Energy Sec. Chris Wright Has His Way With The IEA

A new report published November 5 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) appears to contain multiple concessions to pressure applied by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright in July. In a July 15 interview with Bloomberg, Sec. Wright threatened to suspend U.S. funding to the agency if it failed to reform recent forecasting methods which have given critics ammunition to accuse its findings of being politicized.

Wright’s IEA Concerns Center On Modeling

“We will do one of two things,” Wright said at the time. “We will reform the way the IEA operates, or we will withdraw.” He expressed a preference for maintaining U.S. membership as an IEA funder, saying, “My strong preference is to reform it.” It is a threat which carries great weight given that IEA’s support is derived from contributions of 49 subscribing nations, and the U.S. funded 18% its most recent budget.

The controversy centered on IEA’s use of what it calls its “Announced Pledges Scenario (APS).” The APS is an aspirational scenario which the agency says “models a future for the energy system in which all national energy and climate targets – such as countries’ nationally determined contributions – are achieved in full and on time.”

The APS was implemented in 2021, when IEA abandoned its original role of generating fact-based data and analyses about the global energy situation, adopting an advocacy role for the energy transition. It displaced the “Current Policies Scenario (CPS)” used by the agency as its main forecasting model before 2021 in the creation of its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO). The emphasis on the APS formed the basis of IEA’s repeated projections of the world reaching Peak Oil Demand before 2030, a conclusion which has been widely panned as unrealistic by other, competing forecasting entities.