3 climate misconceptions that add to noise over energy and net zero
Confusion over power vs electricity, energy input vs output and net zero vs zero emission does not help the already complex climate conversation
Reading recent media coverage about climate action means lurching between apparent victory and defeat. It’s triumph one day as another decarbonisation milestone is heralded. Then disaster the next as countries and companies alike walk back on climate commitments or veer perilously close to denying climate change altogether.
We can expect more such whiplash: Hong Kong Green Week takes place next month, the UN General Assembly and Climate Week NYC are also due to begin in September, followed by the Cop30 climate change summit in Brazil in November.
If the year so far is any guide, discourse at these events will be laced with three common misunderstandings (promoted deliberately or otherwise). They are simple and beguiling misconceptions that impede our understanding as an increasingly noisy debate rages.
The first is the tendency to conflate electricity with energy. The second: confusing energy input with energy output. And the third? Mistaking net-zero emissions for zero emissions.
This isn’t just splitting semantic hairs. In the race to decarbonise, headlines like “Renewables now supply 50 per cent of China’s power” frequently trumpet dramatic progress. They sound transformative – until you realise “power” usually means electricity, not total energy.
And therein lies a problem.
Electricity accounts for only about 20 per cent of final global energy use. The rest – transport fuels, industrial and residential heating – is still overwhelmingly fossil-based. Yet the word power blurs this distinction. Phrases like “solar power”, “power plants” and “clean power” reinforce the illusion that electricity is synonymous with energy.
This has consequences. Policymakers and the public often overestimate how far we’ve come. Electrifying cars, homes and factories is vital but not the whole picture. Aviation, shipping, steel and cement remain stubbornly carbon-intensive sectors.
By focusing on electricity, we highlight the sectors where progress is easiest and downplay the harder, messier parts of the energy system. The word “power” becomes a rhetorical short cut, masking the complexity of full decarbonisation. We should celebrate the strides that renewables have made but remember not to conflate electricity with total energy demand.
We also frequently confuse energy input with energy output. In other words, energy supply is not the same as the energy we use.
Commentator Michael Liebreich calls this the “primary energy demand fallacy”. It arises from a key metric the International Energy Agency (IEA) calls “primary energy demand” – which doesn’t represent the energy we use. It’s more like supply.
This is important because fossil fuels are significantly less efficient than clean energy technologies in converting primary energy inputs like oil or coal into energy outputs – like light from a bulb, motion from a car or heat from a radiator.
This efficiency gap is huge. Many coal-fired power stations, for example, convert no more than 35 per cent of their fuel into usable power like electricity, with the rest mostly lost to heat. Oil and gas are not much better. An electric motor, by contrast, converts around 90 per cent of its electricity into motion.
By implying clean energy needs to replace fossil fuels on a one-to-one basis, proponents of the primary energy demand fallacy ignore the efficiency gains of electrification, perpetuate the idea that clean energy can’t meet global energy needs and make the transition look more challenging than it is.
So the next time you read a climate sceptic decrying renewables’ small share of the world’s energy demand, remember that around two-thirds of fossil fuels’ share of this “demand” is waste heat. The transition is difficult, but not nearly as difficult as some would have you believe.
And it should be obvious, but net zero doesn’t mean zero emissions. It means all emissions are balanced by equivalent carbon removals.
It’s a term that’s come in for a lot of flak. A long-standing criticism is that the “net” in net zero gives countries and companies a licence to soft-pedal decarbonisation: enabling them to continue emitting on the basis they can cancel it out later. In other words: burn now, pay later. It leads to an overdependence on carbon offsets, which sparks questions about the integrity of carbon credits and their susceptibility to double counting.
Yet tightening regulatory compliance, increased scrutiny of voluntary carbon markets, and recent progress with international carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement have gone some way towards addressing these concerns.
A more challenging, yet often overlooked, problem with net zero is with “zero”.
Focusing on “zero” tends to have unhelpful implications. “Zero” is psychologically satisfying: it feels clear, clean and complete. But it also encourages an overly binary framing of the climate problem, i.e. renewables = good, while fossil fuels = bad. This gets in the way of a reasoned discussion of the transition.
A bias towards “zero” also tends to promote techno-centricity, emphasising electrification, hydrogen and carbon capture, often to the detriment of powerful nature-based solutions like reforestation, wetland restoration and regenerative agriculture.
Net zero is an essential idea in understanding the pros and cons of climate action and solutions. But absolutism, whether from a “net” or “zero” angle, gets in the way of that understanding.
Climate is hard, complicated and contentious enough already. Puncturing sweeping yet erroneous generalisations and recognising the nuance of the debate on either side of the argument are essential to making continued progress. Keeping these three common misconceptions in mind can go a long way to staying grounded in the process.