The IEA’s Reluctant Return to Energy Realism

Elections have consequences, even for international technocracies

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.