The most consequential gamble in industrial history — and almost nobody is checking the arithmetic.
Britain has bet its prosperity, its industry and its security on a single proposition: that a modern economy can run on renewable energy. It is the largest peacetime rebuild of the country’s infrastructure ever attempted. You would expect the numbers underneath it to have been worked through slowly, in public, by people with no stake in the answer.
They mostly haven’t. That’s what this newsletter is for.
I come at energy the way an engineer does: measure first, argue second. I’m an electrical engineer, a petroleum engineer and an energy economist, and I spent thirty years in the oil and gas industry before I started writing about it. None of that makes me right. It does mean I read the meters before I reach for the opinion.
Here’s the argument, in one breath. Every energy transition in history has moved us to a denser fuel — wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to gas. The renewable transition is the first that asks us to run that process backwards, from concentrated fuels to diffuse ones, and the physics of going backwards is unforgiving. Meanwhile the oil and gas that would have to pay for the switch are draining faster than the official figures let on: we now burn oil roughly fifteen times faster than we find it.
That isn’t an argument against caring about the climate, and it isn’t a brief for fossil fuels. It’s a simpler, more awkward question — can the plan we’ve actually chosen be built? I think the honest answer is no, not as promised, and that there’s a better one. I’d rather show you the sums than tell you what to think.
So that’s the deal here. I keep it short. I reference what I can, and I take care over the references, so you can check me rather than trust me. I’m sometimes sharp, rarely angry, and the comments stay open — if I’ve got something wrong, say so, and I’ll correct it in public.
This is also the thinking behind my book, The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can’t Work — And What Can (Swift Press, 24 September 2026). You can see the whole argument, the chapter breakdown and pre-order it at theenergytrap.org. Subscribe here and you’ll get the argument as it’s built, the data notes you can pull apart yourself, and first word when the book lands.
If you’ve ever suspected the numbers don’t add up but couldn’t find anyone showing their working — you’re in the right place.
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