In an emailed statement, the IEA said: “The IEA Secretariat’s current programme of work is based on the mandates from our Member countries, as agreed at our last Ministerial in February 2024. The IEA Secretariat will continue to take into account feedback from all 32 Member countries on their priorities for the Agency going forward.”
Headquartered in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the IEA was created following the 1973 oil crisis to act as a buffer against energy shocks. In 2019, after a sustained campaign by environmentalists, the agency shifted its focus to researching and actively supporting global efforts to avoid disastrous and extreme global warming.
That elevated the agency’s chief, Turkish energy expert Fatih Birol, to a role as one of the chief spokespeople for the green transition, supported by the agency’s formidable army of energy experts and modelers. Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, a Brazilian official said the “International Energy Agency has been quite extraordinary in pointing directions and showing impressive statistics and tendencies that are influencing considerably the negotiation.”
‘Eye of the storm’
This also made Birol a target of fossil fuel interests, especially in the U.S. With the second Trump administration far more intent on reorganizing the world’s institutions to reflect its version of American interests, Birol and the IEA are now “caught in the eye of a storm,” the European official said.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso — a powerful Republican from the coal state of Wyoming — has personally criticized Birol and is leading the charge to have the IEA ditch research that aids efforts to stop catastrophic climate change, given that such changes “are never going to happen,” he told reporters this winter.
President Donald Trump has ordered a review of U.S. involvement in all international organizations due in August. That has put bodies like the IEA on notice, with Washington’s withdrawal from the agency one possible outcome. U.S. funding has made up an average of 14 percent of the IEA’s annual budget over the past 10 years, according to the agency.