{"id":843551,"date":"2025-04-25T20:12:05","date_gmt":"2025-04-26T01:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/25\/the-doublespeak-of-energy-secretary-chris-wright\/"},"modified":"2025-04-25T20:12:05","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T01:12:05","slug":"the-doublespeak-of-energy-secretary-chris-wright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/25\/the-doublespeak-of-energy-secretary-chris-wright\/","title":{"rendered":"The Doublespeak of Energy Secretary Chris Wright"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories<\/a> as soon as they\u2019re published.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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For Chris Wright, there may be no simple truths. At his Senate confirmation hearing<\/a> on Jan. 15, the man poised to take control of the U.S. Department of Energy and its vast apparatus of technological research and development sat behind a walnut desk wearing a gray suit and a crisply knotted red tie. Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a $3 billion natural gas fracking company, harkened back to his days as a solar energy researcher and offered lawmakers a vision of open-mindedness and innovation. Climate change is an urgent challenge, he reassured them, and he would address it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a global issue. It is a real issue. It\u2019s a challenging issue. And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,\u201d he told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. \u201cI am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since his confirmation as the secretary of energy on Feb. 3, though, Wright has outlined an anti-climate agenda. Speaking to conservative audiences, he is charismatic, animated and far more zealous. Wright dismissed the transition to renewable energy as nonexistent in a Feb. 18 speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering associated with the podcast host Jordan Peterson, and called global efforts to boost the use of renewables, which he said drive up the price of energy, \u201clunacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world simply runs on hydrocarbons,\u201d he told the group, \u201cand for most of their uses, we don\u2019t have replacements.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before Congress, he pledged to listen and learn and then chart his course. Before Peterson\u2019s group, he announced he already had \u201ca nine-point plan\u201d that would more than double the world\u2019s consumption of the very fuels causing the planet to overheat. \u201cNumber one is, get out of the way of the production, export and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas,\u201d he said. Yes, they cause climate change, he has repeatedly acknowledged, but it amounts to an inconvenient complication.<\/p>\n

Over the past several weeks, Wright has delivered speeches not just at Peterson\u2019s conference but also at the Conservative Political Action Conference<\/a> and at CERAWeek<\/a>, widely seen as the oil industry\u2019s most influential business event, during which he continued to assert that the world\u2019s economy is primarily dependent on the expansion of hydrocarbons and that alternatives like solar and wind have proved both costly and a failure \u2014 characterizations that ignore the swiftly falling costs and rapid adoption of both technologies. \u201cI think the agenda might be different here than climate change,\u201d he mused at Peterson\u2019s forum, referring to \u201cthe climate-obsessed people\u201d he\u2019s spoken with. Then he hit on a theme that he emphasized again in the weeks that followed: \u201cIt\u2019s certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top-down control and shrink human freedom. This is sinister.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Chris Wright has different answers for different audiences \u2026<\/h3>\n

\u2026 on fossil fuel dependence<\/span><\/h3>\n
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In Congress<\/span><\/p>\n

Senate Confirmation Hearing<\/span>
Jan. 15, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe only pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lift up people’s quality of life is through energy innovation.<\/span> And America has been a hotbed of that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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At Events<\/span><\/p>\n

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference<\/span>
Feb. 17, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe world simply runs on hydrocarbons and for most of their uses, we don’t have replacements.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2026 on responding to climate change<\/span><\/h3>\n
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In Congress<\/span><\/p>\n

Senate Confirmation Hearing<\/span>
Jan. 15, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve studied and followed the data and the evolution of climate change for at least 20 years now. It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It’s a challenging issue.<\/span> And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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At Events<\/span><\/p>\n

CERAWeek<\/span>
March 10, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI’m honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change with people as simply collateral damage.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2026 on alternative energy sources<\/span><\/h3>\n
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In Congress<\/span><\/p>\n

Senate Confirmation Hearing (Written Response)<\/span>
Jan. 15, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI will be an unabashed steward for all sources of affordable, reliable and secure American energy<\/span> and the infrastructure needed to develop, deliver and secure them.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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At Events<\/span><\/p>\n

CERAWeek<\/span>
March 10, 2025<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBeyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas.<\/span> I haven’t even mentioned oil or coal yet.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>

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As Wright\u2019s views have become more public, it suggests that he and the rest of Trump\u2019s cabinet will embrace the premise of climate change but downplay its threat, even building a case that it is a benefit to society. The White House is seeking to reverse the legal definition of carbon dioxide as a climate pollutant and undo scores of rules addressing the economic costs of the extreme warming it causes. \u201cRecently I\u2019ve been called a climate denier or climate skeptic,\u201d Wright told attendees at CERAWeek. \u201cThis is simply wrong. I am a climate realist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world,\u201d he continued. Global life expectancy has soared. Poverty has sharply declined. Modern medicine and telecommunications and airplanes have all resulted. And in the process, \u201cWe have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50%.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything in life involves trade-offs,\u201d he added. \u201cEverything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a jarring claim amounts to more than a philosophical difference about the priorities of the world. It is unambiguously dismissive of a climate crisis that the vast majority of global scientists warn will prove devastatingly disruptive. It has given some of the people he addressed in Congress whiplash. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who sits on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, wrote through a spokesperson in response to questions from ProPublica that Wright stated a willingness to \u201csupport all energy sources,\u201d but now that he is prioritizing a fossil fuel agenda, it is \u201cdeeply disappointing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The one thing it is not, however, is new.<\/p>\n

In 2024, Liberty Energy published a little-noticed, 180-page manifesto called \u201cBettering Human Lives<\/a>,\u201d connected to the similarly named poverty-alleviation foundation his company created that year to bring cooking fuels to Africa. The document amounts to a spirited moral argument for how energy produced from oil and gas has advanced the developed world and how essential it will be to raise undeveloped countries out of poverty. Wright\u2019s premise is that communities that lack electricity or modern fuels should get the immediate benefit from the cheapest existing energy source available to them. He says that recent climate policies prohibiting U.S. investment in infrastructure that could provide that energy using oil and gas does enormous human harm. But the \u201cBettering Human Lives\u201d report goes further, suggesting that there is little role for non-hydrocarbon technologies and arguing that if oil and gas production are not expanded globally, billions of people will be held in poverty.<\/p>\n

At his senate confirmation, Wright was asked several times to explain his embrace of \u201call sources\u201d of energy. During one exchange, in which Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., pushed him to expand on what he meant, Wright listed them: wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydropower. \u201cAnd if I didn\u2019t say solar, it was an oversight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statement is a sharp contrast to what Wright has told his investors in Liberty Energy\u2019s earnings calls, where he has blamed many of those renewables for rising poverty and declining growth and has criticized \u201cthe incessant repeating of the simply false term,\u201d referring to \u201cthe so-called energy transition.\u201d He argues that for all the years and dollars invested in lowering carbon and subsidizing a transition to cleaner energy, hydrocarbons still fuel roughly the same 85% of global energy supply that they have for decades. Renewables, he says, still account for less than 3%. (The remainder being nuclear and hydroelectric energy, among other sources.)<\/p>\n

According to the Energy Institute\u2019s \u201cStatistical Review of World Energy<\/a>,\u201d the energy industry\u2019s trusted source for global market trends, though, hydrocarbons have dropped to 81.5% of global energy consumption, and renewables now account for roughly 8% of global energy use \u2014 more than twice what Wright claims \u2014 and are projected to grow sharply over the next few years. Moreover, the report states that solar and wind capacity grew by 67% in 2023, adding more wind and solar capacity than ever before and driving the vast majority of the world\u2019s increase in electricity generation for the year.<\/p>\n

Wright, whose office did not respond to a detailed list of questions, has said he rejects similar calculations on methodological grounds.<\/p>\n

He also ignores the ways in which the energy transition in the U.S. is already well underway. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the government\u2019s primary energy data office, wind and solar are responsible for substantial growth in American electricity generation while generation from natural gas is forecast to decrease. South Dakota, for example, gets 80% of its electricity from renewables, and Vermont relies on them nearly 100%.<\/p>\n

Facts aside, Wright, in his recent remarks, has begun to present his agenda in ideological terms, drawing a straight line between fossil fuel use and conservative fears that Americans\u2019 freedom is under assault. At CPAC, liberated from the necktie he said he\u2019d been compelled to wear since his confirmation hearing, roaming the brightly lit stage with his arms outstretched, he reframed oil and gas not as the cause of climate change the way he\u2019d previously conceded but as a fuel that is patriotic and moral. \u201cNot everyone in the world has access to the liberty and energy we have,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cBut in our own country, both of those concepts have been under great threat in the last four years. Maybe that\u2019s why my political career started. Liberty under threat, energy resources under threat.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a whole different message from the one Wright delivered before the Senate.<\/p>\n

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Amy Westervelt of Drilled contributed research.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they\u2019re published. For Chris Wright, there may be no simple truths. At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, the man poised to take control of the U.S. Department of Energy and its vast apparatus<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":843552,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50979,22983],"tags":[143452,6506],"class_list":{"0":"post-843551","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-doublespeak","8":"category-energy","9":"tag-doublespeak","10":"tag-energy"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=843551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/843551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/843552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=843551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=843551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=843551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}