People like Bill McKibben of 350.org make a big deal out of the “successes” of carbon divestment, where the 350.org organization bullies convinces some hapless organization to divest from coal and petroleum stocks in investment portfolios. Besides the fact that this has no real impact, since when one person or group “divests”, another one buys the shares up, this graph shows why 350.org, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, NRDC, and the whole lot of climate campaigners are just practicing an exercise in futility.

Dr. Roger Pielke writes on Twitter:

I’m preparing some slides for an upcoming talk (on climate policy, yowza!). The attached is an effort to show in a readily understandable way the mind-bending scale of the energy challenge associated with deep decarbonization. What do you think?

This graph of global fossil fuel consumption tells the true story: green efforts to reduce fossil fuel use have not succeeded with any impact at all. With a 57% increase in fossil fuel use since 1992, their efforts have been completely without effect.

Be sure to save this post URL and share it widely to those that think they have “made a difference”.

UPDATE:

Someone asked a “what if” question on Roger Pielke’s Twitter feed for this graph.

one q: if there had been no “climate diplomacy” how much would fossil fuel consumption have increased? // is there a comparison 25 years to compare it to?

Roger’s answer:

Great Q. 1980-1992 FF increased 1.6%/yr 1992-2016 1.6%/yr

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