To Be or Not to Be — On Climate Change & Electrification (II)
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V. To be decarbonized, or not to be?
A few years ago decarbonization was the loudest sentence in the room. Every summit produced a net-zero date; every major appointed a chief sustainability officer; every utility published a pathway. The decarbonization initiative has since changed. Not reversed —but becoming quiet.
The cooling shows up mainly in expenses. By one securities analysis, the seven largest international oil majors cut low-carbon investment to about $8.3 billion in 2025, the lowest since 2019 and down sharply from roughly $24 billion the year before — the first time low-carbon spending has fallen while hydrocarbon investment rose. BP has dismantled its low-carbon energy unit and trimmed transition spending to $1.5–2 billion a year; Shell has moved to exit offshore wind. United States EV purchase tax credits were cancelled, and the European Union has softened its 2035 combustion-engine phase-out. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence expects 2026 global EV sales growth of about 13%, the slowest since 2020. Some political movements now campaign openly on abolishing net-zero targets. Climate governance is widely described as stalled, with green trade barriers multiplying in place of cooperation.
The physics, meanwhile, has not cooled. The Statistical Review of World Energy 2026 records that renewables grew nearly 10% in 2025 — yet added only about 3.2 exajoules, while oil, gas and coal together added roughly 4.9 EJ, more than half of the 8.1 EJ increase in total global energy supply. Fossil fuels still supplied about 86%. New coal capacity additions rose 3.5%, to among the highest levels on record. And a driver no negotiator in 2015 imagined has arrived: artificial intelligence. Gartner projects global data-centre electricity demand of 565 TWh in 2026, up 26%, with power draw rising from 104 GW to 132 GW and to 290 GW by 2030. In the United States, gas-fired capacity in development tied to data centres nearly doubled within six months, to 378 GW. The EIA expects American power consumption to set records again in 2026 and 2027.
So the world sits in an awkward asymmetry: the rhetoric has retreated while the demand it addressed has accelerated. The easy, cheap decarbonization is largely banked. What remains — industrial heat, grid firming, long-duration storage, the unglamorous remainder — is precisely the part that no longer earns applause, and it is the part that decides the outcome.
Should carbon dioxide reductions continue now that the fashion for announcing them has passed? Should the clean-energy transition press ahead at pace, slow to what balance sheets will carry, or pause until the next crisis makes it urgent again?
VI. To evolve or not to evolve?
The earlier questions were about infrastructure. This one is about adaptation — and in biology, adaptation is not offered as a choice.
For companies, evolution is rarely a moral decision. It is a survival reflex that balance sheets tend to misprice. Does it worth it to invest cleaner energy and make it profitable for customers in next decades? This is hard to answer, because the situations are different from one region to another. In China, wind-solar power bases and investments are still growing. Wind plus solar power generation accounted (from near zero in 1990) to 22% of total power output in 2025 - now larger than hydropower. In terms of car sales, the penetration of NEV (including BEV, PHEV and EREV) sales recorded 60.4% in July 2026, a monthly sale over 50% for the first time in history. Many customers are curious to try new EV, as they more often look nicer, smarter and luxurious; while other customers think gasoline cars are way tougher and longer-lasting. It's hard to give a simple answer. In some places, the EV are getting more and more popular while most markets are still more in favor of combustion engine vehicles.
For individuals, the temptation is to treat this as a moral test. It reads better as a run of unglamorous decisions: the next car, the next boiler, a roof, a pension fund, and above all the trade one is trained in. An engineer with twenty years on internal combustion is not an obstacle to the transition — retrained, that person is the transition. The honest limit matters equally. Personal choices cannot stand in for grids, standards and prices; a citizen who recycles diligently while national emissions rise can change very little, and he/she should not be asked to carry what a system should load.
To evolve, or not to evolve. In the fossil record, the species that deliberated at leisure left no descendants to read about.
VII. To involve or not to involve?
Every solution leaves a residue. The clean transition runs on batteries, and batteries are chemical objects with chemical consequences.
The materials list is uncomfortable. Cathodes draw on nickel, cobalt and manganese — transition metals whose mining and smelting have documented effects on water and soil. In 2022 a thallium exceedance in the Jinjiang river basin near Yichun, China, was traced to lithium supply-chain operations. Brine extraction in the Atacama — Chile and Argentina together supply roughly a quarter of the world's lithium — can consume up to two million litres of water per kilogram of lithium, in some of the driest places on earth.
Then there is the fluorine. Most cells bind their cathode with PVDF or PTFE, fluoropolymers at the outer edge of the PFAS family, and the dominant electrolyte salt, LiPF₆, hydrolyses on contact with moisture into hydrofluoric acid. Emissions during manufacture are small. The trouble arrives at end of life, when thermal treatment of that binder releases fluorinated degradation products into the stack gas. PFAS persist; they respect no fence line and do not degrade on any human timescale.
Recycling is improving — from a low base, against an explosive denominator. The European Commission expects global battery demand to grow roughly fourteenfold. EU Regulation 2023/1542 sets ambitious terms: 70% recycling efficiency for lithium-based batteries by 2030, lithium recovery rising from 50% in 2027 to 80% in 2031, cobalt, copper, lead and nickel at 90–95%, a battery passport from 2027. In September 2026 the Commission declared these targets fit for purpose. Targets, however, are not tonnage. Collection networks are incomplete, recycling economics swing with lithium prices, and enforcement outside the EU remains patchy.
Sodium-ion chemistry offers a partial exit — no cobalt, no nickel — while work on cellulose, lignin and fluorine-free binders is genuine but early.
So: to involve, or not to involve? The residue is documented. So is the alternative.
VIII. To be humane or not?
Is new technology created to be humane or harmful for the whole ecological system? Everyone knows that technology is not naturally benevolent.
Even the atomic energy is doing its part in power supply for human beings, its residue is still believed to harm the whole ecological system for hundreds, even tens of thousands of years!
Can battery technologies be invented humane? We hope the answer is yes. Make the battery tech to be humane: to involve, and to involve with intent.
The transition must proceed, and it must be built from the least harmful materials we can specify. Where performance allows, sodium-ion rather than cobalt-and-nickel cathodes. Aqueous, cellulose and lignin binders instead of PVDF and PTFE, so the fluorine never reaches the furnace. Electrolytes that do not hydrolyse into hydrofluoric acid. Honest water accounting at brine and hard-rock mines, and full remediation when a site closes. Cells designed to come apart, so that the recycling targets written into law become tonnage in practice — and passports that tell the truth about what is inside. Auto parts easy to find, open to public for repair. Expired batteries are legally and willingly recycled.
None of this is sentimental. It is the only version of the transition that leaves the next century better off than this one did.
Technology will not acquire a conscience of its own. One must choose the materials. That deliberate choice is what "humane" means — and it is ours to make. A cleaner energy supply is a must of evolution, while cleaner energy consumption reacts with it; and all these transitions need to be proceeded in a steady way to make it adaptable for everyone.