Under intense pressure from the Trump administration, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has issued a carefully-hedged analysis that still shows fossil fuel demand peaking within years, but also portrays an alternate universe of sustained consumption where average global warming approaches 3°C.

Nearly five years after the Paris-based agency first reported no need for new investment in oil, gas, or coal development, this year’s edition of the World Energy Outlook (WEO)—long styled by the IEA as the “gold standard of energy modelling”—presents two energy futures scenarios that show greater reliance on fossil fuels and higher greenhouse gas emissions, along with a net-zero scenario that adheres more closely to a 1.5°C climate target.

“There’s poison on the menu,” said David Tong, global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International, commenting on a report that Politico headlined as a “global energy body’s fossil fuel backpedal”. But in a briefing following the report release Wednesday morning, the IEA said the net-zero scenario still indicates no new investment in longer-term oil and gas megaprojects.

This year’s IEA scenarios include:

• A Current Policies Scenario (CPS) that projects rising oil and gas demand through 2050 and 3°C average warming based on existing national laws, policies, and regulations;

• A Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) that nearly triples renewable energy deployment by 2030 but still lands around 2.5°C, based on the current “direction of travel” in policies that countries have put forward but not yet adopted;

• The Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE), which presents a pathway to bring energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by mid-century, deliver universal energy access by 2030, and reduce energy bills.

No Need for New Oil or Gas

The IEA’s modelling provides scant support for the new pipelines or liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney might want to include in his list of fast-tracked nation-building projects. While the Current Policies Scenario shows oil and gas demand growing through mid-century, countries do have the capacity to make different choices: STEPS projects oil demand flattening by 2030 and gas following suit by 2035, while the net-zero scenario eliminates fossil fuels at a faster pace.

“Natural gas demand has been revised up in this year’s STEPS, but questions still linger about where all the new LNG will go,” with the potential for higher global demand limited by “continued momentum behind the deployment of renewables, nuclear energy in some countries, and efficiency policies,” the IEA says. Across all three scenarios, “a downside risk to the uptake of natural gas and LNG is a failure by the industry to reduce methane leaks.”

The IEA identifies several common elements, addressed in different ways by each of the scenarios:

• Growing demand for energy services for a range of uses, including data centres and artificial intelligence;

• Serious concerns over the resilience of energy systems against a range of threats, from cyberattacks to droughts, storms, floods, and wildfires;

• The “acute vulnerability” of critical mineral supplies;

• The dawn of what the agency has previously dubbed the Age of Electricity, with electrification rising by about 40% by 2035 in the CPS and STEPS scenarios and 50% in the NZE;

• The increasing role of renewable energy;

• A “shift in the centre of gravity of the energy system” toward India and other emerging economies beyond China;

• A comeback for nuclear energy.

The IEA is postponing release of a fourth model—the Announced Pledges Scenario, which assumes that governments will keep their promises under the Paris climate agreement, in full and on time. Countries’ emission reduction commitments for 2035 have only recently been filed with the United Nations climate secretariat, and so far only 60 countries representing 63% of global emissions have bothered to submit their paperwork.

’Zombie Scenario’ vs. a 1.5°C Future

The mixed result produced a critical response from the climate and energy analysts who follow the IEA’s work.

“Trump has pressured the IEA to resurrect a zombie scenario from the past—the Current Policies Scenario, in which the current momentum of the energy transition evaporates,” said Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare. “This is an unrealistic assumption when we look at the progress renewables are making around the world. And even if the CPS were realized, it only shows is that Trump’s vision is a disaster for the economy, household bills, and the climate.”

The IEA’s Net Zero Scenario “shows that, although overshoot is now inevitable due to insufficient action to date, it is still possible to bring temperatures back below 1.5°C before the end of this century,” Hare added.

“This year’s World Energy Outlook sets out a stark and simple choice: we can protect people and communities by aiming for 1.5ºC, settle for a disastrous business-as-usual 2.5ºC, or choose to backslide into a nightmare future of much higher warming,” said Oil Change’s Tong. “Holding warming to 1.5ºC means no further delay, no new fossil fuels, and public planning and funding to guarantee a just energy transition.”

The report “shows Donald Trump’s dystopian future, bringing back the old, fossil-fuel intense, high pollution Current Policies Scenario, charting an unrealistic pathway where governments drag their energy policies backwards and rates of renewable energy adoption stall, leading to high energy prices and unmitigated climate disaster,” Tong added.

“Crucially though, the IEA has also confirmed that no single country can stop the energy transition, with oil and coal demand to peak by 2030 in its business-as-usual scenario, with gas to follow by 2035. And, again, it has reconfirmed that there is no investment in new oil and gas fields for 1.5ºC.”

“The International Energy Agency has made a regrettable choice, published against a backdrop of the climate talks in Brazil, to no longer provide a credible scenario for keeping warming as close as possible to 1.5°C,” said Reclaim Finance analyst Christophe Etienne. “By avoiding the problem of fossil fuel expansion and offering a new scenario that leads us toward 3°C of warming, it is failing to provide the necessary economic, political, and financial guidance on managing the energy transition.”

But even though “some may wish to turn back the clock,” said European Climate Foundation CEO Laurence Tubiana, one of the architects of the Paris accord, “the direction of the energy system is clear. More than $10 trillion has been invested in clean energy since 2014, and oil demand is on track to peak before 2030 in the IEA’s main scenario. The electricity age is well under way. The choice now is between accelerating or paying later to undo the damage: every tonne of carbon we avoid today saves far greater costs tomorrow.”

“There’s a revolution happening right now and it’s in renewables and electrification. The evidence on the ground is overwhelming—EV sales are taking off in many emerging countries, solar is permeating even through the Middle East,” and “grid batteries now mean solar is increasingly dispatchable,” said Ember chief analyst Dave Jones. “Scenarios based on current policies and legislation are behind the curve of technology change as the electrotech revolution gathers pace.”

Giving In to the Bully

The WEO has always presented multiple scenarios, and in years past, climate policy analysts have paid close attention to the order in which those scenarios are presented—since the most prominent in the series makes the headlines that can guide many billions of dollars’ worth of energy investments. Beginning in 2021, when political change in the United States shifted the composition of the IEA board, the agency became a data-driven champion for a faster, wider energy transition.

That momentum began to shift over the summer, when the Trump administration threatened to pull out of the IEA—taking 40% of the agency’s funding along with it—if it didn’t bring its independent forecasts in line with the administration’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda.

“We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg in July. “My strong preference is to reform it.”

That threat reflected “growing tensions between the Trump administration’s energy priorities and the IEA’s focus on clean energy transitions,” Forbes reported at the time. The criticism from Wright, an oilfield services CEO before he joined the Trump cabinet, “centres on the IEA’s reports and projections, which he and other critics of the agency argue are overly optimistic about renewable energy adoption and fail to adequately prioritize energy security.”

The overt pressure had intensified by mid-September, prompting Bloomberg energy columnist Javier Blas to report on the IEA’s plans to restore the outmoded Current Policy Scenario and project healthy demand for oil through 2050. By giving the CPS pride of place as the first scenario in the series, the WEO became a case of “good analysis, but terrible comms,” veteran IEA-watcher Greg Muttitt writes on LinkedIn.

“We knew the IEA had acceded to U.S. demands to resurrect its obsolete Current Policies Scenario (CPS), which tells a story of continued fossil fuel growth. The trouble is how prominent CPS is: it’s the first scenario presented,” Muttitt explains.

“For all IEA’s warnings that CPS is not ‘business as usual’, putting it first means that’s how people will read it. And the name doesn’t help. The CPS doesn’t describe a future based on current policies—that comes later, in the Stated Policies Scenario”(STEPS).”

But “you have to wade through a lengthy discussion of the CPS before you get to the real story: where existing policies are taking us, in STEPS, [is] “the prevailing direction of travel for the energy system”.

In the IEA’s own cautious framing, the report invites readers to choose their own adventure. “There is no single storyline about the future of energy, which is why the World Energy Outlook presents multiple scenarios, none of which is a forecast,” the IEA states.

But even so, “options to reduce emissions substantially are well understood and, in many cases, cost-effective,” the report adds. “A pathway that mitigates the most severe risks from climate change remains feasible and there is strong momentum behind key technologies.”

But some countries’ commitments to the Paris targets have “waned” over the last decade, and countries’ new climate commitments for 2035 “do little, in aggregate, to move the needle beyond the outcomes already projected in the STEPS.”

So while the net zero scenario is still within reach, “implementing these actions at scale would require an intensified international push to increase transition-related investment in emerging and developing economies, and much more practical efforts to ensure that these investments deliver tangible near-term social and economic benefits.”