The U.S. will be energy independent by 2035! And it’ll only cost us a few measly degrees Fahrenheit.
The new World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency is chock-full of forecasts like that one about global energy markets [PDF]. More big news: The U.S. is poised to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia, and to start exporting more oil than we import by 2030.
The continued rise of dirty energy is bad news if you care about the climate. Is there any good news about clean energy? Well, renewables could become the world’s second-largest source of power generation by 2015, second only to coal, if clean-energy subsidies keep rising. The IEA projects that such subsidies could hit $240 billion by 2035, at which point renewables could draw even with coal in terms of electricity generation.
But ultimately the IEA sees lots more coal, oil, and natural gas in our future. The U.S. may be energy independent by 2035, but we’ll have a fried climate to show for it. The IEA projects that we’ll see a 6.5 degree Fahrenheit (3.6 degrees Celsius) rise in global temperature by then should our hunger for energy stay this course.
