Why the world needs CLEW now more than ever

Lamentably, the internet is awash with misinformation about the energy transition. 

Take for instance what happened in Spain in April this year. Within hours of the lights going out across the country, many commentators were baselessly blaming the blackout on the intermittency of renewables. Had they waited for the Spanish government’s report into the matter, they would have found out that it was actually the fault of the grid operator for not turning on a thermal power plant.

Or think back to 2023, and the furore over the German government’s law for making heating more climate-friendly. Many commentators claimed the law would force people to replace their boilers with heat pumps. In fact, it merely mandated that new homes should be built with clean heating systems - perhaps a heat pump, or perhaps an electric boiler, or a district heating connection, or even a “hydrogen-ready” boiler (although the chances of such devices actually burning any hydrogen are slim.)

Or take the endless breezy talk about how carbon capture or nuclear fusion or hydrogen or E-fuels are going to save us from climate change - much of it based on scant understanding of how long these technologies will take to develop, and how much they will cost.

For even the most astute researcher, the attempt to figure out how the energy transition is actually going, and which technologies might hasten it, can often feel like wading into a quagmire of uncertainty. And that quagmire may well deepen as we get more and more of our information from AI tools such as Grok, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini. 

These glorified chatbots can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. All they can do is reflect their makers’ predilections, and regurgitate information they find on the internet, jumbling up diligent reporting with baseless speculation. If their makers aren’t careful to stop them regurgitating misinformation, then they will. Elon Musk’s Grok has been found to spout climate denialist talking points, such as blaming global warming on an upswing in solar radiation. It even made up an entire scientific paper denying anthropogenic climate change. Google’s Bard, now renamed Gemini, cheerfully told one user to “relax and enjoy the ride. There is nothing we can do to stop climate change, so there is no point in worrying about it.” The insouciance with which tech companies have loosed these bullshit machines on the world is an affront to the values of journalism. We should treat these programmes with trepidation - not necessarily foregoing them, but neither accepting their output as gospel. 

In this increasingly treacherous information environment, it is invaluable to have specialist reporters such as those at Clean Energy Wire who put in the hard yards of journalism, phoning experts, checking facts, and reading scientific papers for themselves. Article by article, they lay the foundation on which the rest of us - and even chatbots - can build a reality-based worldview. 

As a climate reporter on a daily paper, I often don’t have time to look into issues in as much depth as I would like. So if I’m on a deadline, it’s incredibly useful to be able to refer to the work of specialist journalists like the CLEW team's Caro, Sören, Benjamin and Julian, who have had the time to delve into complex topics and summarise them. I found their work especially helpful when I wrote an essay about the controversy over the heating law in 2023. I don’t write about Germany and continental Europe very often, but I’m sure that for those who do, CLEW’s work is as constant a helping hand as Carbon Brief’s UK coverage is for me.

CLEW’s work is especially important at a time when there is more disagreement than ever before about where the energy system is heading. If you look at the forecasts of fossil fuel incumbents such as Exxon or Opec, they’ll unsurprisingly say that the world will probably be using as much fossil fuel in 2050 as it uses today. If, on the other hand, you look at the forecasts of those who are paying more attention to the rapid growth of renewables, such as BNEF, Rystad, or the Rocky Mountain Institute, they’ll suggest that fossil fuel demand is about to decline, and may even plummet by 2050. 

We’ve reached the moment of maximum disagreement in energy forecasting. In just a few years, we’ll begin to see who’s right. In this period of confusion, we should be thankful that the CLEW team are here to keep an eye on the day-by-day developments of the energy transition, reporting on everything from the German car industry’s wavering approach to electric cars, to the steel industry’s struggle to clean up its production, to the social consequences of increasing carbon taxes across the EU.

I’ve had a marvellous time hanging out with the CLEW team for the last couple of months. They’ve been so generous in helping me get my head round the complexities of German politics and business. Thanks to them, I’ve had the chance to interview CEOs of steel companies, chat with the mayor of Mannheim about decommissioning the city’s gas grid, and quiz the port of Amsterdam about its plans to import hydrogen. I’ve also had the chance to hang out by Berlin’s lakes, dance till dawn, eat excellent Korean food, and make a bunch of friends.

I look forward to staying in touch with the CLEW team as they continue to cover the most important story in the world. I hope they are able to keep doing so for decades to come, and that one day they have occasion to write about how we fixed the mess we’re in.