Preempting Possibility: Critical Assessment of the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2010

摘要

The World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency's (IEA) most prominent publication, is arguably the world's most authoritative energy forecast. The series is produced by the IEA's Office of the Chief Economist whose current director, Fatih Birol, was named by T. Boone Pickens (in 2009) as one of the world's seven most powerful people in energy.1 The World Energy Outlook series has been published annually since 1993 and since 1999 it has focused on specific subjects in odd years with the purpose of focusing the agendas of governments on topical and geographical areas the IEA technocrats think require attention.2 Despite shifting topical and regional focus, the World Energy Outlook series has had one consistent objective: to promote open and efficient markets, encouraging governments to establish market institutions, remove trade and investment barriers, and to implement market-based policies in the energy sector to expand the role of the market in the provision of energy supplies and services. The market, or more precisely, a largely fictitious, idealized rendition of the capitalist market, is cast as the only and ultimate solution to a wide range of problems from the security of energy supplies to curbing climate change and eradicating energy poverty.