Why Everyone Wants to Meet the ‘World’s Most Boring Man’
By Max Bearak, The New York Times.
Excerpt: ...Fatih Birol... has led out of obscurity over the past decade, the International Energy Agency [IEA]. ...Mr. Birol likes to joke that he is “the world’s most boring man.” He certainly exudes a kind of bureaucratic plainness. But he has also deftly led the I.E.A. through a decade during which energy has re-emerged as a geopolitical weapon. The debate over how to address climate change is upending economic and diplomatic relations around the world — right as the Trump administration works to reverse a global push for a transition to renewable energy by producing, consuming and exporting as much fossil fuel as it can. Mr. Birol, for his part, has repeatedly offered the fossil fuel industry a kind of “adapt or fail” warning, particularly as solar power grows at a pace that even the I.E.A. underestimated. ...The organization’s members, mostly Western countries, have increasingly turned to it for guidance, even if the I.E.A. has occasionally been wrong on some of the biggest questions, like how fast solar power would grow or how quickly coal would decline. Perhaps the biggest question of all — whether or not the world is nearing peak demand for fossil fuels — is one that the I.E.A. has revised its response to numerous times. ...A dim view of the I.E.A. is shared by many in the fossil fuel industry. ...But Mr. Birol says he is not telling anyone what to do, just what is most likely to happen. ...The International Energy Agency was created by Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, in the 1970s at a time when climate change was not part of the political lexicon. The agency’s original mandate was to monitor global oil supplies and help countries coordinate to prevent energy-price shocks....
Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/climate/fatih-birol-iea.html.