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We Don’t Have an Energy Supply Problem — We’re Just Burning It Like Idiots
This isn’t about replacing fossil fuels. It’s about using energy that actually works.
Deep in the Patagonian winter, the damp, gray cold was creeping into my bones. I was living in a one-bedroom flat with paper-thin windows and a radiator that hissed, pretending it was doing something — but wasn’t.
I remember sitting at my desk, wrapped in a hoody and a puffy vest, hat, and fingerless gloves, trying to write through the shivers. Every few minutes, I’d get up, touch the radiator again — hoping, stupidly, that this time it would be hot. That this time, the energy I was paying for would do what it promised.
The boiler was on full blast. My heating bill was obscene. And still, I was wearing three layers and drinking tea after tea inside my apartment.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have energy. It’s that most of it was being wasted.
The boiler burned gas. The pipes leaked heat. The radiator coughed it out unevenly. And outside, half the warmth bled straight through the glass. My money was going up in smoke. I’m not alone. Millions of people live this way — in homes that consume enormous amounts of energy but deliver very little comfort.
This is the tragedy no one talks about: we don’t have an energy supply problem. We have an energy efficiency crisis.
We’ve designed entire systems — our homes, cars, power grids — to burn more, not to waste less. Cars that lose heat in traffic. Radiators that gulp gas to barely warm a room. Power plants that hemorrhage two-thirds of their fuel as waste.
But then we turn around and panic at the scale of fossil fuels we use, as if the raw number is sacred — as if that grotesque overconsumption is something we must match with renewables, watt for watt, drop for drop.
It isn’t.
And that’s the fallacy. The so-called . It tricks you into believing that because fossil fuels account for such a massive share of global energy input, renewables must somehow do the same. When in truth, they don’t have to. Not even close.
They just need to do the job — without the waste.
The Illusion of Energy Abundance
Scroll through the comment section of any post on clean energy, and someone will drop a graph. You know the one — the towering mountain of fossil fuel use and on top of it the snow cover on a spring day that renewables represent. The message? “We’ll never replace this.” It looks irrefutable. Intimidating. It’s also completely misleading.
That graph doesn’t show useful energy. It shows — the raw, unrefined input of coal, oil, and gas before it gets turned into anything we can actually use. Think of it like tracking the volume of water dumped into a leaky pipe system, instead of measuring how much actually comes out the tap.
The term “primary energy” includes every ounce of coal before it’s burned, every cubic meter of gas before it’s ignited, every barrel of oil before it’s refined. But it doesn’t account for the energy that’s lost — and there’s a lot of it. of their input as heat. Cars with lose more than two-thirds of their fuel to friction and heat. That “massive mountain” of fossil fuel energy? It’s .
, on the other hand, . They don’t burn anything. They don’t pollute at work. So when we compare the two — fossil fuels versus renewables — using primary energy charts, we’re comparing wasteful inputs to efficient outputs. It’s like comparing a broken truck that guzzles fuel with a bike that needs none, and claiming the truck is better because it “consumes more energy” — while setting the air on fire.
Fossil fuels look dominant not because they work better, but because we still measure the world by how much we burn (and how much energy we waste), not by what we get. The scoreboard is rigged, praising a horse for how much hay it eats, not how fast it runs.
This is the sleight of hand at the center of the primary energy fallacy: confusing quantity with quality.
But if we stop counting all that wasted heat and instead measure energy services — light, heat, motion — renewables don’t just compete. They crush.
The True Cost of Energy Waste
When you pump gas into your car, you’re probably thinking about getting it moving. You are right, of course, but here’s a harsh reality check: 75–80% of that gasoline’s energy is lost as heat that dissipates in smoke, quite literally. And it’s meant to do — move your car.
From an engineering standpoint, this is a downright embarrassment. And this isn’t just a financial headache for drivers who get just 20 cents worth of driving motion for every dollar of petrol added to a reckless discharge of pollutants, , into the atmosphere. With zero payoff.
In the US’s 2023 — a sprawling flowchart of energy movement — two-thirds of the energy input is simply… lost. Burned off. “Rejected energy,” they call it. A polite term for waste.
But the only energy we actually care about is the kind that actually *does something — *the energy services. Heating your apartment. Getting you home. Lighting a street. Everything else? Money burned in invisible smoke.
Now, that “rejected” chunk of energy isn’t some inevitable cost of doing business. It’s a byproduct of using outdated, combustion-based technologies that were never designed with efficiency in mind. Why would they be? Fossil fuels were cheap. The incentive was always to burn more, not less.
So, until we recognize this, another will be hitting the streets this year, along with and some navigating the oceans.
But transportation is just a handy example. We generate heat in any energy transformations, such as chemical into flame and then flame into motion. And more heat means more energy down the drain. The same principle applies whether you’re talking about a combustion engine, an electric generator, a power plant, jet engines, even an oil drilling rig, or anything else turning fuel into motion.
And that inefficiency turns lethal during crises. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, fossil fuel prices , and the — the waste, the inefficiency, the dependence — became painfully visible. Households struggled to heat their homes. for alternatives.
Meanwhile, the world has surpassed as renewables achieved record growth in 2024 and continue this . EVs use from two-thirds to vehicles. And heat pumps heat homes using than boilers.
Not by burning more. By wasting less.
So, no. Renewables don’t need to match fossil fuels. They need to replace what they actually do. And we can do it with less — if we stop mistaking the size of the fire for the strength of the flame.
The Real “Energy Crisis” Is An Identity Crisis
This is not about belief. It’s about vision. About shedding the mirage of strength built on waste and shifting to systems that actually work.
Britain carved its empire from . The U.S. secured global supremacy with , fueling everything from WWII to Walmart. But the days of oil-drenched dominance are over. The next superpower runs not on barrels, but on batteries.
And China has the .
Forget the nostalgia-soaked slogans of “American Energy.” The world’s future is being soldered together in , not Texas. On , not in fracking fields. China is the planet’s first true , exporting not just batteries but an entire system. . . . A full-stack approach. It’s not always ethical. But it’s effective.
Meanwhile, the U.S. clutches its pickup trucks and myths like a cowboy too old for the saddle, watching in. The empire of fossil fuel is in slow collapse and China quietly controls the new motherboard: . And that’s not a side market anymore. It is the market, with .
Over 20 million electric cars will be sold this year — . In just the first quarter of 2025, sales jumped 35%. This isn’t hype. This is a gravitational shift.
China sold more EVs in 2024 than the whole world did in 2022, with exported last year alone — 40% of the global trade — dominating in countries like , , , , and .
Europe is sprinting. The UK built a , and now it’s while mandating . Germany is electrifying , heat pumps, , and . Former empires can evolve.
So, why are we still calculating power like it’s the Industrial Revolution? Who benefits from keeping the old equation? Why do we measure in inputs, when it’s the outputs — warmth, movement, power — that actually matter?
Maybe the real “energy crisis” isn’t about oil or grid reliability, but about identity.
Because believing you’re the sun is exactly how you drift into darkness.
When My Grandfather Discovered Freedom
I used to think energy was all about consumption — that “efficiency” simply meant extracting a bit more power from burning coal. That’s how I grew up in Patagonia: turning the old oil heater to the limit, and re-stocking my grandfather’s fireplace with an ever-present woodpile as the cold bore down.
Until one day, when we came in to visit, and we couldn’t hear the crackling of wood. Instead, silence — warm silence coming from a heat pump humming quietly in the corner and connected to the solar panels recently installed on the roof. No smoke. No fire. Only efficiency filling up the room.
I thought of my apartment’s gas heater flickering in the wind, of all that wood that we burnt and the oil consumed at my grandfather place. I thought of the lie we’ve been sold.
But my grandfather had just found the way out of it — he’s just discovered freedom.
The primary energy fallacy is not just a technical error. It’s the scaffolding of a dying empire that tell us to “follow the data” — when the data has been doctored.
And so, we let gas pipelines dictate policy. We let outdated statistics and delay action. We build the wrong infrastructure and bet on the wrong horse.
My grandfather was there to witness his miracle of for only one winter season. But that was enough for him to feel what energy fredom really means. And if he could — a man from the fossil-fuelled generation, who loved V8 engines, loud motor rumblings and a hypnotizing fireplaces with whisky on the rocks — then what are we waiting for?
By 2050, emissions from . Yet global agencies and national plans still cling to fossil inputs as the benchmark for progress, as if the goal was to burn smarter, instead of not burn (and pollute) at all.
This lie doesn’t just distort spreadsheets — it distorts lives. It keeps millions locked into dirty and life-threatening systems. It inflates bills, props up autocrats, and sabotages the clean transition by making it look like it hasn’t happened yet.
We are not in an energy transition anymore. We are in an energy reckoning. And the longer we let outdated metrics dictate the rules, the longer we subsidize the collapse.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. If the world were to electrify industry, buildings and transport to their full potential, .
Are you still defending the idea that “fossil fuels are more efficient” because a chart told you so? Have you ever looked at your electricity bill and asked, “What am I really paying for?” Would you judge your home’s energy use by how much gas you bought — or by how warm your kids are in winter?
If we shift the frame — if we start measuring by what works, not wastes — we’ll see that the most radical idea isn’t abandoning the old system.
It’s finally admitting it never worked in the first place.
So be loud.
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