Well, Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy, has crunched those numbers, laid out his presumptions and the results of his crunching, and they don't support the climate scolds' claims. City Journal's Mark P. Mills has the story:

In his March 4 address to Congress, President Trump proclaimed that he had “terminated the ridiculous Green New Scam,” referring to assorted Biden-era Green New Deal policies directed at an “energy transition.” The weekend before, the Wall Street Journal featured a lengthy essay with a title seemingly calibrated to pre-bunk Trump’s expected remarks: “The Clean Energy Revolution Is Unstoppable.” The authors, two Oxford professors, asserted that the “clean energy revolution is being driven by fundamental technological and economic forces that are too strong to stop,” and that “large segments of fossil fuel demand will permanently disappear . . . in the next two decades.” Two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal featured another op-ed, this one coauthored by former vice president Al Gore, proclaiming the “energy transition is inevitable.”

So, which is it? Inevitable or a “scam?”

To determine that, one has to look at the numbers. Mr. Cembalest has done so.

We find a useful referee in this war of words with the recently released Eye on the Market 15th Annual Energy Paper by Michael Cembalest, J. P. Morgan’s chairman of market and investment strategy. As this 70-slide, deep-dive report pointedly notes, “after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the renewable transition is still a linear one; the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year [emphasis added].” One does not need a mathematics degree to understand that such anemic growth rates are not the hallmarks of an “unstoppable” juggernaut. Hence, Cembalest’s bottom line: “Growth in fossil fuel consumption is slowing but no clear sign of a peak on a global basis.” That is to say, no “energy transition” is in sight.

You can view the full report here.

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There is so much in Mr. Cembalest's report that it would be the work of several of these stories just to unpack them all, but let's just concentrate on the renewables for the moment.

Look at the numbers. Those harsh, immutable numbers. Notice that they compare like-to-like; final energy consumption, at the user level. This means the electricity that you use to power your home's lights, to run your appliances; it means the gas that goes in your car, and so forth. Energy, then, at the consumer level. The rates of that energy - of which, we note, that only electricity can come from renewable (solar, wind, etc.) sources - that are delivered by those renewables are scarcely budging. At the rate of 0.3 to 0.6 percent per year, we are talking decades - maybe centuries - to realize any appreciable rate of increase.

But there are a couple of other problems. 

First, renewable sources, like solar and wind, are, for the most part, fairly new installations, as such things go. As these systems age, and as their maintenance requirements increase, and as they begin to fail, the economic equations will change. They may change dramatically. We are already seeing problems, like the storage of worn-out windmill blades, and solar power farms hit by hail. 

Second, economics is, like the math on which it depends, a harsh mistress. The energy produced by renewables and the systems that produce them are only tenable in the market when they are subsidized; in other words, they are not tenable in a free marketplace. The Trump administration, we should note, is working to move us closer to a free marketplace in energy.

As with so many things related to this issue, the math just doesn't support the claims of the scolds. And the math, as these systems age and require replacement, may turn less to the favor of the climate scolds' preferences over time. 

There is, of course, a truly emissions-free, clean, sustainable, economically viable, and high energy-density solution to all this - nuclear power. But the climate scolds, inexplicably, don't want to talk about that, either. We might refer them to Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.