Climate imposters – and how to avoid them

Staying grounded in a time of polarised views and contentious headlines

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same”

Rudyard Kipling, If—

Reading recent climate coverage brings to mind Kipling’s famous couplet. One day: triumph, as another decarbonisation milestone is heralded. The next: disaster, as countries and companies alike walk back earlier climate commitments or veer perilously close to denying climate change altogether.

We can expect more such triumph and disaster in the coming months’ headlines, with the UN General Assembly and New York Climate Week both due in September and the Conference of the Parties (COP) to follow in Brazil.

And if this year’s reporting is any guide, coverage of these events will be laced with tree common misunderstandings (promoted deliberately or otherwise). In the context of Kipling, they are best regarded as climate “imposters,” simple and beguiling misconceptions that impede our understanding of the fundamentals 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 absolute zero emissions.

Electricity is not energy

This isn’t just splitting semantic hairs. In the race to decarbonize, headlines like “Renewables now supply 40% of U.S. power” frequently trumpet dramatic progress. They sound transformative – until you realize “power” usually means electricity, not total energy.

And therein lies a problem.

Electricity accounts for only about 20% of final global energy consumption. The rest – transport fuels, industrial heat, residential gas – 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 itself.

This linguistic sleight-of-hand has consequences. Policymakers and the public often overestimate how far we've come. Electrifying cars, homes and factories is vital, but it’s not the whole picture. Aviation, shipping, steel, and cement remain stubbornly carbon-intensive, largely untouched by the clean power narrative, at least thus far.

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 shortcut, masking the complexity of full decarbonization. We should celebrate the strides that renewables have made – and will continue to make – but remember not to conflate electricity with total energy demand.

Energy supply is not the same as energy demand

We also frequently confuse energy input (the raw energy content of fuels such as oil, coal or gas) with energy output, which is the actual energy we get. In other words, energy supply is not the same as the energy we use.

Energy industry commentator Michael Liebreich calls this the Primary Energy Demand Fallacy. It arises from language chosen by the International Energy Authority (IEA) for one of its key metrics. The problem here is what the IEA calls Primary Energy Demand doesn’t represent the energy we actually 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% of their fuel into usable power like electricity, with most of the rest lost to heat. Oil and gas are not much better: Only 30% of a petrol-driven vehicle’s fuel actually goes towards moving the car. An electric motor, by contrast, converts around 90% of its electricity into motion.

By implying that clean energy needs to replace fossil fuels on a one-to-one basis, proponents of the Primary Energy Demand Fallacy ignore the inherent efficiency gains of electrification, perpetuate the idea that clean energy can’t meet global energy needs, and make the transition look even more challenging than it is.

So next time you read a climate sceptic decrying renewables’ relatively small share of the world’s total energy demand, remember that two-thirds of fossil fuels’ share of this “demand” is pure waste heat that simply does not need to be replaced. The transition is difficult, to be sure, but not nearly as difficult as some would have you believe.

Net-zero is not zero

It should be obvious, but net-zero doesn’t mean zero emissions. It means that all emissions are balanced by equivalent carbon removals, by natural or other means.

It’s a term that’s come in for a lot of flak recently. A long-standing criticism from some within the climate community is that the “net” in net-zero gives countries and companies licence to soft pedal decarbonisation.

In this reading, focusing on “net” enables companies to continue emitting on the basis that they will be able to cancel it out at a future date. In other words: burn now, pay later. In also leads to overdependence on carbon offsets, in turn leading to fundamental questions about the integrity of carbon credits and their susceptibility to double counting.

Yet tightening regulatory compliance in many (but not all) markets, increased scrutiny of voluntary carbon markets, and recent progress with international carbon markets under Article 6 of the UN Paris Agreement have gone some way toward addressing these concerns.

A more challenging, yet often overlooked, problem with net-zero is not with “net” but with “zero”.

Focusing on the “zero” in net-zero tends to have unhelpful implications. “Zero” is psychologically satisfying: it feels clear, clean and complete. Yet it loses the nuance and balance inherent in the complete term. It encourages 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 how to get there from here.

A bias towards the “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 climate 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 like these three climate imposters and recognising the nuance of the debate on either side of the argument is essential to making continued progress. Plus, the equanimity that Kipling celebrates in If— can go a long way towards keeping yourself grounded in the process.

Note: A de-Kiplinged version of this article first appeared in the South China Morning Post, titled 3 climate misconceptions that add to noise over energy and net zero.