Daily Caller Piece: Energy Companies Are Laughing At Predictions Of ‘Peak Oil’

[Note: This story is also published at the Daily Caller]

One could almost hear the howls of laughter emanating from the hallways of major oil companies and analyst firms in August when the increasingly politicized International Energy Agency published a report projecting that global demand for crude oil would peak by 2030. Last week, the agency doubled down on that prediction, going further to add similar predictions about natural gas and coal demand in its Global Energy Outlook for 2023. 

“A legacy of the global energy crisis may be to usher in the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era: the momentum behind clean energy transitions is now sufficient for global demand for coal, oil and natural gas to all reach a high point before 2030 in the STEPS,” the report’s executive summary says, referring to its Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS). That scenario, one of several the agency ran through its statistical model, is supposedly based on energy, climate, and industrial policies already in place in countries around the world. 

But, while policies can influence markets, they seldom dictate outcomes, and even in totalitarian nations, the ultimate outcomes really tend to be entirely unpredictable. See the outcomes experienced by the people of Venezuela during the Nicolas Maduro regime as a prime example.