LONDON — A Trump administration official ripped into climate policies at an energy summit in London Thursday, claiming efforts to halt global warming were restricting energy supplies and handing power to China.
“When and where their energy is scarce or restricted, humans suffer. Unfortunately, the focus during the last [U.S.] administration was on climate politics and policies leading to that scarcity,” Tommy Joyce, a Trump supporter who is acting assistant secretary of international affairs at the U.S. Energy Department, told a gathering of ministers and representatives from around 60 countries.
“These policies have been embraced by many, not just the United States, and harm human lives,” he added.
Joyce’s intervention ran counter to the sentiments expressed by most other speakers at the summit, including U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and French Minister for Industry and Energy Marc Ferracci, who said: “As long as we remain massively dependent on fossil fuels, there will be no energy security for Europe.”
The U.S. has pressured Europe to increase its imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas. But Ferracci said: “We need to accelerate the phasing [out] of imported energy, and this means decarbonization.”
One U.K. energy industry figure said of Joyce’s speech: “That went down like a fart in a phone box.”
Chinese ‘coercion’
Both Ferracci and Joyce voiced concerns over the reliance of clean energy supply chains on China.
Joyce said the construction of wind turbines was reliant on magnets. “And since China, the supplier of nearly all of them, restricted their sale, there are no wind turbines without concessions to or coercion from China.”
Net-zero policies, he said, risked ”putting abstract emission goals and the interests of our adversaries first, and the security of our people last.”
He advocated for the removal of climate policy barriers as a way to reduce poverty in developing countries, saying that the world should “get out of their way and to let them lift themselves out of poverty, especially through affordable energy.”
Barbados Minister of Energy Lisa Cummins, on the same panel, took a different view of the fuels preferred by the White House. She bemoaned the billion dollars, which she said Barbados spent importing fossil fuels last year, and focused on the effect of those fuels on the world.
“We are facing climate crises that we have not experienced before,” she said.
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