Climate change: Fatih Birol president of the International Energy Agency transition on nuclear power in Australia and the transition to net zero

Who’s the world’s best-connected climate warrior? Is it Greta Thunberg, or David Attenborough, or Al Gore? Maybe. Or it might be a modest man without a household name, someone most people have never even heard of.

The job of running the IEA, which has 31 largely rich-country members, including Australia, is usually the preserve of an ex-politician. But Birol is a lifelong bureaucrat, who started at the OPEC oil cartel and then rose through the IEA ranks. But if I had any thought, hope or expectation that we might be tucking our napkins into our collars at a Michelin-starred, sommelier-staffed temple of haute cuisine, Birol has other ideas.

Being a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, this bistro has an eye on the heavy traffic of the tourist trade. But it’s pretty quiet as we settle in. Initially, we’d thought about sitting outside; but spring has been late coming to Paris, and it’s just too cold. When Galatasaray last won the Turkish league, he celebrated by telling his 400 staff that for the following day they could eat or drink whatever they wanted from the staff cafe, for free, on his dime.“I will tell you a secret. For all of my meetings – it can be Lula, it can be Modi, it can be anyone – I set the timing of meetings according to the fixtures of my football team, so I can watch it on TV. So I never miss a match. In Brazil or India or Tokyo, I never miss a match.

His father also told him to give up playing football and concentrate on his studies. Birol took a degree in electrical engineering, but his true ambition was to become a film director. He won prizes in Turkey for his early shorts, which apparently included “a lyrical love murder”. He went to Vienna to study at the film academy.

After a stint as an economic modeller at OPEC, he went to Paris to join the modelling team at the IEA. It wasn’t entirely a career-driven move. Divorced from his first wife, he was smitten with a Parisian. His campaigning zeal rests on this data. His motto: “Data always wins.” But information doesn’t exist in a political vacuum, I counter: he has to persuade people to act on it.that has become “a benchmark for shareholders around the world”; and setting policy goals, such as tripling renewables capacity and doubling energy efficiency, which were adopted holus-bolus by

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