Ringside: A Fact-Based Appraisal of California’s ‘Net Zero’ Strategy

The Statistical Review of World Energy is arguably the most authoritative and comprehensive source publicly available for national and global energy statistics. And a funny thing happened between the report issued in 2024 and the report issued in 2025. “Renewables” as a percent of total energy consumed in 2023 was quietly lowered from 9.3 in the U.S. and 8.2 worldwide to only 5.9 and 5.2 percent, respectively (each edition shows reports the most recent two years of data).

This is because in 2025, the energy economists who compile this data finally discontinued the practice of grossing up what “non-combustible” energy sources actually produced. The reporting used to reflect how much more energy input would have been required if that same energy were to come from less efficiently converted combustible fuel. Now at last, they just report how much energy these sources actually generated.

With the 2026 edition released and continuing this new and more accurate reporting method, the percentage of total raw energy consumed worldwide – not including the United States – in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal was 87 percent; in the U.S. it was 83 percent. There are plenty of gigantic nuances to this story, starting with how this compares to 25 years ago.

Back in 2000, when the Statistical Review normalized units of energy into “MTOE” (million tons of oil equivalents), fossil fuel represented 89 percent of U.S. raw energy inputs. In the rest of the world, not including the U.S., fossil fuel delivered 86 percent of raw energy inputs – i.e., its share of total energy is actually slightly greater today than it was 25 years ago.

If you consider absolute quantities of energy, now reported in exajoules, or EJs, there has been an astonishing expansion of fossil fuel use worldwide in the last quarter century. Oil production is up 50 percent from 110 EJs to 165 EJs. Natural gas is up 79 percent from 66 EJs to 118 EJs, and coal is up 127 percent from 69 EJs in 2000 to 157 EJs in 2025.

How does the growth in renewables – biomass, biofuel, geothermal, solar, and wind – compare?