Global oil and gas demand will start to fall before 2030, marking the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, the International Energy Agency (IEA) declared last week, in an op ed penned by Executive Director Fatih Birol.
But even so, the decline in demand will be “nowhere near steep enough to put the world on a path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C,” Birol concludes in a post for the Financial Times. “That will require significantly stronger and faster policy action by governments.”
While Birol says energy supply concerns and the limits of countries’ current policies still dictate new investment in oil and gas, the latest edition of the IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook will still point to a new era of fossil decline when it’s released next month.
“There’s a taboo in the traditional energy sector against suggesting that demand for the three fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—could go into permanent decline,” Birol writes. But “this age of seemingly relentless growth is set to come to an end this decade, bringing with it significant implications for the global energy sector and the fight against climate change.”
Read the rest of this story here.