TAFT, CA – JULY 22: Oil rigs just south of town extract crude for Chevron at sunrise on July 22, 2008 in Taft, California. Hemmed in by the richest oil fields in California, the oil town of 6,700 with a stagnant economy and little room to expand has hatched an ambitious plan to annex vast expanses of land reaching eastward to Interstate 5, 18 miles away, and taking over various poor unincorporated communities to triple its population to around 20,000. With the price as light sweet crude at record high prices, Chevron and other companies are scrambling to drill new wells and reopen old wells once considered unprofitable. The renewed profits for oil men of Kern County, where more than 75 percent of all the oil produced in California flows, do not directly translate increased revenue for Taft. The Taft town council wants to cash in on the new oil boom with increased tax revenues from a NASCAR track and future developments near the freeway. In an earlier oil boom era, Taft was the site of the 1910 Lakeside Gusher, the biggest oil gusher ever seen in the US, which sent 100,000 barrels a day into a lake of crude. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
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Fossil fuels are yesterday’s news, get it? That’s what Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research recently told the New York Times. In his words, “We are at the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel economy. The U.S. is betting on the wrong horse.” Will Rockstrom’s prediction prove prescient? History says no, and that’s not a political statement.
More realistically, it’s a comment that naysayers have been questioning the worth of fossil fuel extraction for about as long as they’ve been extracting fossil fuels. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in the most famous energy fortune of all, that of John D. Rockefeller. If the skeptics hadn’t outnumbered the optimists by many miles, there’s no way Rockefeller could have pieced together what became Standard Oil.
The location of oil has long elicited as much skepticism as the future of the oil industry itself. Think Venezuela. As energy historian Daniel Yergin explained it in the Wall Street Journal just a few weeks ago, an American geologist “dismissed the country’s petroleum prospects as a ‘“mirage’” in 1922. The present and past are lousy predictors of the future. Energy instructs.
In 2005, Matthew Simmons released Twilight In the Desert to great acclaim. It predicted Saudi Arabia’s looming and “irreversible decline” as an oil producing nation. Perhaps more notable is that in 2005, the U.S. wasn’t even part of the global energy discussion. As fracking legend Harold Hamm jokes to this day, he couldn’t even get the fossil-fuel friendly members of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board to return his calls or e-mails in 2005 about the abundance of oil in North Dakota. “Saudi America,” the most shared editorial in the history of the Journal’s editorial page, wasn’t published until November of 2012.
The uncertainty that’s always defined the oil sector, along with even greater uncertainty about the location of oil, calls into question the certitude of Dr. Rockstrom. Just the same, it calls into question the conceit of the pro-fossil fuel crowd who think Rockstrom as ridiculous as he thinks them.
As opposed to bombastic, solar and “green energy” skeptics more broadly would be wise to temper their rhetoric about what will constitute future energy consumption much as Rockstrom perhaps should. Past predictions about what’s ahead haven’t aged well, and there’s no reason to suspect that today’s presumed seers possess a clearer view of what awaits than their predecessors did.
How we know this can be found in the proliferation of data centers, something that few saw coming as recently as 2022. It was in October of 2020 that the Department of Justice filed suit against Google owing to its “search engine dominance.” Fast forward to 2026, Google and others described as “Big Tech” are literally investing trillions to find a technology future that in no way resembled the outlook less than four years ago.
Which is the point, or should be. Technological change that so few saw coming in 2022 has transformed how we use technology in the years since, and has even more profoundly changed the energy needs that will power these unforeseen technological leaps.
It’s a powerful signal that the energy space is poised for change that could perhaps be greater than the change found in a technology sector that looks less and less like the one that prevailed just a few years ago. It calls for humility not just about the twilight of fossil fuels, but also the would-be replacements of fossil fuels. As history tells us, we just don’t know.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2026/01/20/energy-history-tells-us-to-be-humble-about-what-constitutes-energy/
