US Energy Secretary Chris Wright renewed his threat Thursday to pull out of the International Energy Agency, saying Washington would press the organization to abandon a net-zero agenda “in the next year or so.”
Speaking on the last day of an IEA ministerial meeting in Paris, Wright said the 52-year-old agency should return to its founding mission of ensuring energy security.
“The US will use all the pressure we have to get the IEA to eventually, in the next year or so, move away from this agenda,” Wright said in a news conference.
“But if the IEA is not able to bring itself back to focusing on the mission of energy honesty, energy access and energy security, then sadly we would become an ex-member of the IEA,” he added.
Meaning of Wright’s Warning
A US exit means a deep cut to IEA’s budget undermining the agency’s global influence.
Washington is not just a member of the agency but its largest funder. It alone contributes to 25% of the IEA core budget (equivalent to between $25 and $30 million annually) and therefore its exit would “dry up” a quarter of the agency’s financial resources.
Also, Washington is the world's largest oil and gas producer, meaning the US exit will affect the agency's reports and their credibility in markets.
The IEA was created to coordinate responses to major disruptions of supplies after the 1973 oil crisis. But in recent years, it became the main advocate of green transition policies, which the US considers as “politicized.”
The IEA produces monthly reports on oil demand and supply as well as annual world energy outlooks that include data on the growth of solar and wind energy, among other analyses.
Wright praised IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol for reinserting in November 2025’s annual outlook a Current Policies Scenario in which oil and gas demand would grow in the next decades. That scenario had been dropped for the past five years.
But the report still included a scenario where the world reaches net zero emissions by mid-century.
Birol’s current four-year term ends in 2027, but Wright demurred when asked who he would like to head the IEA, which has over 30 member nations.
“We remain today undecided or neutral on who the leadership is. We care about the mission much more than the individual leaders,” the US energy chief said.
If Birol can make the agency “get out the politics and get out the anti-energy part of it, that's great by us,” said Wright, who first warned last year that the US could leave the IEA if it did not reform.
For his part, Birol insisted that the Paris-based agency was “data-driven.” He said, “We are a non-political organization.”
The IEA was created “to focus on energy security,” Wright said on Wednesday at a ministerial meeting of the agency in Paris.
“That mission is beyond critical and I'm here to plead to all the members (of the IEA) that we need to keep the focus of the IEA on this absolutely life-changing, world-changing mission of energy security,” he said.
The Energy Secretary said he wanted to get support from “all the nations in this noble organization to work with us, to push the IEA to drop the climate. That's political stuff.”
His comments come just a day after he publicly threatened to quit the organization unless it abandoned its focus on the energy transition— a call that several countries rejected, including the UK, Austria and France.
