IEA’s net zero emissions road map puts a knife to the fossil fuel industry’s neck

Name: World leaders pledge to cut greenhouse emissions at virtual Earth Day summit
Uploaded: 2021-05-21T21:30:05.000Z
Duration: 3 min 27 s
Description: World leaders pledge to cut greenhouse emissions at virtual Earth Day summit

The IEA acknowledges that to get to net zero by 2050 will be a ‘monumental task’ requiring global buy-in that will not be achieved without massive behavioural changes in how we produce, transport and consume energy

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David Dodwell

Published: 5:30am, 22 May 2021Updated: 5:50am, 22 May 2021

In March, I was taken aback by a full-page Financial Times advert from the climate campaigning group Avaaz.org. It had a cartoon-like Fatih Birol, the Turkish economist and energy expert who heads the International Energy Agency (IEA), holding aloft a football trophy under the headline: “Who is Fatih Birol Playing For?”

“His public statements are all for a green recovery,” the ad read. “But the IEA’s flagship report misguides governments, underplays clean energy and scores goals for the fossil fuel industry.” They closed by asking “whose team is Birol on?” and answer their own question: “The proof will be in this year’s World Energy Outlook.”

Birol’s World Energy Outlook was unveiled last Tuesday, and the Avaaz campaigners have the answer they were looking for. “Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector” is targeted at the global fossil fuel industry – no new oil or gas fields; no new coal mines or extensions; unabated coal demand to be cut by 90 per cent by 2050, with natural gas demand down 55 per cent and oil demand by 75 per cent.

For the IEA’s traditional Opec clients, it says overall per capita earnings will fall from US$1,800 today to US$450 by the mid-2030s. Anyone who believes the IEA sits in the pocket of the world’s oil producers received a 224-page jolt to the system.

The road map is awesome in its comprehensiveness. It is aimed at government policymakers and the heads of the world’s leading companies, and it provides as detailed a set of work plans as I have yet read on what must be done to get to “net zero” by 2050. Its forcefulness comes from its meticulous detail on how to get there, as well as the simple fact of who is saying it.

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World leaders pledge to cut greenhouse emissions at virtual Earth Day summit

This is no longer the petroleum industry’s poodle. The report “calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, transport and consume energy”.