At an energy security summit in London this week, around 60 government officials presented sharply different views on how to secure national energy supplies, with the US pushing for more fossil fuels and downplaying renewables.
While the leaders of the UK, European Union (EU) and ministers from Barbados and Colombia argued that clean energy provides energy security, ministers and officials from oil and gas producers like the US, Iraq and Egypt said that fossil fuels should remain part of the energy system.
But while his Iraqi counterpart boasted of using more renewables alongside oil and gas, the US Department of Energy’s Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of International Affairs Tommy Joyce criticised renewables too, arguing that they cause power cuts and increase reliance on China.
Fossil fuel-price rollercoaster
This Thursday and Friday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Summit for the Future of Energy Security took place at Lancaster House in London – which stands in for Buckingham Palace in Netflix’s “The Crown” series – and kicked off with the UK’s minister for net zero and energy security Ed Miliband reading out a letter from King Charles.
It said that “events over recent years have shown that, when well-managed, the transition to more sustainable energy systems can lead itself to more resilient and secure energy systems”.
Later, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the UK was “paying the price for our over-exposure over many years to the rollercoaster of international fossil fuel prices, leaving the economy and therefore peoples’ household budgets vulnerable to the whims of dictators like [Russia’s President] Putin, to price spikes and to volatility that is beyond our control”. He added that since the 1970s, half of the UK’s recessions have been caused by “fossil fuel shocks”.
Speaking after Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised the US for providing gas “when we needed it during the energy crisis” and said US gas imports “remain of strategic importance for the European Union”. “But it is not only a question of alternative suppliers” of gas other than Russia, she added.
Von der Leyen argued that “clean homegrown renewables” strengthen the bloc’s resilience, while at the same time spurring new jobs and innovation. “As our energy dependency goes down, our energy security goes up. That is a lesson we have learnt in Europe,” she added.
Expensive fossil fuel imports
Ministers from Barbados, Colombia, France and Spain echoed these messages. Colombia’s mines and energy minister Edwin Palma Egea said clean energy would be cheaper in his country, where many people “have to choose between paying for energy or to eat – that is a dilemma for them”.
“We have to go for clean energy,” he said, asking the room of energy officials and business leaders for investment, “not just to secure decarbonisation for the North of the world but also to develop a huge economy around the green economy”.
Barbados’ energy and business development minister Lisa Cummins said that energy security looks different for small island developing countries like hers. “Barbados is on the receiving end of fossil fuel generation in the sense that we are on the frontline of sea level rise as the result of the climate crisis,” she said.
She added that, as well as suffering from fossil fuels through the climate crisis, Barbados spent over $1 billion importing fossil fuels to generate electricity in 2024. The Caribbean country’s biggest fossil fuel suppliers are Trinidad and Tobago and the US, but it aims to generate all of its electricity from renewables in 2030, using solar, wind and battery storage.
“Geopolitical tensions then create energy insecurity for countries like ours. We do not produce the technologies, we do not produce energy goods, we are not the producers of fossil fuels, we are the importers and the price-takers and the ones that are on the frontline of every single geopolitical crisis that is happening around us,” Cummins said.
US criticises renewables
But, speaking immediately after her, US envoy Tommy Joyce blamed recent power cuts in Barbados’ Caribbean neighbour – US territory Puerto Rico – on the island becoming more dependent on renewables for electricity. “After bolting on over about 30% wind and solar variable renewables, traditional grids began failing,” he said.
Puerto Rico’s electricity grid has been damaged by storms like Hurricane Maria in 2017, made more intense and frequent by climate change, and by under-investment. The company operating the grid said the most recent blackout was caused by an overgrown tree damaging an electric cable.
Joyce added that pursuing offshore wind power would make countries reliant on China. “A typical offshore wind turbine requires four tonnes of a permanent magnet made in the form of rare earth elements and, since China, the supplier of nearly all of them, restricted their sale, there are no wind turbines without concessions or coercion from China,” he said.
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On Thursday, the UK government announced it would invest £300m ($400m) in the supply chain for British offshore wind. “Let my message to the world go out: come and build the clean energy future in Britain, said Starmer.
Speaking to journalists in a briefing before the summit, energy experts said that relying on other countries for equipment like solar panels and wind turbines is preferable to relying on them for fuel. Ember’s Europe programme director Sarah Brown said importing fossil fuels involves “constant risk, constant cost” whereas importing machinery like solar panels is a one-off on both fronts.
But Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC, told Climate Home that the climate community needs to address the question of whether the West can decarbonise while decoupling from China.
He said that the drift towards economic fragmentation hinders emissions reductions through technologies like electric vehicles and lithium batteries. “Without a proactive response, this trajectory could further derail climate action and lend weight to the conclusion articulated by Mr. Joyce: if China controls the raw materials essential for cleantech manufacturing and we are determined to decouple from them, then we might as well abandon climate goals altogether,” he warned.
Petro-states praise fossil fuels
At the London summit, Joyce’s pro-oil and gas stance was backed by Hayyan Abdel-Ghani, the oil minister of Iraq – the world’s most oil and gas-reliant economy. “As you all know, fossil fuels will remain, and it’s one of the most important sources of energy production around the world,” he said.
Iraq has “worked a lot in order to boost and increase the production of gas” and is planning a transition from oil to gas, he noted, adding that at the COP28 climate summit “it was looked at that [gas] could be the transitional source of energy going forward”.
At COP28 in 2023, governments agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems but also said that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security”. This clause – pushed for by Russia – was criticised as a “dangerous loophole” for gas at the time.
Egypt’s petroleum minister Karim Badawi said in London that Egypt was focusing on “how we can really unlock future reserves” to make petroleum available to Egyptians and “partners around the world”. He added that fossil fuels are not just a source of energy but the basis for industries like petrochemicals.
Outside the summit, Lauren MacDonald, lead campaigner for the Stop Rosebank campaign, told Climate Home that “the only way to have real energy security and lower bills – which is what the people of this country want – is to invest in cheap homegrown renewables”. Rosebank is an undeveloped offshore oil and gas field in Scotland where production was approved by the previous UK government but which is now being challenged in the courts.
MacDonald pointed out that oil and gas companies were present at the energy security summit. Delegates from BP, Abu Dhabi’s National Oil Company, ExxonMobil, Shell and Sonelgaz were among those listed as attending a private panel titled “Oil and gas security – ensuring security and affordability for today and tomorrow”.
The session was to be addressed by the oil ministers of oil-producing states, like Norway and Guyana, and co-hosted by Jassim Alshirawi, secretary-general of the Riyadh-headquartered International Energy Forum.
Reporting back publicly to the summit as a whole, Alshirawi said the group he co-chaired had discussed measures like oil and gas producers keeping some of their fuel in reserve to combat disruptions to oil and gas supply from choke points, extreme weather and cyber attacks. “We heard that ensuring conditions for adequate investment and access to finance for all energy sources including oil and gas remains of key importance,” he added.
Other sessions covered energy in the contexts of access and affordability, resilience to climate change, the role of artificial intelligence, electricity supply and critical minerals supply chains.
As delegates went into the summit on Thursday morning, MacDonald and her fellow climate protesters chanted “no more oil, no more gas, we don’t want a climate crash” and “hey, we want to keep living – no more oil, no more drilling”. They held up two inflatable eyeballs and eyeball placards, alongside one that said “Starmer – all eyes on you”.
This article was updated on April 25, 2025 to add Alshirawi’s comments and information on Rosebank, as well as a table of participants at the oil and gas security session and the announcement of investment into British offshore wind
The post At energy security talks, US pushes gas and derides renewables appeared first on Climate Home News.
At energy security talks, US pushes gas and derides renewables
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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