Joyce’s intervention ran counter to the sentiments expressed by most other speakers at the summit, including U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and French Minister for Industry and Energy Marc Ferracci, who said: “As long as we remain massively dependent on fossil fuels, there will be no energy security for Europe.”
The U.S. has pressured Europe to increase its imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas. But Ferracci said: “We need to accelerate the phasing [out] of imported energy, and this means decarbonization.”
One U.K. energy industry figure said of Joyce’s speech: “That went down like a fart in a phone box.”
Chinese ‘coercion’
Both Ferracci and Joyce voiced concerns over the reliance of clean energy supply chains on China.
Joyce said the construction of wind turbines was reliant on magnets. “And since China, the supplier of nearly all of them, restricted their sale, there are no wind turbines without concessions to or coercion from China.”
Net-zero policies, he said, risked ”putting abstract emission goals and the interests of our adversaries first, and the security of our people last.”