in the past two decades, renewables still face profound challenges if they are to become the world’s predominant source of energy. Global fossil fuel consumption continues to rise, and even among the leaders in renewable development, fossil fuels remain imbricated in national economies (Norway and Brazil are dependent on oil exports, while Costa Rica’s car-heavy transportation system makes it fundamentally reliant on fossil fuel imports).

Faced with this reality, we might gesture to a more complex energy history: a history where large changes in the energy base are possible, yet there is a strong tendency towards the layering of new kinds of energy generation in ever greater quantities, rather than a replacement of one technology by the next.[2] In this context, the inevitable transition romance – and specifically its faith in technological development and market mechanisms – has become a distraction from the obstacles standing in the way of the high-renewable energy system we need to secure our collective future, and the scale and urgency of the action necessary to overcome them.

There are four main obstacles to consider. Firstly, the inevitable transition romance encourages an underestimation of the levels of support still needed in order to shift to a high-renewables energy system. Despite state subsidies in some richer nations and corresponding private investment, renewables need continued backing if they are going to achieve high proportionality. This is especially important in economies with rapidly expanding electricity demand such as Nigeria, Indonesia, South Africa and India, where grids remain reliant on the dirtiest energy supplies, while support is constrained by restrictive fiscal rules and astronomical borrowing costs (the legacy of punitive debt regimes levelled against countries across the Global South). Confronting this will require political and economic action that goes beyond the ability of cheap renewables to outcompete fossil fuels.

Secondly, the transition romance obscures the infrastructural work required for technologies such as solar and wind to be able to replace fossil fuels at times when these ‘intermittent’ renewables are less abundant. Nations are still not building out electrical storage and grid infrastructure at the rate and in the ways required, compounded by the fact that, for much of the world, grid systems are operated by private actors connected through complex, market-mediated relationships that make it difficult to coordinate change at scale. Tellingly, it is China – where the energy system is powered by public corporations and public money – that leads the way here, with grid and storage investment constituting 42% of total Chinese energy investments in 2024 (compared with 17% in the United States and 23% in the EU).

Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, the world’s much-touted record investments in renewable energy are currently largely being deployed to meet an enormous surge in global energy demand, rather than the displacement of fossil fuels. Even the return of nuclear energy has been prompted not by net zero planning but rapidly growing energy demands associated with data centres. Combatting this rise in energy demand, while meeting as much of it as possible with renewable resources, remains a critical challenge.

This leads us to the final obstacle obscured by the transition romance: the continued support and growth of fossil energy alongside renewables. Joe Biden’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 enacted $270 billion in tax credits for renewable energy, but, in a compromise with legislators in fossil fuel-dependent states, it hedged this with measures to expand fossil fuel projects and build new pipelines in federal lands and waters. The effect was that, while Biden oversaw unprecedented growth in the renewable energy sector during his presidency, green energy didn’t move to displace fossil fuels within the American economy, as the sequential logic of the inevitable transition romance suggests. Instead, by the end of his presidency, though wind and solar were the fastest-growing sources of power in the United States, the country had the highest annual production of crude oil of any nation in history as well as world-leading natural gas exports.[3] That year, fossil fuels made up almost sixty percent of US electricity generation – just one percentage point less than at the end of Trump’s first term. Around the world, there are many places where fossil fuels continue to grow. If fossil energy is to be replaced, political actors not only need to intensify renewable rollout, but also take measures to suppress fossil fuels at their source – both preventing extraction and ending fossil fuel subsidies in already oil and gas-rich countries, and supporting alternative pathways to economic development in poorer countries with unexploited fossil fuel reserves.

Before 2022, the language of ‘the green transition’ dominated global energy policy, even if meaningful decarbonisation strategies were far from universal. Since the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the transition narrative has been challenged by a different energy narrative, one rooted in ideas of national security. This framework prioritises energy-intensive military buildups, and measures to redirect the world economy away from ‘enemy’ energy exports, over decarbonisation. It allows for growth in domestic fossil fuel output under the rubric of ‘economic security’ – reducing reliance on foreign energy suppliers. And, darkly, it operates through an acknowledgement of the escalating effects of climate change, asserting that, as global temperatures rise and demand for cooling systems and other mitigation infrastructure surges, fossil fuels will be needed to meet growing energy demands.

The security framework offers fossil energy extraction as a measure of security on a vulnerable planet. It is grounded in a precarious sense of the present, framed through a world defined by military conflict, inflationary pressure, cost of living crisis, destabilised ecologies and increasing strain on physical and social infrastructures. In this, it operates in the cracks of the transition romance, with its increasingly fragile notion of history as a linear progression towards a sustainable future.

Yet the security narrative also rests on fundamental fallacies. Not only does fossil investment obviously contribute to climate insecurity, a renewable-based system arguably offers greater energy self-sufficiency than fossil fuels, without as much exposure to supply line risk and subsequent geopolitically-influenced price fluctuations. Moreover, decentralised energy infrastructure is less vulnerable to climate disruption, and less easy to target militarily than large centralized power stations. Trump’s own interpretation of energy security – cheap oil and gas for American consumers, and an exportable surplus of fossil fuel production – rests on a fundamental contradiction that is already weakening its intended coalition of finance capital, fossil companies and MAGA politics. It is the task of the climate movement to widen these fissures.

Political narratives survive long past their exhaustion as viable stories about the future. In the Caribbean, as David Scott writes, the anticolonial romance persisted even after structural adjustment and the US invasion of Grenada made its moral clarity and historical certainty an anachronism – the ghost of a future past, no longer attainable as a practical politics, yet lurking in the political thought of a shipwrecked generation. The response to the Trump administration’s early energy policies suggests that the romance of the green transition still holds a similar grip over the liberal political imagination. But the time when the climate crisis could be contained through a smooth, orderly and historically progressive process has long since passed. The inability of the inevitable transition romance to speak to people’s fears, to the sense that history is not, in fact, a steadily rising curve, and to talk instead in terms of material safety, makes it a story out of time. We need a new political story, one that confronts the obstacles to a low-carbon, high-renewable energy system, while linking the radical, unprecedented work of decarbonisation with people’s need for safety – indeed, security – in their everyday lives. And we need it fast.