Why Everyone Is Wrong About Clean Energy Prof Gio

TITLE: Why Everyone Is Wrong About Clean Energy CHANNEL: Prof Gio | Giordano Scarciotti DATE: 2026-05-22 ---TRANSCRIPT--- This is going to be a controversial video, because no matter what your political leanings are, our collective perception of the global energy transition is fundamentally detached from physical reality. And this is not your fault. This is not just a simple misunderstanding. It is the result of a broken information ecosystem. A system designed to feed us specific psychological triggers that distort our perception of the world. In this video, I’m not going to guess if specific politicians are lying or just misinformed. Frankly, their intent does not matter. What matters is that whether by ignorance or by design, the result is exactly the same. We’re all being manipulated about the renewable energy transition. What I’m going to do today is to show you hard data and global market studies. I will prove that public perception is vastly disconnected from this reality. And I will expose the exact psychological traps driving the disconnect. So, let me start with an example. In 2023, the Copper Consultancy asked a thousands of people a simple question. What percentage of the UK’s electricity comes from renewables? Nearly a quarter of the public guessed that between 11% and 20%. In reality, it was 41%, more than double. Out of everyone surveyed, only 6% got the answer right. That means that 94% of the population is walking around with a fundamental misunderstanding of the physical reality of our energy grid. This level of collective blindness does not happen by accident. It is the direct result of decades of political messaging, media narratives, and corporate PR campaigns that systematically distort how people perceive the energy transition. Spreading bad data is just the surface level. The actual objective of this campaign is much more sophisticated and affects everyone. I’m an associate professor in the control and power group at Imperial College London, and I’m gutted to see that the general public is living under an illusion about renewables. When you look at the raw data of the global energy transition, you see a technological revolution moving at an astonishing pace. But, when you look at public perception, you see a society that believes we are still stuck 15 years ago. This is what we call a perception gap, and it is not just a UK problem. For instance, the research firm Ipsos runs a global survey called at the Perils of Perception. They found that across 30 different countries, people cannot identify the best ways to impact on climate change. Legacy energy industries also claim that going green requires sacrificing our economy and living in dark ages. Europe, on the other hand, has a long way to go with many countries being on the brink of destruction. They were going green, and they were going bankrupt. But, the reality is different. The data proves that we can completely decouple economic growth from carbon emissions. Since 1990, European greenhouse gas emissions have dropped by 36%. While the European GDP has grown by roughly 70%. In other words, we are getting richer and cleaner at the exact same time. Let’s look at cars, because electric vehicles highlight this gap perfectly. When you ask citizens in a country where EV adoption is lagging, say around 10% like in Italy, what they think the global average is, they assume the rest of the world must be at 5%. They project their local neighborhood onto the entire planet, assuming their own country is the baseline. And just for clarification, this is not just an Italian phenomenon. It happens to every country. But, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook, in the year 2024 alone, global plug-in electric car sales exceeded 17 million vehicles. That means that more than 20% of all new cars sold worldwide were fully electric or plug-in hybrids. One in five. But global averages hide the truly staggering localized data. Norway is our time machine, sitting about 5 to 10 years ahead of the rest of the world in EV adoption. In 2025, electric vehicles made up an estimated 97% of all new car sales in Norway. Here in the UK, plug-in EVs accounted for about 35% of new car sales in 2025, and the number keeps climbing. But the absolute juggernaut is China. Western media often portrays China purely as a coal-burning monolith. Yet, in 2025, EV sales in China reached over 30 million vehicles, accounting for 54% of all new car sales in the country. That means that over half of all cars sold in the largest auto market on the face of the planet are now electric. While politicians here debate whether we should push back bans on gas cars because the market is not ready, China is eating the global automotive industry for breakfast. The public perception is that EVs are still an oddity, a rarity. But the physical reality is that they’re becoming the new default mode of global transportation. So, why the massive disconnect? Why do perfectly intelligent people think renewables are at 10% when they’re at 40%? Part of it is a fundamental flaw in human psychology. Human beings are hardwired to think linearly. If I take one step today and one step tomorrow, I will take one step the next day. But technological transitions do not happen linearly. They happen exponentially, following what we call an S-curve or a logistic function. At the beginning of an S-curve, progress looks slow. It looks like a flat line. For years, EVs and solar panels were stuck at 1%, then 2%, then 3%. And during this phase, the skeptics point at the data and say, “Look, this tech has been around for decades and it’s barely making a dent.” And this has been true for many years. But then the system hits a critical mass. The technology gets cheaper, the infrastructure scales up, and suddenly the curve goes vertical. It jumps from 5% to 15% to 50% in the blink of an eye. This happened in the last 10 years. Renewable are not anymore a pipe dream in the future, but they are a reality right now in the present. The public and politicians are often stuck looking at the flat tail of the curve, making linear predictions about the future. But the reality has already rounded the corner and is rocketing straight up the vertical axis. This is not just because we are building more of these machines. The reason the S-curve is suddenly going vertical is that the physical technology got very good, very fast. By the way, they’re a joke. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They’re not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn’t blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate. For instance, wind turbines from the early 2000s were rated at 1 to 2 MW of power. That means that we needed 500 wind turbines to replace a single gas power plant. By 2022, the global average power for a new offshore wind turbine had jumped to 7.7 MW. In 2023, only a year after, it was 9.7. Today, just 3 years later, we are deploying 20 MW giants into the ocean. These structures are as tall as the Eiffel Tower. You need only 25 to replace a gas power plant, and one single turbine can power 44,000 houses per year. If we look at solar, we see a similar massive growth. According to the Ember Global Electricity Review, in 2025, global solar generation grew by an unbelievable 30% in a single year. 30% is a tsunami. In fact, the data shows that in 2025, for the first time ever, the entirety of the growth in global electricity demand was met by clean sources. Fossil fuels in the power sector are no longer growing to meet new demand. They are stagnant. China accounted for over half of the world’s solar generation growth, building the equivalent of dozens of nuclear power plant worth of solar capacity every few months. Because of this explosive growth, in 2025, the global share of renewables in global power generation hit 33.8%. So, if all of this progress is happening, why is the public perception so completely detached from the data? Because our ignorance is a highly profitable weapon. The objective of industries and politicians is not to really convince you with their exaggerated, almost absurd claims. They know that they cannot convince you, at least most of you. Their objective is simply to give everyone the impression that this is a discussion, that the topic is open. This is a corporate manipulation strategy called manufactured doubt. They don’t need to prove that fossil fuels are better. They just need to create enough doubt in the population to delay policy. They want to confuse you, exhaust you, and create a general pessimistic outlook about the alternatives, squeezing a few more years of profit out of the fossil fuel infrastructure they already own. If this strategy sounds familiar, it is because we have seen it before. The fossil fuel industry didn’t invent this playbook. They inherited it directly from the tobacco industry. In 1969, an executive at a major tobacco company wrote a now infamous confidential memo outlining their strategy. It explicitly stated, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public.” They didn’t need to prove that cigarettes were safe. They just needed to create the illusion of an ongoing debate to stall government regulations. Today, that exact same psychological architecture has been copy-pasted onto the energy transition. They’re selling you doubt to buy themselves time. Let’s talk about EVs again. A 2026 report by Cox Automotive found that 66% of non-EV drivers suffer from range anxiety, and 60% are terrified about battery lifespan. That is the perception. Now, let’s look at the reality. The same report pointed out that once drivers actually test drive an EV, their confidence shoots up, and 95% of current EV owners say that they will choose electric again. The reality does not match the myth. But if the myth keeps you from ever taking that test drive, the doubt has done its job. We are currently seeing this strategy play out at a massive scale in the United States. In 2025 and 2026, we saw a wave of executive orders from the second Trump administration aimed at rolling back clean energy incentives, imposing massive tariffs on the green technology, and freezing offshore wind development. But these policies are not actually working in stopping the energy transition. According to analysis by the Financial Times in May 2026, the US renewables rollout has been shockingly resilient. Fully 93% of the US electricity capacity set to be added in 2026 is expected to come from solar, wind, and batteries. And the reason is simple, the market does not care about the political rhetoric. Money talks, and the money is fleeing fossil fuels. In 2024, for every single dollar invested globally in fossil fuels, more than $2 were invested in clean energy. Most expensive energy ever conceived, and it’s actually energy you’re supposed to make money with energy. Technological advances mean that renewables are still the cheapest, fastest way to put power on the grid. The point is that you cannot legislate away, at least in capitalistic economies, the physical fact that solar energy is cheaper than coal energy. But, while politicians cannot stop the turbines from spinning, they can blindfold the public. Over the course of 2025 and 2026, the federal government in the US initiated a systematic removal of climate science and data collection. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the administration actively defunded the climate agencies, dismantling data repositories, and literally deleting thousands of web pages related to environmental tracking. Essentially, they go to a patient with the flu, and instead of trying to help them, they are breaking the thermometer. Because if they stop collecting the data on global warming and emissions, they can look the public in the eye and say there is not a problem. It doesn’t slow down the physical deployment of the green technology, but it keeps the public trapped in this perception gap. But, the manufactured doubt takes many forms. A pervasive one is the argument that wind and solar produce little and unreliable power and that we should just build nuclear power or wait for nuclear fusion. Academics have classified this as a discourse of climate delay. A psychological trap where you accept that climate change is real but advocate for a solution that is either economically unviable or doesn’t exist yet as an excuse to do nothing today. According to the financial firm Lazard, building new utility-scale solar plants cost roughly between $29 and $92 per megawatt hour. Instead, building a new nuclear power plant sits at roughly $142 to $222 per megawatt hour. It is up to four times more expensive. Furthermore, a solar farm can be built in a couple of years while a modern nuclear plant like Hinkley Point C right here in the UK takes 10 to 15 years to build and frequently goes billions over budget. They were going green and they were going bankrupt. And the new leadership new leadership came in and they went back to where they were with fossil fuel and with nuclear, which is good. Let me clarify that I’m not against nuclear power. Nuclear power is definitely part of the energy transition. What I’m pointing out is that when we are compelled to contra pose nuclear power to wind, solar and so on, it is often as part of a discourse of climate delay. Now, one of the reasons why I’m making this video is because I think that something has changed in the public perception. While before we always talked of energy transition in the context of climate change, now we start to understand that this is also a matter of national security. In early 2026, the war in Iran escalated the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital choke point for 20% of the world’s oil. By late April and May 2026, the crude oil prices went past $118 a barrel. When you rely on fossil fuels, your domestic economy is held hostage by global conflicts on the other side of the planet. But, you cannot blockade the sun. You cannot put an oil embargo on the wind. People often worry that we would be just trading a dependency on Middle Eastern oil for a dependency on Chinese solar panels and batteries. But, that is a false equivalence. Fossil fuels dependency is an active daily hostage situation. If a foreign power cuts off our gas supply today, our economy crashes tomorrow. Renewables, on the other hand, are a hardware purchase. If the hardware supply chain is cut tomorrow, the solar panels and wind turbines you already installed don’t stop working. They will keep generating free electricity for the next 25 years because the fuel is local and it’s yours. Let me make an aside here. In this video, I’m brushing past a lot of topics which would deserve a dedicated video. For instance, there are a lot of contradiction in the Chinese energy policy. So, if you want me to cover any topic in more detail, let me know in the comments below and I will try to make a video about that. Now, returning to the Middle East, because of the war, countries and investors are scrambling to decouple from oil markets. In April 2026 alone, investors poured over $3 billion into global clean energy funds. The UN climate secretary recently noted that this conflict is inadvertently supercharging the renewable boom because clean energy is now viewed through the lens of sovereignty and autonomy. If you build a solar farm in your own country, the energy it produces belongs to you. It is immune to geopolitical extortion. Paradoxically, Trump has demonstrated to the public that green energy is not just about climate change, that a lot of people unfortunately don’t give a damn about, but it is also about security and autonomy. I remember being a teenager and hearing about a renewable energy. Back then, it was just a promise. It felt like a fantasy for tomorrow. But, standing here today, speaking to researchers and energy companies all around the world, seeing how the national system operators are working incredibly hard towards net zero, something became clear. That tomorrow is here. Norway is at 97% EV adoption. China is selling 13 million electric cars a year. The UK generates nearly half of its electricity from renewables. The next time a politician tells you the green transition is a pipe dream or that the technology is failing, remember the data. Whether they are genuinely misinformed or actively reading from a corporate PR playbook, the result is the same. They are pushing a campaign of manufactured doubt that distorts your reality. The energy revolution is not coming. It’s already here.

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