And the IEA, for its part, expects China to continue to be the sole meaningful over-achiever. It recently revised upwards by 728 GW its forecast for total global renewables capacity additions in the period 2023–27. China’s share of this upward revision? Almost 90 percent. While China surges ahead, the rest of the world remains stuck.
The US Senate is now threatening the IEA, saying that it’s going to pull funding.
They claim that IEA projections guide industry, and they don’t like the way industry is reacting to the IEA projections.
This boils down to the fact that the IEA considers energy within the context of climate change - that infinite oil cannot be burned forever because it will kill us and stop us from burning more oil. The Senate does not consider this a valid criteria for evaluating energy security because “reasons” (impairment of short-term profit & power).
The US government is waging a war against reality, the planet, and its inhabitants on behalf of a handful of industry titans. Which leads me to the same conclusion (for the millionth time): Capitalism can’t solve climate change.
edit: This actually connects with the interesting story of the perversion of the IPCC. Basically, this group exists to report the global consensus on climate change. But there are more lobbyists and other suits attending the conference than scientists. The political division has complete editorial control over the way the science division’s findings are reported. Pre-edited releases have been leaked to prove that this control is actually being exerted.
The connection lies in that the Senate is upset that the IEA recognizes the expertise of the organizations establishing the consensus on climate change, because it is not in their mission to do the research themselves (for obvious reasons). The IEA cites data from agreements that the US signed on to, because what else is it supposed to consider official? It turns out, they’re supposed to ignore the data altogether.
So the US (and countries like it) is corrupting the global framework of managing climate change, and then turning around and threatening groups who use those cooked numbers because they still aren’t cooked enough. It would destroy any remaining legitimacy to blatantly manipulate numbers to the extent they would need to be manipulated in order to make US short-term objectives seem like a good idea, so they tell the groups they fund (which is pretty much everyone, to some degree) to just ignore the issue. They reduce research - at the IEA and for the IPCC - to toy models that ignore the most important considerations.