- The IEA has reversed course by reintroducing the “Current Policies Scenario” in its flagship World Energy Outlook, marking a significant policy shift.
- The debate highlights the inherent subjectivity of data in energy modeling and the political stakes tied to forecasting fossil fuel demand.
- U.S. political leaders and fossil fuel advocates pressured the IEA, arguing that its previous modeling discouraged oil and gas investment and threatened energy security.
A great debate is unfolding about the subjectivity of data in producing the energy outlooks that guide public policy and private spending, shaping the future of the global energy sector. The International Energy Agency has been caught in the crossfire of a partisan debate in which environmental and energy industry leaders vehemently disagree about what constitutes accuracy, truth, and good science in data, and particularly in the agency’s flagship World Energy Outlook report. And this year, the fossil fuels industry is getting its way.
It’s easy to forget that data is not objective, nor is it purely subjective. This false dichotomy, according to data expert Melanie Feinberg, “distorts the empirical realities of data collection, the challenging work of forcing unruly phenomena to speak in clean, distinct, ideally quantitative phrases.” Instead, good science is about recognizing the responsibility of being an active decision-maker to produce methods and outputs that most accurately represent complex realities.
Human-led decisions and difficult choices are being made at every step of developing a report like the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s annual World Energy Outlook – from how to collect and clean the data to how to analyze and report on it.
One of those critical choices is how the agency chooses to construct its projected scenarios for the clean energy transition and the phaseout of fossil fuels.
The choice that has recently come under scrutiny is whether to include a “Current Policies Scenario” along with the typical scenarios that the agency uses to make its forecasts.
The IEA based its “business as usual” outlooks on current policies until 2019, when the agency decided to switch to a “Stated Policies Scenario,” which it believed to be more accurate.
The difference is that the Stated Policies Scenario assumes certain future policy actions, such as the extension and renewal of policies with end dates.
Hellbound and Down 