The world’s wiliest climate warrior? It’s not who you think
International Energy Agency boss Fatih Birol, a lifelong bureaucrat with roots in the oil industry, has made the net zero transition a personal mission.
Who’s the world’s best-connected climate warrior? Is it Greta Thunberg, or David Attenborough, or Al Gore? Maybe. Or it might be a modest man without a household name, someone most people have never even heard of.
It might just be Fatih Birol: a 66-year-old Turkish-born energy economist, a self-described number cruncher and Nutella muncher, who will this year become the longest-serving head of the International Energy Agency in its five-decade history.
“I have two big passions in life: one is my work, the other one is football,” says International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol. Nathan Laine
Birol’s job involves jetting around the world, meeting presidents, PMs and their energy and environment ministers. He’s at Davos, he’s at COP, he’s at the UN General Assembly. He pops up in Brussels, Washington, Brasilia, Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi.
He cajoles, collaborates, colludes and campaigns, as he pushes politicians and policymakers to move faster and smarter in retooling their energy systems to fend off climate change.
The job of running the IEA, which has 31 largely rich-country members, including Australia, is usually the preserve of an ex-politician. But Birol is a lifelong bureaucrat, who started at the OPEC oil cartel and then rose through the IEA ranks.
Emerging from this fossil-fuel chrysalis, Birol has used his nine years at the helm to muscle the IEA into the forefront of the global debate on how to manage the disruption and cost of the energy transition.
Other international figures, such as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, seldom speak about the climate in anything but apocalyptic terms. Birol’s crusade is equally relentless, but its tonal register is more rigorous.
How did Birol turn around an organisation whose culture was rooted in its founding mission of helping countries to build oil stockpiles? How did this unassuming football and film buff become such a frank and unsparing missionary for net zero?
I’m going to try and find out, and I’m going to do it in the way we like to do things at AFR Weekend. I’m going to take him out to lunch.
It’s not exactly a hardship. The IEA is based in Paris, occupying a few floors of the Harry Seidler-designed, Seine-side behemoth that houses the Australian embassy.
But if I had any thought, hope or expectation that we might be tucking our napkins into our collars at a Michelin-starred, sommelier-staffed temple of haute cuisine, Birol has other ideas.
He’s a busy guy, and since I’m not one of his VIP engagements – he had breakfast that morning with former Italian PM and president Mario Draghi – his preference is to duck out for an hour to his favourite local haunt, the Eiffel Café.
“This is my second address. If I don’t have an official lunch, I come here quickly, eat something, drink something, go back to work,” he says. “They know me very well, they know everything. It’s not a very chic place, but it’s OK.”
Birol’s “second address”, the Eiffel Cafe, is a stone’s throw from the tower, the Seine, and the IEA. Nathan Laine
It’s a classic Parisian joint, in every particular. The sandstone-coloured 19th-century building, the art-deco font of its sign, the red roll-down awning, the wicker chairs and round marble-topped tables out the front. The wood-panelled interiors, the mirrored walls, the tiles, the menu, and the brusque but competent maitre d’ in his 50s, with an air of alpha-masculinity and an oh-so Gallic profile.
Being a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, this bistro has an eye on the heavy traffic of the tourist trade. But it’s pretty quiet as we settle in. Initially, we’d thought about sitting outside; but spring has been late coming to Paris, and it’s just too cold.
Birol doesn’t need to look at the menu. He knows what he wants. After trading a few pleasantries with the waiter, he orders a salad with goat’s cheese, honey, and two kinds of ham.
I don’t have much difficulty either. It’s the same fare you find in almost every bistro in central Paris. And it’s also offered at prices that seem preposterously cheap to a Londoner. So cheap, in fact, that I decide to have not only a mushroom omelette but also a French onion soup, since I figure Birol will be doing most of the talking.
He proposes a convivial glass of wine. Mais oui: this is France, where drinking at lunchtime still feels like the norm. Two glasses of your house Bordeaux, please waiter.
We don’t have long together, but no lunch is too short for pleasantries. With a distinct feeling of inevitability, we alight on the topic of soccer. Although he’s from Ankara, his team is Istanbul-based Galatasaray, the country’s best-known club.
“Everybody is passionate about something. I have two big passions in life: one is my work, the other one is football,” he says.
When Galatasaray last won the Turkish league, he celebrated by telling his 400 staff that for the following day they could eat or drink whatever they wanted from the staff cafe, for free, on his dime.
“In my view, we have missed something about China at least three times,” says Birol. Nathan Laine
“I will tell you a secret. For all of my meetings – it can be [Brazilian President] Lula, it can be [Indian PM] Modi, it can be anyone – I set the timing of meetings according to the fixtures of my football team, so I can watch it on TV. So I never miss a match. In Brazil or India or Tokyo, I never miss a match.”
I know something of Galatasaray. Former Socceroo star Harry Kewell ended up there. Birol lights up. “Ah, the ‘Oz magician’. He is a wonderful man.”
Wilfred Zaha, the zippy winger who used to grace my London team Crystal Palace, also now plays there. “An Australian who likes football?” Birol says appreciatively. “This is unusual.”
He launches into a complaint about the extent to which fossil-fuel interests sponsor or advertise with football teams, particularly in England. It seems that now, as our food arrives, we are segueing into the meaty part of the lunch.
A winding road
I’m curious as to how and when a man who began his career at OPEC became an acolyte of the energy transition. We circle back and forth to the story a bit, piecing together the winding road.
His father was a doctor, one who didn’t charge patients if they were struggling financially. Sometimes he even bought their medicines or prescriptions for them. This was foundational to Birol’s concern with poverty and affordability in the energy space.
His father also told him to give up playing football and concentrate on his studies. Birol took a degree in electrical engineering, but his true ambition was to become a film director. He won prizes in Turkey for his early shorts, which apparently included “a lyrical love murder”. He went to Vienna to study at the film academy.
But the course didn’t live up to his expectations, and having married at 18 and become a father a year later, he had to worry about money. He enrolled in a PhD in energy economics, studying by day and working in a fruit and vegetable market at night. “Vienna is a beautiful city, but my life in Vienna was not a very easy one,” he says.
He never considered sticking with engineering. “Energy economics, it’s more comprehensive: it’s climate change, it’s social life, it is poverty. It’s related to the different walks of life,” he says.
At one lecture, he was told that most of the emissions causing climate change come from the energy sector. With his inherited sensitivity to underprivilege, he says the message hit home and became life-defining. “I saw that this was a major issue. And I’ve tried, all of my life, to highlight this issue.”
After a stint as an economic modeller at OPEC, he went to Paris to join the modelling team at the IEA. It wasn’t entirely a career-driven move. Divorced from his first wife, he was smitten with a Parisian.
Birol (right) at the 2022 Sydney Energy Forum with (from left) Andrew Forrest, Fortescue CEO; Masatsuga Asakawa, president of the Development Bank; and US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. AFP
“Since we are drinking wine, I shouldn’t hide this from you. I also followed my heart,” he says. I raise my Bordeaux to him, as someone who did the same thing. “You are lucky,” he says ruefully, wistfully. “Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.”
In his early years at the IEA, one of his preoccupations was to get the agency focused on Asia. In about 1996, he got information and data from the region included in the IEA’s otherwise largely Western-focused reports. This has become a theme of his directorship, with China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand among the agency’s 13 associate members.
“In my view, we have missed something about China at least three times,” he says. First, when its fossil-fuel boom started; second, now, as its economy undergoes structural change; and third, that China is becoming the champion of clean energy manufacturing.
He made his name as a “number cruncher”, in an organisation whose strength, he says, is its incredible array of data. “You can ask me, what in the last month was the coal consumption in Indonesia in the cement sector? I can tell you in one minute, from my computer. You can ask me, what is the solar investment in the United States, California? I can give you the numbers. We built this strength.”
His campaigning zeal rests on this data. His motto: “Data always wins.” But information doesn’t exist in a political vacuum, I counter: he has to persuade people to act on it.
He reels off a list of recent achievements: working out a policy response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis; building a net zero road map that has become “a benchmark for shareholders around the world”; and setting policy goals, such as tripling renewables capacity and doubling energy efficiency, which were adopted holus-bolus by COP28 in Dubai.
He says he has fashioned a nimble, meritocratic organisation with “a good nose for what is important”. But this has involved internal change and external resistance.
“I have a lot of bruises. It is not a rose garden, to be honest with you,” he says. “You have to push many things, and international organisations are complex bodies. And at the same time, the more you’re under the spotlight as the IEA, the more people look at different views about your work.”
Birol with then minister for resources and energy Josh Frydenberg at Parliament House in 2016. Alex Ellinghausen
We’ve cleared our plates and drained our glasses. Birol announces he is going to have a crepe filled with Nutella. It’s his weakness: when he was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people, in 2021, he celebrated by polishing off an entire jar.
No to nukes in Australia
The waiter already knows what Birol wants, but I slip an order in too. I later regret it – it’s huge, it’s jammed with Nutella, and the French onion soup had already been super-filling. If only I had Birol’s insider savvy, I might have avoided this case of bistro bloat.
As we chew our crepes, I try to get him ruminating on the difficult politics of the energy transition. Is net zero becoming a harder political sell?
He admits he is up against vested interests, political intransigence and a combination of misinformation and misunderstanding. But in some ways the IEA is different. It is not like a climate NGO; it is driven by its member countries, and it has roots in the oil and gas industry.
So, for example, Birol sees gas as a necessary transition fuel. He also regrets that industry has not worked harder to crack carbon capture and storage. And he is in favour of nuclear power.
“But if there is a country that has a lot of resources from other sources, such as solar and wind, I wouldn’t see nuclear as a priority option. I’m talking about Australia now,” he says.
“Many member countries, they have different views on energy, climate policies, etc. But we say what we think is the right thing. It’s up to them to agree or not, but they believe that we are honest, what we are saying has been proven,” he says.
But what about the public? Does the IEA need to speak to them, too? Yes, Birol says.
“We should be aware that we want this clean-energy transition happening for the people, not despite the people. Without having their support for what we are doing for them, it really doesn’t make any sense,” he says.
“I have to confess that some governments’ clean-energy transition programs put a disproportionate burden on the shoulders of the low- and middle-income groups. They should be better designed, and those groups should be better protected,” he says.
The IEA will imminently release a report on the affordability of the clean-energy transition. He also tries to get the agency’s reports and press releases cleansed of jargon. “I tell my colleagues, my editors, we should write in a way my mother can understand. We are not doing it for the energy experts, we are doing it for the people.”
The pancakes have tipped our conversation well over the hour, and our time is up. Birol is startled when I tell him. But time, and the lack of it, has been hovering over our lunch the whole time.
“The climate crisis is happening, and it is going to affect our lives, it is affecting our lives immediately,” he says.
“Energy security is a key issue, and also how to make this transition in an affordable and in a secure way. This is not an easy thing, what we are working on. But we don’t have much time.”
The bill
Bistrot Eiffel Cafe, 4 Boulevard de Grenelle, Paris
Onion soup, €7
Mushroom omelette, €8.50
Salade Tour Eiffel €12
2 Nutella crepes €11
2 Bordeaux €11
Coffee €2.70
Total: €52.20 ($85)
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