PARIS - A short walk from the Eiffel Tower, Fatih Birol oversees the world’s energy watchdog, whose analyses of fuel demand have long been viewed as the gold standard by government officials, energy executives and investors.
The critics say it underplays the speed at which the world could switch to renewable sources of energy. The result, they say, is to bolster the case for continued investment in fossil fuel companies, undermining the fight against climate change. “If they criticize us, the only option that comes to my mind is that they don’t know exactly what we are doing,” said 61-year old Birol during an interview at the IEA’s headquarters in Paris last week. “They must be misunderstanding, or they must have been misled.”
The increased scrutiny of the World Energy Outlook shows how the once esoteric subject of energy modeling is becoming a focus of the mainstream investment community as worries over climate change intensify. The publication’s main report, or scenario, maps how demand for different forms of energy would evolve over the next couple of decades based on existing government policy commitments. Some critics say that because it doesn’t take account of the likelihood that governments will take more drastic action to curb emissions, it means projections will inevitably be conservative.
Among those pressing Birol for that change is a group of institutional investors representing $30 trillion of assets under management, called the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change.
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