 Global Energy Outlook 2026: How the World Lost the Goal of 1.5°CDaniel Raimi,
Emily Joiner,
Bryan Hubbell,
Nafisa Lohawala and
Molly Robertson
No 26-06, RFF Reports from Resources for the Future Abstract: The events of 2025 have shaken the global order. Due largely to changes in rhetoric and policy from the United States, key pillars of international economic and security systems have been called into question. The reports we examine here were prepared well before the United States undertook military activities in Venezuela and Iran. They will undoubtably influence modeling and projections in 2026 but are not reflected here. Global expectations around energy and climate, in turn, have been disrupted. A decade after the 2015 Paris Agreement articulated the “stretch goal” of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, it has become clear that achieving this goal is no longer plausible. Global leaders have increasingly focused on energy security and affordability, relegating climate change to a second-tier priority (or lower) in many cases. Still, preventing the worst outcomes of global climate change remains critical, highlighting the importance of continued effort to reduce emissions while ensuring reliable and affordable energy supplies.One way to consider the future of energy and climate is through annual long-term energy outlooks that articulate different trajectories based on varying assumptions about future policies, technologies, costs, and other factors. Outlooks published in 2025 envision a wide range of possible futures but do not chart a plausible path to achieving the 1.5°C target. Specifically, two of the 1.5°C scenarios published in 2025 (BNEF and Equinor) are reproductions of scenarios prepared in previous years, and the 1.5°C scenario of the International Energy Agency (IEA) exceeds 1.6°C before returning to 1.5°C by 2100. Therefore, we generally exclude these scenarios, focusing instead on scenarios that reflect the realities of the current moment.The outlooks we include offer useful insight into the future of energy, but they are not easily comparable because of differences in units, assumptions, geographic groupings, and more. Here we harmonize 15 scenarios across eight organizations to produce as close to apples-to-apples estimates as possible. These outlooks and scenarios are shown in Table 1 and discussed in more detail in Section 4.A brief description of our methodology is provided in Section 4, Data and Methods, with select indicators in Section 5, Statistics. For the full methodology and interactive graphing tools, visit www.rff.org/geo.To enhance interpretability, we use consistent symbology in this report’s figures and the online data tool. We group scenarios into three categories based on their underlying assumptions or, in some cases, their trajectory of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (Table 2):For reference scenarios, which assume no new policies are enacted by governments or follow similar global emissions trajectories, we use a long-dashed line. This set comprises scenarios from Equinor (Plazas), ExxonMobil, IEA (CPS), IEEJ, OPEC, and Total (Trends).For evolving policies scenarios, which assume that policies and technologies develop according to recent trends or the expert views of the team producing the outlook, we use solid lines. This set comprises bp Current Trajectory, BNEF ETS, and IEA STEPS. We also include Equinor Walls, IEEJ Advanced Technologies, and Total Momentum because they follow similar emissions trajectories.Ambitious climate scenarios are not designed around policies but instead are structured to achieve specific climate targets. For these scenarios (bp Below 2°C, Total Rupture), we use a dotted line. We exclude 1.5°C scenarios. Date: 2026-04-07 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rff:report:rp-26-06 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in RFF Reports from Resources for the Future Contact information at EDIRC. |
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