IEA Must Return to Its Roots and Face Reality on Net Zero

The expansion of affordable and reliable energy has provided economic prosperity and improved the livelihoods of millions around the world. The Chief of the International Energy Agency (IEA), historically the most prominent and relied upon energy market forecaster, used to understand this reality, but has increasingly given in to special interests and diminished his organization’s global credibility.

In 2019, Faith Birol spoke truth to power when he proclaimed that America’s carbon emissions reductions were the “largest in the history of energy,” and that our country’s success was in large part due to the expansion of American natural gas. At the time, he even pushed the Trump Administration to further eliminate bureaucratic hurdles to exporting American oil and natural gas.

Now, Birol’s rhetoric and the focus of his organization couldn’t be more starkly different. As recent reports from Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) and the National Center for Energy Analytics lay out in detail, the Paris-based IEA has transformed from a fiduciary forecaster of energy markets to an activist organization seeking to artificially reduce demand for oil and natural gas.

The most concerning change at IEA occurred in 2020, when the agency suddenly ceased publishing energy market forecasts based on real-world demand scenarios in its widely read annual World Energy Outlook. Instead, it decided to publish three separate scenarios, each based on hypothetical net-zero policy changes.