The Argument For Clean Energy Has Flipped
It all started as a moral argument for taking climate action, but that driver has now been relegated to third place.
Last week, the International Energy Agency published a bulky report called Electrification. Its central thesis can be traced back to 2009, when a Stanford engineer named Mark Jacobson wrote an article for Scientific American presciently arguing that we could power 100 percent of the planet with renewables. At the time, this was a somewhat niche position.
However, just over a decade later, the Australian inventor Saul Griffith popularised this idea with his book Electrify, with an argument that could neatly fit on a bumper sticker: Plug in everything that can be plugged in, then clean up the grid behind it.
In September 2025, a small team led by Kingsmill Bond at the UK-based think tank Ember, coined the term ‘electrotech’ and rebuilt the case for electrification around economics and security. Moving the energy system towards electrons, they said, wasn’t just about cutting emissions, it was about making energy cheaper and more geopolitically secure. We can, largely, thank China for the 'cheaper' part of this. In November 2025, The Economist said China is “a new type of superpower: one which deploys clean electricity on a planetary scale.” Adding that China had become the world's first 'electrostate' - making more money from exporting (cheap) green technology than America (the world’s biggest petrostate) makes from exporting (expensive) fossil fuels.
It is the kind of language finance ministries could understand, and proved to be mightily influential. The IEA’s new report borrows many of the same concepts, and lists the benefits of electrification in the same order: energy security first, competitiveness second, and emissions third (think how different this is to the moral argument for taking climate action). This, of course, has now been greatly amplified by Trump's calamitous excursion into Iran.
