US threatens to leave IEA if net zero focus remains

PARIS

The United States has stepped up pressure on the International Energy Agency  to drop net zero from its agenda, giving it a year to do so or risk Washington exiting the organisation.

Speaking on the last day of an IEA ministerial meeting in Paris on Feb. 19, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the 52-year-old agency should return to its founding mission of ensuring energy security.

The Paris-based IEA was created to coordinate responses to major disruptions of supplies after the 1973 oil crisis, but it has broadened its focus to include renewable energy and net zero goals under Executive Director Fatih Birol.

"The U.S. will use all the pressure we have to get the IEA to eventually, in the next year or so, move away from this agenda," Wright said in a news conference, calling net zero a "destructive illusion."

"But if the IEA is not able to bring itself back to focusing on the mission of energy honesty, energy access and energy security, then sadly we would become an ex-member of the IEA," he added.

The net zero emissions target is crucial to meet the Paris climate agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

But Wright, a former fracking executive, said there was a "0.0 percent chance" that net zero would be achieved.

Wright praised Birol for reinserting in last November's annual outlook a Current Policies Scenario in which oil and gas demand would grow in the next decades. That scenario had been dropped for the past five years.

But the report still included a scenario where the world reaches net zero emissions by mid-century.

In a closing press conference, Birol said the IEA would "continue to have multiple scenarios" that look at investments, capital needs and resulting emissions from all of them.

But he also said he had yet to talk to colleagues about what would go into the next annual outlook which will be published later this year.

Birol's current four-year term ends next year but Wright demured when asked who he would like to head the IEA, which has over 30 member nations.