Clean Energy Investments Surge, But That Is Only Part Of The Story
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The International Energy Agency’s World Energy Investment 2026 report released on May 28, 2026, contained some startling news. The general perception is that, with the US government massively favoring the dirtiest forms of energy, global investments in fossil fuels are soaring. The reality is quite dif ferent. According to the IEA, clean energy investments last year were nearly double those in fossil fuels — $2.2 trillion versus $1.2 trillion. By the IEA’s definition, clean energy includes solar and wind energy, nuclear energy, grid-scale battery storage, and grid upgrades. You might think this is a recent trend, but We Don’t Have Time says it has been evident for the past decade.
In an essay for Forbes published on June 7, 2026, Ingmar Rentzhog, the CEO of We Don’t Have Time, wrote: “Fossil fuels do not compete on a level field. Governments around the world still spend enormous sums keeping fossil energy cheaper than it otherwise would be. These subsidies are usually defended as protection for households during periods of high prices. They also keep fossil fuels artificially competitive against cleaner alternatives. So the honest question is this: If we add fossil fuel subsidies to fossil fuel investment, does clean energy still lead?”
The Subsidy Debate
Rentzhog writes that even taking the subsidies for clean and dirty energy into account, the amount of money on the clean side of the ledger is still nearly double what it is for dirty fuels. He is up front about the difficulty of providing a fair comparison.
“This is not a perfect accounting exercise, and it is worth saying so plainly,” he said. “Fossil fuel subsidies mostly appear as direct government support, including consumer price support and producer incentives such as tax breaks and other measures that help lower costs or encourage production. The figures used here include only these direct subsidies and do not include the much larger estimates that also account for unpriced climate, health, and environmental damages.”
He adds, “Clean energy subsidies, by contrast, often help finance investments that may already be counted in clean energy spending totals, creating some potential overlap. I have shown both for completeness, but the numbers should be viewed as directional rather than strictly additive. The broader conclusion remains unchanged — governments continue to provide substantial support to fossil fuels even as investment increasingly flows toward clean energy…..Fossil fuels are not cheap. They are under priced and society quietly pays the difference.”
Exposing The Fossil Fuel Fallacy
Across all the energy the world uses, not just electricity but transportation, heat, and industry too, fossil fuels still supply about 80 percent of the world’s energy, Rentzhog says. So doesn’t that prove clean energy has a long way to go to catch up with or surpass fossil fuels?
No, it does not. What most people miss (CleanTechnica readers already know this) is that nearly two thirds of the energy contained in fossil fuels is wasted. The all-energy total as seen in the graph above is a look in the rear view mirror. “It measures how slowly the whole system turns, not where it is heading. And the leading edge — electricity — has already started to bend,” Rentzhog said.
“Electricity has cleaned up first because so much hydro, nuclear, wind and solar already lives there. The reason the all-energy figure is still near 80 percent is the rest of the system. Cars, furnaces, and factories still run mostly on oil and gas, and that is what the headline number captures — the slowest moving part of the transition rather than the fastest. That is the part of the system that is just beginning to turn, following electricity. When people hear that fossil fuels supply 80 percent of all energy, they imagine we must build an equal amount of clean energy to replace every unit. That is the primary energy trap, and it badly overstates the task.”
Wasting Energy Is Stupid — And Unprofitable
Rentznog claims the reason for this distortion is that those who advocate for the preëminence of fossil fuels fail to account in their thinking for the gargantuan amount of waste built into the fossil fuel system. “A barrel of oil or a ton of coal is not useful energy,” he says. “It is raw energy that has to be extracted, refined, shipped, then burned, and most of it is lost along the way. According to RMI, of the 606 units of primary energy that entered the global system in 2019, only 227 ended up as useful energy — the heat, motion, and light people actually want. Overall, the system is just 37 percent efficient. Almost two thirds of all the energy we dig up is wasted before it does a single thing of value, a loss RMI puts at more than $4.6 trillion a year, or roughly $600 for every person on Earth.”
That, dear reader, is a ton of money pissed away for no gain. What makes it close to criminal negligence is the amount of pollution created to produce that amount of energy before the waste occurs. You would think a species that prides itself on its advanced intelligence would be able to grasp how insane it is to pollute the Earth so heavily only to throw away two thirds of the energy available. Homo sapiens? Not even close.
RMI has found that extraction and refining — getting fuels out of the ground and turning them into usable form — wastes around 51 exajoules a year. Moving fuels around the planet wastes even more. Nearly half of all global shipping demand exists for just one purpose — to transport fossil fuels. “The world burns fuel to ship fuel, then burns more to liquefy and regasify it. Pipelines run pumps and compressors and leak along the way. None of this energy lifts a home’s temperature or moves a single passenger. It is the cost of operating a system built on digging things up and hauling them across oceans,” Rentzhog says.
In May, 2025, Bill McKibben wrote on Substack, “Occam’s Razor…would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember — Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy.” In fact, wasting energy is the very foundation of the fossil fuel industry.
Renewables Conserve Energy
“Sunlight and wind do not need to be mined. They do not need to be refined. They do not need to be shipped through a strait or pumped down a pipeline,” Rentzhog says. “As RMI puts it, wind and solar can be generated almost entirely without losses, because they require effectively no extraction or processing energy and suffer none of the thermal losses of a power plant that burns fuel. A rooftop solar panel transports its energy a few meters down a wire. The fuel arrives on its own, for free, every morning.
“The combustion losses vanish too. A coal plant throws away around 60 percent of its energy as waste heat up the cooling tower. A petrol car wastes roughly three quarters of its fuel before the wheels turn. The clean replacements do the same jobs on a fraction of the input. A heat pump moves heat rather than burning fuel to create it, delivering the same warmth on around a quarter of the energy. An electric motor turns nearly all its electricity into motion. The IEA’s Energy Efficiency analysis finds electrified technologies are typically two to four times more efficient than the fossil machines they replace.”
“We do not need to find 606 units of clean energy to match what fossil fuels supply today,” Rentzhog writes. “We need to deliver the 227 units of useful service, and clean electricity delivers each one with far less energy in. A transition is not a like-for-like swap of one fuel for another. It is the replacement of a wasteful system with a lean one. That is also why, in the IEA’s net-zero scenarios, total energy demand can fall even as the world grows richer and uses more energy services. The same comfort, mobility and light, delivered with much less waste. The fossil share looks immovable only if you assume every wasted joule must be replaced. It does not.” [Emphasis added.]
The reason investors are putting money into clean energy is not because it has lower emissions but because it delivers the same comfort, mobility, and light with fewer units of energy bought, shipped and burned. It is a bet on lower costs and lower risk, not lower emissions, Rentzhog claims.
“Infrastructure does not change the day money is committed. A wind farm, a transmission line, or a battery factory takes years to finance, permit, and build. So today’s investment numbers are not just a snapshot of the present. They are construction orders for the 2030s. Wind farms approved today will still be generating in the 2050s. Transmission lines financed this year may carry power into the next century. The IEA notes that around three quarters of this year’s energy investment is effectively locked in by decisions already made. The energy system of the future is not a distant idea. Much of it is already under construction.”
Clean energy is also far more secure than fossil fuels, as the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has made abundantly clear. All the bloviating about “energy dominance” wafting outward from the banks of the Potomac is just so much hot air. “Because sunlight and wind need no shipping, a country that builds them is far less exposed to the next price shock or blockade. The IEA estimates that clean energy and efficiency saved the five largest fuel-importing regions around $260 billion in avoided fossil fuel imports in 2025 alone. That is not only a climate benefit; it is independence,” Rentzhog asserts.
Rescue Me!
“Governments are spending hundreds of billions to defend the side that is already losing the investment race, while slowing down the more efficient, more secure, and increasingly cheaper option. That money would do far more good aimed at the real bottlenecks — grids, storage, faster permitting, skilled workers, and lower cost capital for the developing world. Capital is not required to be optimistic; it is required to be profitable. And right now, by nearly two to one, global investment is moving toward the cleaner, more electric, and more home grown side of the ledger.”
Rentzhog concludes his analysis with this statement. “Fossil fuels still dominate the system we have, but increasingly, the world’s capital is building the clean system of tomorrow. The scandal is not that fossil fuels are losing. The scandal is that we are still paying so much to keep them in the race.”
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