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This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Climate change, caused in large part by the emissions from burning oil, may drown much of the world’s coastal cities as sea levels rise.

But first, oil may “drown” the world.

An unusually warm winter, weak demand and increased supply will lead to a glut of oil until late 2016, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Energy Agency. Spring-like weather has driven down heating oil prices. And China’s economy, which is off to a rough start this year, has tapered the country’s usual thirst for the fuel. But despite plummeting prices, oil producers in Saudi Arabia have kept on pumping in fear of losing market share to Iran as the oil-rich country reemerges after earning relief from crippling sanctions. “Unless something changes, the oil market could drown in over-supply,” the IEA, which is part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, wrote in the report. “Oil is largely transportation fuel, and renewables are largely electricity sources that provide power.” Conventional wisdom posits that continuously cheap oil also poses a threat to the development of renewable energy. Even as the price of renewables goes down, why invest in wind turbines and solar panels—so thinking goes—when cheap fossil fuels are so abundant? The answer is that, for the most part, oil doesn’t compete with renewables. “Oil is largely transportation fuel, and renewables are largely electricity sources that provide power,” Brian Warshay, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told The Huffington Post in August. “They’re not really competing against one another in the same energy application.” Just 1 percent of electricity generated in the United States last year came from oil, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That figure has remained unchanged for the past five years. Renewable energy accounted for 9 percent of US electricity produced last April—nearly doubling from the same month in 2010, when it accounted for just 5 percent.