A person fills their car with fuel at a gas station. The global transition away from fossil fuels is advancing despite US political resistance and shifting priorities. The shift to electric vehicles is central to that transformation. (Shutterstock/Desintegrator)

‘Fossil Fuels Are So 20th Century’

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The transition away from fossil fuels is moving forward with or without the United States—and electric vehicles will play a central role in shaping its future.

The undergraduate’s voice fluttered as she told me how passé fossil fuels were a few months back. She might retain little in preparation for our next exam, but she is clear-eyed in her outlook on how energy flows through our lives today.

The energy revolution goes on all around consumers in 2026, and we must take care not to be influenced by the political extremism of the moment. In our transition that was initiated by emerging energy realities after the 1970s, significant adjustments have come in the patterns defining what historians refer to as the “high-energy existence” of the 20th century.

Today, we are in a moment of “swing-back,” when the pendulum of cultural change swings back and can make it appear that our fleeting green dalliance is gone. Poof! 

In fact, though, the historian in me knows that this is how transitions happen. It is upon us. But American culture is fickle to change. We don’t just jump in the bucket seat next to our leader who spins down the road in the new Ford F-150 Lightning, as President Joe Biden did in 2022.

In our moment of “swing-back,” the real tragedy, though, is that we are in danger of not leading this shift in human living. But that doesn’t mean the energy transition won’t happen. It only means that when people like me teach about our transition from fossil fuels in a few years, we won’t have the proud opportunity—as we do to discuss Henry Ford and the American culture that seized a new era of cars, roads, and suburbs in the 1900s—to own it. 

We were there, poised and ready for an energy revolution. But a lack of American leadership in this transition now likely means that humans’ shift, particularly to electric transportation, will be guided by others. And that should gall us. 

It should drive us to demand the United States’ traditional role of leadership as the change barrels ahead.

Global Leadership in the HEV........

© The National Interest