written 15 February, 2026
published 22 February, 2026
One of the traditional guidelines for long term financial stability is to live within your income and avoid consuming your savings. But modern human civilization has disregarded such wisdom when it comes to energy.
For as long as life has existed on Earth, it has overwhelmingly been solar powered. Plants live directly on solar energy, and everything else lives on plants, or eats things that live on plants.
When humans learned how to create fire about one million years ago, we began using the solar energy relatively recently saved in the form of trees, allowing our civilization and population to slowly increase. Use of fossil fuels (ancient stored sunlight) began with coal about 25,000 years ago, oil about 5,000 years ago, and natural gas about 2,500 years ago. These energy dense materials further increased growth rate, and the last two centuries of industrial revolution pushed it into hyperdrive. Like foolhardy kids, discovering a rich inheritance, we are mindlessly squandering a finite resource, literally burning it up.
That is coming to an end. The entire planet has been explored, and annual consumption has outpaced new discoveries for over half a century. The easy reserves have been developed and depleted, leaving only the less accessible, and therefore more expensive. The affordable energy savings account is heading toward empty. The fossil fuel industry knows this truth, but it still generates $8 trillion annually, so those in control are reluctant to admit they are heavily invested in a dead end.
However, Oilprice.com, an industry mouthpiece, recently posted an article stating "renewables are the long-term winners and will inevitably replace fossil fuels and nuclear". This is not because of the climate issue (which the industry still denies), but is being driven by basic economics.
Life time operating costs of renewable systems are cheaper because the energy is free. Hardware costs are declining as manufacturing scale and technology improves. Energy capacities per unit are increasing, and equipment lasts longer. In the last 50 years, solar panel prices declined by a factor of 1,000, and batteries are getting cheaper almost as fast.
In contrast, fossil fuels are not free, and because they are finite, prices continue to rise. In the last 50 years, gasoline prices have increased a factor of 25. Nuclear fuel is also expensive, finite, and inefficiently used, consuming only 5 percent before the fuel rod is no longer economically useful. This radioactive "spent fuel" must then be sequestered for thousands of years, or reprocessed to recover the remaining useful fuel, an expensive procedure that creates even more radioactive waste material. Nuclear power is already the most expensive on the grid, without including the cost of nuclear waste disposal (which don't exist in the US), fuel reprocessing (which has ended in bankruptcy the two times it has been tried in the US), or reactor decommissioning (which has yet to happen for a large commercial reactor).
Renewable systems can be built and deployed more rapidly: with 2 year construction times, versus 5-6 years for natural gas and more than 10 years for nuclear. Combined with adequate battery storage, renewables are better at meeting real time demand changes. They are modular, with the same equipment scalable from kilowatt sized household systems to gigawatt sized utility systems.
These economic realities are driving an accelerating global switch from burning saved energy to collecting income energy. Just last year, more than 600 gigawatts of solar were installed. While the sun only shines part of the day, this is still about the same energy capacity as installing 100 large nuclear reactors in a single year. China is the only country that brought a new reactor online in 2025, after 7 years of construction. That means solar installation is happening 700 times faster than nuclear.
"R" stands for reverse, and this Republican administration is going backward, shutting down renewable projects and invested heavily in coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear, working to corner the buggy whip market in an age of automobiles. This is insane, and self-destructive. Meanwhile, China is producing the energy systems of the future, manufacturing 80 percent of the solar panels, 80 percent of the batteries, and 70 percent of the EV's produced in the last year.
The US could be a player. A majority of citizens are concerned about the climate crisis, and support taking action. But our current political system doesn't represent the people, only short-term monetary return. The result will be irrelevance, and long-term monetary bankruptcy.
