US Energy Secretary Chris Wright urged the International Energy Agency on Wednesday to abandon its work on climate change and focus instead on energy security."I want to get the other support of all the nations in this noble organisation to work with us, to push the IEA to drop the climate. That's political stuff," Wright said at a ministerial meeting of the agency in Paris.
Wright threatened last year to pull the United States out of the IEA -- which was founded to coordinate responses to disruptions of supplies after the 1973 oil crisis -- unless it reformed the way it operates.
The IEA was created "to focus on energy security", Wright said on Wednesday.
"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," the former fracking magnate said.
Speaking earlier, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol insisted that the Paris-based agency was a "data-driven" organisation.
"We are a nonpolitical organisation," he added.
