The International Energy Agency has dropped any explicit reference to climate change from its list of policy priorities, bowing to months of pressure from the Trump administration after several years of projecting a path to net-zero by 2050.

In a summary document released at the end of a two-day ministerial summit in Paris, climate change was “not listed among the agency’s priorities,” Politico EU reported Thursday. “Instead, the document focuses on energy security, resilience, critical minerals, and electricity systems.”

Those priorities are all elements of the energy transition that the IEA had begun to champion in recent years. But the watered-down language still represented “a remarkable turnaround from the last ministerial two years ago, when addressing the climate crisis and phasing out fossil fuels was named as the IEA’s top priority,” the news story states.

The chair’s summary, issued in lieu of the usual joint communiqué from participating countries, stated that “a large majority of ministers stressed the importance of the energy transition to combat climate change and highlighted the global transition to net zero emissions in line with COP28 outcomes.” Those outcomes, adopted at the end of the United Nations climate summit in 2023, included a transition out of fossil fuels, as well as a tripling of renewable energy deployment and a doubling of the pace of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.

At the closing news conference for the ministerial, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol “sidestepped questions about whether Washington had pushed to dilute climate language” and declined commit to including a net-zero scenario in future editions of the agency’s annual World Energy Outlook, Politico wrote.

Threatening to Quit

Earlier in the week, the United States was still threatening to quit the IEA, claiming the Paris-based agency wasn’t doing enough to align its independent modelling and analysis with the Trump administration’s energy agenda.

The Reuters news agency broke the story Tuesday, in a short dispatch reporting that U.S. Energy Secretary and former fracking CEO Chris Wright “is not satisfied yet” with the “reforms” the IEA has introduced to water down its work.

The U.S. does “not need a net‑zero scenario” from the IEA and could leave the agency “if they insist that it’s so dominated and infused with climate stuff,” Wright reportedly told an event hosted by the French Institute of International Relations.

“We’re definitely not satisfied,” Wright added, ahead of the IEA ministerial conference in Paris Wednesday and Thursday. “If it goes back to what it was—it was a fabulous international data recording agency, it was getting into critical minerals, was focused on big energy issues—we’re all in on that.” But “if they insist that it’s so dominated and infused with climate stuff—yes, then we’re out.”

Through the summer and fall, Wright worked hard to arm-twist the IEA into abandoning the net-zero energy scenario that it first published nearly five years ago. In May, 2021, the IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO)—which it styled at the time as the “gold standard of energy analysis”—included a full net-zero emissions scenario that called for no new investment in oil, gas, or coal development.

Instead, the scenario showed a massive increase in renewable energy adoption, speedy global phaseouts for new natural gas boilers and internal combustion vehicles, and a sharp focus on short-term action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are supercharging the global climate emergency.

“Beyond projects already committed as of 2021, there are no new oil and gas fields approved for development in our pathway, and no new coal mines or mine extensions are required,” the IEA wrote at the time. “The unwavering policy focus on climate change in the net-zero pathway results in a sharp decline in fossil fuel demand, meaning that the focus for oil and gas producers switches entirely to output—and emissions reductions—from the operation of existing assets.”

Since then, in the WEO and a slew of other publications, the IEA has proclaimed an emerging “Age of Electricity”, consistently projecting an imminent plateau for all three fossil fuels followed by falling demand.

U.S. Senate Republicans’ criticisms of the IEA’s work date back at least to March 2024, and by last summer, Wright’s strong-arm tactics were out in the open. “We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” he told Bloomberg in July. “My strong preference is to reform it.”

In November, in the words of one longtime IEA-watcher, the 2025 World Energy Outlook put “poison on the menu” with a Current Policies Scenario (CPS) that projects rising oil and gas demand through 2050 and 3°C average warming based on existing national laws, policies, and regulations. The CPS was just one of three future pathways the IEA modelled, and a net-zero scenario survived the adversity.

But a longstanding concern with the WEO is that its lead scenario each year draws the lion’s share of attention from analysts and investors, potentially influencing many billions of dollars’ worth of energy decision-making around the world. As recently as last week, an analysis by a government-funded think tank in India showed coal consumption more than doubling through 2050, despite growing evidence that the country is pivoting rapidly to solar.

Nothing Much to See Here

In a brief post on social media ahead of the ministerial, Birol said he’d met with Wright and discussed at least one area where the agency and the Trump administration are still cooperating. “We discussed a range of global energy matters, including how the @IEA Summit on Clean Cooking in Africa on 9-10 July that we’re co-chairing in Nairobi can deliver key progress on this vital issue,” he wrote.

But in a more expansive interview with the Financial Times, he warned that a “fracturing in the world order” is widening divisions on energy policy, and that climate change is “moving down on the international policy agenda”.

Kelly Trout, research director at Oil Change International—which previously led a multi-year #FixTheWEO coalition urging the IEA to align its analysis with a net-zero future—warned that Wright is “attempting to bully ministers and the IEA into caving to the fossil fuel lobby.”

Wright’s threat to depart the IEA, “even as the agency is successfully growing its global membership, reflects the Trump administration’s desperate attempts to reshape the IEA’s independent energy analysis in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy that makes them and their donors wealthy,” Trout told The Energy Mix in an email.

With oil demand set to peak by 2030 and decline from then on, just as the IEA has projected, “countries around the world are recognizing the energy security and affordability benefits of shifting from fossil fuels to renewables, and are cooperating to accelerate the transition and realize these critical advantages,” Trout added. “If the USA follows through on its threat to leave the IEA, the agency may have a significant budget hole to fill—but will have safeguarded the credibility, integrity, and independence of its analysis.”

Over the last 10 years, the U.S. has covered an average 14% of the IEA’s budget, or about $6 million per year.

Veteran IEA-watcher Stephan Singer, senior advisor on global energy policy at Climate Action Network International, was just as happy to see Wright follow through on his promise. “CAN welcomes the USA to leave the IEA,” he told The Mix. “No more ridiculous roadblocks. That will give the IEA the needed space to further work with responsible and caring governments across the globe to credibly foster policies for renewables, energy efficiency, and 1.5°C scenarios.”

Maria Pastukhova, programme lead, global energy transition at the E3G climate and energy think tank, said Wright’s demands are “disconnected from today’s economic and geopolitical reality and damaging to the global economy.”

In contrast to 1974, when the IEA formed, “energy security today is not just about barrels [of oil] in storage,” she explained on LinkedIn. It’s about a wider form of “systems security” that includes bigger, more reliable, more flexible power grids, affordability and demand reduction, cyber- and physical protection of energy infrastructure, clean technology supply chains, recycling and stockpiling of renewable technologies, and managing the economic transition for fossil-producing countries.

“Yes, the IEA must remain rigorous—ideally even more rigorous than before, linking its modelling [more strongly] to the economic growth pathways. Yes, its modelling must stay transparent and analytically grounded, resistant to political cherry-picking by others, including its own members,” she said.

“But stripping out the modern energy systems security issues would not depoliticize the IEA. It would narrow its field of vision exactly when the risk landscape is widening.”