WITH the advent of Trump 2.0, the world is changing. A tectonic shift is taking place while multilateralism is being jettisoned.

The US is out of the Paris Climate Accord. It has opted out of the World Health Organisation. Since his election in November last year, President Donald Trump has been insistent on beginning a trade war with neighbours and friends for decades, Canada and Mexico. He is adamant about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and is also threatening to take over the control of the Panama Canal. Greenland is also up for grabs, so believes the president.

The new administration is also dictating business terms to its allies in Europe. It is threatening its Nato partners to alter their current business practices. The US also wants to evict Palestinians from Gaza, take over, and administer Gaza and the West Bank.

Furthermore, in this new Trumpian era, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) energy watchdog founded by the likes of the late Henry Kissinger to counter the then-growing clout of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), is also beginning to feel the heat.

For the last decade and a half, the IEA has been urging the need to control global gas emissions and rising global temperatures. To counter the menace, the IEA has advocated reducing fossil fuel use and switching to green energy at the earliest possible. The world has begun paying attention to the calls of the IEA.

As the world began paying attention to its calls, global efforts were made to diversify away from fossil fuels. The previous Biden administration was no exception.

As the world was beginning to look towards cleaner energy to meet its growing needs, the IEA began underlining for the last few years that the global oil demand was reaching a plateau. And peak oil demand is just around the corner.

Initially, the IEA said oil would reach peak consumption by 2030. However, later in some papers, it also cited 2027 as the year when the global oil demand could peak. Not everyone liked this.

Saudi Arabia and Opec were the first to react, underlining that the world is still decades away from an oil peak. The industry and oil majors also didn`t like the IEA`s policy directions and instead insisted the world still needed oil to meet its needs.

Many in the industry felt that the IEA needed to change course and revert to itsoriginal role of stabilising the supply side of the global oil equation; the battle lines were becoming clear.

In this entire debate, Mr Trump stood on the side of the industry, hinting that the world needs to develop the oil sector for decades to come; his mantra has been `Drill baby, drill`. For understandable reasons, the industry has been standing firmly behind Mr Trump. He was their man.

So, with the advent of Trump 2.0, everything done by the Biden administration is coming to naught, and heat is growing on the IEA.

Late in January, the IEA`s former oilindustry and market chief, Neil Atkinson, criticised the agency`s focus on the global energy transition. In a report titled `Energy Delusions,` co-authored with Mark Mills, director of the National Centre for Energy Analytics, and released in the presence of a few Trump team members, Mr Atkinson insisted that the IEA should concentrate on oil and gas supplies.

The report was launched on Capitol Hill alongside Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso and Alan Armstrong, CEO of pipeline firm Williams and current president of the National Petroleum Council, Reuters reported.

The document identified 23 assumptions made by the agency that led to what it calls a `flawed conclusion` that global oil output would peak by 2030 and that no new oil and gas investment was needed. It further says the IEA underestimates growth in emerging economies and plastic and petrochemical markets while overestimating the pace of electric vehicle adoption.

`The promotional aspirations and flawed assumptions underlying IEA`speak-demand scenarios have serious irnplications, given the obvious global econornic and security considerations in planning for and delivering reliable, affordable energy supplies,` the report said.

Mr Barrasso, who earlier led a congressional report criticising the IEA for its green focus, declined to respond when asked whether he thought IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol should be replaced but said the agency risks losing its relevance.

`They [the IEA] are going to get ignored because they are basing their proposals on aspirations that are never going to happen, and the world is seeing that, andelections are rejecting what they want,` Mr Barrasso said on the sidelines of the report-launching event on Jan 29.

Many now feel that the Birol era is close to an end. That will be unfortunate because Mr Birol has been a professional to the core.

Refuting the allegations in the report, the IEA said the Atkinson and Mills report was `full of rudimentary errors` and `fundamental misrepresentations about both energy systems in general and IEA modelling in particular`. The agency said it welcomes ideas for improving its analysis.

`The report also incorrectly suggests the IEA`s oil demand projections are an outlier; in reality, the projections are well aligned with comparable scenarios of other organisations, including major oil companies,` the agency added.

The IEA is under attack. If the trend continues, the demise of the Bretton Woods institutions era the structure built after the Second World War may only be a matter of time. American supremacy was instituted around these organisations.