Britain’s climate minister takes a trip to South America — and tries to win round her skeptical hosts.
By ABBY WALLACE
in Parque Andino Juncal, Chile
Photo by Abby Wallace
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Three-and-a-half thousand meters above sea level, chunks of icy rock tumble down the side of Chile’s Juncal Glacier and crash into the lake below.
It startles the pack of ten officials, diplomats, scientists and park rangers gathered on the other side of the water, here to see up close the impacts of climate change on the Andean glacier.
One of them is Katie White, a climate activist-turned-U.K. government minister, who was first elected as an MP in the northern English city of Leeds in 2024.
“I think just standing by that glacier and actually hearing the instability, and hearing the rocks falling … It’s just a real reminder of what is happening and what we’re doing to our world,” White says.
The climate minister was in Chile, and after that Argentina, to persuade her hosts of the urgency of the climate crisis at a time when some of the world’s most powerful leaders are ditching environmental policies. But are governments, including the new Donald Trump-aligned administration here in Santiago, actually listening?
“Well,” reflected White, “I gotta make them listen.”
The self-styled “practical greenie” will have her work cut out.
Chile’s left-leaning government under Gabriel Boric agreed to work with the U.K. on hitting global climate targets after Labour swept to victory. But it has been booted out.
Its replacement is the new right-wing government of Jose Antonio Kast, which has tossed out 43 pending environmental regulations — including, according to reports, rules governing harmful emissions from power plants — just days into office.
That sparked alarm among local campaigners.
“It was a very unusual move from a new government,” said Ezio Costa, a lawyer and executive director of FIMA, a Chilean environmental NGO. “This is something that we are worried about, and I think that it shows that the ideas of the new government are not aligned with the protection of the Chilean environment,” he added.
Kast’s focus, instead, was a day-one deal with Trump on access to Chile’s much-coveted supply of critical minerals. In Argentina, President Javier Milei has toyed with following Trump’s example and abandoning the landmark Paris agreement to limit global warming.
Kast is “part of the same platform that brought Trump, [Hungary’s Victor] Orbán, [Italy’s Giorgia] Meloni and Milei to … power,” Costa said.
Sitting down with POLITICO for several conversations during her three-day Chile trip, White offered a glimpse into how Labour hopes to land its climate-friendly message in a world where that job has got tougher.
“Politics is the art of the possible,” she acknowledged ahead of meetings with her Chilean counterparts. “Not the art of the perfect.”
In Parque Andino Juncal, the sun beats down on the streams and wetlands of the Chilean Andes, home to lizards, small green birds (called “bacon eaters” by local rangers), and guanacos — the South American llama.
“We want to find ways of working with [the Chilean government]. And my understanding is that Chileans are pretty practical in the same way that Brits are,” said White, perched on a rock not far from the foot of the glacier.
The 13,000-hectare park, which White trekked to the glacier edge, is a privately-owned conservation site. She wants to learn about the toll climate change is taking on Chile before heading into the “rooms of government” for talks.
Evidence of that impact is unmissable.
“We see this big lake in front of the glacier, but this lake just formed less than eight years ago,” said Francisco Fernandoy, a glaciologist who’s been monitoring its retreat. “If you were here eight years ago, you can just walk over the glacier.”
People have to “face reality,” White said, arguing that a certain level of climate change is “baked into the system already.”
United Nations experts warn the world is already set to miss targets for limiting planetary warming agreed by 195 countries in Paris over a decade ago. That, the UN says, means extreme events like wildfires and drought becoming ever more common.
“I think it’s dangerous to go in with assumptions. I think there is a lot of things we will have in common,” White said, brushing off fears about a clash of priorities.
The U.K. will, White suggests, lean into wider arguments about a shared pursuit of economic growth, something Keir Starmer’s government has focused on — so far without much sign of success — since the day it came to power.
That is one common goal, White said. “They see that there is some regulation that is not helpful to that. So does our government.”
Economic upside is the main message White is here to sell: In copper-rich Chile, clean energy deals are in the interests of both countries.
Chile’s “pro-new technologies” approach is already attractive to investors — and that opportunity isn’t lost on the green-skeptic new government, according to Costa, the NGO campaigner. Those investments mean “it’s unlikely that the government will go hard against these climate change policies,” he said.
The country is, for example, the world’s top copper producer. Copper demand is going to “radically increase,” said Christopher Vandome, a critical minerals expert at the Chatham House think tank.
Kast’s rush to sign up to critical minerals collaboration with Trump is “fundamental to the national security and commercial industries of both countries,” according to an account from Santiago.
For White, standing at a viewing point on top of one of the country’s largest copper mines, owned by British-headquartered Anglo-American, such deals are about green progress, too. Climate and critical minerals are “two sides of the same coin,” she said.
Her government needs access to minerals like those under her feet, which are fundamental to building clean tech like wind turbines and electric cars, and hitting ambitious targets for shifting off reliance on high-polluting oil and gas.
To that end, demand for copper is expected to double in the U.K. alone by 2035, according to Whitehall’s critical mineral strategy, which also commits the country to diversifying away from reliance on Chinese supply chains.
“For me, this is the practical layer of: How do we solve the climate crisis?” White said.
From the retreating glacier to the copper mine, she argued, the impact of the crisis and its potential solutions are “juxtaposed in a way that I’m not sure you could see quite as clearly anywhere else in the world.”
As White chatted, self-driving trucks rolled around the mine pit below. The minister pocketed a small piece of shiny copper ore to take home.
Future co-operation with Chile on critical minerals may mean “access to some of this,” she said. “But it may mean unlocking access elsewhere.”
Countries across the world are vying for resources like those buried in the Chilean Andes. U.S. officials have already swooped in. London remains a small player in the global critical minerals market.
But White has come armed with her own pitch. In a volatile world, the U.K’s well-developed clean energy planning “stands us in good stead to be a good partner” and an “honest broker” in global energy deals, she said.
Her visit is a chance to suss out Santiago’s priorities for its critical minerals and thrash out what the U.K. can offer, experts reckon.
Chile is “potentially a complete powerhouse of the industrial transition,” said Nick Mabey, chief executive of the climate think tank E3G.
“I imagine that the U.K. wants to find out where the new government is positioning itself in that context, and probably, in a more parochial sense, work out whether the U.K. is going to get access to some of Chile’s resources,” he added.
“Yes, we’d like to work with them on any other forum in terms of moving forward our climate change ambitions. But this is practical action,” White said.
All this is happening against the backdrop of a global energy shock, one which has focused minds in Westminster on shifting to clean power.
“We’ve been working together for years,” White said from a park bench in northern Santiago. “But as the trip approached, it became more apparent that … energy being central to our relationship was even more relevant.”
As she spoke, U.K. gas prices had just hit 136 pence per therm, up roughly 75 percent since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks on Iran. A barrel of brent crude — a benchmark for international oil prices — was $100, up almost 40 percent in the same five weeks.
The conflict has rattled global energy markets. Forecasters expect a big jump in U.K. energy bills from July. Ministers and officials are wondering how to bail out hard-pressed families if costs spike in the summer and fall.
It’s the kind of volatility from which the U.K. government is desperate to break free, by scaling-up even more wind and solar power at home. In the minds of ministers, the only answer is domestic renewables, insulated against international turbulence, and supply chain pacts with countries like Chile to build them.
Shifting to a cleaner energy system is becoming more crucial “hour by hour,” White said. Chancellor Rachel Reeves told G7 leaders last week to follow the U.K.’s lead by rushing to go green as a way of beating future crises.
Over 7,000 miles away, White planned to make the same overtures towards her Chilean counterparts.
“First and foremost, we need to make sure that we establish a good relationship with this government, and energy security [and] clean energy will be at the center of that,” she said.
Later in the week, White and Chile’s new Energy Minister Ximena Rincon agreed to work together “at pace to deliver the energy transition and build out resilient supply chains across renewable energy, electrification and nuclear,” according to a note from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The Ministry of Energy in Santiago did not respond to a request for an account of the meeting.
There is a reason White has trekked to the top of the Andes for all this.
She may be here paving the way for a “strategic” partnership with Chile, but the hours spent trekking up a glacier, her team in tow, were used to prepare for talks with the new government about teaming up on the move to clean power.
“Clearly, for climate change reasons, I would like that shift to be as swift as possible,” White said, as her car ferried her away from the glacier. And, she added, “I would also like Britain to do pretty well out of it.”
The global rollout of renewables, and the cheap cost of tech like solar, was a “pipe dream” when she first started out on climate work in 2004. But now, she reckons, the green transition is “completely unstoppable.”
There are deals to be made, White insisted.
“There are some people who are trying to peddle a case that this is some kind of ideology,” she said. But she rejects the idea green policies are to blame for politicians backing away from the climate agenda.
“I’m not a purist. I’m not an ideologue,” White said, as she headed back to the heart of Santiago. “I’m a practical Yorkshire woman, and this is a scientific question.”
