The Trump administration this week threatened to pull the United States out of the world’s leading energy agency unless it abandoned its focus on tackling climate change.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that the International Energy Agency had become a “climate advocacy organization” and should stop publishing its annual road map for how countries could eliminate their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions by 2050, known as its “net zero scenario.”
“We don’t need a net zero scenario, that’s ridiculous, it’s not going to happen,” Mr. Wright, a former gas executive, said on Tuesday at a side event during the agency’s annual meeting of energy ministers in Paris. He said he wanted the agency to “focus on energy security,” but added that “if they insist that it’s so dominated and infused with climate stuff, then we’re out.”
The International Energy Agency is enormously influential, and its data and reports on everything from oil stockpiles to electric vehicle sales are frequently cited by energy companies and investors as a basis for long-term planning. The United States provides around 14 percent of the agency’s budget and is among its 32 member states.
Founded in 1974 in the aftermath of a global oil crisis, the agency was originally created to monitor global crude oil supplies and help prevent price shocks. Since 2015, however, the agency has broadened its focus under the leadership of Fatih Birol, a Turkish economist. Many member nations have urged the agency to pay more attention to rapidly growing energy technologies such as solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the risks of global warming.
Mr. Wright’s remarks were the latest effort by the Trump administration to persuade other countries and international organizations to scale back efforts to address climate change and instead to continue to rely on fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal, the main drivers of rising global temperatures. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and President Trump has dismissed global warming as a “hoax.”
Mr. Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, a pact among nearly all of the world’s nations to curb greenhouse gases. In October, the Trump administration also successfully pressured countries to halt a global agreement to slash emissions from cargo ships.
Those moves have created diplomatic tensions with European leaders, who have continued to place a high priority on trying to halt global warming.
In competing remarks this week, President Emmanuel Macron of France praised the International Energy Agency’s work and said that Europe would keep trying to move away from fossil fuels and to expand low-emissions energy sources like wind, solar and nuclear power.
“Scientists alert us every day about the dramatic risks of climate change,” Mr. Macron said in a video address on Wednesday. He added that an “orderly, progressive transition away from fossil fuels is the key.”
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Europe has struggled with high energy prices for years, particularly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket. Many European leaders have said the continent needs to reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels, though Trump administration officials have blamed Europe’s high energy costs on its climate policies and heavy use of wind and solar power. It has urged European countries instead to buy more American gas.
The Trump administration’s biggest dispute with the International Energy Agency has to do with the way it projects the future of the world’s energy system.
Before 2020, the agency would publish an annual outlook that asked how the world’s energy mix would continue to evolve if countries did not pass new policies, such as stricter fuel-efficiency standards for cars. These projections, known as the “current policies scenario,” typically showed that oil, gas and coal were expected to dominate the global energy mix for decades to come.
But starting in 2020, the agency replaced that scenario with one that took into account policies that countries were expected to adopt going forward, particularly as they promised to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. This was known as the “stated policies scenario.” In recent years, these scenarios have projected that global oil demand would stop growing this decade.
At the same time, the agency created the net zero scenario, which asked what changes would be needed if countries were to phase out fossil fuels rapidly in an effort to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by 2050. Scientists have said that doing so would be necessary to keep average global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial levels, and limit the risks of heat waves, sea-level rise, species extinctions and other disasters.
The net zero scenario would involve drastic and rapid changes to the world’s energy system, including shutting down most coal plants and replacing virtually all gasoline-powered cars on the road with electric models in just a few decades. Oil and gas production would also end up declining dramatically. Nations are very far from meeting that scenario, and global fossil fuel use was still rising as of last year.
The Trump administration has been pushing the International Energy Agency to change course. Last year, after intense lobbying by Mr. Wright, the agency restored its current policies scenario to its annual outlook, which projected that global oil and gas demand could continue rising for decades.
At a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Birol said that the agency had not decided whether it would continue to offer the net zero scenario.
Instead, Mr. Birol tried to emphasize many of the issues that countries still agreed on, even in an era of geopolitical turmoil. That included a new global alliance focused on providing clean cooking technologies to the two billion people around the world who still rely on polluting cooking methods like burning wood or dung indoors. It also included a new effort among countries to cooperate to secure supplies of rare earth metals and other critical minerals that have historically been dominated by China.
“I can tell you that during our discussions, there was much more common ground and agreements among the countries than the differences,” Mr. Birol said.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
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