LONDON — Donald Trump won’t be in London for the U.K.’s big energy security summit this month — but he’ll cast a long shadow over the proceedings.
When U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband hosts energy ministers and industry leaders in just over a week for talks on “a new era for energy security,” he will be confronted by a White House delegation bringing a very different vision about how to achieve that — one slated to be led by an official, U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary Tommy Joyce, who is committed to disrupting global efforts to go green.
For the Labour government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the two-day international summit is a chance to argue that pursuing net zero is both the right choice for the climate and a hard-headed strategy for achieving energy security in an unstable world.
But Joyce has insisted the U.S. will never “sacrifice” its economy to net zero, and has called on other world leaders to follow Washington’s example. The rhetoric is well matched to moves by Trump, under whom the U.S. has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, invited U.S. oil and gas firms to “drill, baby, drill,” and demanded that Europeans buy more American fossil fuels in exchange for tariff relief.
It is also an energy policy starkly at odds with both Starmer — who is expected to address the event at Lancaster House — and co-host the International Energy Agency, of which the U.S. is a founding member.
The IEA, under its top official, Turkish economist Fatih Birol, promotes the transition away from fossil fuels and argues that “energy security and climate security go hand in hand.”
That raises the stakes for a summit, first proposed two years ago when President Joe Biden was in the White House, intended to demonstrate a degree of international unity — at least among the IEA’s 32 members.
“It is becoming a bigger moment than was originally envisioned,” said one senior U.K. government official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to brief on the event.
Guest list
By embracing clean energy, Starmer and Miliband will argue at the summit, countries can weaken the influence of dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has used his vast fossil fuel resources to blackmail neighbors and drive up energy prices for all — fueling inflation and political discord throughout the West.
But they will have to make that case in the face of a U.S. administration that fundamentally disagrees — and sees the clean energy drive as a strategic threat that empowers its great rival, China, a country dominating solar, wind and electric vehicle supply chains.
There is no confirmation that the summit will be a high enough priority for Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright — once the chief exec of a major fracking firm — to turn up in person.
Wright has, however, found time for a tour of the Middle East in April, with a view to strengthening ties with fossil fuel producers like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In Riyadh he signed a memorandum of understanding on energy cooperation — and bemoaned a “global movement, including in my country, the United States, that stood in opposition to energy development.”
China’s attendance at the summit is not yet confirmed. The IEA is expected to finalize attendees this week. Energy ministers from Germany, France, Ukraine, South Korea and Turkey are expected to come, along with EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen and the bosses of energy firms Shell, Eni and Ørsted.
Meet Tommy and his LNG
Joyce will be leading the U.S. delegation to London, according to one federal official and another individual familiar with the administration’s plans.
He served in the first Trump administration, but is currently in an acting position while Trump’s choice to head the Department of Energy’s international affairs office, David Eisner, awaits Senate confirmation.
Joyce used an industry summit in Washington last month to outline what the administration’s energy policy means for other countries.
“We will not sacrifice our economy or our security for global agreements for a so-called net zero future, nor do we encourage any other nation to make that sacrifice either,” Joyce said, emphasizing Wright’s distaste for other countries’ pledges to zero out emissions — and the Trump administration’s desire to boost exports of American natural gas to Europe and beyond.
“There’s no greater thing we can do for our fellow human beings around the world than share with them our energy technology and our energy bounty,” said Joyce. “That includes, of course, LNG [liquefied natural gas] exports.”
Last week, Trump explicitly linked U.S. LNG exports to severe tariffs on the U.K.’s European neighbors, arguing that the U.S. trade deficit with the EU “can disappear easily and quickly” if Europe hikes its already substantial imports of U.S. LNG — a super-cooled form of fossil fuel gas.
The EU — despite its own net zero drive — appears willing to play along.
‘Sinister’ net zero
The U.K. is also negotiating with the U.S. over an economic deal that could lead to tariff relief — and some think the Trump administration is about to push the same offer, potentially even at the London summit.
“It won’t be long until they make that point [about LNG],” said one U.K. energy industry figure.
“We’ve all been expecting something,” agreed the U.K. official quoted above. “It’s entirely possible [the question of LNG] will be launched into the [trade] talks.”
Some U.K. green campaigners insist Trump is best ignored. “On energy security, there’s rhetoric and then there’s reality. According to the IEA itself, 85 percent of global clean energy investment happens outside the U.S. That’s where the story is,” said Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank.
Nonetheless, using a summit ostensibly about clean energy to push fossil fuel exports would be in line with the Trump administration’s broader approach on energy security.
In the MAGA reading, Western democracies have virtue-signaled their way out of secure energy supplies. Energy Secretary Wright is the most vocal on that front, frequently calling 2050 net-zero targets “sinister.”
He has charged that governments set such goals to score points with the public, no matter whether they were achievable.
Nor has the U.K.’s co-host, the IEA, escaped Republican ire.
“They’re heading in the wrong direction,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, a key member of the Republican leadership, told reporters this winter. “They’re going to get ignored because they’re basing their proposals on aspirations that are never going to happen.”
The IEA, for its part, told POLITICO it had “worked constructively with all the governments of our member countries for many years, including during the first administration of President Trump between 2017 and 2021.”
“We look forward to continuing this with President Trump’s current administration and to the U.S. participation in the Summit on the Future of Energy Security.”
The U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Karl Mathiesen.