Interview with IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol

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Fatih Birol Offers the World an Oil Health Check, and the prognosis isn’t good.

The International Energy Agency used to have the role of being the energy optimists, reassuring Governments and markets that there would be sufficient supplies to keep the world sufficiently fueled for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is still one of their wildly outdated and wildly optimistic forecasts that still underpins the UK government’s absurb assertion that oil will cost $67 a barrel in 2020.

Every year the IEA publish their ‘World Economic Outlook’, which gives their assessment of where the world is in terms of oil and other energy supplies. Last year’s talked of a ’supply crunch’ in 2012. This years has been based on their going back to the data and reassessing the state of the world’s supply. What they have found has clearly shocked them, and already IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol, a man with the perfect hang-dog glum expression to be breaking this news, is doing the rounds preparing people for the forthcoming report.

What follows is an interview he gave recently in International Politik, the Journal of the German Council on foreign Relations. If ever there was an example of a man with bad news to break breaking it in the most straightforward way possible and not mincing his words, this is it.

http://transitionculture.org/2008/06/12/fatih-birol-offers-the-world-an-oil-health-check/

[bananas]

1. There are some charts in the pdf version

http://www.internationalepolitik.de/archiv/jahrgang-2008/april/download/1dd009358046b66009311ddacf8b74f50e1742a742a/original_ip_04_birol.pdf