It’s increasingly common to hear from experts and the general public that the global shift away from fossil fuels is glacially slow, or even nonexistent.

As the view goes, the meteoric rise of clean energy is only supplementing fossil fuels rather than pushing them out. Repeated with increasing frequency by many – including the fossil fuel lobby – this view is not only incorrect, but dangerous. If accepted as truth, it will encourage climate fatalism.

In reality, we’re living through the fastest energy transformation in human history. Every previous large-scale shift in energy – from muscle power to wood to coal to oil – has taken decades or even longer. But the “renewable revolution” is happening far faster.

It’s only in the past ten years that renewables have become cheap and reliable, and only in the past five that energy storage has become cheap and widely available. Solar farms, wind turbines and grid-scale storage can be built remarkably quickly. Net-zero cities are becoming possible. The iron laws of economics have kicked in. These cheap forms of electricity generation are already displacing more and more fossil fuels.