One of the more effective (seeming) techniques of the central planners steering — or attempting to steer — the green “transition” was the idea of its inevitability. This was the future. Get aboard! Gas cars = horse and buggy. Slow (and sometimes unreliable) to charge EVs = the radiant future.
That is not exactly how things are working out. Even before the U.S. changed course and the EU began (?) to change course over EVs, gasoline sales were hitting new peaks.
Bloomberg’s indispensable Javier Blas:
After the pandemic, the International Energy Agency said gasoline demand wouldn’t ever surpass its 2019 level. The theory was that as EV cars became more popular, appetite for gas guzzlers would be “disproportionally” impacted. “This means that the fuel is likely to exhibit the earliest and most pronounced peak in demand” of all elements of the oil market, the IEA wrote in an influential report in 2023. But demand quickly surpassed the pre-pandemic peak and kept on growing.
Last year, gasoline consumption posted an all-time high of 27.36 million barrels a day. The IEA initially thought again that was the peak, and suggested consumption would drop in 2025. Instead, year-to-date gasoline demand has jumped to a fresh record high of 27.62 million barrels a day.
That the IEA, an organization that has all too often moved from analysis to propaganda, got things wrong is by now no surprise, but Blas’s trawl through the data still reveals some unexpected numbers:
[S]ome of the greatest thirst for gasoline comes from Europe, supposedly a region that’s an energy-transition champion, but one where consumers are shifting from diesel cars into brand new gasoline and plug-in hybrids. Spain and France have seen consumption reaching heights unseen for two decades.
In Blas’s view, gasoline demand will peak toward the end of the decade as more people switch their “conventional” cars for EVs. Maybe, and I don’t know how surging demand for plug-in hybrids and EREVs (extended range electric vehicles) affects that, but, if that switch does happen, it should be because EVs are a superior, price-competitive product, not because drivers are bullied or bribed into buying them. Meanwhile allowing a continuation of genuine competition between EVs, hybrids, EREVs, and conventional cars is likely to mean better, more efficient versions of all four, something that central planners could neither achieve nor would they allow.