The Liberal party may have finally dumped net zero emissions as a policy, but the ruling Labor party remains obsessed with the idea, and there has been yet another climate talkfest, this time in Brazil, with the traditional media unable to discuss anything else.

Has all this effort, hand-wringing, endless pronouncements on the dangers of emissions, conferences in exotic locations, and billions of taxpayers’ money spent on the issue in Australia alone had any effect? The short answer is no. The statistics on global production and consumption of fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – compiled by various organisations show a hiatus during the Covid years, particularly in oil, but otherwise they march ever upwards.

For those interested in the figure for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and few seem to be, readings published by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii show that CO2 increased by about 2.5 parts per million during the year to October, reaching 424.87 ppm. In other words, there has been no discernible change in the rate of increase.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), which tracks energy consumption and usage worldwide, partially and rather grumpily, conceded this point in its latest World Energy Outlook, published on 12 November. A tireless advocate for renewable energy, the IEA has previously produced unrealistic estimates of the likely peak and decline in fossil fuel consumption, including a forecast that oil production would peak before 2030, or in less than five years’ time.

With the rate of growth in electric vehicle sales slowing markedly from a small base, and global consumption of oil, gas, and coal increasing, the US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has called the IEA’s projections ‘nonsensical’. Pressure from Wright, including threats to pull the 14 per cent of IEA’s budget contributed by the US unless the agency returned to its main task of producing realistic estimates, resulted in an outlook report with two scenarios.

One of these is the Current Policies Scenario (CPS), based more on what countries are actually doing in energy consumption, last published in 2020, in addition to its previously favoured Announced Pledges Scenario, which assumed that countries would meet the goals they set for themselves, if not the pledges they made for the Paris climate agreement.

The CPS forecasts that oil consumption will increase by 11.4 per cent from 2024 to reach 113 million barrels per day by 2050, which is at least more in line with forecasts from other organisations. However, despite those occasional flashes of realism, the IEA analysts still seem to be paid-up members of the greens. That supposedly more realistic CPS scenario, for example, projects that nearly half of all new car sales in advanced countries will be electric vehicles by 2035, in just ten years’ time.

Really? The US is the biggest consumer of petroleum products. In November, the Financial Times quoted Ford chief executive Jim Farley as saying that EVs will eventually achieve a market share of about five per cent. That forecast, at an earnings presentation, followed a 25-per-cent slump in sales of the company’s EVs in October, compared with a year earlier. That slump was the result of President Trump ending a popular tax incentive for such cars, with the US President proving noticeably uninterested in EVs or in reducing emissions.

In Australia, according to figures compiled by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries and the Electric Vehicle Council, EVs make up about 7.6 per cent of new car sales, with sales mostly holding steady this year. Although those figures show that EVs have performed better than many sceptics had anticipated, they are not going to account for half the market in a decade. In Europe, various countries have announced that they will ban the sale of petrol cars by certain dates, but there is now considerable doubt about whether those bans will be enacted.

Leaving aside the IEA’s green fantasies, the big news from the agency’s report is the astonishing rise of the LNG industry. The report notes that after a period of relatively slow growth in export capacity, global LNG supply is expected to increase by 50 per cent in 2025-2030. More than half of that new capacity is being built in the United States, and a further 25 per cent in Qatar, with Australia contributing a small slice of the increase. LNG overtook pipeline gas as the predominant way of trading gas over long distances in 2023. The report also points out that, under the CPS, all of that supply will be absorbed by projected demand growth over 2024-2030. China, Europe, and Japan are expected to buy around half of the increase in LNG supply, with the developing Asian economies taking a large share of the rest.

This big increase in energy consumption is reflected in figures from other sources. Graphs produced by Our World In Data, a research group affiliated with Oxford University, show that oil consumption dipped sharply during the Covid pandemic but has since bounced back to above pre-pandemic peaks. Coal consumption lost ground in the 2010s but has begun to grow again, while gas consumption has increased steadily. Net zero does not fit this picture.

Another chart, showing global energy consumption by source, which includes fuel for transport as well as gas for industrial use and domestic heating, shows that in 2024 oil supplied 31.5 per cent of energy, coal 26.2 per cent, and gas 23.6 per cent. That adds up to more than 81 per cent, with hydro and nuclear supplying much of the rest. Solar power contributed 2.9 per cent and wind 3.5 per cent.

Although the contribution of wind and solar has obviously increased sharply in recent years, there is no indication that they will even slow the rate of growth in fossil fuel consumption, as energy demand increases, let alone dominate the energy mix.

Among other trends, the IEA report points to an expected surge in electricity consumption. However, it estimates that only about ten per cent of the growth in demand will be due to the use of data centres for artificial intelligence. Industry will want power, and populations in tropical areas will want access to air conditioning, not to mention power for stoves. More controversially, the IEA also projects that a major surge in EV ownership will further increase power demand.

Whatever the eventual increase in demand, it is clear that much more energy will be required, particularly in developing countries, which will be far more interested in raising their citizens’ standard of living than in Western obsessions with emissions. As the figures also show, renewables will be unable to supply more than a fraction of the increase, despite the hopes of green zealots.