The UK’s net zero policy is “nonsense” according to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright

Fracking baron Chris Wright has increasingly found bedfellows in the UK and Europe for his climate-scepticism and anti-net zero crusade, writes Andrew Warren, who chairs the British Energy Efficiency Federation, and is a former special advisor to the House of Commons environment committee, in an article on the Business Green website.

The US Energy Secretary’s attacks on UK net zero policy are as deluded as they are dangerous

The UK’s net zero policy is “nonsense” according to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who went on to claim in a recent speech that Britain’s decarbonisation efforts are leading to a “complete deindustrialisation” of the “birthplace of the Industrial Revolution”.

The latest comments from the Trump Administration’s energy policy chief came during an address at the prestigious US Council on Foreign Relations in New York earlier this month. Claiming to be a “lifelong Anglophile”, Wright – who also founded Liberty Energy, one of the USA’s biggest shale gas fracking companies – spent much of his speech attacking UK plans to deliver a decarbonised economy.

Wright suggested policymakers had “shut down the factories and plants that were innovated in the United Kingdom” and falsely claimed that the UK’s success in halving its emissions over the past three decades had been achieved by simply consuming far less energy.

For UK politicians, he claimed, net zero is merely “a reason for greater top-down control”. “It’s just a reason to shrink the production of energy,” said Wright.

Wright’s UK bedfellows

It is not the first time Wright has derided the UK’s climate and clean energy agenda. And, as his engagements with the media in recent days show, it is not a topic he is likely to be dropping any time soon – particularly given the number of allies he appears to be gaining in Westminster.

Back in February, Wright shared a platform with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch at a right-wing gathering in London. Shortly after that event, Badenoch announced her decision to renege on her Party’s long-held support for the UK’s 2050 net zero target – a goal she had tacitly supported during her time in the previous government. She has continued to vehemently attacking the entire concept of net zero ever since. No doubt Wright would also be pleased to see Nigel Farage’s Reform party – which has also cast doubt on the science behind climate change and pledged to scrap all things net zero – gaining strong traction in the UK polls.

During that February event, Wright – the self-styled King of Fracking – had claimed that the UK’s net zero push was simply a “sinister tool to shrink human freedom”.

Presumably these “sinister” activities are therefore a keynote not just of the UK, but of the 107 governments around the world that have also committed to net zero? Even the USA had been committed to net zero by 2050 before President Trump’s election earlier this year.

Wright also once again sought to argue that as the UK’s economy had suffered thanks to net zero policies which had served to drive down the country’s total energy consumption by 28 per cent since 2005 – dropping from 10.6 to 7.6 exajoules. In reality, of course, a great deal of that reduction in energy consumption in recent decades is in fact down to our far more productive use of energy, through more efficient, cleaner technologies and behaviours.

It is true that the UK economy is a bit stuck in the doldrums, with little growth to speak of and a tough looking year ahead as geopolitical tensions and rising fossil fuel costs continue to bite. But it is also true that for all the wider economic headwinds, the UK’s net zero economy continues to go from strength to strength, bucking wider trends to deliver a 10.1 per cent growth in gross value added (GVA) in 2024 alone, according to CBI Economics – something Wright, of course, failed to mention.

Climate change ‘not important’

Predictably, Wright also regularly expresses great scepticism with regards to the scientific consensus on the extent of man-made climate change. In his New York speech earlier this month, he dismissed the issue altogether. “Climate change for impacting the quality of your life is not incredibly important,” he said. “In fact, if it wasn’t in the news and the media, you wouldn’t know it.”

However, he acknowledged that climate change is “an incredibly important topic” politically. No doubt that is why Wright ordered the US Department of Energy to carry out ‘A Critical Review of the Impact(s) of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate’ earlier this year, where a hand-picked set of climate change deniers were given free rein to produce a 141-page document littered with falsehoods that sought to demolish all commonly accepted conclusions regarding global warming.

Wright also said he accepted that accept temperatures have risen somewhat, and that “the rise in sea level is real. But argued that “both of them are rather gradual and rather modest”.

“If you extrapolate them for another century, we will be a little bit warmer, a little bit greener, and a little bit wetter than it was a hundred years ago,” he added. “Is that a crisis? Is that more important than people having a job today and affording to pay their bills? Is that worth getting 20 per cent of children having nightmares about climate change, people agreeing that they shouldn’t bring children into the world that’s rapidly falling apart? We’ve just so exaggerated what climate change is.”

Earlier, he had also claimed that “any negative impacts of climate change are clearly overwhelmed by the benefits of increasing energy consumption”.

Wright concluded in his speech earlier this month that “the most offensive thing” to him was that at the COP26 UN Climate Summit hosted by the UK in Glasgow in 2021 “nineteen of the richest nations in the world pledged that they would no longer supply capital to the developing world for anything to do with hydrocarbons”.

‘Burn, baby, burn’

Wright is set to take his anti-net zero crusade to Europe next week, where he is set to meet the small cadre of climate change deniers in the European Parliament, doubtless with the intention of providing them with what he would regard as strong ammunition as the stand bearer for fossil fuel expansion.

In a recent interview, Wright warned that Brussels’ rules and its “crusade” to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions “posed a major threat” to the EU-US trade deal. Wright is also threatening that the USA will quit membership of the International Energy Agency (IEA) unless it withdraws its expressed view that fossil fuel investment is set to decline.

Wright’s views on climate change and net zero may be outlandlish, rooted in conspiracy theory, and totally without merit – but as the energy policy chief at the government which oversees the world’s biggest economy, they unfortunately hold significant influence – and he is finding growing numbers of allies in the UK, Europe and beyond.

Wright is truly intent on becoming Trump’s facilitator of that infamous “burn, baby, burn” philosophy, obviously determined to burn as much fossil fuel as possible in the deluded view that it will not run out nor burn up our climate. But, hopefully sooner rather than later, scientific and economic reality will prove him wrong.