From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

In a report published last week by the National Center for Energy Analytics (NCEA), two seasoned veterans of the global energy forecasting establishment delivered what can only be described as a sober and consequential verdict on the state of international energy realism. Neil Atkinson, former head of the oil markets division at the International Energy Agency (IEA), and Adam Sieminski, previously administrator of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), examined the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 and concluded that something important, if overdue, had shifted.

The IEA, nudged firmly by altered political realities under the Trump administration, has reintroduced its Current Policies Scenario (CPS), abandoned unceremoniously since 2019 under pressure from the EU’s climate-obsessed Brussels bureaucracy, America’s “first environmental presidency” under Biden, and influential environmental NGOs. The reintroduction of the CPS, a ‘business as usual’ baseline, quietly postponed the IEA’s once-confident proclamations of imminent “peak oil demand”.

On the surface, this looks like a technical adjustment, a reshuffling of scenario tables in a familiar annual report. In reality, it is a tacit admission that years of advocacy-driven forecasting have collided with political, economic and physical realities that cannot be wished away. Elections, as the cliché has it, have consequences. And under the altered circumstances of a second Trump administration committed unapologetically to energy dominance, the IEA has been dragged, kicking and screaming, back towards something resembling its original objective advisory mission.

Perhaps, like Bill Gates, who changed his tune on climate alarmism under the altered circumstances of the Trump administration and its ‘energy dominance’ agenda, Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA since September 1st, 2015, has also come around to singing from a different hymn sheet.

From Energy Analyst to Net Zero Evangelist

The reintroduction of the CPS matters precisely because it restores a baseline grounded in what governments are actually doing, not what climate activists hope they might do someday. Since 2019, the IEA had dropped this scenario as it leaned ever more heavily into aspirational constructs designed to flatter the ambitions of the climate industrial complex. It was a capitulation to heavy lobbying from environmental groups, European governments and US Democrats and ‘RINO’ allies obsessed with aligning every forecast to the Paris Agreement’s Net Zero ambitions.

Instead of neutral projections, the IEA began churning out scenarios predicated on varying degrees of “climate action”, assumptions that inflated the uptake of renewables, electric vehicles (EVs) and other green technologies far beyond what real-world data supported. In the process, it alienated not only producing nations but also consuming countries whose energy security depends on realistic assessments of oil and gas demand and supply.

The NCEA report is explicit. Under the reinstated CPS in World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2025, global oil demand does not peak before 2050. Even under the IEA’s Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), which assumes governments actually implement announced measures, oil demand peaks later and at higher levels than claimed in WEO 2024. These are not marginal adjustments; they represent a quiet retreat from the agency’s most aggressive narratives of rapid fossil fuel obsolescence.

To understand how significant this retreat is, one must recall how far the IEA had strayed from its founding mandate. Created after the oil shocks of the 1970s, the agency’s purpose was to provide sober, technically grounded advice on global energy supply, demand and security. For decades, it did precisely that. The annual World Energy Outlook reports provided a reasonably objective view for global energy markets and were the go-to source of intelligence on investment requirements in the energy resources sector for the world’s leading energy companies.

That credibility began to erode as climate politics intensified. By the late 2010s, the IEA’s modelling increasingly blurred the line between analysis and prescription. This drift culminated in the agency’s astonishing 2021 manifesto, ‘Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector’, which declared that no new investment in oil, gas or coal was compatible with climate goals. Fatih Birol declared unambiguously that “there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal” from that year onward.

This was not analysis; it was ideology with spreadsheets attached. It ignored the IEA’s own historical data on decline rates in existing fields, population growth and energy demand growth across Asia and the Global South. As Rupert Darwall observed in his critique of the agency’s transformation, the IEA had allowed itself to become a cheerleader for radical Net Zero policies, misleading policymakers while endangering Western energy security.

Trump, Energy Dominance and Institutional Fear

The backlash was inevitable. OPEC dismissed the IEA’s “peak oil” timelines as fantasy, with the Saudi oil minister calling the report a “la-la-land” scenario. Industry analysts warned that capital starvation in upstream oil and gas, driven by regulatory hostility and ESG pressure, was colliding with resilient global demand. The result was not an orderly ‘energy transition’ but tighter markets, higher prices and a dramatic transfer of geopolitical leverage to producers outside the Western alliance.

Today, with global energy demand surging in Asia and Africa, such shortfalls could ignite price volatility, inflation and geopolitical tensions. The collapse of the Net Zero Banking Alliance in late 2025, amid political backlash and market realities, is a harbinger of what is to come if realism does not prevail. In a broader sense, the IEA’s saga illustrates the perils of institutional capture by climate ideologies. What began as a guardian of energy security morphed into a mouthpiece for aspirational green targets over the hard truths of physics, economics and human development. Fossil fuels are not just energy sources; they are the backbone of modern civilisation, enabling everything from fertilisers to pharmaceuticals. Dismissing them prematurely risks condemning billions in the developing world to energy poverty while enriching adversaries such as Russia and Iran through higher prices.

The Trump administration’s intervention offers a glimmer of hope. By demanding evidence-based forecasting, it reminds the IEA of its roots: advising on real trends, not prescribing utopian visions. But vigilance is essential. As the NCEA report warns, methodological issues persist, and the agency’s European leanings could tempt backsliding. Policymakers must now scrutinise World Energy Outlooks with a critical eye, cross-referencing against EIA and OPEC projections. In the end, the IEA’s reluctant embrace of the CPS is a victory for sanity in energy discourse. But the damage, from misguided investments to eroded trust, has been done. It will take sustained pressure to ensure the agency does not revert to form. After all, in the high-stakes game of global energy, realism is not optional; it is imperative.

From the outset, the Trump administration made clear that energy policy would be subordinated to national interest rather than climate virtue-signalling. “Energy dominance” was not rhetorical flourish but strategic doctrine, encompassing expanded domestic production, regulatory rollback and a blunt reassessment of international institutions whose climate agendas conflicted with US economic and security priorities. Under this administration, the US has exited and defunded 66 international organisations deemed inimical to American interests, including climate-related bodies inside and outside the UN system. The message to remaining institutions was unmistakable: reform or lose American participation. It was in this context that US Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a stark warning to the IEA: abandon advocacy and return to energy security analysis, or risk a US exit.

For an organisation whose authority depends heavily on American engagement, the threat was existential. The shift in tone was immediate. At CERAWeek 2025 in Houston, Birol conceded what would have been heresy just a few years earlier: “There is a need for oil and gas upstream investments, full stop.” One could almost hear the ideological gears grinding as institutional self-preservation asserted itself.

A Partial Return to Reality, and a Warning

None of this should be mistaken for a full return to analytical sobriety. As the NCEA report rightly emphasises, WEO 2025 remains riddled with heroic assumptions. Electric vehicle adoption is projected to accelerate even as subsidies are rolled back, consumer demand weakens and grid constraints multiply. Mineral bottlenecks – lithium, cobalt, nickel – are acknowledged only glancingly, despite their central role in any electrification fantasy.

The CPS may be back, but the ideological impulse remains. The IEA continues with aspirational modelling that flatters policymakers rather than confronting them with the hard trade-offs imposed by physics, capital stock and political economy. Still, symbolism matters. Restoring the CPS is an implicit admission that the world does not run on scenarios dreamed up in Paris conference rooms. Energy systems evolve slowly. They cannot be bullied into submission by press releases, nor re-engineered on activist timetables.

The deeper lesson is an old one. Institutions are not immune to political pressure, but neither can they defy reality indefinitely. For a time, the IEA mistook moral fervour for analytical authority. It took a change of government in Washington, and the credible threat of irrelevance through defunding, to remind it of its founding purpose. Elections, as they say, have consequences. Under the altered geopolitical landscape ushered in by the Trump administration’s unapologetic “energy dominance” agenda, the IEA appears to have been dragged, kicking and screaming, back towards a semblance of objectivity. As Atkinson and Sieminski note in their report, the CPS’s reinstatement “has gone a long way toward answering that its scenarios are divorced from reality”.

Institutions rarely change course voluntarily. What shifted between the IEA’s 2021 peak zealotry and its more subdued tone in WEO 2025 was not new climate science or technological breakthroughs, but politics, specifically the return of Donald Trump to the White House. No longer can the Paris-based agency indulge in its role as a cheerleader for radical Net Zero policies without facing the threat of defunding or outright US withdrawal.

Whether this fragile return to realism endures remains uncertain. A future US electoral swing could easily revive the fantasy that oil demand can be legislated out of existence. But for now, the message is unmistakable: even the most ideologically captured institutions eventually rediscover reality, when survival depends on it.

Energy realism has returned to the IEA not because the facts have changed, but because power has.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.