That nearly invisible yellow sliver at the top ("other renewables") is the current contribution of wind and solar to global energy (in millions of tons oil-equivalent).

I think we are witnessing the end of the age of fossil fuels and the beginning of a new age of a clean global energy economy.

As Brad Plumer notes over at Vox, we're nowhere close to the end of the fossil fuels era . That didn't stop climate scientist Michael Mann from asserting that

Brad then quotes Robert Wilson, who I am not familiar with.

... By and large, oil, gas, and coal continue to rule our world. Robert Wilson puts it vividly: "Fossil fuels continue to dominate new energy infrastructure. Maersk is not unveiling solar powered container ships. Boeing and Airbus appear content with the age of kerosene. Steel makers are sticking with coal. 20 million new cars are added to China’s roads each year. ... India plans to double its coal production by 2020. Green Germany just opened a new coal power plant last month." And on and on.

Yes, on and on. Clearly that 1.5 degree target is toast, but what about 2 degrees? How much carbon-free energy must be deployed to reach the promised land?

It will take massively ambitious measures to halt these trends and shift toward cleaner energy. To prevent serious global warming, as the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Jr. likes to point out, carbon-free sources will have to rise from 14 percent of the energy supply today to more than 90 percent by the second half of the century.

That means (roughly) deploying 1 gigawatt of carbon-free power every single day for the next century — the equivalent of opening a large nuclear power plant around the world every day, or raising 1,500 wind turbines every day. It will mean shifting our cars and trucks to clean electricity, overcoming the intermittency problems with renewables, radically increasing energy efficiency, finding new ways to fuel our ships and airplanes (hydrogen? biofuels?) and steel and cement production. [Here is the 2003 paper (pdf) underpinning the "every day" calculation.]

Lest you think you might not have read that correctly, I will repeat it:

That means (roughly) deploying 1 gigawatt [GW] of carbon-free power every single day for the next century.

Tim Garrett, in the original paper describing his physical model of the global economy, came to a very similar conclusion.

To reach stabilization, what is required is decarbonization that is at least as fast as the economy’s rate of return. Taking the 2005 value for η of 2.1% per year, stabilization of emissions would require an equivalent or greater rate of decarbonization. 2.1% of current annual energy production corresponds to an annual addition of approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon emitting power capacity—approximately one new nuclear power plant per day.

For your information, the smallest nuclear plant in the U.S. is about 0.5 GW, and the largest is about 3.9 GW.

Every day during which humans do not build 1 gigawatt of carbon-free power, we get further behind. Every day in which additional fossil fuel capacity is added to the energy mix to support the global economy, we get further behind. Basically, every day in which you get out of bed, we get further behind. Every god-damned day.

And what does Brad have to say about this? (The word "hard" is emphasized in his text.)

This isn't impossible, at least not in theory. The detailed reports from the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project offer a vivid illustration of how we might make that shift to clean energy. I'll write about them more in the coming days. But it is hard. It will require much more than a single climate treaty that corrals fairly weak and largely voluntary national efforts. And that's the real work that lies ahead. Declaring victory after Paris is premature.

Maybe I don't understand what the words "hard" and "impossible" mean. The phrase "in theory" doesn't make the difference Brad seems to be highlighting. Lots of things are possible in theory, but that doesn't mean these things will ever happen, unless we have infinite time available to us. Which we don't.

You might remember what I've said today anytime somebody proclaims the end of the age of fossil fuels.

Every god-damned day.