Revision 02
Thanks @MaxParzen. Interesting times. Here are my reactions. Some relate to your original posting (above), some to the report from Barrasso (2024), some to my recent experiences, and some to earlier activities from within this community.
More specifically, this posting looks at:
- information integrity and the US Republican Party
- whether certain scenarios should be accorded baseline status
- modeling practices currently used by the European Commission
- the uptake of open science by the IEA
- whether member governments “pay twice” for IEA information
John Barrasso
The eclectic political positions of US senator John Barrasso are summarized on Wikipedia EN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barrasso#Environment_and_energy
Context
The geopolitical context is relevant. Mathiesen et al (April 2025) describe intense lobbying at a closed‑door meeting of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in early‑2025, where US officials reportedly pushed for the IEA to cease all work on promoting global transitions to clean power and net‑zero emissions. Mathiesen et al write:
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso — a powerful Republican from the coal state of Wyoming — has personally criticized Birol and is leading the charge to have the IEA ditch research that aids efforts to stop catastrophic climate change, given that such changes “are never going to happen,” he told reporters this winter.
The Barrasso (2024) report (cited in the original post above) is clearly part of efforts by the United States Republican Party to repurpose the IEA. The US remains the largest national producer of oil and gas.
Barrasso (2024) advocates that the IEA adopt scenarios that favor fossil fuels. This would then represent the IEA returning to it roots in some sense. The IEA was established in 1974 as a response to OPEC member countries exercising market power to drive up their oil revenues. (I was working for Shell Oil NZ at the time and witnessed the ensuing chaos.)
More generally, Elbeyi et al (2025) provide a comprehensive review of the integrity of published information on the nature of climate change and the solutions on offer. The authors observe (page 33):
In the polarized political landscape of the United States, climate change has become one of the most divisive topics. Whereas the Democratic Party has recognized the urgency of climate action, the Republican Party has employed a variety of countertactics, including denial of the reality of climate change, discrediting climate scientists and climate policy advocates, and rejecting global solutions to climate change.
Scenarios
Let me talk about future energy system scenarios more generally.
I thought the notion of a “business‑as‑usual” (BAU) or baseline scenario was long discredited. We are in the midst of an energy transition on multiple levels: technological, social, and contextual, with new and sometimes novel public interests being progressively included — and the concept of some policy‑frozen projected BAU plot line no longer makes much sense.
Indeed, analytical agencies are increasing allowing third parties to assess and rank the resulting sets of scenarios presented as they prefer. Of course, a complete separation between analysis and interpretation is not possible. But the methodological intent is clearly changing towards more detachment in this regard.
The notion of a reference scenario is also becoming more a modeling convenience to allow new scenarios to be defined by difference but carrying no innate weighting otherwise.
Barrasso (2024) is correct in stating that recent IEA reports (the latest being October 2023 at the time of writing) have not included a Current Policies Scenario — or “business as usual” reference case as the IEA describes this plot line — since 2015. That role has been substituted by a Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) which tries to capture all announced likely-to-be-enacted policy ambitions. There is also an Announced Pledges Scenario (APS) which takes on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and other long‑term announcements with various degrees of credibility and ambition.
The Net-Zero Emissions (NZE) Scenario aligns with the Paris Agreement. The United States was then a signatory but Donald Trump withdrew again on becoming president for the second time.
Box 1.1 from EIA (September 2023:24) summarizes these various IEA scenarios (screenshot below). My understanding is that no one scenario is accorded special status by the IEA.
Fig 1 Classification of IEA scenarios
To my mind, Barrasso’s promotion of a “correct” BAU scenario is simply an attempt to embed and bury prescriptive views into systems analysis. Geden (2015) warns against this practice under the rubric of “policy‑based evidence making”.
European Commission reference scenario
It is worth looking at recent efforts by the European Commission in this general space.
I attended the European Commission hybrid consultation meeting on their reference scenario for the PRIMES model. The meeting was held on 22 October 2024 and titled “European Commission DG ENER Workshop on Technology Assumptions”. About 90% of the underlying dataset is to be made public. And that dataset will apparently be released under a Creative Commons open license but no one was able to state exactly which license — which could lead to the non‑open NC‑ND variant or even an abandonment of the idea of public licensing altogether.
The withheld circa 10% of reference scenario information is deeply concerning. Key characterizations, like ramp rate constraints on thermal plant, will not be released. Commission officers present at the meeting were very clear that key details will be held back. Some academics present at the consultation meeting were clearly concerned about that practice and that the European Commission will fail to provide sufficient information to allow parallel independent analysis. I also worry that Commission results cannot be verified by other modelers.
The European Commission should release and publish the entire PRIMES input and output datasets on Zenodo — in native format and under CC‑BY‑4.0 licensing. And the Commission should adopt open source modeling as standard practice. Anything short of open analysis is insufficient for genuine transparency. Based on past statements, I am sure the PRIMES team are resistant to full disclosure but the European Commission should make full publication a condition for their continued engagement.
Policy transparency is fundamental to the functioning of a democracy. Indeed it is hard to decry the presence of fake news when public agencies will not place their public interest calculations on the table for scrutiny and to build trust.
Open science
I read Barrasso (2024) carefully regarding the kind of openness being sought for the IEA. While noting too that the IEA has long been lobbied for genuinely open data on many fronts, for example, Ritchie and Roser (2022).
Barrasso (2024:ii) calls the IEA to “make all of its data and methodologies, which are paid for by taxpayers, freely available”. Nothing more. No mention in his report of open licensing of this data, nor any mention of source code and its publication under approved open‑source licenses.
I personally remain skeptical that Barrasso (2024) represents a genuine attempt to seek open data from the IEA. I view the sentiments expressed in the report as part of an attack against an organization that has embraced both electrification and rapid decarbonization through renewables uptake. That places the IEA at odds with those who would instead prefer vibrant fossil oil and gas sectors, irrespective of planetary constraints.
Energy security
Energy security is a difficult concept to define and evaluate. It is necessarily country‑specific although it can be aggregated across sets of similarly developed and integrated nations. And nowadays normally includes the concepts of resource security and sovereign risk. The notion of resource is now being expanded to include the critical minerals needed to manufacture photovoltaic panels, batteries, generators and motors, and controllers.
I searched Barrasso (2024) for an objective treatment of the concept of energy security and found none. And so concluded that energy security in the context of this report is simply a means for boosting United States oil and gas production and exports.
National security
In terms of the wider issue of national security, climate protection has not been taken up to any degree by national security agencies. This is a complete travesty of course. Sometimes the opposite happens: national security considerations override climate protection goals. Take for instance, the recent decision by Sweden to ban 13 offshore wind projects so Russian submarines can be more easily monitored (Bryant 2024).
IEA modeling
The Barrasso report claims that the IEA uses “flawed modeling”. With the main complaint being that the IEA does not include a no‑climate‑protection scenario that omits all constraints on greenhouse gas production going forward.
Some passages in the Barrasso report are also incomprehensible. For instance, Barrasso (2024:ii):
[The IEA] also ignores the fact that a Net Zero Emissions scenario would concentrate oil and gas production in the very group of countries that prompted the US and others to establish IEA in 1974.
IEA funding
As I understanding it, about 25% of IEA revenues come from the sale of legally‑encumbered data. So to go open would required national governments to increase their contributions. I did not see Barrasso cover this aspect — although of course I agree with the sentiment of publicly‑funded analysis being open and public.
My impression was that governments do not “pay twice” as Barrasso (2024:33) states and that the data sales relate to third parties, including corporations and financial sector analysts. I emailed the IEA for clarification on 27 December 2024 and the IEA responded on 23 January 2025 saying that “IEA Member governments are provided with free access to all IEA reports and data”. So that particular remark by Barrasso is incorrect.
Questions of openness and transparency and the design of scenarios should be treated as separate matters. Some individuals in the current US administration will undoubtedly want to force their vision of a fossil fuel‑dominated BAU by critiquing the methodology and transparency used by the IEA. But again, I caution that these two issues should be seen as orthogonal and that oil‑dominated BAUs should be subject to the same scrutiny as any other scenario choice and status.
Efforts within this community
The openmod community produced an open letter to the IEA in late‑2021 and, as it happened, received coverage in The Guardian as Ambrose (2021).
Closure
I suggest people read the Barrasso report to determine to what degree the claims it appears to make regarding open science are substantiated and whether ulterior motives might be at play.
Energy security is clearly a key issue today. The IEA says its 2023 Net‑Zero Emissions Scenario (NZE) offers improved energy security as well as decarbonization. In which case, Barrasso (2024) puts forward a straw man by presenting energy security and decarbonization as necessarily in opposition.
The notion of a policy‑frozen BAU scenario being remotely useful should be abandoned. Calls for BAU scenarios should instead be seen as attempts to protect incumbents.
The notion that the IEA relies on “flawed modeling” was not developed or even established in the Barrasso report. Indeed, some statements the report are complete nonsense.
The concept of “freely available” promoted in the report falls well short of the legal and cultural benchmarks for open science and transparent policy development. Nothing in the report gave me confidence that the author remotely understood the wider debate on open modeling.
I see rough times ahead for IEA and also for the various US agencies designed to support public interests like energy security, energy services access and affordability, anti‑trust, consumer protection, environmental protection, and rapid decarbonization.
The European Commission also needs to up their game. The use of the PRIMES and POTEnCIA (also closed‑source although controlled by the JRC) codebases belong to a previous era. It is clearly time for the Commission to embrace open science and transparent policy development in this domain.
A human researched and wrote this posting. 
DeepL Write was used occasionally to assist with style.
References
Ambrose, Jillian (10 December 2021). “Energy watchdog urged to give free access to government data”. The Guardian. London, United Kingdom. ISSN 0261-3077.
Anon (23 December 2024). Barrasso issues report on the International Energy Agency. US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Washington DC, USA. Webpage.
Barrasso, John (23 December 2024). Restoring the International Energy Agency’s energy security mission: IEA has forgotten why it was established — Minority Staff Report.
Bryant, Miranda (4 November 2024). “Sweden scraps plans for 13 offshore windfarms over Russia security fears”. The Guardian. London, United Kingdom. ISSN 0261-3077.
Elbeyi, E, K Bruhn Jensen, M Aronczyk, J Asuka, G Ceylan, J Cook, G Erdelyi, H Ford, C Milani, E Mustafaraj, F Ogenga, S Yadin, PN Howard, and S Valenzuela (eds) (2025) Information integrity about climate science: a systematic review — Synthesis report SR2025.1. Zurich, Switzerland: International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE). ISBN 978-3-03983-008-4. doi:10.61452/BTZP3426.
Geden, Oliver (7 May 2015). “Climate advisers must maintain integrity”. Nature. 521: 27–28.
International Energy Agency (IEA) (October 2023). World energy outlook 2023. Paris, France: IEA Publications. 
International Energy Agency (IEA) (September 2023). Net zero roadmap: a global pathway to keep the 1.5°C goal in reach — 2023 update. Paris, France: IEA Publications.
International Energy Agency (IEA) (26 May 2021). US Secretary of Energy to chair the IEA’s 2022 ministerial meeting — News. International Energy Agency (IEA). Paris, France.
Mathiesen, Karl, Sara Schonhardt, Charlie Cooper, and Nicolas Camut (25 April 2025). “Trump officials pressure world’s top energy agency to drop climate mission”. Politico. Arlington County, Virginia, USA.
Morrison, Robbie (25 April 2022). Why the IEA must open license the data it collects — Guest post. Icebreaker One. London, United Kingdom.
Ritchie, Hannah and Max Roser (6 January 2022). The IEA wants to make their data available to the public — now it is on governments of the world’s rich countries to make this happen. Our World in Data. Oxford, United Kingdom.
Signatories (December 2022). Open letter to IEA and member countries requesting open data.
Wikipedia community (25 November 2025). John Barrasso — Environment and energy. Wikipedia. United States. Version ID 1321366714.
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