LONDON — President Donald Trump won’t be in London for the U.K.’s big energy security summit this month — but he’ll cast a long shadow over proceedings.
When U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband hosts energy ministers and industry leaders in just over a week for talks on “a new era for energy security,” he will be confronted by a White House delegation bringing a very different vision about how to achieve that — one slated to be led by an official, U.S. acting Assistant Secretary Tommy Joyce, committed to disrupting global efforts to go green.
For the Labour government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the two-day international summit is a chance to argue that pursuing net zero is both the right choice for the climate and a hard-headed strategy for bringing energy security in an unstable world.
But Joyce has insisted the U.S. will never “sacrifice” its economy to net zero, and has called on other world leaders to follow its example. The rhetoric is well matched to moves by Trump, under whom the U.S. has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement; invited U.S. oil and gas firms to “drill, baby, drill;” and demanded Europeans buy more American fossil fuels in exchange for tariff relief.
