Year after year, the International Energy Agency publishes detailed data on how much energy the world uses, where that energy comes from, and what the global energy picture may look like in the future.
Lately, the I.E.A.’s influential forecasts have suggested that global demand for oil and gas could peak by the end of the decade as electric-vehicle sales grow and the cost of solar panels and battery storage plummets.
That has landed the agency and its boss, the outspoken Turkish economist Fatih Birol, in the cross-hairs of the Trump administration.
Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary and a former fracking executive, has called the agency’s projections of peak oil demand “nonsensical” and has said the United States could withdraw from the global organization if it doesn’t change the way it operates. House Republicans have said the agency is publishing “politicized information to support climate policy advocacy” and have threatened to withhold U.S. funding. The United States provides around 14 percent of the agency’s budget and is among its 32 member states.
“The way the I.E.A. sees the world is not the way the Trump administration sees the world,” said Michael Bradshaw, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.
There’s a reason for that. The United States is the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas. The Trump administration is keen to extract more and sell more to other countries. Detailed data that shows slowing demand for oil and gas gets in the way of that ambition, not least because the agency’s reports are widely used by countries and companies to plan for the future.
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