What is undermining climate change mitigation? How fossil-fuelled practices challenge low-carbon transitions

Why are fossil fuels stuck at 80 % of global energy despite impressive rollouts of wind and solar energy and increased efficiencies? This investigation documents that the reason is the accelerating treadmill of energy demand based on fossil-fuelled practices whose enormous scale nullifies advances in efficiency and clean energy, making mitigation of climate change exceedingly difficult. Humans are running faster innovating efficiency and green energy just to stay in the same place of emissions. The article investigates the under-researched deep causes of human-caused climate change, namely the increasing demand for discretionary, energy-intensive practices resulting from affluence. Proportionality of greenhouse-gas emissions by emitters is central in the study. The article constitutes an additional step in attribution by specifying how much emissions can be attributed to particular social practices and their huge growth. It disaggregates gigatons of global emissions into pounds and kilograms from common practices. It shows the value of using the social practices, treadmill of production, and Weberian social closure frameworks to study energy demand and climate change and proposes more inclusive versions of each. The article ends by proposing two hypotheses for further research: i) widespread unawareness of the harmful consequences and scale of specific fossil-fuelled practices, and ii) awareness as a necessary condition for mitigating climate change.