WND By William Murray, Real Clear Wire 1/31/2026
But damage already has been doneIt can be hard to explain to a general audience how important the release of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) is to policymakers, energy companies and investors who make hundreds of billions of dollars in investment decisions worldwide each year.
The Outlook is published yearly by the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), one of the world's most preeminent authorities on energy data. The IEA was formed in 1974 by many of the world's most developed countries to provide better information on oil and gas demand forecasts in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the Outlook included a Current Policies Scenario (CPS) that forecast future oil and natural gas demand over the coming decades based on current laws and government energy policies. This scenario was then used by banks and companies to extrapolate how many billions of dollars they must invest to satisfy coming energy demand.
The IEA's all-star reputation made the CPS the benchmark for global energy supply and demand forecasts for decades – until recently.
In 2020, under its long-time Executive Director Fatih Birol, the IEA decided to abandon the CPS, "in part due to pressure from European nations and green campaigners," according to Bloomberg energy analyst Javier Blas. Most of these green campaigners were interested in using climate policies to permanently displace oil and coal production.
To do this, IEA inserted new scenarios that considered policy ambitions and aspirations that had not yet become law. This analytical misdirection allowed Paris Accord-era net-zero emission goals to become a concrete forecasting reality. As a result, these forecasts showed peak global oil demand only an additional 3 million to 106 million barrels a day by 2030 before permanently declining.
Riding on IEA's reputation, these forecasts helped the Davos crowd churn elite public opinion toward the Net-zero and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework in the early 2020s, which played a role in the ultimate suppression of billions of dollars in investment in carbon and hydrocarbon resources.
More:
https://www.wnd.com/2026/01/expert-study-shows-sanity-returning-global-oil-forecasts/