International Energy Agency

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An autonomous intergovernmental body established in Paris in 1974 under the framework of the OECD, in direct response to the 1973 oil embargo, with an original mandate to coordinate emergency oil stocks among consuming countries. It became, over half a century, the closest thing the world has to an official energy statistician, and its World Energy Outlook is the reference document of the field. Its position in this Journey is double-edged and both edges belong in the record. The IEA assembles the energy balances and technology cost data on which almost every serious transition analysis depends, including much of this Journey. It is also the institution whose successive Outlooks projected essentially flat solar deployment year after year while actual deployment grew exponentially — a failure documented at length by outside analysts and now partly acknowledged, arising from a methodology that projected policy-as-legislated rather than cost-as-falling. The agency subsequently restructured its scenarios, added a Net Zero Emissions by 2050 pathway in 2021 and revised its solar treatment substantially. The lesson is not that the IEA is unreliable; it is that a forecast built on the wrong model of cost formation fails in a specific and predictable direction, and that this is exactly what the learning curve predicts about it. Its Paris headquarters is not a subject of this Journey and no coordinate is asserted here.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.