US pushes global energy body to abandon net-zero modeling

The United States is urging the world's leading energy organization to abandon its net-zero emissions scenario modeling, which has guided much of the global green transition, claiming that the targets are unrealistic.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright made the call to other energy ministers at a closed-door ministerial meeting of the International Energy Agency in Paris on Wednesday, two people who were part of the discussions told POLITICO, News.Az reports.

The comments met with a muted response from other ministers, the people said.

It comes just a day after Wright publicly threatened to quit the organization unless it abandoned its focus on the energy transition— a call that several countries rejected, including the U.K., Austria and France.

The International Energy Agency is a key venue for inter-governmental cooperation around climate and energy policy but has drawn criticism from the U.S. for its increasing advocacy for the green transition. Wright on Tuesday warned the U.S. would quit the IEA outright if it didn't abandon "leftist fantasies."

At the closed-door meeting Wednesday, Wright said the agency should stop basing its modeling on assumptions that it's possible to cut emissions to zero, arguing such targets will never be met, according to four people present.

Doing away with those baseline assumptions would be a significant shift for the IEA, which has made them central to forecasts that have in turn formed the basis of global political decision-making around the green transition and underpinned billions in green energy investments.

Officials familiar with the discussions said Wright's comments were more diplomatic than his public rhetoric, casting them as an attempt to rationalize the more hardline, anti-renewables stance of U.S. President Donald Trump. Unlike Trump, Wright acknowledges the scientific basis of global warming.

One said that Wright didn't specifically mention renewables — a key source of energy in much of Europe — and instead focused on a broader criticism of the emissions target that other members might find reasonable.

"He’s being diplomatic, saying it’s a fantastic organization," said the official, granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks. "He very smartly divided the political from the organizational, saying, 'Let’s leave politics out of this, let’s focus on the real world [and] stop wasting our resources on scenarios that are zero percent likely."

News.Az 

By Ulviyya Salmanli