DOHA, Qatar — Inside the U.S., President Donald Trump is dogged by rising consumer prices, the Epstein files debacle, and Republicans’ newfound willingness to defy him. But go 100 miles, 1,000 miles, or, as I recently did, 7,000 miles past U.S. borders, and Trump’s domestic challenges — and the sinking poll numbers that accompany them — matter little. The U.S. president remains a behemoth in the eyes of the rest of the world. A person who could wreck another country. Or perhaps the only one who can fix another country’s problems. That’s the sense I got this weekend from talking to foreign officials and global elites at this year’s Doha Forum, a major international gathering focused on diplomacy and geopolitics. Over sweets, caffeine and the buzz of nearby conversations, some members of the jet set wondered if Trump’s domestic struggles will lead him to take more risks abroad — and some hope he does. This comes as Trump faces criticism from key MAGA players who say he’s already too focused on foreign policy. “He doesn’t need Capitol Hill to get work done from a foreign policy standpoint,” an Arab official said of Trump, who, let’s face it, has made it abundantly clear he cares little about Congress. Vuk Jeremic, a former Serbian foreign minister, told me that whether people like Trump or not, “I don’t think that there is any doubt that he is a very, very consequential global actor.” He wasn’t the only one who used the term “consequential.” The word doesn’t carry a moral judgment. A person can be consequential whether they save the world or destroy it. What the word does indicate in this context is the power of the U.S. presidency. The weakest U.S. president is still stronger than the strongest leader of most other countries. America’s wealth, weapons and global reach ensure that. U.S. presidents have long had more latitude and ability to take direct action on foreign policy than domestic policy. They also often turn to the global stage when their national influence fades in their final years in office, when they don’t have to worry about reelection. There’s a reason Barack Obama waited until his final two years in office to restore diplomatic ties with Cuba. In the first year of his second term, Trump has stunned the world repeatedly, on everything from gutting U.S. foreign aid to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. He remains as capricious as ever, shifting sides on everything from Russia’s war on Ukraine to whether he wants to expel Palestinians from Gaza. He seeks a Nobel Peace Prize but is threatening a potential war with Venezuela. Trump managed to jolt the gathering at the glitzy Sheraton resort in Doha by unveiling his National Security Strategy — which astonished foreign onlookers on many levels — in the run-up to the event. The part that left jaws on the floor was its attack on America’s allies in Europe, which it claimed faces “civilizational erasure.” The strategy’s release led one panel moderator to ask the European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, whether Trump sees Europe as “the enemy.” Yet, some foreign officials praised Trump’s disruptive moves and said they hope he will keep shaking up a calcified international order that has left many countries behind. Several African leaders in particular said they wanted Trump to get more involved in ending conflicts on their continent, especially Sudan. They don’t care about the many nasty things Trump has said about Africa, waving that off as irrelevant political rhetoric. Trump claims to have already ended seven or eight wars. It’s a wild assertion, not least because some of the conflicts he’s referring to weren’t wars and some of the truces he’s brokered are shaky. When I pointed this out, foreign officials told me to lower my bar. Peace is a process, they stressed. If Trump can get that process going or rolling faster, it’s a win. Maybe there are still clashes between Rwanda and Congo. But at least Trump is forcing the two sides to talk and agree to framework deals, they suggested. “You should be proud of your president,” one African official said. (I granted him and several others anonymity to candidly discuss sensitive diplomatic issues involving the U.S.) Likewise, there’s an appreciation in many diplomatic corners about the economic lens Trump imposes on the world. Wealthy Arab states, such as Qatar, already are benefiting from such commercial diplomacy. Others want in, too. “He’s been very clear that his Africa policy should focus on doing business with Africa, and to me, that’s very progressive,” said Mthuli Ncube, Zimbabwe’s finance minister. He added that one question in the global diplomatic community is whether the next U.S. president — Democrat or Republican — will adopt Trump’s “creativity.” The diplomats and others gathered in Doha were well-aware that Trump appreciates praise but also sometimes respects those who stand up to him. So one has to tread carefully. Kallas, for instance, downplayed the Trump team’s broadsides against Europe in the National Security Strategy. Intentionally or not, her choice reflected the power differential between the U.S. and the EU. “The U.S. is still our biggest ally,” Kallas insisted. Privately, another European official I spoke to was fuming. The strategy’s accusations were “very disturbing,” they said. The official agreed, nonetheless, that Trump is too powerful for European countries to do much beyond stage some symbolic diplomatic protests. Few Trump administration officials attended the Doha Forum. The top names were Matt Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, and Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. Donald Trump Jr. — not a U.S. official, but certainly influential — also made an appearance. Several foreign diplomats expressed optimism that Trump’s quest for a Nobel Peace Prize will guide him to take actions on the global stage that will ultimately bring more stability in the world — even if it is a rocky ride. A British diplomat said they were struck by Trump’s musings about gaining entry to heaven. Maybe a nervousness about the afterlife could induce Trump to, say, avoid a conflagration with Venezuela? “He’s thinking about his legacy,” the diplomat said. Even Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of State whom Trump defeated in the 2016 presidential race, was measured in her critiques. Clinton said “there’s something to be said for the dramatic and bold action” Trump takes. But she warned that the Trump team doesn’t do enough to ensure his efforts, including peace deals, have lasting effect. “There has to be so much follow-up,” she said during one forum event. “And there is an aversion within the administration to the kind of work that is done by Foreign Service officers, diplomats, others who are on the front lines trying to fulfill these national security objectives.” Up until the final minute of his presidency, Trump will have extraordinary power that reaches far past America’s shores. That’s likely to be the case even if the entire Republican Party has turned on him. At the moment, he has more than three years to go. Perhaps he will end immigration to the U.S., abandon Ukraine to Russia’s aggression or strike a nuclear deal with Iran. After all, Trump is, as Zimbabwe’s Ncube put it, not lacking in “creativity.”

By ALEX PERRY in Paris Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO This article is also available in French When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company. Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer. The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné. Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes. Advertisement “What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.” Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands. In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.” Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty. On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique. The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months. The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021. “TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity. In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.” Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” This week, the spokesperson repeated that position. Advertisement Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels. The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors.  The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre. In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught.  After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant. There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them. Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared. Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project. This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate.  Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial.  Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business. Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted. How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné? ‘POUYANNÉ PETROLEUM’ Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made. Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow. Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.” A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes. His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business. “Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023. Advertisement Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.” Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.”  Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer. The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.” The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.” In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.” ‘DON’T ASK US TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND’ What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them. His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021. A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation.  Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast. Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West. While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks. As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient. “Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.” Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line. “Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said. ‘A COLLAPSE WILL NOT PUT TOTAL IN DANGER’ The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar. At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more. To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa. But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions.  By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion.  Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings. Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road.  A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression. Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.” Advertisement In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.” In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.” Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces. Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency. It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one. Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added. Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. “This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said. Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.” Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss. “Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.” ‘VERY VULNERABLE’ A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security. “This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.” Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.” Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates. At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.” The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said. The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.” The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO. “Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors. Advertisement Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound.  The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed. “It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.” ‘TRAIN WRECK’ By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out. Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris. That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know. One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town. In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23. Advertisement Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return. Hours later, the Islamists attacked. “Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said. Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope. Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris. Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond.  ‘WHO CAN HELP US?!’ Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists. The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police. With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues. But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently. Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.” Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company. Advertisement A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in. It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said.  If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them. So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers. Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up. On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates. On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America. “He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’” Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved. “I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.” Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out. The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.” Advertisement TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.” The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault.  “The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.” In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.” He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.” ‘AN ALMOST PERFECT DINNER PARTY’  TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation. Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris. Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100.  Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change. Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public. Advertisement The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership.  The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct.  In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it. Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year. He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels.  Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.” So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions. “Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?” ‘FALSE ALLEGATIONS’ The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction.  The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak. U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively. Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October.  In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them. Advertisement ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny. The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company.  There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document. The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them. TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews. In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.” Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.” Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.” A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.” In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre. Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year. Advertisement That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K.  In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath.  A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest. Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.” For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life. ‘CAN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR?’ The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields. In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events. The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029. The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse. Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project. A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.” Advertisement All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia. The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town. TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year. “This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week. Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure.  Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns.  Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond. A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders. At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration. In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.” Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.” Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.” At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.” Advertisement TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique. Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business. “You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?” As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests. First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?” Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?” Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.

LUXEMBOURG ― Internal EU spats don’t get much bigger than the European Commission facing off in court against the European Parliament. Played out during a three-hour hearing before 14 red-gowned judges in Luxembourg on Tuesday, the Court of Justice of the EU examined the Parliament’s allegations that the Commission broke its own rules when it unfroze funding to Hungary in December 2023. MEPs accuse officials of political expediency because the decision came on the eve of a crucial summit of EU leaders where the bloc was desperate for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to play ball on aid to Ukraine. “The Commission rushed” the unblocking of EU funds, which it based on a “premature and incomplete” assessment of Hungary’s adherence to rule-of-law and judicial independence standards, the Parliament’s lead lawyer Richard Crowe told the court. At the heart of the conflict ― and the key case law the court will produce when it issues a judgement ― is how much discretion the Commission has in assessing rule-of-law violations. Four lawyers from the Commission, backed in court by a lawyer from Hungary’s government, strongly defended its approach, arguing that its decision was based on detailed and objective legal analysis. In the days after the decision, MEPs derided the move. It came just hours before a summit in Brussels at which Orbán dropped his objections to Ukraine’s EU membership talks and a €50 billion aid package for Kyiv. At the time, Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian MEP who opposes Orbán, told the Parliament the Commission was “selling out” EU values.  “The timing of the decision was not due to political consideration, but simply to the fact that the Commission, after a lengthy investigation procedure, which had already lasted several months, had no further grounds to prolong the procedure,” the Commission’s lead lawyer Bernd Martenczuk said. Tamara Ćapeta, the advocate general assigned to the case, pressed both sides during the hearing and expressed skepticism about the Commission’s decision-making. “I am still puzzled by the outcome,” Ćapeta said, questioning why the Commission had deemed judicial independence sufficiently restored to release one tranche of funds while keeping another €6.8 billion frozen under a separate conditionality mechanism that also deals with judicial independence and rule of law. Ćapeta, who will issue a non-binding legal opinion on Feb. 12, also probed the Parliament’s accusation that the Commission had failed to publish a detailed assessment justifying its decision. Her opinion will help guide the Court’s final ruling, expected several months later. MILESTONES At the heart of the legal dispute is the interpretation of the Common Provisions Regulation (CPR) and its “Charter Conditionality,” which sets strict conditions — most notably, judicial independence — for the release of cohesion funds. The Parliament’s lawyers argued that the Commission should have taken a broader view of systemic rule-of-law deficiencies in Hungary, not just whether pre-established technical “milestones” had been formally met. Katalin Cseh, a Hungarian MEP who opposes Orbán, told the Parliament the Commission was “selling out” EU values. | Thierry Monasse/Getty Images They argued the Commission had “turned a blind eye” toward Budapest’s controversial sovereignty protection bill, which was being discussed when the Commission unfroze the funds. Crowe also argued the Commission had ignored a bill passed in 2023 that intimidated judges to stop them from requesting assistance from the European court on how to apply EU law in Hungary. Martenczuk dismissed the Parliament’s concerns over the sovereignty protection bill, saying that at the time of the decision there was no evidence the bill would undermine judicial independence. He characterized other objections raised by the Parliament as either speculative or irrelevant. Hungarian government lawyer Miklós Zoltán Fehér emphasized the broader stakes: “This case raises general questions that will certainly have an impact on the future functioning of the EU budget and EU funds.”

[1] https://digitalreport.protectedplanet.net/ [2] Satellite sea surface temperature measurements began in 1982; ocean heat content estimates are derived from in situ observations that started in 1960. [3] https://marine.copernicus.eu/osr9-summary/flipbook/ [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/world/europe/spain-beach-blue-dragon-sea-slugs.html#:~:text=The%20arrival%20of%20the%20tiny,what%20they’re%20dealing%20with. [5] https://marine.copernicus.eu/osr9-summary/flipbook/ [6] https://marine.copernicus.eu/osr9-summary/flipbook/

LIVERPOOL, England — Forget about thriving. Party conferences are to be survived. The fringes, receptions, panels, meetings, dinners and drinks parties make most people’s heads spin. The heaving bar queues and sharp wine probably don’t help. It’s hard enough for the experienced. As someone suffering/enjoying my 10th conference season, I still feel I haven’t quite got the hang of it. But I do have a few basic tips for newbies:  The security queue is usually fine, apart from that one time (probably 9:15 a.m. on Monday) when it takes an hour (plus) to get through. No, telling security how important you are doesn’t help. I have a fond memory of a famous journalist shouting threats up to staff on a balcony. They obviously couldn’t care less. But take your lanyard off when you leave. The only thing worse than being called a Labour traitor/Tory scum by protesters is when you’re actually just a journalist or a lobbyist. (Which, by some people’s metrics, are arguably worse.) Everyone gossips, and there are journalists everywhere. This is very good for journalists and not so good if you are not a journalist. By the time you’ve thought about telling your boss/news desk/client something they either very much do or very much don’t want to hear, it’s already on social media, somewhere. Related: The Wi-Fi will always drop out exactly when you need it, especially in the stuffy basement of Liverpool’s ACC. The first time you hear the party leader’s big pitch at an evening reception, it might seem thoughtful and interesting. Prepare to hear it seven more times. Cabinet ministers’ main stage speeches are scripted and checked to within an inch of their life. Most of them do nothing to change the music. You usually won’t learn anything from a five-way panel event that you didn’t already know or expect. Ditto five-minute stump speeches at regional receptions (There are many, many honorable exceptions, known in the trade as “gaffes.”)  Just because the title of a fringe event is interesting, doesn’t mean the event will be. In fact there is often an inverse correlation. Don’t worry too much. There’s always a party you can get into. | Adam Vaughan/EPA A panelist being (invited) to a fringe doesn’t count. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re in the guide. Anyone who says “it’s more of a comment than a question” should be catapulted into the Mersey. You will get “conference brain.” Dramas will assume enormous importance that mean absolutely nothing to anyone a mile away. Work out where you’ll sit for meetings. Some lobbying shops run lounges, but you need to register in advance to use them. Plan for this three weeks before reading this piece (sorry). Block out time to eat. I avoid the cooked breakfast, because it makes me feel sluggish, and make sure I get lunch. Others go for the cooked breakfast and last all day. Spoiler: All the food in the conference center is measly, overpriced and unsatisfying. Book a dinner somewhere you can sit down. It doesn’t matter who with, or even if you eat alone — your blood sugar needs you. Keep something small and sweet in your bag, too. The first time you hear the party leader’s big pitch at an evening reception, it might seem thoughtful and interesting. Prepare to hear it seven more times. | Adam Vaughan/EPA Stay hydrated. No, coffee doesn’t count. Beer definitely doesn’t, although it does seem to help in other ways. Alcohol-free beer tastes almost like the real thing these days. Bring painkillers, Berocca, Strepsils — and some kind of jumper. The conference venue can be home to its own strange kind of dry chill. And always prepare for rain — and howling wind. Liverpool and Brighton (home to Labour conference) are far less forgiving than Manchester or Birmingham (home to the Conservatives), but they can all be brutal. In early fall, that midnight rain is cold. Cobbles make it worse. Good luck getting a taxi! Which brings us to: Proximity is everything, especially when choosing a hotel. You won’t spend any time there anyway. See also: The McDonald’s on the dual carriageway by the Albert Dock is always heaving at 2 a.m. Good luck getting a taxi! | Adam Vaughan/EPA There are usually at least six drinks parties going on at the same time. It’s bedlam trying to work out what they all are, where, and how you can get on the list. Don’t worry too much. There’s always a party you can get into. No one remembers the parties you weren’t at; only the ones you were. The minister’s aide or a party policy official will usually be a better contact than their boss. And you might even have a nice time together. Work out your own personal diary before you get there. You’ll suddenly realize the 11 things you wanted to do at the same time. But rip it all up when you get there. Go with your gut. Lean into the chaos. Almost no conversations you have after 1 a.m. will be useful … apart from that one that changes the entire path of your career. And the things you do in these hours will be your very best memories of conference. Choose at least one event to go to purely because you’ll enjoy it personally — not for any professional gain. Unless you’re one of those mad people who actually enjoys conference. You will get sick. Best of luck.

PARIS — After nearly two weeks as a political dead man walking, French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s moment of reckoning has arrived. Bayrou and his minority government on Monday will face a confidence vote over a proposed €43.8 billion budget squeeze that, barring a miraculous change of heart from a major bloc of opposition lawmakers, they are almost certain to lose. Toppling the government would likely force President Emmanuel Macron to hunt for a fifth head of government in less than two years as Paris scrambles to assuage financial markets that it can sufficiently rein in runaway public spending. We’ll bring you the latest from newsmakers hitting the airwaves on French radio and television. We’ll be following developments and watching financial markets in the lead-up to the proceedings in the National Assembly, which are slated to begin at 3 p.m. For more on what to expect, check out our guide on how to watch the government collapse like a pro (INSERT LINK SUNDAY).

President Donald Trump’s campaign to shake up international institutions has a new aim: upending the leadership of a Paris-based agency whose data and research help shape global energy policy. The 32-country International Energy Agency has increasingly rankled Republicans in Washington by producing analyses that point to a waning future for fossil fuels and a need to embrace wind and solar power. Now the Trump administration is demanding that the agency replace its No. 2 leader with someone more aligned with the president’s policies, multiple energy industry insiders and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO’s E&E News. The IEA’s second-ranking position has traditionally been filled by an American. Its current second-in-command, retired career State Department diplomat Mary Warlick, has served in the role since 2021. The new pressure from Washington follows months of Trump’s efforts to bend global power centers to his will, including through his trade wars, his demands for higher defense spending by NATO members and his withdrawals from bodies such as UNESCO and the World Health Organization. It also follows months of public complaints about the IEA from top Trump administration officials, most notably Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who has vowed to make changes at the body or end U.S. support. Some Republicans say the IEA has discouraged investment in fossil fuels by publishing analyses that show near-term peaks in global demand for oil and gas. “The product that the IEA produces is not generally accepted by everybody. It’s just not,” said Mark Menezes, who served as deputy Energy secretary during Trump’s first term. “And the political context has changed.” ‘FIGHT FROM THE INSIDE OUT’ The Trump administration is aiming to push changes internally, according to a Republican energy lobbyist with close ties to the Department of Energy. “They want to get operatives in there, whether they’re career or political, who can actually move the needle,” said the lobbyist, who like the others familiar with the U.S. efforts was granted anonymity to speak freely. “They’re going to get someone they trust and that person is going to fight from the inside out.” Regarding the U.S. effort to pressure the IEA, the lobbyist said: “The fact that Wright is out there now talking about it publicly shows that it’s elevated.” House Republican appropriators are also lashing out against the IEA by pushing legislation to withdraw U.S. funding starting Oct. 1. The White House did not respond to requests for comment, and an Energy Department spokesperson did not respond directly to questions posed by E&E News. The IEA said in a statement that it “does not disclose information about individual staff contracts due to reasons of privacy and confidentiality.” A former U.S. official who worked closely with the IEA called Warlick a “hardworking, serious, diligent and capable professional” who does her work in a way that is consistent with guidance from the executive director and with guidance from the member countries. The U.S. helped establish the IEA following the 1973 Arab oil embargo to focus on energy security. Today, the organization publishes influential energy market forecasts and data that guide major investments and government policies. Many of those studies have conflicted with the White House’s insistence that fossil fuels are more reliable and often cheaper than wind, solar and other clean energy sources. Leaving the IEA would lessen U.S. influence or input on its work. Historically, the United States has wielded a lot of influence at the agency and has been able to work with other member governments to advance its mission, said Jonathan Elkind, a former assistant secretary for international affairs at DOE during the Obama administration. “There are going to be certain elements of policy that the current U.S. administration really disagrees with other member countries on, and the U.S. administration is entirely within its rights to advocate for adjustments in the agenda of the IEA,” Elkind said. “The U.S. does not have the right to simply insist that everybody will change as a consequence of what the U.S. has done.” Threatening to pull out of the IEA is “misguided and myopic,” said Amanda Maxwell, managing director of global engagement at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. “Unfortunately, it’s par for the course for the Trump administration to try and ignore objective data,” Maxwell said. “Whether it’s climate science or energy trends, this administration is trying to make us less informed about the world we live in.” ROSY SCENARIOS Wright has been especially critical of the IEA’s projection that oil demand will peak this decade, calling it “nonsensical” in a Breitbart interview in June. Republicans also bristled at the Biden administration’s use of IEA analysis in 2024 to justify a U.S. decision to pause consideration of new liquefied natural gas export permits. In testimony at a Senate hearing last year, David Turk, then-deputy Energy secretary under Biden, cited IEA findings that showed global natural gas demand on the decline. The Trump administration is now betting heavily on the opposite occurring — pushing for a huge increase in U.S. natural gas exports and using trade pressure to cajole allies into buying massive amounts of the fuel, though some market analysts have expressed doubts about the realities of those hopes. The IEA has also said that no new oil and gas projects are compatible with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit the rise in global temperatures to less-than-catastrophic levels. Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from that pact on the first day of his second term. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and then-Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), now retired from Congress, wrote in a letter to IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in March 2024 that the IEA has strayed from its mission and become a “cheerleader” for the “energy transition.” Birol has defended the organization’s commitment to energy security while acknowledging that its mission has broadened. Meanwhile, Trump ordered the State Department in February to do a six-month review of U.S. participation in international organizations and treaties and recommend leaving those that don’t serve his priorities. One point of contention is the IEA’s World Energy Outlook, a lengthy annual report that dissects global trends and related impacts on energy security and greenhouse gas emissions. IEA calls it the “most authoritative global source of energy analysis and projections.” In 2020, the IEA abandoned a portion of the outlook, known as the “Current Policies Scenario,” that analyzed the global energy picture based on existing national energy policies. Trump officials have criticized the IEA for replacing the current policy analysis with a “Stated Policies Scenario,” which multiple Republicans and fossil fuel supporters say is based on policies that aren’t being implemented. The critics say the change paints a rosier-than-justified picture of global trends toward lower-carbon energy sources. IEA officials are pledging to resurrect the Current Policies Scenario this year. “As ever, the forthcoming World Energy Outlook 2025 will contain multiple scenarios reflecting the wide spectrum of possible outcomes that today’s market conditions and policies imply,” an IEA spokesperson told E&E News. “This year’s edition will include the Current Policies Scenario, which will illustrate the implications of a continuation of policies and measures currently in place.” Warlick, the IEA’s deputy executive director, spent decades at the State Department, including as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Serbia from 2010 to 2012 and as the National Security Council’s senior director for Russia under George W. Bush. From 2014 to 2017, Warlick was the State Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of Energy Resources and represented the U.S. on the IEA governing board. Trump administration officials in DOE’s Office of International Affairs, which is led by acting Assistant Secretary Tommy Joyce, tried to pressure the State Department into signing off on pushing Warlick out in March, according to a former State Department official. At the time, State prevented that from happening, but since then a broad reorganization of the department has eliminated its Bureau of Energy Resources and most of the officials there who worked closely with the IEA. That could mean DOE would face little resistance if it tries again. In recent IEA meetings, POLITICO has reported, U.S. officials have pushed for the organization to stop publishing data that they argue promotes the shift to clean power over fossil fuels. Just how the U.S. would force the agency to replace Warlick isn’t entirely clear. She is on a limited contract, and while the U.S. is an important member of the IEA, providing around 14 percent of the organization’s budget in recent years, it isn’t the only one. Warlick rarely speaks publicly. At an Atlantic Council event in 2022, she said that the uneven pace of clean energy investments among countries has caused “geopolitical fragmentation” in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Such investment is still well below the level needed to bring [greenhouse gas] emissions down if we are to keep net-zero and sustainable development goals in sight,” Warlick said. “Massive investment in clean energy is the best guarantee of energy security in the future, and it will also drive down harmful greenhouse gas emissions.”

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music This week, we’re taking a breath. EU Confidential is stepping away from summits, trade battles, and late-night trilogues — and turning to something more refreshing: books. Host Sarah Wheaton is joined by audio producer (and self-confessed book nerd) Dionisios Sturis for this special summer reading edition. From sharp political non-fiction to playful fiction, poetry and literary escapes, we’re sharing what EU insiders are packing in their holiday bags — and what they think you should read this summer. You’ll hear from: -Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat – Jessica Rosencrantz, Sweden’s minister for EU affairs – Glenn Micallef, Commissioner for intergenerational fairness, youth, culture and sport – And from listeners and colleagues with their own smart, silly, brainy and bloody picks We also speak with Jeroen Reijnen, author of “Big in Brussels” — an insider’s guide to surviving (and thriving) in the EU bubble. So pour yourself something cold, put your phone on silent, and dive in. And here is our summer reading list: * Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan * Killing Thatcher – Rory Carroll * Do Not Disturb – Michela Wrong * The Great Game – Peter Hopkirk * The Situation Room – George Stephanopoulos * Autocracy, Inc. – Anne Applebaum * I Giorni di Vetro (The Days of Glass) – Nicoletta Verna * Dak li l-Lejl Iħallik Tgħid (What the Night Lets You Say)– Pierre J. Mejlak * The Vegetarian – Han Kang * Human Acts – Han Kang * Tatendrang (Urge for Action) – Theresia Töglhofer * The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré * Perfection – Vincenzo Latronico * Prague – Arthur Phillips * Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf * Common Sense: A Political History – Sophia Rosenfeld * I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There – Róise Lanigan * The Redbreast – Jo Nesbø * The Kingdom – Jo Nesbø * The Kindly Ones – Jonathan Littell * The Empusium – Olga Tokarczuk * Tell Me Everything – Elizabeth Strout * There Lives the Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die – Tove Ditlevsen * Notes from a Big Country / I’m a Stranger Here Myself – Bill Bryson * H is for Hawk – Helen Macdonald

LONDON — Tight spending constraints have been causing Keir Starmer’s government all manner of headaches. Now his own troops want a scaling back of the official forecaster they believe holds too much of a stranglehold on his administration. In an intervention to POLITICO, an influential grouping of Labour MPs are on Sunday night urging the government — bound by strict fiscal rules and scrutinized by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) — to slash the number of fiscal forecasts the watchdog issues and to stop treating its estimates as a “crystal ball.” It comes hot on the heels of a debacle over welfare spending that some in the party believe was driven by concern for balancing the books over sound policymaking. Jo White, the leader of the Red Wall group, which represents Labour MPs in highly-competitive seats in former industrial heartlands, told POLITICO: “Red Wall constituents are crying out for change and there is so much potential in what the government is doing — be it in our 10 year NHS plan, infrastructure investment or Industrial Strategy. “But to deliver national renewal we need policy and fiscal stability and the OBR has a vitally important role to play in that. Fine tuning policy to fit a central estimate — that we know will be inaccurate — is not the way to do that. To recognize the value of the OBR, we must acknowledge their limitations.” WELFARE ROW The OBR was set up in 2010 by Britain’s post-financial crisis Coalition government to give independent analysis of Britain’s public finances. Every time the chancellor makes a set-piece financial statement to the Commons, the forecasts of the watchdog are pored over and their headline figures tend to set the narrative on the state of the economy. Rachel Reeves, who has been dubbed the “Iron Chancellor,” set herself tight fiscal rules — policed by the OBR — in a bid to build Labour’s credibility in opposition. Labour MPs pushing for change are particularly exercised by the OBR’s role in the recent welfare row. A spring forecast from the watchdog said the amount of budgetary headroom left to Reeves had fallen dramatically since the prior forecast —largely because of higher debt interest payments and weaker-than-expected tax receipts.  It was this change that explained the scramble by Reeves to billions of pounds in savings from the country’s ballooning disability benefits bill. Without the proposed cuts, Reeves would’ve been seen as on course to miss one of her “iron clad” fiscal rules: that her budget should be on course to at least balance the books by 2029/30. Labour MPs who came into politics raging against the austerity imposed after the 2008 financial crisis had no interest in what they saw as balancing the books on the backs of the U.K.’s most vulnerable, and threatened a mass rebellion that removed the vast majority of the planned savings. A slow-motion series of U-turns afterwards appeared to be a desperate attempt to get the OBR to still “score” the hoped-for changes.  MOUNTAIN TO CLIMB The Red Wall MPs who want a rethink have enlisted Andy MacNae — an avid mountaineer and adventure sports entrepreneur who entered Parliament at last July’s general election — to outline how the OBR’s remit should be altered. Rather than two forecasts a year, its economists should produce just one, the MP for Rossendale and Darwen argues, and this should only come alongside the chancellor’s budget, not at another fiscal event. MacNae also calls for single-point estimates of the chancellor’s “fiscal headroom” to no longer be treated as “gospel” across government. Instead, he argues, the leeway against the Treasury’s budgetary rules should be replaced by ranges and probabilities to prevent a focus on what he sees as misleadingly precise figures. This would amount to a big change in how they’re perceived. MacNae told POLITICO: “OBR forecasting is an invaluable tool that must be used properly. It provides a rough guide — a well-informed guess — as to where the economy might be in four years’ time. But the OBR has never claimed to have a crystal ball and we shouldn’t treat it as if it does.  “This is especially the case regarding the ‘central estimate’, which seems to be given far too much weight in influencing fiscal policy, despite the OBR themselves recognizing that it’s ‘almost certain to be wrong‘.  “We have to understand that these are useful but limited forecasts, which should help to guide our decisions, but not determine them.” MacNae points out that OBR forecast published on March 26 didn’t take into account the government’s £113 billion increase in infrastructure spending, measures in its industrial strategy or its investment in social housing — nor did it account for Donald Trump’s looming tariffs or new trade deals. At best, he argues, they are incomplete snapshots of the public finances — and at worst, they age too quickly to be useful. In a piece in the left-leaning New Statesman, MacNae puts it in colorful terms, arguing that nobody would cancel a wedding months out because of a forecast of drizzle. “Instead, let’s stay alert, carry an umbrella when needed, and remain flexible,” writes MacNae — who once co-authored a book on mountain safety. Reeves argues that altering the checks and balances on a government are “risky,” not least because of the importance of the bond markets. But she did say in an interview with the Guardian that she was looking “seriously” at recommendations by the International Monetary Fund about better fiscal policymaking. A Treasury official, granted anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations, suggested Reeves is considering asking the OBR to only assess compliance with the fiscal rules once a year, while still requesting their fuller forecasts. Ben Zaranko, associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, agreed that a move away from debates around “spuriously precise” estimates of headroom and the “constant policy tinkering” that results from them is needed. But he added: “That’s not the fault of the OBR, who bring transparency and credibility to the process, and do what has been asked of them by the government. Seeking to reduce the amount of transparency, by moving to one forecast per year rather than two, is not a solution to the underlying problem.” A Treasury spokesperson stood by Reeves’ fiscal rules as the “non-negotiable” basis of economic stability. “The first bill passed by this government included the fiscal lock, which prevents the side-lining of the OBR and demonstrates that this government will never play fast and loose with public finances,” the spokesperson added. That bill — nicknamed the “Liz Truss Bill” because of its attempt to score political capital on the former prime minister’s disastrous handling of the economy — only discusses requiring OBR forecasts on major taxation and spending announcements. Reeves has committed to only holding one of these a year — so the changes being pushed by Labour MPs wouldn’t require legislation. The fiscal rules may be non-negotiable right now, but how and when they’re actually measured appears very much on the table.