At an energy security summit in London, around 60 government officials delivered sharply different views about the role of fossil fuels and renewables in securing energy supplies, with the US pushing for more fossil fuels and downplaying renewables.
While the leaders of the United Kingdom, European Union and ministers from Barbados and Colombia argued that clean energy provides energy security, ministers and officials from oil and gas producers like the US, Iraq and Egypt said that fossil fuels should remain part of the energy system.
But while his Iraqi counterpart boasted of using more renewables alongside oil and gas, the US Department of Energy’s Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of International Affairs Tommy Joyce criticised renewables too, arguing that they cause power cuts and increase reliance on China.
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Fossil fuel price rollercoaster
This Thursday, the International Energy Agency’s Summit for the Future of Energy Security took place at Lancaster House in London – which stands in for Buckingham Palace in Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ series – and kicked off with the UK’s minister for net zero and energy security Ed Milliband reading out a letter from King Charles.
It said that “events over recent years have shown that, when well-managed, the transition to more sustainable energy systems can lead itself to more resilient and secure energy systems”.
Later, the UK’s prime minister Keir Starmer said that the UK was “paying the price for our overexposure over many years to the rollercoaster of international fossil fuel prices leaving the economy and therefore peoples’ household budgets vulnerable to the whims of dictators like Putin, to price spikes and to volatility that is beyond our control”. He added that since the 1970s, half of the UK’s recessions have been caused by “fossil fuel shocks”.
Speaking after Starmer, the European Commission’s President Ursula Von der Leyen praised the US for providing gas “when we needed it during the energy crisis” and said US gas imports “remain of strategic importance for the European Union”. “But,” she added, “it is not only a question of alternative suppliers” of gas other than Russia.
Von der Leyen argued that “clean homegrown renewables” strengthen the bloc’s resilience, while at the same time spurring new jobs and innovation. “As our energy dependency goes down, our energy security goes up. That is a lesson we have learnt in Europe,” she added.
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Fossil fuels imports are expensive
Ministers from Barbados, Colombia, France and Spain echoed these messages. Colombia’s mines and energy minister Edwin Palma Egea said clean energy would reduce the cost of energy in his country, where many people “have to choose between paying for energy or to eat – that is a dilemma for them”.
“We have to go for clean energy,” he said, asking the room of energy officials and business leaders for investment “not just to secure decarbonisation for the North of the world but also to develop a huge economy around the green economy”.
Barbados’s energy and business development minister Lisa Cummins said that energy security looks different for small island developing countries like hers. “Barbados is on the receiving end of fossil fuel generation,” she said, “in the sense that we are on the frontline of sea level rise as the result of the climate crisis”.
She added as well as suffering from fossil fuels through the climate crisis, Barbados spent over $1 billion importing fossil fuels to generate electricity in 2024. The Caribbean country’s biggest fossil fuel suppliers are Trinidad and Tobago and the USA, but it aims to generate all of its electricity from renewables in 2030, using solar, wind and battery storage.
“Geopolitical tensions then create energy insecurity for countries like ours. We do not produce the technologies, we do not produce energy goods, we are not the producers of fossil fuels, we are the importers and the price-takers and the ones that are on the frontline of every single geopolitical crisis that is happening around us,” Cummins said.
US criticises renewables
But, speaking immediately after her, US envoy Tommy Joyce blamed recent power cuts in Barbado’s Caribbean neighbour – US territory Puerto Rico – were a result of the island becoming more dependent on renewables for electricity. “After bolting on over about 30% wind and solar variable renewables, traditional grids began failing,” he said.
Puerto Rico’s electricity grid has been damaged by storms like Hurricane Maria in 2017, made more intense and frequent by climate change, and by under-investment. The company operating the grid said the most recent blackout was caused by an overgrown tree damaging an electric cable.
Joyce added that pursuing offshore wind power would make countries reliant on China. “A typical offshore wind turbine requires four tonnes of a permanent magnet made in the form of rare earth elements and, since China, the supplier of nearly all of them, restricted their sale, there are no wind turbines without concessions or coercion from China”, he said.
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Speaking on a briefing before the summit, energy experts said that relying on other countries for equipment like solar panels and wind turbines is preferable to relying on them for fuel. Ember’s Europe programme director Sarah Brown said importing fossil fuels involves “constant risk, constant cost” whereas importing machinery like solar panels is a one-off cost and risk.
But Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC, told Climate Home that the climate community needs to adress the question of whether the West can decarbonise while decoupling from China.
He said that the drift towards economic fragmentation hinders emissions reductions through technologies like electric vehicles and lithium batteries and “without a proactive response, this trajectory could further derail climate action and lend weight to the conclusion articulated by Mr. Joyce: if China controls the raw materials essential for cleantech manufacturing and we are determined to decouple from them, then we might as well abandon climate goals altogether.”
Petrostates praise fossil fuels
At the London summit, Joyce’s pro-oil and gas stance was backed by Hayyan Abdel-Ghani, the oil minister of Iraq – the world’s economy which is most reliant on oil and gas. “As you all know, fossil fuels will remain and it’s one of the most important sources of energy production around the world”, he said.
He said Iraq had “worked a lot in order to boost and increase the production of gas” and is planning a transition from oil to gas, adding that at COP28 “it was looked at that [gas] could be the transitional source of energy going forward”.
At COP28 in 2023, governments agreed to transition away from fossil fuels but also that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security”. This clause – pushed for by Russia – was criticised as a “dangerous loophole” for gas at the time.
Egypt’s petroleum minister Karim Badawi said that Egypt was focussing on “how we can really unlock future reserves” to make petroleum available to Egyptians and “partners around the world”. He added that fossil fuels were not just a source of energy but the basis for industries like petrochemicals.
Outside the summit, Lauren MacDonald, lead campaigner from the Stop Rosebank campaign, told Climate Home that “the only way to have real energy security and lower bills – which is what the people of this country want – is to invest in cheap homegrown renewables”.
MacDonald pointed out that oil and gas companies were present at the summit. Delegates from BP, Abu Dhabi’s National Oil Company, ExxonMobil, Shell and Sonelgaz were among those listed as attending a private panel titled “oil and gas security – ensuring security and affordability for today and tomorrow”.
The session was to be adressed by the oil ministers of oil-producing states like Norway and Guyana and co-hosted by Jassim Alshirawi, the secretary-general of the Riyadh-headquartered International Energy Forum.
Other sessions covered energy in the contexts of access and affordability, resilience to climate change, the role of artificial intelligence, electricity supply and criticial minerals supply chains.
As delegates went into the summit on Thursday morning, MacDonald and fellow climate protesters chanted “no more oil, no more gas, we don’t want a climate crash” and “hey, we want to keep living, no more oil, no more drilling”. They held up two inflatable eyeballs and eyeball placards, alongside one that said “Starmer – all eyes on you”.
