Future oil demand is wildly uncertain

First and foremost, the chart above shows that there’s still so much uncertainty about how aggressive governments will get about climate policy that predicting fossil fuel demand even a few years into the future, let alone decades, is a fool’s errand — which makes investing in the sector a risky proposition.

But the data also show that a long future for fossil fuels is all but guaranteed, and that, the report says, “a phaseout is not a prerequisite to achieving international climate goals.”