Juking the Stats
How majors become colonels and dung becomes renewable
Roland 'Prez' Pryzbylewski starts off as a police detective and then becomes a schoolteacher. His narrative arc allows the HBO hit series The Wire to move off the streets and into the classroom, exposing Baltimore’s ailing public school system.
My favorite moment from Prez’s storyline comes in an episode about standardized testing, where the teachers get strong-armed into teaching toward the test. No dummy, Prez asks a fellow teacher what the tests could even be measuring if they’re explicitly teaching the kids test questions.
She tells Prez that improving the test scores is about assessing the teachers, not the kids. If scores go up, then the powers that be can say the schools are improving; if the scores go down, then it makes everyone look bad.
“Juking the stats,” he says, flashing back to his days on the force, when the brass pressured the rank and file to improve the crime rate—or rather, the crime rate statistics.
“Excuse me?” his coworker replies.
“Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats and majors become colonels.”
This is all to say that there are some number crunchers over at the International Energy Agency in serious danger of becoming colonels.
A recent piece out from Real Clear Energy mentioned something that made me—in real life—smack my gob. Here it is:
The extent of people relying on traditional energy is often hidden in the formal statistics on energy use, or goes underreported. Some organizations, such as the International Energy Agency, have begun to categorize traditional burning as renewable energy. The IEA has been able to show an increase in renewable energy consumption by this reporting and an increase in “women in the energy workforce” by classifying women who gather dung and sticks as “energy workers.” [emphasis mine]
That’s right, according to the IEA, burning dung, wood, or even lumps of coal is a kind of renewable energy. And if you use it, you’re an “energy worker”!
The IEA is essentially fudging the numbers: hey! All animals shit if you keep feeding them, right? That’s renewable…ish. Oh—and the impoverished women whose spines look like question marks from backbreaking labor and who have to haul wood miles at a time to make dinner? If you squint really hard, they’re also renewable energy workers, because trees can…grow back.
How about that—climate change and poverty are solving themselves one Excel spreadsheet at a time.
If that kind of nonsense isn’t juking the stats, I don’t know what is. Somebody pin a medal on the chest of whatever keyboard jockey cooked up that genius innovation in the annals of sophistry.
Anyway, this is the kind of fantasy-as-policy stuff that’s been fashionable for the last couple of decades and my read on it is that everyone’s pant leg feels soaked through and they’re sick of being told it’s raining.
At least, that’s what I argued in my first ever op-ed for The New York Post (!!!). My broad take is that Trump’s energy Executive Orders signal the end of the climate catastrophism era and the birth of the age of energy realism. You can read the piece here. That’s my hope, anyway.
Though I should add, some of Trump’s tariff threats have me worried, especially when it comes to Canadian crude. More will certainly be revealed.
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Crom’s Blessing
The IEA has lost itself completely in the transition narrative. Irina Slav has been pillorying them on a regular basis for years now on her Substack.
I guess they miss the point that when a large number of people are “energy workers” it means that society is very unproductive. There are probably some Adam Smith or William Jevons style lessons in there somewhere if one cares to look…
Congrats on the NY POST piece!