The 'Clean Energy Transition' is Not Happening

Heard Around The Grove

Blake Newcomer • April 6, 2026

If nothing else, here are two major things from my conversation with Dr. Emily Grubert last week that changed how I see cleantech

• Despite narratives in popular media about energy insecurity, the U.S. is already energy independent
• A real clean energy transition is in fact not happening.

Emily is an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame. She studies fossil phase-out and what it means to do that in a way that promotes a just future.

Let's dive in.

In this week's issue

• The transition is not happening
• What a good transition actually looks like

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

The Transition Is Not Happening

Huh?

Global emissions are still going up. Coal use in the U.S. has fallen by about half over the last fifteen/twenty years, which is good, but far short of what an actual transition looks like. Oil and gas have barely moved.

The changes are in capacity. Solar and wind are working & are hella cheap. Without disregarding real progress, adding clean capacity on top of existing fossil infrastructure is just not a transition.

Emily's distinction: a transition is normative. You have to decide to do it and we have not strictly done that.

Part of what makes the decision elusive is the ownership structure of the U.S. energy system. Unlike most other countries, the U.S. system is almost entirely privately owned: Oil extraction, refining, pipelines, gas stations, power plants. It is very hard to get private businesses to make decisions that are designed to put themselves out of business. The inertia in the fossil phase-out conversation is structural.

Emily is clear that she feels much more confident today than she did fifteen years ago. The technology is there, the barrier now is commitment across regulatory, political, and institutional parties.

How do you force an energy company to do anything? Emily said Energy companies often say "yes, we support the transition" only if their business is the last one to close. No one wants to act first.

One of the best attempts we've seen is Illinois putting explicit asset-level closure dates into state law. This law requires specific coal plants to close by 2035.

A funny way that Emily responds to pushback "Can you not do that for thermodynamics reasons, or can you not do that because you don't have enough staff?"

Knowing which problems are actually solvable is the first step to solving them. Most of the barriers to transition fall into the second category. That should be clarifying, even when it is also frustrating.

What the Good Transition Looks Like

A good transition, in Emily's framing, starts with a simple question: at every point along the path, do people have what they need to survive? Are they warm enough? Cool enough? Able to get where they're going?

This question is apparently mostly absent from how energy policy gets designed.

The human-centered lens opens up policy space that a fuel-mix focus does not:

• Building efficiency becomes a front-line climate policy, especially given the strain that heating electrification puts on grids during winter when solar availability is lowest.
• Universal healthcare becomes a prerequisite for transition, not a separate conversation.
• The injustices embedded in the current energy system become things you have to actively design against.

The current system is not the stable, functional baseline it is often assumed to be. Roughly a third of Americans had trouble paying their power bills in 2024. That is not a baseline worth defending.

Another question addresses the workers and communities whose livelihoods are tied to the industries being wound down. Emily pushes back on the idea that this is prohibitively expensive. One of the exercises she gives her undergrads is this:

(1) Calculate the cost of buying out the fossil fuel workforce over a transition period.

(2) Then, put that number against the social cost of the carbon that workforce would produce if those industries stayed open.

The buyout number, large as it sounds in isolation, is small by comparison. The transition will be disruptive, but we know how to address disruption when we decide it is worth addressing.

Bonus: We spoke about carbon markets. I love this conversation because they're a darling of sustainability. At the same time, I just don't think they work.

Emily agreed & thinks voluntary carbon offsets have probably done more harm than good. The core problem is that purchasing a promise not to emit does not obligate anyone to address your actual emission.

Carbon markets are only sorting for which emissions get to stay. If we're serious about being net zero, then the point is that none of them do. Removal-based credits are physically more sound, but in a market context, they get allocated to whoever can pay rather than to the emissions that are hardest to eliminate.

There is short term application in places where there genuinely is no cleaner alternative yet: see cement production and certain agricultural processes. However, it does not have a meaningful role in power generation, where wind and storage can do the job without it.

Enjoy this newsletter? Forward to a friend or hit reply to share your thoughts.

Feedback

Have any thoughts about what you'd like to see? Let's build together

Roundtables

Curated, pitch-free roundtables that spark real collaboration between and your prospects. GTM solution for long and complex sales cycles.

Cohort-based event series

Small groups (10-15 people) + industry expert speakers + 4-5 targeted sessions = accelerated career development. Want to participate or present? Reply to this email.

Podcast Guests

Would you or anyone you know like to be a guest on The Grove? Reply to this email to get the conversation started.

With love, Blake

See you next week!