International Energy Agency Is Wrong To Forecast Coal's Demise
by Tom Harris via The Epoch Times,
Activists would have us believe that coal is a dying energy source. But, thankfully for American coal st
What the Documents Show
Simultaneously, the IEA's own projections acknowledge coal consumption will increase 3 percent annually in India and 4 percent annually in Southeast Asia through 2030. This is not a nuance. This is an agency claiming the sky is falling while documenting why it isn't. The data reveals a more damning reality: since 2020 alone, global annual coal consumption has risen by 1.4 billion metric tonnes. China, accounting for 55 percent of global coal demand and currently burning approximately 3 billion tonnes annually, shows no signs of the deceleration the IEA forecasts.
Follow the Money
The agency predicts "gradual but marked decline" in Chinese coal use over the next five years, but provides no credible mechanism for how this reversal occurs when China continues expanding coal infrastructure and remains locked into coal-dependent industrial capacity. What the mainstream narrative obscures is that the IEA's forecasting record on coal is objectively failed. As The Kobeissi Letter documents, "past forecasts of peak coal demand have repeatedly proven wrong." The IEA's own historical graphs—showing coal consumption projections from 2000 to 2022—demonstrate the gap between predicted and actual outcomes. Year after year, the agency projected decline; year after year, consumption either plateaued or increased. Yet policymakers, climate advocates, and financial institutions continue treating IEA projections as authoritative baseline assumptions for divestment decisions, grid planning, and energy policy. This matters because the IEA's false consensus creates a cascading effect.
What Else We Know
Investment banks cite the agency to justify pulling capital from coal projects, creating artificial scarcity narratives that drive up coal prices and profitability for existing operators—precisely the companies the forecasts were designed to undermine. Meanwhile, China, India, and Southeast Asian nations, unburdened by Western institutional groupthink, continue building coal capacity at scale. The IEA doesn't slow coal's growth; it merely redirects it geographically and enriches the operators who remain. The specific institutions responsible—the IEA's leadership, the economists producing these forecasts, the organizations publishing them without critical interrogation—have faced no accountability for serial inaccuracy. They issue revised predictions, and the cycle repeats. American coal-dependent states like West Virginia and Canadian provinces like Saskatchewan continue operating on the assumption that their industries are dying, even as global demand reaches historic highs.
The pattern here is institutional capture dressed as expertise. The IEA serves wealthy Western nations that want to appear committed to decarbonization without actually dismantling carbon infrastructure—they just want to move it elsewhere and control the narrative. I find striking how effectively a "declining coal" forecast operates as cover for geopolitical energy realignment rather than genuine transition.
Who benefits? Energy transition consultants, renewable energy investors, and the financial class managing the shift from fossil fuels to green assets. They need coal to appear doomed to justify trillion-dollar energy infrastructure bets. China benefits differently—it gets to expand coal capacity while Western institutions waste resources fighting a phantom decline.
Watch the IEA's 2026 forecast revision. When it arrives—and it will, because reality keeps intruding—demand answers: which economists are being replaced, which leaders are resigning, and which media outlets will acknowledge they built policy on serial fabrication. Accountability doesn't happen automatically. You have to demand it.
Primary Sources
- Source: ZeroHedge
- Category: Government Secrets
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
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