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| Mon, 27th Jul 2020 16:44:00 |
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For all its green talk, the IEA still gives comfort to oil and gas producers |
When oil major Total announced it had raised finance for a $20 billion project to exploit Mozambique’s gas reserves, it faced criticism for undermining international climate goals.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) – perhaps the world’s most influential energy forecaster – gave the company an easy defence.
In its climate strategy, Total cites the IEA’s most “sustainable development scenario”, which sees methane gas consumption soaring between now and 2040 to meet a quarter of global energy demand.
Gas, Total insists, “is the best option currently available for combating global warming”. This is just one example of how oil and gas companies use IEA forecasts to justify investments in fossil fuels.
Under the direction of Turkish economist Fatih Birol, the agency has become increasingly supportive of clean energy. Yet it continues to appeal to its oil-producing funders, ducking hard questions about the endgame for dirty energy.
“The IEA is an organisation that was set up and designed for a different era and it needs a radical transformation if they are still to have relevance in the modern era,” Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at Carbon Tracker, told Climate Home News.
With a reputation for having excellent analytical skills and a deep understanding of the energy system, the IEA could be repurposed to show the full cost of fossil fuels and drive the energy transition, Bond said. That would be “a game-changer”.
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