2025: A Volatile Mix of Hope and Denial

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My description of 2025 is a volatile mix of hope and denial, as these emotions are the dominant dynamics. The zeitgeist is alive with hope for a renewal that fixes everything that's broken or decaying, a hope that embodies different measures of hope: hope for a return to the stable prosperity of an earlier era, hope that new technologies will power this renewal, and unstated but central, the hope that everything we have now will not change and that no sacrifices will be required to maintain the status quo.

Hope is an emotion that is often evoked but rarely examined. That humans need hope is well understood. Less well understood is the ease of substituting wishful thinking or denial for positive expectations (i.e. hope) based on realistic assessments.

The biblical story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh's dream as a forecast of seven lean years following seven years of abundance poses a question: what is hopeful in this forecast? On the face of it, nothing: what's hopeful about seven years of famine? The hope is not in the forecast but in the potential to prepare for the difficult years ahead as the means to reduce the suffering.

This isn't the kind of hope currently in circulation. The current kind of hope leans heavily on unspoken assumptions that can only be characterized as denial / magical thinking.

Consider the widespread notion that economies are rapidly electrifying vehicles and industries as the pathway to reducing the consumption of hydrocarbons. Another widespread notion is that China is the leader in electric vehicles and therefore a leader in the energy transition from hydrocarbons to sustainable "green" energy sources.

The reality is jarringly different. "Accounting for more than half of global coal demand, China is by far the world's largest coal consumer. In 2022, the country's overall coal demand rose by 4.6% to a total of 4 520 Mt, with coal taking a share of more than 60% in power generation."

Then there's China's soaring imports of oil: "China, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, imported 11.3 million barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil in 2023, 10% more than in 2022."

If China's consumption of both coal and oil is increasing, then where is the transition to "sustainable green energy"? Transitioning vehicles from consuming hydrocarbons directly to vehicles consuming hydrocarbons indirectly isn't a transition to consuming less hydrocarbons. If China's expansion of wind, solar and nuclear energy sources is successfully replacing hydrocarbons, then why is China's consumption of coal and oil rising?

That we consume all the energy we produce regardless of source is called Jevon's Paradox: rather than substitute a new energy source for an existing one, we use more of both. The world hasn't even let go of wood as an energy source; we're burning more wood for fuel than ever before.

The same can be said of the global economy as a whole. The hope of a seamless, sacrifice-free energy transition is based not on factual assessment but on denial and wishful thinking.

As energy analyst Vaclav Smil has pointed out, if an electric vehicle is charged with electricity generated by burning coal, that vehicle is effectively powered by coal, intermediated by first turning the coal into electricity, a process that also consumes energy. The same can be said of natural gas and oil used to generate electricity: the vehicle isn't "consuming" electricity, it's consuming hydrocarbons converted into electricity.

As for another energy source steeped in hope, renewed investment in nuclear power is widely anticipated to provide the energy needed to wean the planet off hydrocarbons. But as energy analyst Gail Tverberg has explained, most of the enriched uranium needed to fuel nuclear power plants has come from recycling decommissioned nuclear warheads, a source that has been consumed. The world economy needs to simplify.

Where will all the uranium needed to power thousands of nuclear power plants globally going to come from, and how expensive will it be to mine and process?

Recall that uranium isn't found in great chunks, awaiting our discovery. Entire mountains of earth must be torn apart and sifted for a handful of uranium. There is no cheap or easy way to do this, and these immense processes are powered by hydrocarbons.

A few years ago, the zeitgeist was alight with hope that thorium nuclear reactors would be the ideal solution to our energy needs. But the few thorium reactors being constructed have run aground on cost overruns and technical problems without easy solutions. This hope was based not on realistic assessments but on wishful thinking and the denial of obvious realities. Nobody talks about thorium reactors now, they gush over modular nuclear reactors, which are inherently costly to build and dependent on scarce uranium as fuel.

The same can be said of other examples of hope for a sacrifice-free transition to super-abundance: for example, fusion energy. "The minimum temperature required for nuclear fusion is approximately 100 million degrees Celsius (Kelvin). This is the temperature needed to fuse deuterium and tritium, the most commonly studied fusion fuel on Earth, and is significantly hotter than the core of the Sun." Basic physics informs us that controlling temperatures at these extremes is not easy or cheap, if it is even possible for longer than milliseconds.

The hope for fusion is based on an implicit guarantee that technological advancement is both limitless and unstoppable and so it's only a matter of time before incomprehensibly extreme temperatures are controlled by forces that themselves require monstrous quantities of energy, and this immensely costly project will magically result in nearly limitless, nearly free power. This expectation--that there are no limits on human ingenuity or our technological advances--has no scientific basis.

As for "drill, baby drill," the hope that we can continue to extract oil in whatever quantities we desire in remote pockets of the planet, energy analyst Alice Friedman has pointed out that the arctic permafrost is melting, meaning that it's impossible to pave a road and drive heavy vehicles hundreds of kilometers over permafrost to "drill, baby drill."

When these realities are raised, the reaction is indignation, as if conducting a realistic assessment is anathema because it destroys hope for a better, easier future.

What a realistic assessment undermines isn't hope; it undermines denial and magical thinking, both of which exist by disconnecting hope from reality. Hope based on fantasies isn't actually hope, it's delusion substituting for hope.

Hope based on denial makes for a volatile mix, as denial isn't a productive adaptive strategy--and neither is indignant rage when the fantasy is questioned. Rather, both emotions delay our acceptance of reality and hinder our real progress, which starts with a realistic assessment of conditions, obstacles, options, costs and benefits, and what choices offers the best odds of weathering whatever comes our way in good form.

Returning to the biblical story, hope grounded in a factual assessment isn't dependent on indignation, denial or wishful thinking, fantasies disconnected from the real world. An idea really only qualifies as hope if it's based on a realistic assessment of costs and limits, and what lies ahead.

If we face seven lean years, the hope is we can manage well enough if we set aside unrealistic fantasies and prepare for lean times in common-sense ways. That such preparations require change and sacrifices is to be expected, and these realities don't diminish our hope, they power our hope.

What's the foundation of a realistic assessment?
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