Energy addi(c)tion versus green transition: Why renewables supplement rather than replace fossil fuels

Despite surging renewable investment and rapidly falling clean technology costs, global fossil fuel production continues to grow. This paradox is not accidental: it reflects deep structural dynamics that dominant analytical frameworks are ill-equipped to explain. This Perspective article identifies three interrelated blind spots often present in energy transition research: a binary ontology that treats fossil fuels and renewables as substitutes rather than co-constitutive systems; a supply-side bias that renders industrial structural determinants of energy consumption invisible; and a spatiotemporal myopia that erases colonial legacies, developmental state trajectories, and geopolitical competition. Against these limitations, this article proposes understanding energy as an integrated System of Provision (SoP), a political economy framework that treats energy finance, production, trade, and consumption as mutually constitutive processes embedded in historical and politically-dense structures. The SoP framework, operationalised through a multi-scalar, multi-agents relational matrix, reveals three structural pressures that systematically reproduce ‘energy addi( c )tion’ rather than green transition: the material reality of fossil-dependent social reproduction in the Global South; the compulsions of capitalist accumulation for profit that offset efficiency gains with volume expansion; and geopolitical competition among competing capital regimes that prioritises energy security over system transformation. The article concludes by outlining a research agenda capable of addressing these structural determinants of the climate crisis.