I've seen this succintly and accurately described this way: "No One Goes to War Over a Solar Panel" [1].

If you think about it, once you build a solar panel, it just produces power for the next 20-30 years. Then you buy another one and replace it. To get oil or natural gas, you need to drill a well. That well requires constant labor. What many don't seem to know is that oil wells decline in production over time. It's called the "decline rate". For the Permian Basin (source of the US shale revolution), the decline rate is 15-20% per year. So a well producing 1000bpd (barrels per day) will be producing ~500bpd in 3 years. That means you have to constantly be drilling new wells.

Oil wells (and resource extractors like mines in general) are great wealth concentrators. Solar panels are not. So the point of that quote is that a limited resource creates wealth and is limited but also war is profitable (for the weapons manufacturers) so every incentie lays in continued fossil fuel use because it's constantly minting new billionaires.

One thing I'll add here is that there are a lot of energy usages for fossil fuels for which we have no alternative. Aviation is a big one. To some extent, so is truck freight (although China is busy electrifying this too [2]). There are a lot of non-energy uses too eg plastics, industrial, chemicals, construction. So fossil fuels aren't going away anytime soon but we sure could take a leaf out of Chin's commitment to renewable energy [3][4][5].

Instead we get nonsense like warnings to Europe of a dangerous dependency on Chinese clean tech [6].

[1]: https://www.theenergymix.com/no-one-goes-to-war-over-a-solar...

[2]: https://prospect.org/2026/04/29/aftermath-china-electrifying...

[3]: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/12/china-adding-more-re...

[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping_Thought_on_Ecologic...

[6]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/europe-getting-dangerously-re...

Colombia hosts talks on exiting fossil fuels as global energy crisis deepens