Energy Musings - September 15, 2025

Bloomberg Opinion's energy writer, Javier Blas, has acknowledged that there is no energy transition, only energy addition. He is struggling to embrace the reality that net zero is going bust.

Is Javier Blas The Latest Walter Cronkite?

Although considered a media myth, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was an astute politician who could read the mood of voters and deliver what they wanted. So, while he likely didn’t say, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” he understood the potential for one influential person to shift public sentiment 180 degrees.

The comment, attributed to Johnson, supposedly came after he watched iconic CBS News anchor Cronkite’s half-hour special on February 27, 1968, following his two-week tour of the Vietnam battlefield. Actually, Johnson was in Austin, Texas, delivering remarks at a birthday party for Texas Governor John Connally, a longtime friend and supporter.

The transcript of Cronkite’s final remarks comes from an obituary following his death on July 17, 2009, by National Public Radio, “Final Words: Cronkite's Vietnam Commentary.”

“Mr. CRONKITE: (Reading) Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we'd like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I'm not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout but neither did we.

“Then, with as much restraint as I could, I turned to our own leaders whose idea of negotiation seemed frozen in memories of General MacArthur's encounter with the Japanese aboard the Battleship Missouri.

“We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders.

“Both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain than ever, that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations.

“But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

“This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

To those who did not live through the Vietnam War and the resulting social upheaval, or watched the Cronkite special and remember how its pictures reshaped the debate over the war and ultimately led to Johnson’s famous ad lib about not seeking a second presidential term, reading this in an energy newsletter may seem strange. We would suggest, however, that the points Cronkite made about the war and its likely future can be applied to the Net Zero climate change battle. Now, instead of Walter Cronkite, we have Javier Blas, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities.

Blas has just written a column in which he demonstrated his “Cronkite moment,” only it is in the form of describing how the International Energy Agency (IEA) has made a significant adjustment to its global energy scenarios, which portend a very different outcome than previously offered as policy guidance.

We previously discussed this IEA policy shift when examining the latest ExxonMobil and Thunder Said Energy forecasts for fuel use in 2050. We noted that the IEA was resurrecting its Current Policy Scenario (CPS) to reflect a more realistic view of global energy policies regarding net-zero emissions. The CPS was in effect until 2020, when it was ditched in favor of the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) and later the Announced Pledges Scenario (APS). Ending CPS came under pressure from European nations and green energy activists. Their pressure to adopt the new energy scenarios grew each year beyond the 2015 Paris Agreement. That treaty was designed to limit the global average temperature rise below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels, and hopefully keep it below a 1.5ºC increase. However, emissions continued to rise, and governments appeared impotent, and the shift to renewable energy was not progressing fast enough for these climate activists.

The new energy scenarios (STEPS and APS) embraced current climate policies and “policy proposals, even if the specific measures needed to put these proposals into effect have yet to be fully developed.” Policies and promises were mixed together. APS went further than STEPS and assumed that all energy and climate policies, as well as political aspirations, were fully met and on time.

CPS will reappear in the upcoming release of the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025. The draft report is out for review, and from Blas’s comments, he has seen and read it. In describing some of the differences from the World Energy Outlook 2024, Blas cautions that final conclusions and numbers may be subject to change.

While the IEA is reportedly warning readers that CPS should not be interpreted as a “business as usual” case, we are reminded that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 scenario, a most unlikely climate change scenario, has been adopted by the media and climate activists as the “BAU” future for the world in 2100.

Climate scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., notes that an extreme climate scenario, which envisions an average annual greenhouse gas concentration increase double the single largest increase since 1959 (3.53 parts per million of CO2), would indicate a 7 ppm increase. That extreme is well below the RCP8.5 scenario, which has a 12.6 ppm increase as its driver. The 7 ppm increase is slightly higher than that in RCP6, which has a 5.7 ppm increase. Pielke and a co-author are working on a paper that shows the current emissions trajectory is undershooting RCP4.5, which concludes that the temperature anomaly in 2100 would be a 2.9ºC increase. We understand that the rise Pielke foresees may be closer to 2.2ºC, not the catastrophe predicted by most of the IPCC models.

The punch line of Blas’s article is that under CPS, crude oil use is projected to be 114 million barrels per day (mmb/d) in 2050, up from today’s 103.9 mmb/d average, which is approximately 10% higher. Imagine, 10% more oil consumed annually in 25 years!

Compared to the 2050 predictions of the STEPS and APS scenarios, the CPS projection is 22.5% higher and more than double the respective scenarios. We believe this CPS prediction validates the forecasts of ExxonMobil and other oil companies that oil will be needed in significant quantities for decades.

The IEA states that oil consumption will primarily increase in the aviation and shipping sectors, as well as in petrochemical feedstocks. This outlook is totally consistent with the views of oil companies and other forecasters. Shipowners wrestling with what power systems to install in new ships will be overjoyed to learn that oil may still be their primary fuel. We assume the IEA expects the efforts of the UN’s International Maritime Organization to mandate a shift to green fuels will fail when it is considered later this year.

Interestingly, the IEA still sees China and Europe as the sweet spot for electric vehicle fleet growth. However, given the EU’s concern about protecting its domestic automobile manufacturing industry from Chinese EV imports with tariffs, we wonder what it means for Chinese EV exports. Mexico is installing a tariff against Chinese EVs to protect its auto industry. However, the IEA reserves its biting commentary for the U.S., writing in the draft, “EV adoption stalls in regions lacking strong policy support,” which implies that massive subsidies for these expensive vehicles or mandates eliminating the freedom of choice for auto buyers are needed, and the U.S. doesn’t want to cooperate.

Blas, a huge supporter of the energy transition idea, struggles to score points against reality. He notes that CPS isn’t a forecast, but in fact, it is because it predicts what will happen under the realities of today’s policies. He describes its outlook as “what the world may look like in 25 years if nothing changes and governments sit on their hands.” He piles on with pointing out that the world is not going through an “energy transition” but rather an “energy addition,” terminology expounded upon by energy guru Dan Yergin and his co-authors in an article in Foreign Affairs early this year. That is the reality of the green revolution.

What Blas fails to comment on is that the IEA is returning to its original mandate when it was established in 1974, which is to help manage “energy security” rather than dictate to nations which energy sources they should use. Such a shift is likely to prove difficult for IEA officials to embrace, and government officials unwilling to acknowledge the energy reality.

For those paying attention, Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA, hinted at this policy shift when he spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January. He said, “With well-designed energy transition policies, we can have the best energy security... we can bring the prices down, we can bring prosperity to the people and we can create jobs.”

The problem is that this outcome has not occurred despite mandates and substantial government expenditures. Maybe these aren’t “well-designed energy transition policies.” The policies have left citizens with expensive electricity, increased risks of brownouts and blackouts, and mandates to buy less efficient but more expensive appliances. We are witnessing a climate change movement struggling to remain viable in a world that prizes low-cost and reliable energy over more expensive, less reliable, and only somewhat cleaner power.