A trifecta of global meetings last month laid bare the geopolitical chessboard of climate and energy policy, spotlighting the tussle between the US and China for economic and energy dominance. In his speech to the annual IMF and World Bank Spring Meeting in Washington, DC, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered a two-fold message to officials of the two Bretton Woods institutions. First, he emphasised that fossil fuels are critical for developing nations, decrying the eco-zealots’ stranglehold on global finance. Second, he pointed out that both institutions failed in their approach to China: the World Bank by continuing to treat China as a ‘developing’ country with ready access to concessionary finance, and the IMF by refusing to call out the country for its mercantilist trade policies and resulting global current account imbalances.

In London, the joint IEA-UK Summit on the Future of Energy Security saw Acting Assistant Secretary for the US Department of Energy Tommy Joyce assert fossil fuels’ indispensable role for reliable power, clashing with UK and EU representatives’ ideological insistence that only renewables ensure energy security. He highlighted the reliance on China which dominated global supply chains for rare minerals used in the renewable energy sector such as wind and solar, electric vehicles and batteries. He suggested that this reliance necessitates Western concessions to coercion from China antithetical to the former’s energy security.