At a high-profile summit in London, Trump administration officials are expected to clash with European politicians and experts over differing visions of what energy security means.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused gas prices to spike, Europe has rushed to roll out renewable electricity and start reducing its dependence on other countries for its energy needs.
It also swapped part of its Russian gas supplies with growing shipments of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, President Donald Trump, backed by American fossil fuel producers, is trying to pressure Europe to buy even more of it.
The two sides are expected to clash at the Summit on the Future of Energy Security in London starting on Thursday and hosted by the UK government and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
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The two-day gathering will be attended by the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, the US Department of Energy’s Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of International Affairs Tommy Joyce, and officials and ministers from around 60 governments.
Energy access, climate security, the future of oil and gas markets and clean energy supply chains are among the key topics of discussion, according to the meeting’s official agenda.
Renewables are ‘surest way’ to security
Ahead of the summit, Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, discussed climate action with 17 heads of state, including the president of COP30 host Brazil, in an online meeting on Wednesday.
China’s leader Xi Jinping told the meeting that “no matter how the international situation changes, China’s active actions to respond to climate change will not slow down”, according to state media.
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After the meeting, Guterres told reporters that “the pathway out of climate hell is paved by renewables – they offer the surest route to energy sovereignty and security, and ending dependence on volatile and expensive fossil fuel imports.”
That is what the leaders of the European Union, UK and IEA also think. Von der Leyen said in January that clean energy “strengthens our energy independence”.
Whereas coal, oil and gas deposits are concentrated in certain countries, renewable resources like sunshine and wind are spread more evenly across the globe.
Better to rely on solar panel imports
Referring to Trump’s pro-oil and gas production slogan, Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, a French centre-left member of the European Parliament, told reporters on Wednesday that “for us Europeans, we know that the drill, baby, drill approach cannot work in Europe because of geology”.
“We know that we need more wind power, more thermal insulation and more energy efficiency for our buildings, more heat pumps,” he added. About three-quarters of all countries import more energy than they export, according to World Bank figures.
Some of the equipment needed to produce renewable electricity also has to be imported.
But, while China dominates the solar panel industry, experts told reporters in a briefing that relying on foreign-made solar panels was not as bad as being dependent on fossil fuel imports.
Buying solar panels abroad is a one-off risk and one-off cost, said Ember’s Europe programme director Sarah Brown, but importing fossil fuels is “constant risk, constant cost”.
“It’s perfectly unconcerning that we might be importing solar panels from the major producer of solar panels,” said Rob Gross, director of the UK Energy Research Centre.
Experts also warned of oil and gas price volatility, pointing to a string of spikes triggered only in the last few years by the conflict in Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war and the Red Sea blockade in 2023.
Trump official attacks renewables, pushes gas
But the US representative at this week’s London talks – Tommy Joyce – is likely to argue that renewables are the main threat to energy security rather than the solution.
Two weeks ago, he told the SAFE summit in Washington DC that “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”. He added that “that includes, of course, LNG [liquefied natural gas] exports”.
In a reference to the Paris climate agreement, which the US has begun the process of leaving, he said that “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.”
“Such sacrifices are quite simply the worst form of risk management policy imaginable. As I’ve said, they focus on one risk alone. They ignore every other risk – such as energy insecurity which can and will cost people their lives,” he added.
Joyce said that pro-climate policies could lead to power shortages in the winter. In February 2021, Texas suffered power cuts – but that was mainly due to failures at gas-fired power stations and infrastructure that wasn’t designed for extremely cold weather and insufficient electricity connections to other parts of the country.
Some right-wing media commentators, like Tucker Carlson, overemphasised the role of frozen wind turbines in causing the power cuts. The CEO of the company that runs Texas’s electricity said the problems were “primarily due to issues on the natural gas system”.
Farooq Ullah, a senior policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said that “fossil fuels have failed to deliver energy security” and “the clean energy transition is the best way to shield customers from these threats”.
