2025 is when global fossil fuel use will finally begin to decrease, ending a period of energy history initiated in the eighteenth century which has traumatized the earth and its inhabitants. 
What happens next?
This essay assesses claims being made about the best approach to energy transition and the shape of the renewable world that lies just over the horizon. Nation-states and entrepreneurs are offering publics competing visions of energy and environmental futures, even as right-wing ideologues fight to ensure the future looks much like the past. Who should we believe can and will undertake climate action in the interest of all the planet’s inhabitants? Are each of these actors only in it for themselves? What do the gaps, limits, and problems in the plans of the powerful tell us about how to best approach energy transition, so that we get the environmentally just futures we want? This paper will look offer a look at some of the discursive struggles now being fought to establish (in the words of Bill Gates) “the dull, factually correct middle” in which our green futures are supposed to be lived out.