Britain’s Collision Course With Trump’s Energy Counter-Revolution

Ed Miliband has spent his career as one of the world’s most committed climate zealots, and he now finds himself installed as Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s new government, personally taking up the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced this week that the former Energy Secretary would personally occupy the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank, a job normally left to a junior minister, so that the “climate crisis” and overseas development sit at the very heart of British foreign policy. “International development is not an add-on to British foreign policy – it is central to it,” Miliband declared. “By taking on the role of UK governor to the World Bank, I want to send an unambiguous signal that this Government is serious about its global leadership on development and climate.”

He arrives there determined to push the Bank back toward the climate agenda it has just spent a year being forced to retreat from under the Trumpian energy agenda of “drill baby drill” and “energy dominance”. It sets Miliband, and the Burnham Government behind him, on a collision course with the Trump administration’s deliberate campaign to strip the ‘globalist’ climate agenda out of the very institutions Miliband now intends to use as his platform.

The Trumpian energy counter-revolution

Since Donald Trump’s return to office, his administration has waged a sustained campaign to wrest the great multilateral institutions back from the ‘globalist’ climate agenda that captured them over the past two decades. Washington threatened outright withdrawal from the International Energy Agency unless it abandoned the Net Zero fantasies embedded in its 2021 “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap; the IEA duly reintroduced its Current Policies Scenario, quietly shelving two decades of advocacy dressed up as forecasting.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has led the same campaign more bluntly still with respect to the Bretton Woods twin institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). The Treasury Secretary told the IMF and World Bank that fossil fuels remain critical for developing nations and, reading between the lines, that the eco-zealots’ stranglehold on global finance had to end. Last October, Bessent told the World Bank directly to refocus on affordable energy, poverty reduction and country self-reliance; by this April he was warning the IMF that “mission creep” into climate, gender and social issues had left it disconnected from its core mandate.

Both institutions seem to have started moves to comply with these marching orders from their most powerful stakeholder. The World Bank formally abandoned its target of directing 45% of lending to climate causes only last month, a retreat which Reuters reported followed months of pressure from Bessent personally. The IMF, for its part, is folding its climate and gender units into a single office focused on core macro-financial work, eliminating what Bessent called “extraneous, non-core issues” from its board work programme.

The actions of key Trump officials such as Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright seek to reverse what amounts to a long march of climate activism through the institutions founded to fight poverty and stabilise the international monetary system, not to remake the global energy mix in the image of Whitehall’s and Brussels’ green priesthood. The same instinct – that Western institutions had been captured from within by a narrow progressive elite indifferent to the people they nominally serve – animated Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich Security Conference address in February 2025, a speech aimed at European governance broadly but which set the tone for everything that has followed at the IEA, the World Bank and the IMF.

Enter the climate zealot

Miliband declared that his elevation would send “an unambiguous signal” of Britain’s climate leadership, never mind the folly of such an enterprise for a country responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions. Lord Nicholas Stern – the leading climate alarmist economist who authored the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change – predictably welcomed the move as a signal that would resonate “powerfully” internationally. No one who has followed Miliband’s career should be surprised. Ed Miliband has spent nearly two decades ratcheting up Britain’s climate commitments, from the 2008 Climate Change Act he shepherded as Gordon Brown’s Climate Secretary through to the legally binding 2050 Net Zero target and the windfall taxes that have throttled North Sea production.

His tenure at the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is defined by an economic illiteracy borrowed wholesale from his favourite economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission-oriented” industrial policy. Miliband’s doubling-down instinct has persisted even as the IPCC’s own high-emissions scenarios were quietly abandoned as unrealistic. His successor at DESNZ, Miatta Fahnbulleh, offers no meaningful change of direction and the real question is whether she will be “as mad as Ed Miliband”, not whether Britain’s Net Zero trajectory will bend under this new Burnham Government. What has changed is the stage. Miliband now carries his climate maximalism from a domestic arena that voters can eventually punish at the ballot box into an unelected international board seat at the World Bank precisely at the moment Washington is dragging that institution back toward energy realism.

A green activist in Downing Street

Miliband’s elevation cannot be separated from who put him there. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the former Manchester mayor now installed in Downing Street, is himself an enthusiastic green activist, insisting there should be “no turning away from Net Zero”, even as households across Britain buckle under energy bills inflated substantially by that same agenda. While the UK Government’s overseas aid will fall from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2029, and climate finance itself has already been cut by 14% – it doubles down on the rhetoric. That combination, cutting the cheques while intensifying the sermon, is entirely of a piece with a governing instinct that treats climate virtue as costless because someone else, eventually, pays the bill: the British consumer at home, the World Bank’s other shareholders abroad. Burnham and Miliband are not an odd pairing but a matched set, each reinforcing the other’s conviction that Net Zero orthodoxy is not up for renegotiation, whatever Washington or the British electorate might think.

Collision course with Washington

None of this bodes well for the transatlantic relationship. Donald Trump could barely tolerate Sir Keir Starmer; he will find still less to like in a Downing Street occupied by an unapologetic green activist and a Foreign Secretary who has spent a decade insulting him. Miliband once called Trump a “racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper”, a line that resurfaced painfully when BBC Breakfast’s Jon Kay put it back to him on air and Miliband could only mutter that he had “said some things in the past”. Trump allies have not let the appointment pass quietly: Steve Bannon told the Telegraph the choice was “very injurious” to the special relationship, and the White House was reportedly “deeply concerned” well before the appointment was confirmed.

President Trump has shown before that he can forgive past insults, but as one commentator observed, Miliband may yet have to “bend the knee” much as the ill-starred Peter Mandelson did in describing his own past attacks on Trump as “ill-judged and wrong” before taking up his short-lived Washington ambassadorship – a piece of public grovelling that Miliband, given his temperament and his convictions, seems far less suited to replicate.

The deeper problem is not personal but structural. Miliband’s record gives Washington plenty of substantive grounds for concern beyond old insults: he has been a vocal opponent of new North Sea drilling and, as one commentator noted, led opposition within government to the US use of Diego Garcia for American bombers – hardly the profile of a British Foreign Secretary Washington would have preferred. Washington’s entire strategy at the World Bank and IMF has been to strip out precisely the climate mandate creep that Miliband now intends to reassert from his new perch. A British Foreign Secretary who arrives at the Bank’s board table determined to reverse Bessent’s hard-won progress is not merely an awkward diplomatic footnote; he is a direct challenge to the declared policy of the United States Government, delivered by a minister with no shortage of past provocations already on the record. Add a Prime Minister who seems unlikely to countenance any retreat from Net Zero, and the ingredients are in place for a genuinely fractious chapter in US-UK relations – one considerably more consequential than the everyday friction of allied governments who happen to disagree.

The British Government appears not to have noticed the ground has already shifted beneath it. The IEA, the World Bank and the IMF are, however fitfully, rediscovering their founding purposes under American pressure. Miliband’s determination to drag the World Bank back the other way, backed by a Prime Minister who shares his convictions, suggests Britain is about to find out just how much leverage a single governor’s seat still carries against the wishes of the institution’s largest shareholder – and just how much patience Washington has left for a government that keeps choosing the losing side of that argument.

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.