A Global Green New Deal: IEA’s “Great Reset” Plan

A new global energy plan has been unveiled by the Paris-based International Energy Agency. IEA’s mission of “shaping a secure and sustainable energy future for all” can be seen as a vital part of what Klaus Schwab, the founder and head of the World Economic Forum, recently called a “Great Reset of Capitalism.”

Sound the alarm and set the energy gauges; consumer choice in 195 countries with seven billion people must be rescued by national and international government planning.

The Guardian described IEA’s latest with the headline, “World Has Six Months to Avert Climate Crisis, Says Energy Expert.” The opening paragraph reads:

The world has only six months in which to change the course of the climate crisis and prevent a post-lockdown rebound in greenhouse gas emissions that would overwhelm efforts to stave off climate catastrophe, one of the world’s foremost energy experts has warned. “This year is the last time we have, if we are not to see a carbon rebound….”

The referenced Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA, adds:

The next three years will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond…. If emissions rebound, it is very difficult to see how they will be brought down in the future.

The baseline is April 2020’s 17 percent drop in CO2 emissions compared to April 2019. The Pandemic, as it were, is the new normal from which a storm of government intervention can dampen energy demand and submerge fossil fuels. It’s a six-month policy window and a three-year implementation period. God knows the rest.

Sustainable Recovery

IEA’s Hail Mary (the world is 85 percent reliant on fossil fuels) is a 174-report, Sustainable Recovery. The press release for what The Guardian calls “the first global blueprint for a green recovery” states: “IEA offers world governments a Sustainable Recovery Plan to boost economic growth, create millions of jobs and put emissions into structural decline.”

Call it the international Green New Deal.

The Foreword (p. 3) of Sustainable Recovery positions the report as necessary, energy-neutral, and informational:

At the IEA, we quickly refocused the work of our analytical teams across the Agency on the shocks caused by the crisis to global energy demand, assessing the impact across all major fuels including oil, gas, coal, electricity and renewables…. And now, we are identifying the most effective measures available to governments as they consider their once-in-lifetime recovery plans. The Sustainable Recovery Plan proposed in this report is the result.

But government-directed “recovery plans” are just the opposite of a free market, let-the-market-decide policy. IEA wants a massive market override, a reset of the global energy market:

Our Sustainable Recovery Plan shows governments have a unique opportunity today to boost economic growth, create millions of new jobs and put global greenhouse gas emissions into structural decline (emphasis added).

The promises of the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” (p. 15) are many. The blueprint’s 30 specific energy-policy recommendations, involving a variety of private and public entities, are advertised to add millions of new jobs, increase productivity, improve resiliency, and boost economic growth. Then there is the free lunch of a one-third reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and none more important than carbon dioxide and methane.

This green dream brings to mind Amory Lovins’s pitch 43-years ago. Back in 1977, Lovins told a U.S. congressional subcommittee about how his “soft energy path” of renewables and conservation would “avoid conflict between constituencies by offering advantages to all of them”:

jobs for the unemployed, capital for businesspeople, environmental protection for conservationists, increased national security for the military, opportunities for small business to innovate and for big business to recycle itself, savings for consumers, world order and equity for globalists, energy independence for isolationists, exciting technologies for the secular, a rebirth of spiritual values for the religious, radical reforms for the young, traditional virtues for the old, civil rights for liberals and states’ rights for conservatives.

This was not only a free lunch, the 30-year-old romantic believed. It was a lunch you’re paid to eat! 

Voters, citizens, consumers, taxpayers, capitalists beware. IEA’s grand plan to force-feed “clean” energy and “cost-effective” conservation is a fool’s errand. Making energy significantly more expensive, less reliable, and less useful is a political loser with a miniscule payout—a hypothetical few hundredths of a degree of avoided warming decades out. The IEA-estimated 860 million without access to electricity (p. 115) are shortchanged too.

Sustainable Recovery represents mission creep. IEA was founded in 1974 as a consumer-nation counterweight to OPEC in the wake of the Arab Embargo. IEA’s member nations would share the crude shortages via nation-to-nation transfers, the founding documents read. But come the end of shortages (due to price and allocation decontrol), the IEA became all but missionless.

Then came anthropogenic global warming, the new dream issue of Malthusianism and central planners to check industrialization and modern living. And it is no longer about energy; the Green New Deal is about social justice and just about anything else to set person against person.

The United States should consider withdrawing its membership from the politicized IEA. This advocacy group, handmaiden to the Paris Climate Accord, does not need the U.S.’s money and imprimatur. The world, and particularly the U.S., needs a better energy voice.

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