Reality Check: Even McKinsey Says Fossil Fuels Rule the Day Beyond 2050

McKinsey & Company, one of the world’s most influential consulting firms, has issued a sober reminder to policymakers: fossil fuels will dominate global energy use well beyond 2050. The firm’s “Global Energy Perspective 2025” concludes that oil, gas, and coal will continue supplying more than half of the world’s energy for decades, even under aggressive transition scenarios.

For California, that finding should be a wake-up call. Instead of doubling down on policies like the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act of 2025, which thankfully was defeated because it’s nonsensical and detached from reality, lawmakers should emphasize local energy production. California could be leading the world in responsible oil production and ensuring its energy security forever under the most rigorous environmental and labor standards on the planet.

But that would require courage and common sense, both in short supply in Sacramento. Progressive Democrats have built a political identity on the false notion that California can simply legislate oil out of existence. In doing so, they have driven up fuel costs, shuttered refineries, and increased dependence on massively polluting, Amazon Rainforest-killing supertankers importing crude and gasoline from nations with zero environmental accountability.

As McKinsey’s analysis confirms, the energy transition is real but uneven and it cannot happen without oil. Modern economies depend on petroleum not just for transportation, but for everything from fertilizers and medical plastics to asphalt, jet fuel, and manufacturing feedstocks. Pretending otherwise only deepens the state’s self-inflicted crisis.

California has the resources, the workforce, and the regulatory framework to produce the oil it needs under the best environmental standards anywhere in the world. Rather than bragging about imports from Ecuador, Saudi Arabia, or India, California leaders should be bragging about California oil, produced responsibly, ethically, and locally.

As the McKinsey report makes clear, the world’s demand for energy is growing, not shrinking. Every state that produces its own energy strengthens its economy and its national security. California should be among them, not the cautionary tale of how ideology overrode reality.