International Energy Agency

• Joe Barone, Shale Directories
• Blog
• August 20, 2025

The International Energy Agency Returns to Reality

Following months of criticism from lawmakers and the Trump administration, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has finally decided to take a step towards returning to its original energy security mission.    For the first time since 2019, the IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) will include a “current policies scenario” (CPS) baseline case that forecasts energy demand based on real market signals, not policy hypotheticals.    Ahead of the official release of the World Energy Outlook 2025 in October, let’s look at how IEA has shifted to where it is now and why its recent decision is the first step in a transition back to the agency’s original mission.    The Vanishing Baseline Case Returns    In 2020, the IEA quietly abandoned its longstanding Current Policies Scenario, which was used as a “business as usual” reference case to project how much oil and natural gas the world will need decades into the future.    Instead, under heavy pressure from environmental activist groups, IEA began to publish energy outlooks that relied on subjective scenarios assuming different degrees of climate action, assuming greater uptake of renewable energy sources than the reality on the ground.    As David Blackmon writes in the Daily Caller, the shift allowed the IEA to freely advocate for anti-fossil fuel policies, rather than maintain a neutral, unbiased stance:   “This inevitable bias had an immediate and very noticeable effect.