What goes unsaid makes the loudest statement sometimes. So it was at the International Energy Agency’s ministerial meeting, which drew many of the world’s top energy officials to France for two days this week.
Climate change, which dominated so much of the agency’s discussions in recent years, was scarcely mentioned. The relative silence follows a concerted effort by the Trump administration to force the IEA to drop modeling net-zero emission scenarios and signaled a growing rift between the U.S. and Europe on energy and climate issues.
The meeting ended without the customary joint declaration of IEA’s 33-member nations. Instead, the agency released a summary of the summit that mentioned climate change just twice — underscoring the two sides’ differences.
“A large majority of Ministers stressed the importance of the energy transition to combat climate change,” the summary read, not mentioning that the U.S. was in the minority.
