Food production, water supply, medical care delivery, and many of the other essentials that make life on this planet possible, all require some form of energy. Because of that, it is in everyone’s interest that the world has adequate and reliable supply of energy at all times. But there are deep disagreements about the choices that we need to make to have those critical needs met. That divergence, if left unresolved, could have immense negative implications for human welfare.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is a Paris-based organization that was established in 1974 with the primary mission to help governments in the OECD create comprehensive energy policies to ensure energy security. In recent years, the agency has come under heavy scrutiny for some of its policy recommendations. One of the most notable controversies was the IEA’s 2021 report that called for no new investments in the oil and gas industries. The funding halt, according to the agency, was needed in order to achieve global climate goals.

Energy industry experts were alarmed by the report. Many suspected that it was motivated by politics. At the time, the new Biden administration was heavily promoting renewable energy in its attempt to steer America away from fossil fuels. Those efforts had been underway in Europe for a while, and green energy was very much in vogue. The IEA’s critics charged that it had allowed itself to be swayed by those political winds.

The efforts that nations are making to drastically cut carbon dioxide, methane, and other pollutants emitted by their power, transportation and various industrial sectors are laudable and should continue. Achieving these objectives requires a variety of measures, including curtailment of the use of the dirtiest fuels such as coal, increased reliance on renewable energy, and adoption of mitigation strategies such as methane capture and carbon sequestration.

There are substantial numbers of people who characterize the warnings about climate change as alarmism. Those people say that the doomsayers should be ignored. That dismissive attitude is unwise, even if one doesn’t believe in climate science. The world is enormously complex so no matter what our convictions are, we should always be open to other voices. We all have our blind spots.

In the same vein, environmental activists should be a bit more tolerant of other views than they have been. There are some hard realities that staunch advocates of green energy must confront with respect to our current and future dependence on fossil fuels.

The story of BP, the British energy giant, is instructive. In 2020, BP famously announced that it was pivoting away from oil and gas to focus on renewable energy. The company set a goal to reduce its oil and gas output by 40 percent by 2030. As BP painfully found out, the world was nowhere near ready to move on from fossil fuels, as all the talk had indicated. Its stock significantly underperformed those of its peer companies, raising its investors’ ire. Late last year, BP abandoned the strategy to refocus on its traditional oil and gas business.

Currently, the world consumes a little over 100 million barrels of oil per day. In the BP Energy Outlook 2025 that was issued a couple of weeks ago, the company projected that global oil consumption will fall to about 85 million barrels per day in 2050. That is higher than its previous forecast of 77 million barrels per day in 2050. This view, that the world will continue to use such large amounts of oil for many more decades, is shared by the vast majority of energy industry experts.

Those who say that the world should move to a completely carbon-free energy system, whether now or by 2050, never stop to explain what would replace all those millions of barrels of oil that will still be needed to sustain life on this planet. Making the full transition as quickly as environmental advocates demand would require drastic changes to the way we live. But there have been practically no serious discussions about the enormous sacrifices that we would have to make. It will perhaps be possible at some unknown date in the future for the world to depend fully on renewable energy. However, until that can be demonstrated with a good degree of certainty, we all need to be realistic and responsible in the ways we talk about energy.

My views on this subject are based on what I see every day from my front-row seat in the energy industry. I am a proponent of the all-of-the-above approach to energy policy. There isn’t a single source of energy that doesn’t have drawbacks. Opponents of renewable energy say they don’t like it mainly because of its intermittency and unreliability. Fossil fuels have their own intermittency problems, albeit nowhere near that of renewable energy. There are weather-induced supply disruptions that can make large quantities of oil and gas unavailable, sometimes for extended periods.

In the natural gas industry, extremely cold temperatures often cause wellhead freeze-offs leading to substantial reductions in production. Natural gas-pumping equipment can malfunction in such harsh weather. These supply disruptions tend to occur at the worst possible time, in the middle of winter when demand for natural gas is at its peak.

When I have conversations with people about energy policy, I often point to storage to make my case for why I don’t think renewable energy is ready to take over the global energy system. For contingency purposes, the U.S. has built facilities to hold inventories of oil and gas. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) can hold just over 700 million barrels of oil, while up to 4 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas can be injected into the underground storage caverns that are spread across the country.

The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day currently. According to statistics by S&P Global Commodity Insights, an energy industry data provider, in 2024, the U.S. consumed around 89 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of natural gas each day, on average. During this past winter, which was one of the coldest in recent years, the daily average consumption was about 105 Bcf. If something catastrophic were to happen to completely shut down America’s sources of oil supply, we could, in theory, survive for about 33 days on a fully filled SPR. For natural gas, at full storage, the survival period would be around 40 winter days (the worst-case scenario), or even longer if the disruption occurred at a time of year when demand is low.

It is quite a different story for renewable energy. At best, current utility-scale batteries can store only about eight hours’ worth of electricity. As grid operators in places like Texas, Germany and other European countries where wind energy forms a substantial portion of the generation mix can attest, there are entire weeks, sometimes a whole month, when wind speeds are so low that wind power output is negligible. Even if enough renewable energy capacity were built to displace all fossil fuels, long-duration batteries that can supply electricity for weeks at a time would still be needed. No one can predict when those types of battery technologies will become available.

In the emergency situation described, the stored natural gas and oil would be used to generate not only electricity, but also in all of the other applications where those fuels are normally required. Therefore, having sufficient battery capacity wouldn’t even solve all of our problems. That shows the scale of the challenge we face as we attempt to transition to a carbon-free future.

Given its mandate, it is the IEA’s job to be out there educating governments and the public about the current limitations of renewable energy and why fossil fuels will still be needed for quite some time. Thankfully, the agency seems to have woken up to reality. In a complete reversal from what it said back in 2021, the IEA recently issued a report that called for new investments in the oil and gas sectors to counter declining production. The report said that output from existing oil and gas fields is decreasing at an accelerated rate due to dependence on shale and deep offshore fields. According to the EIA, the new investments are needed just to keep production flat. OPEC sharply criticized the agency after the release of the report, saying that the EIA’s previous statement had discouraged badly needed investments.

One could take a charitable view and say that the IEA wasn’t playing politics in 2021, but had instead made a good-faith estimate of future global demand for oil and gas versus expected supply based on available information at the time. Forecasting, of any kind, requires a heavy dose of humility. That is something all of us, the IEA included, must keep in mind at all times. Because of its critical mission, the IEA must do everything it possibly can to safeguard its credibility.