After Years of Pushing Net Zero Propaganda the International Energy Agency Suddenly Remembers What It’s For

International Energy Agency executive director Fatih BirolPhoto: (CERAWEEK BY S&P GLOBAL)

At last week’s CERA Week conference in Houston, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency Fatih Birol told attendees that "I want to make it clear ... there would be a need for investment, especially to address the decline in the existing fields. There is a need for oil and gas upstream investments, full stop.”

This is quite the turnaround from the IEA’s astonishing report issued in 2021 entitled “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector.” It espoused an end to all new investments in oil and gas (let alone coal) from 2021. Mr. Birol then stated that “If governments are serious about the climate crisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now – from this year.”

Has the leopard changed its spots? And, if so, why?

No More Oil and Gas Needed

The IEA is the OECD’s energy advisory body which was established in the wake of the oil price shock of 1973 to ensure the security of oil supplies and to promote policy cooperation among its members. Its charter includes setting up a collective-action mechanism to respond effectively to potential disruptions in oil supply as well as developing energy-conservation policies. Since its founding in 1974, the IEA emerged as a reliable research institution covering global energy data and trends useful for energy analysts. It quickly became the go-to source for government planners around the world responsible for key national objectives in energy security, affordability and reliability.

Birol had as recently as 2017 urged industry to pump more oil to ensure against future shortages. “Our message to the oil industry here in Houston is invest, invest, invest,” he said at the CERAWeek conference in January that year.

Yet, by the time of its 50^th anniversary conference (2024) in Paris, the IEA was well established in its new role as “the world's shepherd towards a green future from a fossil fuel past.” U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, the Biden administration’s champion for the Green New Deal, said "Thanks to the genuinely extraordinary job Fatih has been doing, the IEA is now probably the principal arbiter ... with respect to our policies."

The 2021 “Net Zero by 2050” report sealed the IEA’s rapid pivot to being an advocacy organization devoted to promoting renewable energy at the expense of conventional fossil fuels. The report aligned the IEA with its key budget contributors in the EU Commission and the Biden administration. The IEA’s “green pivot” cost the organization its credibility as an issuer of objective research such that by 2022, OPEC stopped using IEA data in its oil market assessments.

The infamous net zero 2021 report billed itself as “the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access and enabling robust economic growth”. Its roadmap, the report claims, sets out “a cost effective and economically productive pathway” to a “resilient energy economy dominated by renewables like solar and wind instead of fossil fuels”.

To its detractors, the report constituted an exercise in magical thinking, calling for the replacement of the world’s vast and complex energy system -- built over two centuries of cumulative industrial development and currently supplying over 80% of its primary energy supply – within three decades. Some industry practitioners were more blunt, with the Saudi oil minister calling the report a sequel to La La Land.

Subject to a forensic analysis by the Energy Policy Research Foundation, the report’s optimistic expectations on wind and solar displacing fossil fuels are found to be illusory. Once the costs of new transmission lines connecting remote renewable power sites to demand centres, of integrating intermittent sources with backup dispatchable power, of massive new mining capacity for critical minerals, and of expensive new battery storage are allowed for, the case for net zero ceases to be credible. The report’s forecasts for new innovations and technologies that are yet unproven to be commercially viable are overly optimistic. Out of the IEA’s own database of over 500 listed individual clean energy technologies at various stages of “readiness”, only 29 technologies (less than 6%) have achieved some level of commercial competitiveness.

The EPRF study concludes that “the IEA has made many questionable assumptions and milestones for ‘Net Zero Emissions’ about government policies, energy and carbon prices, behavioral changes, economic growth, and technology maturity.” Forsaking its previous role as an authoritative source of analytical energy research to become an advocacy group for Net Zero, the IEA “has allowed itself to be used as a tool for climate extremism, has misled policymakers, and has endangered the world’s economy and Western security, all while forsaking the purpose for which it was created,” says Rupert Darwall in his foreword to the EPRF report,

The IEA’s Turnaround at CERA Week

What is one to make of Fatih Birol’s remarkable turnaround at last week’s CERA conference in Houston when he called for more investments in oil and gas? Was Mr. Birol finally coming around to the views held by practitioners in the field such as the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, previously CEO of Liberty Energy, and Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company?

In his keynote speech to the conference, Mr. Wright articulated President Trump’s energy agenda in no uncertain terms:

The Trump administration will end the Biden administration's irrational quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens…Our focus will be steadfast on the American people and our allies abroad…Roughly 1 billion people live lives remotely recognizable to us in this room…This lifestyle requires an average of 13 barrels of oil per person per year. What about the other 7 billion people? They want what we have. The other 7 billion people on average consume only 3 barrels of oil per person per year versus our 13. Africans average less than one barrel. We need more energy. Lots more energy. That much should be obvious…We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less. Our goal is to re-industrialize America, not de-industrialize America.

In his speech to the CERA conference, Mr. Nasser was typically, and equally, blunt in his assessment of the state of affairs in global energy.

“New sources add to the energy mix and complement existing sources. They do not replace them. That is why the current strategy of prematurely switching to immature alternatives has been so self-destructive…New sources cannot even meet the growth in demand, while the proven sources needed to fill the gap are demonized and discarded. It is a fast-track to dystopia, not utopia. In short, the net result of 10 trillion dollars over 2 decades is to basically stand still and consume record quantities of coal…Not exactly mission accomplished! In fact, there is more chance of Elvis speaking next than the current plan working! And a wave of public dissatisfaction with transition reality is crashing over countries, companies, and consumers alike.”

The OPEC press room commented on Mr. Birol’s turnaround in his messaging, from demonizing fossil fuels to once again calling for greater investments in oil and gas as follows: “Aside from the risk of whiplash that such severe yo-yoing between positions could cause, a serious point needs to be stressed…Agencies that recognize the responsibility that comes from offering analysis of the long-term perspectives of the industry should not be shifting positions or mixing messages and narratives every couple of years on this matter, particularly ones that were founded to ensure the security of oil supplies.”

Elections Have Consequences

Perhaps Mr. Birol is not so much impressed by objective analysis of the past two decades of wasted spending on intermittent and unreliable renewable energy technologies as he is of the changed circumstances under the Trump administration. It was already apparent during Mr. Trump’s election campaign that the IEA would face pressures for a change in direction if he won. Mario Loyola, a former Trump environmental advisor, said in an interview in Le Monde in October last year that “The U.S. should definitely come up with a strategy to replace the leadership at the IEA.”

At the IEA’s 50^th anniversary conference in Paris, Mr. Birol publicly denied the notion that the organization’s focus would change if Mr. Trump was elected president, saying that "The economic and technology dynamics, the policy dynamics are very strong, I believe the clean energy transition will continue to move fast whoever the next president is.” Climate zealots -- from Ed Miliband, the British Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, to John Kerry, President Biden’s Special Envoy for Climate – have been sold on the thesis of the irreversibility of the energy transition.

It remains to be seen if Mr. Birol is a climate zealot or simply the piper who will play his current master’s tune. Either way, elections matter and President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda will have consequences for Mr. Birol and the IEA. It cannot be soon enough for the billions of people adversely affected by the ‘net zero’ climate change policies foisted by the luxury beliefs of the ruling elites in the developed West over these past two decades.

(An earlier version was first published at the Daily Sceptic: https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/20/after-years-of-pushing-net-zero-propaganda-the-international-energy-agency-suddenly-remembers-what-its-for/ )