U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright blasted net-zero targets as a “colossal train wreck” ahead of his trip to Europe for a gas summit and meetings with EU officials, warning the push for climate policies could weaken energy security and derail a U.S.–EU trade deal.
“Net zero 2050 is just a colossal train wreck,” Wright told the Financial Times in an interview.
“It’s just a monstrous human impoverishment program, and of course, there is no way it is going to happen,” said the Energy Secretary, whose remarks were also shared on X by the official account of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Secretary Wright, a former oil and gas executive, made his position on net zero known shortly after he was picked to lead the energy department earlier this year. Weeks earlier, the Trump Administration had given a loud and clear message on what it thinks of net zero on Day One—the day that President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, again.
After years of aligning with Europe on the net-zero agenda under President Biden, the United States is now on a collision course with the EU and its climate regulations.
The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), commonly known as the “carbon border tax”, ultimately aim to impose levies on higher-emission products imported into the EU.
Many companies outside the EU, including those in the U.S., have signaled they would rather not sell in Europe than pay significant “border taxes”, levies, penalties, or whatever the language will be later this decade, when the mechanism will come into effect.
Related: EU Court Upholds Green Label for Gas and Nuclear Energy
These rules and the EU’s “crusade” toward net zero are a threat to the U.S.-EU trade deal, Secretary Wright told FT.
“I think those regulations significantly threaten the ability to implement the trade deal that was agreed to,” he added.
The U.S.-EU trade deal for European energy purchases of American products already looks unrealistic, analysts say, even without accounting for all EU climate-related levies.
U.S. giant ExxonMobil hopes the ongoing U.S.-EU dialogue on trade would address the “bone-crushing penalties” in the EU’s climate regulations, the supermajor’s CEO Darren Woods told analysts on the Q2 earnings call last month.
Wright’s remarks from this week aren’t the first time the U.S. Energy Secretary has slammed the net zero agenda.
Europe’s goal to pursue a net-zero agenda is depriving citizens of reliable and affordable energy in a choice made by politicians, Wright said at a forum in Poland in April.
“This top-down imposition of enforced “climate policies” is justified as necessary to save the world from climate change,” Wright said.
“But I can say that climate alarmism has clearly reduced energy freedom, and, hence, prosperity and national security across Western Europe.”
Wright noted that affordability is more important than sustainability.
“Today, folks struggling to pay their bills while aspiring to live highly energized lifestyles like you and I is a far bigger global challenge than climate change. Energy access is far too important to get wrong,” Wright said.
The U.S. pushback against net zero has led to Secretary Wright saying that the United States could abandon the IEA if the organization, created in the aftermath of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, doesn’t return to forecasting energy demand without strongly promoting green energy.
“We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” Wright told Bloomberg in an interview in the middle of July.
“My strong preference is to reform it,” Secretary Wright added.
The official echoed voices in the U.S. Republican party that the agency has become an advocate of the energy transition and is not objective in forecasting energy demand trends.
From ensuring security of supply after the 1970s embargo, the agency has shifted from this purpose in recent years to endorsing the net-zero by 2050 goal and is advocating for a major change in the global energy system to include more electric vehicles (EVs), renewable power supply, hydrogen, and all other low-carbon energy sources.
The IEA’s forecast that oil demand will peak this decade is “just total nonsense,” Secretary Wright said.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
