Amusingly, Ronald, this article popped up a "Temu" advertisement, for four manufactured products, made with fossil-fuels.

The only quibble I have is this. Arguably, Net Zero's a greater oxymoron than Renewable Energy. In the first case, one has completely lost one's mind, in the second case, possibly one might respond to intensive treatment.

WTF?

In the same fashion that a drunk University first year Art student, facing a losing argument at 3A.M. in the morning, the anti-science and anti-technology crowd decides to argue definitions.

Nobody believes that energy can actually be renewable. Just the same way that everybody knows, that for the sake of brevity, some people say carbon when they mean carbon dioxide when discussing topics in context.

There are many forms of energy that fit under the banner of renewables". I'm not going to bother listening them.

Any intelligent person knows that in order to transition to other sources of energy that fossil fuels will play a part.

I don't know who the author is trying to convince here. Maybe those that can only imagine a world of black and white.

WTF?

"Any intelligent person knows"

So, after all the years of energy transition, how much of the world's energy comes from wind and solar. (Hint: it was less than 2% a few years ago)

These clowns merely shift the goalpost to attack a strawman.

//Wind and solar cannot make EV's, or any of the products or fuels that get made from fossil fuels.//

Right - and by that same logic, I could argue that fossil fuels are useless because oil and coal can‘t produce a forest. No one’s trying to replace the sun and wind with coal and oil.

If I used this to argue against fossil fuels, I'd be laughed out of the room and dismissed as a fruit cake by people on both sides of the fence. Present an equally irrelevant argument using the same faulty logic to argue against renewables, and it's gobbled up by the tribe.

All that aside, the term “renewable energy” still isn’t an oxymoron, because energy isn’t the opposite of renewable - nonrenewable is.

So, we have a factually incorrect introduction serving as a lead-in to a strawman argument that doesn’t logically follow.

Good grief.

It's me mate John Daysh, still hoping perhaps, cheap renewables will bend the graph and shift us to the UN rainbow of net-zero emissions.

The planet isn't getting the UN memo. Population - well up. GDP and consumption - well up. Emissions - new records. CO2 - new records. Temperatures - well up. Guess the planet should adjust to the theory, eh, and not the other way round.

Steve S,

That’s a curious response. You’ve sidestepped the point I raised about the article using a flawed comparison to discredit renewables by holding them to standards they were never meant to meet.

Instead, you’ve pivoted to a lament about global emissions trends, as if rising CO2 somehow proves wind and solar are a failure, rather than a response to that very problem. By that logic, seatbelts don’t work because car accidents still happen.

Yes, emissions are still rising - but the fact that global renewables are now the fastest-growing energy source and are already reshaping electricity markets is part of the solution, not evidence of its futility.

So we’re back to square one: the article’s central logic doesn’t hold, and your reply doesn’t defend it. In fact you’ve strengthened my argument: If what you’ve said was accurate, then the authors of this article wouldn’t be scraping the barrel like they have, and you wouldn’t need deflect.