The IEA has a decades-long history of vastly underestimating renewables adoption, but it has now truly entered the realms of the absurd and ridiculous. To reach these new fossil-fuel-friendly industry conclusions, it has to ignore different global government's stated Net Zero Commitments. Include them, and that alone sees oil use 77% lower in 2050.
Another thing they had to ignore? Electric Vehicle adoption. These new figures assume there won't be any more in the world in 2050 than today.
The truth is that global coal use is already in steep permanent decline, and oil will soon follow.
Following pressure from the US government, the IEA has revised its figures to say global oil use will keep increasing until 2050, because there will be no increase in the amount of EVs by then.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
18 Comments
I get the feeling everyone is just waiting for Trump to be removed at this point.
If anyone believes these numbers and invests their money on oil, they deserve to lose their shirts when these companies inevitably fail.
Its amazing just how vast the Oil Industry reach is. They appear to have a well established plan to influence Politicians and Governments, conventional and social media (Epstein), and have a track record of suppressing innovation and most recently seem to have bought an entire Country.
This feels like a pump and dump. The ultra rich know solar & alterntive power sources will increasingly take market share because they economically make more sense then costly petroleum extraction. They need rubes (aka ‘the poors’) to invest on mass into these markets, and increase share price, so they can begin to exit them at maximum profit.
There’s also the matter of social control. Most fossel fuel alternatives are decentralised, solar cells on your roof or a small windmill attached to a building, you don’t need enormous companies with fixed channels and infrastructure to supply power. Once the majority of people are not dependent on enormous companies to supply fuel and power, the ultra rich and their puppet government leaders lose control.
Imagine the world didn’t need Russian oil, Putin would be out of power in a week. Imagine fossel fuel companies couldn’t get massive (taxpayer) government subsidies and then gouge the consumer, how would they maintain their network of financial patronage of government leaders.
The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, the Bronze Age didn’t end because we ran out of bronze, and the Iron Age didn’t end because we ran out of iron. They were superceed by new technology.
The Petrolium Age won’t end because we run out of petroleum, it’s use will dwindled to providing resources for plastic manufacturing and industrial furtiliser, and specialist fuels.
The IEA has chronically underestimated the adoption of anything new and if anyone is making any sort of decision based on what they’ve predicted…
It will be an interesting world when more countries start simply boycotting the US and everything it participates in.
This isn’t actually true though. The IEA has produced 2 scenarios. One of which shows continued growth in fossil fuel use. Ember did a livestream where they discuss this https://youtu.be/1n9JJvw0vo8
The post title is false. All the IEA did was include a scenario (among the others) for what happens if current law is followed with no other changes. But the report says it’s highly unlikely.
The US is irrelevant. China owns the global renewable energy future. It’s their game. They dominate the entire production chain, they dominate innovation. They have a plan….the plan is to make renewable energy so cheap, energy will practically be free.
IEA (International Energy Agency)?
Is this using International in the same way as the word world is used in the Baseball World Series?
I see home solar as the big disruptor. Oil has to be pumped, processed and distributed. The same goes for water and gas, also grid electric. Yet people can be self-sufficient in solar power given the improvements made recently in home generation equipment.
What that scenario says doesn’t matter. You can’t beat electrification. It’s simply the more cost-effective technology. You might fool consumers (for a while) with culture war nonsense, but you can’t fool businesses. They will adopt electrification (cars and machines) because it helps their bottom line. Subsidies just make the inevitable adoption faster.
And the electricity for all this will come from wind and solar (maybe some nuclear too), as these are the most cost-effective ways to generate electricity, that only continue to get more cost-effective with scale effects.
You can’t beat fundamental market forces. Same with the tariffs by the way.
Opinionated, behind the Dirty Curtains of this Farce, one could See this is a blatant Money grab.
Quatar is making Sure, that their Goods, here Oil keeps on going and Alternatives are the Enemy of those.
Donny Cawksuck back at filling up Pockets,
hey only for the Rich, please.
He’d rather prefer watching Children starve, as opposing to lose his Wealth.
Go dive deeper, woke Friends, the Rabbit hole is deep.
Trump is the Scapegoat, keep an Eye on Thiel’s Muppet.
Do not follows their Rules nor Commands.
You are Free.
Maybe I’m stupid, but… how does that work? Did they just change their model adding a “fudge factor imposed by the executive”?
Supply vs demand. There is a finite amount of oil. As it runs out the cost will increase. As battery capacity and supply increase electric car price will decrease. At some point consumers will choose electric s it makes the most sense. Consumers will always choose what’s best for them.
What a joke. “Let’s all sell the souls of our future generations so we can hoarde more”…that’s his plan. My god. Terrible.
Well while people say burning oil is dangerous because it will cause a dangerous climate that will threaten countless human lives, the fact is that currently oil is also the thing that saves countless human lives from, maybe you guessed it, the climate.
So the thing that will cause the climate to kill us is also the thing that is currently preventing the climate from killing us.
IEA has been pretty clear-eyed that while EV adoption would increase in the west, the uptake of cars in places like Africa and Asia would result in more ICE vehicles each year. That’s not new – they held that view 5 and 10 years ago. While China has done a surprising good job of promoting EVs, they only now have hit 50% of new car sales, so previously IEA was correct that more ICEs would be sold than EVs. But China is the only market where there’s a lot of car adoption around EVs. India, Vietnam, etc. are adding cars and they are almost exclusively ICE, including a lot of used vehicles taken from other markets, keeping those in the fleet even if the owner replaces them with an EV.
Your interpretation is wrong. IEA isn’t assuming there will be no more EVs in the world in 2050 than today, they are assuming there won’t be any FEWER ICE vehicles in use. It doesn’t matter how many EVs there are. Yes, 50% of cars sold in China are EVs, but that means half of every household that buys their first car (only about 45% of Chinese household own a car, so there’s a lot of room to grow that) is adding a new ICE vehicle to the world. And China is the rosiest market. Only 9% of Vietnams 100 million people own a car. They’re at 40% EV adoption for new vehicles which means that 60% of the cars being added to the world there are ICE.
Additionally, fuel economy and miles driven matter when it comes to oil use. Despite steadily improving fuel economy standards in the US, there has been zero progress in fleet fuel efficiency because people traded out out their 30mpg sedans for a 30mpg SUV when both categories improved fuel efficiency, for no net benefit. Americans aren’t driving more, so domestically we’re seeing a decline, but again in markets with emerging personal vehicle usage, that number is going up, as is the adoption of larger vehicles as the US has seen. And the US is only 4% of global population.
If the IEA has gotten one thing wrong, and I don’t think they’re wrong, I think they’re failing to figure out how to incorporate it is the shift from high emission two stroke vehicles to lower emission four stroke. It’s an increase in the number of cars, an increase in the amount of oil, increase in the miles driven, and yet should be a decline in emissions simply due to mechanical efficiency. That’s a hard thing to quantify and document. I simply think there’s no available dataset to draw on.