The Clear Reality of the Clean Tech Revolution

Posted on October 26, 2023 by Bill Hewitt

Oil companies and OPEC insist that we are going to need their product ad infinitum, but the International Energy Agency said in June this year that “a peak in oil demand is on the horizon” and “Growth is set to reverse after 2023 for gasoline and after 2026 for transport fuels overall.”

The IEA’s latest “World Energy Outlook,” out this week, makes what appears to be a bulletproof case for the looming demise not only of oil, but of coal and natural gas. Dr. Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA, is unequivocal: “The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable. It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ – and the sooner the better for all of us.” (This echoes what the IEA reported in December of last year in “Renewables 2022.” ) Continue reading →

The Green Electric Trifecta

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Bill Hewitt

see note at end of post

I wrote a year ago about what our plans were for the new house we’d bought: Watching the Meter Run Backwards. Well, we just completed the plan a few weeks ago: We picked up our new EV.

The plan was to install solar photovoltaic panels. We did that in December. After that the heat pumps went in in January. Then we went shopping for an electric vehicle and made our choice in May. Continue reading →

Renewables Are Powering Ahead

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Bill Hewitt

(Click on the graphic to open it in a new window.)

Here’s a headline for you: The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the past 20.

Maybe you didn’t see that coming. Well, Amory Lovins, among others, saw it coming. I heard him speak at a conference in New York City in the fall of 2009 and he said then: “The Renewable Revolution has been won. Sorry, if you missed it.”

Continue reading →

Natural Gas Revisited (Again)

Posted on February 16, 2020 by Bill Hewitt

I haven’t taken an extended look at the many ins and outs of natural gas for a good long while. It’s a bloody big topic. But let me preface this by first quoting Amory Lovins, the maestro of the “soft energy path.” I heard him speak at an event over ten years ago. What he said then still reverberates in my psyche: “The ‘renewables revolution’ has been won. Sorry if you missed it.” There is no doubt, at this late date, that solar and wind and the array of other modern renewables, along with energy efficiency, sustainable mobility, and other clean tech are well and truly burgeoning. The numbers don’t lie. Continue reading →

The Avatar of the Fossil Fuel Industry

Posted on August 25, 2019 by Bill Hewitt

I finally got around to reading Private Empire this summer. (You know how it is: a bazillion books, papers, articles and every other doggone thing on your reading list.) I’ve been reading Steve Coll’s stuff in The New Yorker for years. He’s the dean of the J-school at Columbia.

Private Empire, to a certain extent, follows in the footsteps of The Prize, Dan Yergin’s Homeric saga in which he recounts “the Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.” But Yergin’s book is a historic and geographic sweep of the oil industry while Coll’s book zeroes in on ExxonMobil, the company with the second-highest revenues in the world, $453 billion, in 2012 when the book came out. They dropped to eighth by 2018 with $290 billion in revenues. Continue reading →

World Energy Outlook 2017

Posted on January 18, 2018 by Bill Hewitt

I went to a talk last night at the Council on Foreign Relations: Dr. Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency IEA), sat down with Amy Myers Jaffe, the Council’s senior fellow for energy and the environment, for an interesting discussion. (The video is here, along with a transcript.) The IEA was founded in 1974 to help the world’s major economies respond to the Arab oil shocks of that time. It has since become a well of knowledge about the world’s energy resources, now and for the future, and many of the critical aspects of our energy production and use, not the least of which are climate change, pollution, and energy poverty. This year’s World Energy Outlook, in fact, contains an important report on the outlook for energy access for those billion of our fellow world citizens who have no modern energy services. Continue reading →

Peak Carbon?

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Bill Hewitt

Well, maybe not Peak Carbon yet, but it was a pretty hopeful signal that the International Energy Agency sent on March 13th in announcing Global energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide stalled in 2014. The IEA noted “…that efforts to mitigate climate change may be having a more pronounced effect on emissions than had previously been thought.” Continue reading →

A Newer World

on the policy, politics, science and economics of environmental protection, sustainability, energy and climate change

Tag Archives: International Energy Agency