This year We Don’t Have Time turns ten. To mark it, founder and CEO Ingmar Rentzhog has published a long essay with a provocative claim: the biggest lie ever told is not climate denial. It is four respectable words, spoken calmly in parliaments, boardrooms and newsrooms – “we have more time”. We read it with Power-to-X in mind, because the lie he describes is, in our experience, exactly the mechanism that keeps e-fuels, green hydrogen and synthetic molecules stuck at pilot scale.
The respectable lie
Rentzhog is careful about which lie he means. The outright deniers, he argues, are a distraction that barely 15 per cent of Americans still follow. The lie that actually governs decisions accepts the science, praises the Paris Agreement and then schedules the solution for a decade that keeps moving. It no longer needs liars, because it is comfortable, it flatters the institutions that repeat it, and contradicting it sounds extreme.
He then puts numbers next to the comfort. 2024 was the first full calendar year above 1.5 °C. The late-June 2026 heatwave caused around 10,650 excess deaths in Europe in a single week. The IPCC projects 250,000 additional deaths per year by 2050 – a deliberately conservative floor that counts only four causes of death. Actuaries at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter classify 2 °C by 2050 as a risk of more than two billion deaths and a quarter of global GDP. And the UN Emissions Gap Report puts current policies on a path towards 2.8 °C. In the same year, Rentzhog documented 45 climate-policy reversals across 15 jurisdictions – each of them, he writes, only possible if you believe there is more time.
The second lie
What makes the essay timely is its warning about the successor lie. As “we have more time” becomes impossible to sustain, “it is too late, so nothing matters” arrives – most visibly in a widely shared Telegraph column calling for net zero to be scrapped because the war is lost. Both sentences, Rentzhog points out, lead to the same place: doing nothing. The truth sits between them. Too late to avoid all damage, far too early to stop. Every tenth of a degree avoided is measured in lives.
He also pairs the urgency with the progress, because both are real: clean energy now attracts roughly two dollars of investment for every dollar going into fossil fuels, solar delivered the largest annual generation increase of any source in history, and one in four new cars sold last year was electric. The machine is built and running. It is simply not running fast enough – and the entire gap between the speed we have and the speed we need is, in his words, the lie’s work.
What this means for Power-to-X
Electricity is the easy part of the transition. Solar and wind are cheap, electric cars are mainstream, and the numbers Rentzhog cites prove it. Power-to-X lives in the hard part: aviation, shipping, long-distance haulage, steel, fertiliser and chemicals – the sectors that cannot run on a battery and that still burn fossil molecules by the megatonne. Defossilising them means producing green hydrogen, e-fuels and synthetic feedstocks from renewable electricity and recycled CO₂. And this is precisely where “we have more time” does its quiet work.
- Targets that keep moving. E-SAF quotas, the Renewable Energy Directive and hydrogen mandates are repeatedly delayed, diluted or reopened. Every postponement tells investors that the demand they were promised will come later – and a Power-to-X plant financed on a promise that slips is a plant that is not built.
- Offtake that never quite lands. The IEA’s Global Hydrogen Review, which we discussed in July, shows the pipeline consolidating and firm offtake agreements emerging as the binding constraint. Airlines, shipping lines and steelmakers will sign long-term contracts for fossil-free molecules when they are convinced the clock is real. As long as the four words circulate, it is rational for them to wait.
- Cost curves that need volume. Electrolysers, synthesis plants and direct air capture follow the same learning curve that made solar cheap – but only if they are built in series. “Wait until it is cheaper” is the four words in engineering dress. The cost falls because someone builds the first hundred plants, not after.
- Infrastructure on a timescale of decades. Hydrogen pipelines, storage, import terminals and the grid connections behind them take ten to fifteen years from decision to operation. A decision deferred in 2026 is capacity missing in 2040. Power-to-X cannot be switched on in a hurry once the lie collapses.
The second lie is just as dangerous for our sector. “It is too late, scrap net zero” would strand every electrolyser, every synthesis plant and every hydrogen valley currently under construction. It would also lock aviation and shipping into fossil fuels for another generation, when the technical path to fossil-free flying and sailing is already known. Maybe a little less flying – definitely fossil-free flying: that remains the realistic future, but only if the molecules exist when the aircraft need them.
The question to carry into the room
Rentzhog closes with a question he asks readers to take to their minister, their CEO and their editor: if we keep saying we have more time, time until what, exactly – and how do we know? For Power-to-X in Switzerland the question has a concrete form. When a CO₂ Act revision is watered down, when an e-fuel blending quota is pushed back, when a hydrogen strategy is announced without a financing mechanism, the implicit assumption is always that the hard-to-electrify sectors can be dealt with later. They cannot. The lead times are too long, the learning curves too steep and the physics too indifferent to our scheduling.
The honest sentence for our industry is the same one Rentzhog arrives at after ten years: harsher than “we have more time”, far more hopeful than “it is too late”. The technology works. The investment is ready. What is missing is speed – and speed is a political decision, made by people with names, offices and elections to lose. On 22 September, at the Power-to-X Congress in Bern, we will put exactly that reality check on the table.
Source: Ingmar Rentzhog, “The Biggest Lie Ever Told Is Only Four Words Long”, We Don’t Have Time, 20 August 2026 – thebiggestlie.wedonthavetime.org
🤖 AI transparency: This text and its visual were created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human.
Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 – «Reality Check with Net Zero»
22 September 2026, 10–18h, Kursaal Bern. Co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and the Swiss Power-to-X Collaborative Innovation Network (SPIN), partner Réseau H2 Suisse Romande. Programme and registration →