Fracking firm CEO Chris Wright has been nominated to lead the US Department of Energy, and his climate sceptic views do not augur well, writes Andrew Warren, chair of the British Energy Efficiency Federation, in an article on the Business Green website.
More about the role of the Department of Energy is available here.
Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary spells very bad news for US climate policy
“There is no climate crisis – and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”
“We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods, despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists.”
“The only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”
These are precisely the sorts of comments you might expect to read below any of the dozens of articles that have appeared recently in the Daily Telegraph – stories which themselves attack any attempt to further the net zero agenda. And, for the most part, such rants are likely to be automatically dismissed by BusinessGreen readers as rabid, antiquated ignorance, and irrelevant to the real world.
But from next week, when Donald Trump is inaugurated as the new President of the US, these views are set to immediately become commonplace in the upper echelons of power, with huge implications for energy policy throughout the world.
Indeed, all of the above quotations erroneously casting doubt on the climate crisis are taken directly from a video uploaded to LinkedIn last year by Chris Wright, who has been chosen by Trump to become the White House’s new Energy Secretary – a role that is set to afford him massive influence on US energy and climate-related policy.
Up until his nomination for the role, Wright had been the CEO of Liberty Energy, a Texas-based oil and gas firm he founded in 2011 that enjoyed huge success amid the USA’s fracking boom. The company claimed last year that around 10 per cent of total US primary energy production comes from shale gas wells fracked by Liberty Energy.
Wright was a major driver of technological development in fracking, which is often credited with boosting US fossil fuel production. He has argued the benefit of enhanced energy access outweighs any impact from planet-warming emissions. Back in 2019, during Trump’s first term in the White House, Wright even went so far as to drink fracking fluid on camera, in a bid to try and demonstrate it was not dangerous.
Meanwhile, Wright has continued to frequently voice climate sceptic views. In the aforementioned video posted to his LinkedIn page last year, Wright said: “Humans and all complex life on Earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide. Hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous… There is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy. All energy sources have impacts on the world both positive and negative.”
On a similar theme, Wright also forcefully condemned “irrationally restrictive policies against the production of oil and natural gas” in another video posted by ultra-conservative US think tank the Heritage Foundation last year. These “do nothing to change the demand for oil and natural gas,” he claimed.
Elsewhere, Wright has previously likened climate action efforts by Democrats to Soviet-style communism, according to Reuters, and has decried net zero emissions targets as “neither achievable nor humane”.
The self-described “tech nerd turned entrepreneur” uses nuggets of information from mainstream scientific studies to frame the climate crisis as a myth manufactured by the left, and argues scientists, the UN and many world leaders are overreacting to the threat posed by global warming.
Wright contends that global temperature increases will be milder than many predict; that society’s transition to green energy and things like electric cars is a waste of resources; and that the goals and requirements of the 2015 Paris Agreement are impractical. He has even criticised major oil companies for endorsing the Paris Agreement, claiming he was “horrified” by their sustainability reports, which he said amounted to “apologies that we were in this industry”.
He is also adamantly opposed to the philosophy championed by the late US President Jimmy Carter, who frequently trumpeted the importance of conserving energy in the face of the 1970s energy crisis he described as “the moral equivalent of war”. In direct contrast, Wright’s bombast includes the claim that “any negative impacts of climate change are clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption”.
This is the same Chris Wright who is set to hold significant sway over US climate policy over the coming years. The US Department of Energy sets regulations for the fossil fuel industry, drives research into energy technologies, and guides the future of electric power distribution. As Energy Secretary, Wright would be in a key position to carry out Trump’s vision for rolling back any clean-energy subsidies.
Of course, Trump is himself no friend to climate action and the green economy, as demonstrated by his previous four-year term which saw him – among other things – pull the US out of the Paris Agreement and notoriously dismiss climate change as a “Chinese hoax”. At his election rallies throughout 2024, Trump frequently led chants of “drill, baby, drill” as he voiced his support for accelerating fossil fuel extraction in the US.
The incoming President looks intent on following through on those chants, as he now has one of America’s keenest fossil fuel drillers as his top pick for Energy Secretary. For anyone hoping the US could soon start to finally back away from fossil fuels in favour of the new clean energy technology revolution, Chris Wright could be a major stick in the mud.
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 