News flash: you need fossil fuels to create and maintain renewable infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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Only because we choose to do that.
Much like how when automobiles were new, you could prove they weren't actually viable because you still needed horse carts to haul the iron ore, and the coal to smelt it from the mines. The idea that someday the entire fleet of mining and transportation equipment would use internal combustion engines seemed quite impossible.
Probably there's no way to transition to electric mining equipment, electric smelters, electric battery recycling facilities, and electric transport fleets.
Some would call it a bootstrap problem but it's possible you're right and there's no way to transition from one suite of existing technologies to a new, cheaper one.
We know it is fundamentally feasible, photosynthetic organisms can do it with just local resources, with reasonable replication rate and some excess sufficient to sustain the global ecosystem.
However, we don't know how to do that, and, worse, we have stopped pursuing that development route. Some dream that we'll get general artificial intelligence Real Soon Now which can bootstrap molecular nanotechnology in that short time frame that we have left.
Could happen, but that probability is pretty damn low.
Sorry, I suspect my sarcasm may have passed you by. They already make electric mining/construction equipment, solar powered factories and recycling facilities. Steel smelting can be done with grid-connected electric arc furnaces or solar furnaces. The production of solar panels and wind turbines may not be fully detached from oil for some time, but then horses played an important role in heavy industry for decades alongside gasoline and diesel trucks and steel hulled sail ships were still hauling grain well into the 1950s. These transitions are always uneven and the tipping point can be hard to spot even with hindsight, let alone while it's happening.
Electrification can replace more and more links in the chain until the majority or even entirety of the supply chain is no longer reliant on fossil fuels. Even if those components are made with the use of fossil fuels - just like automobiles made with metal hauled by horses could replace those horses.
Gigantism in mining trucks like Belaz 75710 https://www.lectura-specs.com/en/model/construction-machinery/rigid-dump-trucks-belaz/75710-11738579 with 360 tons and 1.7 MW diesel-electric hybrids -- which frequently run 24/7 -- is due to ore grade depletion. You might want to run the numbers of how a sodium-ion mining truck would look like, and how long it would have to recharge. Notice the tires, they're made from at least partly synthetic rubber. What you don't see is lubricants, also synthetic. Polymers, synthetic. Notice the amount of structural steel. Electric arc vacuum ovens for steel recycling exist, but nobody runs them on 100% renewable. That's because of the battery buffering needed. Look at aluminium -- current electrolytic melt processes need 24/7 energy.
Solar PV with battery buffers (necessary for 24/7 industrial processes) has ERoEI of less than 4 which is insufficient to maintain a complex industrial society. You can try to substitute some of that with small-batch fast (running just during the day or whenever the wind blows) processes, but that will be the minority.
You mention horses a lot -- these will be needed again, after the industrial age. And slaves, and ships made of wood. Which will do fine in a world with maybe 100 million people. Maybe a lot less.
That's changing as broader electrification takes hold, and even today, it takes a lot less fossil fuels than just running directly on burning stuff
It's not changing, look at the industrial fabrication and supply chain for solar PV and wind. None of that is powered by renewable electricity.
Renewable infra are a fossil multiplier (but not by much), but the total fraction of fossil in primary energy use is effectively constant, because use of fossil fuels is also increasing.
What I see is a system that's steadily shifting from direct fossil fuel use to electricity, and with that, reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned. We're not done making the change, but it has definitely started
Thing is, there is no energy transition. Renewable infrastructure, built using fossil fuels is stacked on top of rising fossil energy use https://i0.wp.com/ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/World-energy-fossil-fuels-vs-add-ons.png?ssl=1
That's what the beginning looks like. We're just at the cusp of where renewables growth gets to be fast enough to start winding down fossil fuel use at a global level and not just for a few big territories or countries
We're already past primary energy use peak per capita, and we're distinctly past net energy use. At the same time, extraction of increasingly dilute mineral resources necessary for technology requires progressively more and more energy.
So I would expect we start losing fossil inputs quickly, since increasingly unable to extract them, while the renewable infrastructure will not have grown sufficiently, and then starting to decline, since we cannot sustain them with renewable energy alone.
At the same time we're going to lose a lot of population (excess deaths of several billions this century), so at least whatever resources are left will last longer than at the current use rate.