President Trump’s positions and policies, combined with record coal consumption and booming global electricity demand, geo-economic confrontation, and widespread concerns about energy security, are changing the game when it comes to understanding realistic decarbonization trajectories. The war in Europe is intensifying competition between defense and transition budgets. This is also the case elsewhere in the world.

International fragmentation is now compounded by worrying national fragmentation in the energy transition, in a context of budgetary and political crisis, where some are seeking to undermine technologies, policies, institutions, and companies rather than devising an essential long-term energy and climate strategy commensurate with this brutal deterioration in the global context. The challenge is no longer to discuss the merits of this or that technology, or to call for a pause or acceleration of the transition in the name of saving industries or the planet, but to develop a realistic and credible approach to the relationship between industrial policy, decarbonization, societal acceptability, value chain resilience, and energy security in a highly constrained environment where China and now also the United States have a major impact on our economies and constrain our choices.

This Ifri Paper aims to shed light on the French and European debate on the rapid transformation of energy markets and policies worldwide. The goal is to refocus efforts and priorities on keeping the rise in temperatures below 2 °C, focusing on a few key issues that could enable rapid reductions in emissions and promote a certain international convergence. This concerns the deployment of renewable energies and the reduction of coal and oil in industry, electricity production, methane leaks, and energy efficiency, particularly for air conditioning and new uses. There is no single, universal solution to ensure the transitions. Nothing is linear, and we must now, based on the world as it is and not as it should be or as we would like it to be, identify an even more effective, detailed, and focused path to achieve better results. This means choosing our battles and reformulating certain previous priorities, as well as considering reducing emissions where it is cheapest to do so : abroad, in countries that are implementing credible decarbonization strategies.

The full version of the study is only available in French.