Trump administration will head to London energy summit … and into a row

LONDON — The White House has confirmed it will send officials to a crunch energy summit in the U.K. later this month.

U.S. presence at the summit on energy security tees up a clash between European clean power advocates and the fossil-fueled path favored by President Donald Trump.

The White House would not say whether Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary and a noisy critic of U.K. climate policies, would be traveling with them. He was not included on a provisional list of 26 ministers attending the summit, published in March. 

On Friday, a White House official told POLITICO: “The Department of Energy plans on sending representation to the conference.”

Whether Wright attends or not, the summit will highlight tensions between the U.K. and U.S., which have stalked work by Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer to court Trump since he took office in January.

Efforts at outreach from London to Washington were dealt a blow this week when Trump slapped a blanket 10 percent tariff on U.K. exports to the U.S. — although Trump claimed Starmer was “very happy” Britain received the lowest level of tariff. 

The Summit on the Future of Energy Security, co-hosted by the U.K. and the International Energy Agency (IEA), runs April 24-25, and will bring together Britain and the U.S. on another topic where the two capitals have taken opposing stances.

The IEA has confirmed that energy ministers from Germany, France, Ukraine, South Korea and Turkey will attend the summit, along with EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen and the bosses of energy firms including Shell, Eni and Ørsted. 

No major U.S. energy companies have been announced.

U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband hopes to use the summit to promote his vision of homegrown renewable power, which he says will liberate the country from fossil fuels and the wild gas price swings that have harmed industry and consumers since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration views this narrative as a direct attack on its interests, which it describes as “energy dominance” through the production and export of fossil fuels. It also claims that vision underplays the vital role gas plays in energy security in countries like the U.K. The U.S. is Britain’s second largest supplier of natural gas. 

In a speech last month, Wright said: “We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less.” He called the devastating impacts of climate change a “trade off” on the economic progress of the 20th century.

He also lampooned the U.K. for displacing heavy industries to Asia before shipping back the produce. “The net result is higher prices and fewer jobs for U.K. citizens, higher global greenhouse gas emissions — and all of this is a climate policy?” he said.

Some U.S. politicians close to Trump have also picked a fight with Britain’s co-hosts. Senior Republican officials have criticized the IEA, a Paris-based energy club, of which the U.S. is a member. 

In February, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming accused the organization and its Executive Director Fatih Birol of artificially dimming the prospects for coal, oil and gas in its annual forecasts, which are influential guides for energy investment. Barrasso and other lawmakers demanded in December that the IEA “must make it loud and clear that it does not endorse ending investments in oil, natural gas, and coal.”

The IEA did not respond to a request for comment. The U.K. energy department has been approached.