Also: journalism and big oil can now get divorced.
I’ve seen a few great slide decks in my life: Mary Meeker’s internet trends decks, Reid Hasting’s Netflix culture deck, and my daughter’s 2018 deck about why we should let her get chickens (we should have).
Now here’s another one: The Electrotech Revolution, the latest global energy forecast from Ember, an energy think tank.
Just read it, it’s worth it. In great detail, it debunks the ‘conventional wisdom’ that clean energy will just be additive to fossil fuels, vs. replacing them.
It’s great on the big picture stuff, like the fact that the energy received from the sun in a week is greater than all the energy stored in fossil fuels forever.
And it’s persuasive on its core message, which is that electric tech stack will push fossil fuels out because it’s so much more efficient, and improving so much faster.
As a complement to The Electrotech Revolution, I also recommend The Electric Slide, a recent piece by Packy McCormick and Sam D’Amico (a Substack post, also available as a slide deck).
McCormick and D’Amico run through the core innovations of the electric tech stack (batteries, motors, magnets, power electronics, and compute/chips), and how critical these technologies will be to future energy dominance, AI dominance, and military dominance. There’s lots of history, plus some editorializing about how the U.S. is ceding the future to China and missing the boat.
Both these pieces (The Electrotech Revolution and The Electric Slide) are must-reads in my opinion if you want to understand the future of energy and everything else.
But are they journalism?
You be the judge, but I say yes: both are well researched and sourced, fact-based, and the product of known writers and organizations presumably prepared to stand behind both their work and process. And both are free, not stuck behind a paywall. To me, that’s journalism… or close enough.
And speaking of journalism and fossil fuels… is divorce imminent?
I saw this LinkedIn post yesterday about how 60,000 people recently gave money to The Guardian in response to an appeal highlighting that The Guardian no longer accepts fossil fuel advertising.
It caused me to wonder a few things (and ask AI), like:
How much do oil and gas companies spend on advertising these days anyway, with their business mostly unprofitable at $65 a barrel? (AI answer: about .1% of revenue, or less than a tenth of what they spent in the 1960s and ‘70s, when oil and gas were not yet commoditized).
How much of their ad spend has shifted to non-news marketing like sports sponsorships, PR, and political lobbying? (AI answer: almost all of it).
Oil and gas companies no longer need journalism to advance their goals; they’ve figured out how to keep government subsidies flowing and oil and gas exports growing by going straight to the real power brokers – the voting public – via social media influencers, sports, and political campaign contributions.
And journalism no longer needs fossil fuel advertising, either. The ad gusher that funded the 20th century news business has almost completely migrated to social media, sports and entertainment. Reader subscriptions are what’s left.
Take The New York Times: advertising has plummeted as a percent of revenue for them, as for most news companies, so it’s just not existential anymore. The Times no longer needs Chevron or Exxon to sponsor its journalism, since I’m willing to ‘Shell’ out the money myself (for Spelling Bee), along with tens of millions of other subscribers.
So the formerly happy couple no longer needs each other anymore; there’s just no excuse for not finalizing the divorce. Why do they keep relapsing and hooking back up with each other (including NYT… see here and here)?
What journalism and fossil fuels have in common is that their business models are both kind of broken. But I have more faith in journalism to reinvent itself. Oil companies – competing against the electro tech stack – will be lucky to just ride their falling revenues, profits and shareholder returns straight into the ground.
P.S. For some context on the marriage between big oil and journalism, see this great Guardian history of fossil fuel climate denial and greenwashing ads. It’s from 2021, the year after The Guardian itself stopped accepting fossil fuel ads.
