IEA just can't stop demanding money

It’s a new day and the IEA has a new report out. There’s been a weird pick-up in activity at the Agency, probably prompted by frustration at seeing its current efforts remain fruitless as people stubbornly prefer having cheap and reliable energy to expensive and unrealiable one. And it just can’t stop demanding money from everyone it can think of.

In its new report, the IEA is demanding money from some of the poorest nations in the world: Southeast Asia. Of course, Southeast Asia also contains some of the richer Asian nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia but mostly, they are not exactly the Asian equivalent of what the EU used to be.

Yet the IEA doesn’t care about wealth. It cares about the transition, which is why Southeast Asia is supposed to cough up $190 billion in 2035 alone in order to hit the IEA’s lofty transition targets.

The IEA’s apparent belief this is going to happen just because it says it should is truly impressive. The report details Southeast Asia’s forecast electricity demand growth, which the Agency called “a surge of 4%” annually, and how this demand must be covered by wind and solar or emissions would grow by a horrific 35% between now and 2050.

Obviously, no one in their right mind wants to witness a 35% emissions increase so obviously Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will rush to secure those billions and start building wind and solar everywhere.

It’s worth noting that the IEA report never mentions the reason for Southeast Asia’s energy demand “surge”, namely, improving standard of living. Climate forbid such a positive thing is mentioned. No, instead, the IEA attributes this growth in demand to extreme heat that will prompt greater use of air conditioning, and this is not a joke much as I wish it were. Air-conditioning as the One Horseman of Southeast Asia’s Transitionypse.

Meanwhile, in real life, “in 2022, the estimated total GDP of all ASEAN states amounted to approximately 3.67 trillion U.S. dollars, a significant increase from the previous years. In fact, the GDP of the ASEAN region has been skyrocketing for a few years now, reflecting the region’s thriving economy,” per Statista.

Also, “Southeast Asia’s economies remained resilient and delivered credible economic performance in the second quarter 2024.¹ GDP grew in all economies, with Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam recording the fastest rate of year-on-year (y-o-y) growth over the past four quarters,” per McKinsey.

It seems clear now that the IEA is unhappy with thriving Southeast Asian economies so it is trying to do to them what the EU is doing to itself: murder by a constant money bleed in the name of lower concentrations of a trace element in the atmosphere, because who cares about economic growth if we’re all going to die of CO2 excess.