New Energy Cooperation Must be Different in Structure

The Energy That Moves the World

Good morning to everyone. I embrace the greetings and thank you for the invitation to be part of this forum to discuss a topic of utmost importance: energy.

Decades of scientific evidence show with a high degree of certainty that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming. While technical debates persist about the exact magnitude, speed, and regional effects of this phenomenon, there is broad scientific consensus on the causal relationship between fossil fuels and climate change.

There is also consensus that climate change generates high economic and social costs: natural disasters, loss of agricultural and labor productivity, pressure on healthcare and fiscal systems, rising inequalities, and risks to the global financial system. Various studies conclude that the economic costs of inaction will far exceed the costs of adaptation and energy transition.

This was compounded in the winter of 2022 when millions of European families faced a reality that should not exist in the 21st century: the fear of losing heating due to the outbreak of a war. At the same time, in Latin America, middle-class families saw their electricity bills consume an ever-larger portion of their salaries, affected by rising international oil prices. In Africa, 600 million people still lacked access to reliable electricity, suffering similar consequences.

Today, that crisis is repeating itself with other actors who, regardless of the consequences, have chosen to make life harder for people around the world.

A global crisis, two wars on three continents, one common root: energy is not just a productive input. It is the core of household life, the backbone of state sovereignty, and today, the deepest fault line in global geopolitics.
It is from this conviction that I want to speak to you today.

The New Energy Order: A Global Tectonic Fault

For decades, the world order had a main axis: the transatlantic relationship between Europe and the United States. It was an imperfect axis, marked by asymmetries, but it was predictable. It had tacit rules of support and written ones, fundamentally deterrent. Some of these rules are no longer acceptable, such as unconditional support for Israel. But it was on this axis that much of the multilateral architecture we know today was built: the United Nations system, trade agreements, international financial institutions, and the Paris Agreement itself.

That axis is breaking. And energy is the epicenter of the fracture.

The Trump administration has not hidden its agenda: "American Energy Dominance." It is a brutally honest strategy. The United States went from being a major net importer of energy to becoming a net exporter in 2019, primarily due to the boom in shale oil and shale gas through fracking. As a result, it has enormous reserves of oil and gas, to which it seeks to add Venezuela’s oil—the country with the world’s largest reserves. Now we see how it uses them as a geopolitical instrument: maximizing the production and export of fossil fuels to anchor allies and rivals in an energy dependence of American origin; pressuring Europe to buy American liquefied natural gas (LNG); offering coal and LNG to Africa and Asia as a solution to energy poverty; and dismantling all domestic support for renewable energies.

This is not ignorance. It is a deliberate bet to maintain a world order where power is concentrated in the hands of those who control fossil fuels. Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is not an accident—it is the logical consequence of this vision.

Added to this is the fact that China has become a fundamental actor in the global energy transition because it simultaneously dominates the manufacturing of renewable technologies and the processing of critical minerals essential for clean energy. China leads the world in the production of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and wind components, in addition to controlling much of the refining of copper, lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earths used in energy storage, electromobility, and electrical grids. As a result, much of the global deployment of renewable energy currently depends on industrial and technological capabilities developed by China.

There is an additional factor that rarely appears in discussions about energy geopolitics but which, I believe, will dominate in the coming years: artificial intelligence (AI). The main bottleneck for AI development is not human talent or capital—it is energy. The data centers that power large language models, cloud computing, image recognition systems, and mass information processing consume amounts of electricity that double and triple every few years. The most conservative projections estimate that AI’s energy demand will surpass that of entire countries within the next decade.

This has two direct consequences for this debate. First: whoever controls energy controls AI. Not just as a metaphor, but as an economic reality. Trump’s "fossil energy dominance" is not just a reverse climate policy strategy—it is also a strategy for technological supremacy. Anchoring global energy dependence on American fossil fuels is also anchoring global technological dependence on American companies that feed on that energy.

Second consequence: AI is simultaneously a geopolitical weapon and an economic multiplier. Countries that access it first will have competitive advantages in sectors ranging from medicine to agriculture, from industry to finance. Those that do not access it—or access it under conditions of dependence—will be consumers of foreign technology, not producers of their own. The old pattern we talk about in Latin America—we provide the resources, you provide the added value—is now being reproduced in the digital domain.

The energy dispute that this Forum debates is not just about the climate. It is about who will define the 21st century.

Europe’s Role: A New Story

In the face of this, Europe must position itself as an alternative: sustainable energy cooperation, the European Green Deal, the Global Gateway. The question this Forum must ask itself—and the one I ask myself, coming from the Global South—is not whether Europe is right in its diagnosis. It is. The question is whether Europe will live up to its own promise.

Countries of the Global South, like Chile, suffer the most anguishing consequences of climate change while seeking our path to development. A Global South that, by geographic accident, is also a major provider of non-conventional renewable energy, green fuels, and the critical minerals that the transition needs. That is why we are the destination of investments from all developed countries, but especially from China and the United States. Our intention—and necessity—is to be active subjects, not passive objects, of this new order that is being built.

We are the battleground. But we are also one of the players.

A New History with Europe

The relationship between Latin America and Europe has two histories: one sad, and one we are still writing.

We know the sad history well. For centuries, Latin America exported silver, guano, saltpeter, copper, and oil. We exported wealth but did not achieve development. Every time the world found a new commodity it needed, our countries became suppliers. And almost always, the pattern was the same: we provided the natural resources, but we did not build—together with foreign investors—the capacities to generate knowledge and technology, which produce the added value that increases and sustains the profits of having natural resources.

The good news is that today there is a historic opportunity to write a different story. The bad news is that this opportunity can be wasted if the new energy cooperation replicates the old pattern with a different commodity. Replacing oil with clean energy and electromobility, but changing nothing in the distribution of progress.

The new energy cooperation must be different in structure, not just in rhetoric. It must be based on horizontality, not subordination. On addressing common challenges that give sustainability to global development, particularly in the least developed countries. This requires creating and transferring new technologies. A good example is the electrolyzers needed to produce green hydrogen and its derivatives, which will likely become a primary source for replacing fossil fuels. In this area, Europe, Chile, and other Southern countries face common challenges. Such as the more efficient and cheaper production of electrolyzers. Currently, China has an advantage because it has access to cheaper electrolyzers that are not available at the same price elsewhere in the world. Here, technological cooperation (between the EU and Chile or Latin America) would produce enormous benefits for both sides and enhance geopolitical security.

Here, technological cooperation (EU-Chile or Latin America) would produce enormous benefits for both parties and greater geopolitical security.

Moving in this direction is not only key to the development of both parties but also to democracy. In my government, we were guided by the notion that there is no development without democracy, and no stable democracy without development. The anger of societies that feel dispossessed is the breeding ground for authoritarianism. And authoritarianism, as we have seen, goes hand in hand with climate denial.

That is why the question is not just: Is the energy green? The question is: Who owns it? Who benefits? For whom and for what is it built?

Chile as Inspiration

Allow me to speak now from the concrete experience of governing.

Chile has 23 percent of the world’s lithium reserves. It has the world’s largest copper exporting company, the Atacama Desert—with the highest solar radiation on the planet—and wind in Patagonia. In a world that needs critical minerals and renewable energy for its transition, Chile has what the world is looking for.

During our government, we promoted various measures to provide the world with what it needs while strengthening the country’s sustainable development. For example, the National Lithium Strategy places the Chilean State at the center, with CODELCO—the world’s largest state-owned copper company—leading lithium development. Not to close ourselves off from the world, but to negotiate from a different position: with sovereignty over the resource, we are investing to add value, with our own technology and industrial development, building capacities.

The National Lithium Strategy was much more than a change in the State’s role. It was a bet on a development model different from classic extractivism. I am summarizing it in a few words, but it encompasses a profound discussion about what kind of country we want to be.

Chilean lithium is extracted from the salt flats of the north, unique and irreplaceable ecosystems that support extraordinary biodiversity and Indigenous communities with historical rights over these territories. That is why, along with redefining who controls the resource, we established a network of protected salt flats: areas where extraction is prohibited not because there is no lithium, but because there are things more valuable than lithium. This decision was resisted. But it was the right one.

We also defined that the State would not only be a shareholder—it would be the vector of development. The revenues generated by lithium must finance the transformations Chile needs to stop depending on its natural resources. Today’s lithium must pay for tomorrow’s knowledge industry.

For this reason, we created the National Institute of Lithium and Salt Flats, so that Chile can accumulate its own scientific knowledge about its resources: not just to exploit them, but to understand, model, and protect them. Because knowledge about Chilean lithium cannot remain solely in the hands of the companies that extract it.

We also defined a strategy for the development of green hydrogen and its derivatives and launched the first implementation plan. We are aware that the demand for green hydrogen has shifted over time, partly due to decisions by the Trump administration, but there is agreement that demand will grow significantly to become one of the great antidotes to climate change. In this area, we have also invested in making the industry viable and creating the knowledge required to strengthen its value chain.

This is the difference between being a laboratory and not a quarry: not just asking for more in exchange for the resource, but building the capacity to understand these resources, add value to them, and decide sovereignly on their destiny.

This logic has another reference that may seem surprising: CERN. Switzerland has no lithium. No oil. No major natural resources. But it built the institutional framework, human capital, and international agreements to host the world’s most important particle physics laboratory. During my government, Chile joined this great particle laboratory, an incorporation that will give our country’s companies, universities, and institutions access to international tenders that will generate direct value in our technological ecosystem. We will export high-tech products if we win these tenders, and it will also allow us to access patents that we could not previously know.

Chile, I hope together with the European Union, can do something analogous in the field of energy transition technologies. Not by trying to do everything alone, but by being a node in a network of scientific and industrial cooperation that develops technology from and with South America. Identifying the institutions, production chains, and agreements that allow the value of the transition to remain, at least in part, in the countries that provide the resources.

This requires partners who understand the difference between buying resources and building capacities. Between a supplier-customer relationship and a partnership. Europe, with its tradition of scientific and industrial cooperation, its universities, research centers, and experience in industrial policy, can be that partner. If it chooses to be.

Closing: What Kind of Partner Does Europe Want to Be?

The world is reorganizing. The energy transition is not an option—it is a physical, climatic, and increasingly economic necessity. Renewable energies are today, in many contexts, the cheapest option and also the safest to avoid the rising cost of daily life for people.

But this transition can happen in two very different ways. It can happen in a way that deconcentrates global energy power, distributes gains more equitably, benefits families, strengthens democracies, and reinforces multilateral institutions. Or it can happen in a way that simply replaces dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf with dependence on another globally hegemonic country, without changing anything in the underlying power structure.

This choice is not ours alone to make. It is also yours.

Germany, which for decades supported development cooperation as a pillar of its foreign policy. Europe, which presents itself as an alternative to Trump’s fossil fuel domination model. In the face of this challenge, genuine cooperation and self-interest coincide. The EU—and Germany in particular—need clean and affordable energy. Co-designing the required technologies benefits both parties.

And there is something else I want to say here, in this room, with the honesty that a forum like this allows.

Europe is in the middle of a debate about its own budget. The invasion of Ukraine, the retreat of the United States as a guarantor of the continent’s security, and Trump’s pressure for Europe to arm itself have pushed European governments to massively increase defense spending. I understand this. It is a sovereign decision for Europe, and there are legitimate arguments for it.

But I am concerned about what is happening with the other side of the equation. European cooperation—the development aid, energy transition programs with the Global South, climate financing—risks being deeply cut to make room for military spending. And that is a profound strategic mistake.

If Europe invests in defense to protect its security, and at the same time dismantles the cooperation instruments that build its own security and that of its partners, the net result is not more security—it is more instability, more fertile ground for other powers (with fewer scruples about sovereignty and rights) to fill the void.

Investment in defense cannot mean the dismantling of the European cooperation system. Because that system is not an act of charity—it is the smartest investment Europe can make in a multipolar world, where genuine alliances are built with actions, not words.

What the Global South needs is not more rhetoric of partnership. It needs real technological development that generates added value, jobs, and capacities in the South.

The historic window is open. The question is whether we have the political courage to cross it together, on equal terms.

This keynote was held by Gabriel Boric at the Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2026.