The link: World Energy Outlook 2024 (IEA).
What it says: It's always worth going through each IEA's annual report — if it's not the most important global overview document coming out every year, it's up there — but here's a few key quotes from the Overview and key findings:
Clean energy meets virtually all growth in energy demand in aggregate in the STEPS [scenario] between 2023 and 2035, leading to an overall peak in demand for all three fossil fuels before 2030, although trends vary widely across countries at different stages of economic and energy development.
Emissions are set to peak soon, but have to decline rapidly: how consumer choices and government policies play out will have huge consequences for energy markets & for our planet. [My note: the main scenario is consistent with 2.4° of warming by 2100, which is a path with significant social and economic damage through the whole century, not just "a 2100 problem".]
Geopolitical risks are set to remain high but underlying market balances for many fuels and technologies are easing, signaling a shift towards a buyers’ market.The takeaway:
- It doesn't look like we're going to have an energy scarcity problem.
- The balance between ultra-low renewables and existing fossil fuel-driven infrastructure means that, absent some significant, deliberate push to phase-out existing energy systems, the impact of climate change on the 21st century won't be "end of the world" but rather a few generations of semi-continuous disasters and human and economic damage.
- It hasn't really impacted public awareness, but global climate in 2023 and 2024 has been bananas: things have gotten worse much much faster than even the most pessimistic models had anticipated. Which means that our expectation of how badly things are going to get is more likely to be over-optimistic than not.
- It's worth emphasizing the above: it might be the most important and most under-reported story of the year.
- Between a flattening (but, remember, only very and way too slowly decreasing) curve of fossil fuel usage during the next few decades and vast over-investment in exploration and extraction, chances are the purely short-term economic argument to phase out existing fossil fuel usage is going to become very hard as prices lower and stay low. The geopolitics coming from that are going to be... interesting (the Gulf, of course, but also and perhaps specially Russia, and never mind the economic and social vulnerability of India to climate disruption).