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His intellectual influences include longtime climate action skeptics — and Bill Gates’ favorite author.
Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, is a nerd — and he’ll tell you about it. “I’m Chris Wright, and my short bio is, I started out as a science geek, I transitioned to a tech nerd, and then I’ve been an energy entrepreneur my whole life,” he told energy journalist Robert Bryce on the Power Hungry podcast in 2020. “In addition to an energy nerd, I’ve been a climate nerd for quite some time,” he said in a talk hosted by Veriten, the energy consulting firm in 2023.
This is a far cry from Trump’s first Energy Secretary, the former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who famously failed to remember on the Republican primary debate stage the third of the three agencies he sought to eliminate (it was the Department of Energy) and who reportedly didn’t know that the Energy Department’s responsibilities — and budget — then lay heavily with maintaining the country’s nuclear stockpile.
But Wright’s extensive energy experience — studying nuclear fusion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and working early in his career on solar and geothermal engineering (his company, Liberty Energy, the fracking powerhouse he founded in 2011, has invested in the next-generation geothermal company Fervo, and Wright sits on the board of the nuclear company Oklo) — has not won him any plaudits from environmental groups or Democrats who focus on climate change. After Trump announced his nomination, the Sierra Club called Wright a “climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.” Illinois Rep. Sean Casten, one of the House’s most vocal proponents of climate action, also called Wright a “climate denier who prioritizes the wants of energy producers over the needs of American consumers.”
Few Republicans — and certainly few high-level Trump appointees — are as conversant in climate and energy data as Wright. That may make him an even more effective advocate for Trump’s “energy dominance” strategy, built around increased production of fossil fuels and, almost certainly, fewer subsidies for clean energy and electrification.
Typically when a person gains some notoriety by coming out against immediate, large-scale climate action and restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, climate advocates try to link that person to the fossil fuel industry and its long history of deliberate and knowing climate denial. Wright’s associations, however, are perfectly straightforward: Liberty Energy fracks oil and gas in the United States and Canada on behalf of large oil companies. He thinks the company’s contribution to the good of the world consists of its producing more hydrocarbons — full stop.
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Wright calls this philosophy “energy sobriety,” fully conceding that climate change is real while also diminishing the urgency of mounting a response. In seemingly countless speeches, interviews, and legislative testimonies, as well as in Liberty Energy’s annual “Bettering Human Lives” report — its version of an environmental, social, and governance review — Wright is perfectly comfortable acknowledging climate change while also patiently assaulting many key pillars of climate policy as it’s practiced in the United States, Europe, and other countries in the developed world seeking to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
While Wright’s written and spoken record adds up to tens of thousands of words and hours of talks, it can be distilled into a few core ideas: Energy consumption makes people better off; energy access, especially in the developing world, is a greater global challenge than climate change; and existing alternatives to hydrocarbons are not capable of replacing the status quo energy system, which still overwhelmingly relies on fossil fuels, with little prospect of a rapid transition.
He cites a wide range of thinkers, including members of a group of scholars — including the Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg (whose book, False Alarm, is “fantastic,” Wright said in a Liberty talk), University of Colorado science policy scholar Roger Pielke, Jr. (“a real intellectual”), and the Canadian energy scholar and historian Vaclav Smil (“the greatest energy scholar of my lifetime by far”) — who share elements of this deflationary view of climate change.
Lomborg and Pielke have long been bêtes noires of the climate movement, mostly as the subjects of years of furious back and forth in every form of media for the past two-plus decades. (Though in Pielke’s case, there was also an investigation in 2015 over alleged conflicts of interest led by House Democrat Raul Grijalva, who is retiring from Congress this year.) Lomborg has for decades argued that climate change ranks relatively low on global challenges compared to, say, global public health, while Pielke contends that many climate change policy advocates overstate what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change actually says about the connection between climate change and extreme weather, a point that has made him the object of intense criticism for going on 15 years.
Smil, meanwhile, is deeply skeptical of any effort to wean the world from fossil fuels considering their role in the production of steel, cement, plastics, and fertilizers — the materials that he describes as essential to the modern world. Smil also counts among his fans Bill Gates (“Vaclav Smil is my favorite author”), who is also one of the biggest funders and promoters of climate action through his research and investment group Breakthrough Energy and funding for companies like TerraPower, which is currently building the country’s first next-generation nuclear facility in Wyoming.
Pielke called both Wright and Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior and the designated head of a planned National Energy Council “super competent. They know energy, and that’s a fantastic starting point,” he told me.
“There is polarization of the climate debate, and the idea that fossil fuels are evil and the fossil industry are arch-villains — that’s part of the framing from the progressive left about how climate wars are to be fought,” Pielke said. “I’m not particularly wedded to that sort of Manichean evil vs. good framing of the debate.”
But the differences are real. Wright strongly contests much of what is the mainstream of climate policy. While he acknowledges that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide cause higher temperature, he says it’s “actually sort of slow-moving in our lifetimes” and a “relatively modest phenomenon that’s just been wildly abused for political reasons,” he said in a talk to the conservative policy group American Legislative Exchange Council.
While the Department of Energy has only limited authority over energy policy, per se, especially the permitting and public lands issues that typically concern fossil fuel companies, Wright does have some levers he can pull. He will likely act quickly to approve more export facilities for liquified natural gas, though the Energy Department’s recently released study of LNG’s long-term effects — particularly on domestic energy prices — may complicate that somewhat. Beyond that, he will inherit a massive energy research portfolio through the national labs, putting him in charge of developing the energy technology that he says are currently insufficient to replace oil and gas.
“I’ve worked on alternatives. I’d love it if fusion energy arrives,” Wright said in an interview with the conservative website Power Line. “I love energy technology, and I think there’s good things going on, but it’s now become political.”
He believes that reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is “neither achievable nor humane,” he wrote in the foreword to the 2024 edition of “Bettering Human Lives.” He also disagrees with the idea of subsidizing the world’s predominant forms of alternative energy, solar and wind.
“Wind and solar are never going to be dominant sources of energy in the world,” Wright told Bryce on the 2020 podcast. The “main impact” of subsidies for wind and solar, Wright said in another 2023 podcast episode with Bryce, “is just to make our electricity grids less reliable and electricity prices more expensive, and to do nothing for the demand for oil and very little for the demand for natural gas.”
“Oil and gas make the world go round,” he added. “[People] want higher quality of lives. That’s what drives the demand for oil and gas.”
Bryce, a persistent critic of green energy policies, told me in an email that he thinks Wright is “the right person for the DOE. He’s not apologetic about being an energy humanist. Regardless of what anyone thinks about climate change, it is obvious that we are going to need a lot more energy in the future, and the majority of that new supply will come from hydrocarbons.”
While Wright’s arguments certainly have wide purchase among his peers in the energy industry executive corps, he nevertheless stands out from the rest for his willingness to express them. In contrast to the stance taken by large, multinational energy companies, which are willing at least to pay lip service to carbon reduction goals and have, at times, embraced branding and marketing strategies to make them seem like something other than oil and gas companies (e.g. ExxonMobil’s algae-based fuel initiative and BP’s notorious “Beyond Petroleum” campaign), Wright and his company see their contribution to a better world as their work extracting oil and gas.
Other executives “don’t want to deal with the criticism that will come with taking a higher-profile stance,” Bryce told me. “They don’t have time or the inclination. It takes a lot of time, courage, and conviction to engage with the media, get on the speaking circuit, and do so in a thoughtful way.”
Wright’s emphasis on the energy poverty faced by poor countries could potentially serve as a diplomatic bridge to the developing world, especially in Africa, where some observers think there’s space for the United States to start funding natural gas development through the International Development Finance Corporation. For Wright, expanding energy production — and specifically fossil fuel development — is crucial to providing cheap energy to the developing world. He mentions in almost every talk the billions of people who use wood, dung, or other biofuels on open fires to cook indoors, causing 3 million premature deaths per year.
“The biggest problem today is a third of humanity doesn’t have hydrocarbons,” Wright told Bryce in 2023. In a 2023 speech to the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative environmental group, he described strictures against financing fossil fuel development as “not just ignorant or bad policy” but “immoral.” His solution: distributing propane stoves as widely as possible, in part through his Bettering Human Lives Foundation.
Here might be the greatest challenge for advocates of climate action: Even if most of the world’s leaders have accepted the reality of anthropogenic climate change, much of the world, especially outside North America and Europe, is still eagerly increasing its use of fossil fuels. In the United States, coal plant shutdowns are being pushed out further and natural gas investment may soon pick up again to power new demand for electricity. Globally, coal use is set to grow over the next few years. That’s thanks in large part to demand from China, the world’s largest emitter and second-largest cumulative emitter behind the United States, defying predictions that demand there was near peaking. The biggest new source of oil demand is India, a country with a per-capita gross domestic product less than 1/30th of the United States.
And so the greatest danger to aggressive action to lower global emissions may not be Chris Wright and his “sober” ideas at the helm of the Department of Energy. It may be that much of the world agrees with him.
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Investing in red states doesn’t make defying Trump any safer.
In the end, it was what the letters didn’t say.
For months — since well before the 2024 election — when asked about the future health and safety of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, advocates and industry folks would point to the 20 or so House Republicans (sometimes more, sometimes fewer) who would sign on to public statements urging their colleagues to preserve at least some of the law. Better not to pull out the rug from business investment, they argued. Especially not investment in their districts.
These letters were “reassuring to a lot of folks in clean energy and climate communities,” Chris Moyer, the founder of Echo Communications and a former staffer for longtime Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, told me.
“I never felt reassured,” Moyer added.
Plenty of people did, though. The home solar company Sunrun, for instance, told investors in a presentation earlier this monththat a “growing number of Republicans in Congress — including 39 overall House members and four Senators — publicly support maintaining energy tax credits through various letters over the past few months.” The company added that “we expect a range of draft proposals to be issued, possibly including draconian scenarios, but we expect any extreme proposals will be moderated as they progress.”
Instead, the draft language got progressively worse for the residential solar industry, with the version that passed the House Thursday morning knocking billions of dollars off the sector, as tax credits were further squeezed to help make room for other priorities that truly posed an existential threat to the bill’s passage.
What Sunrun and others appear to have failed to notice — or at least publicly acknowledge — is that while these representatives wanted to see tax credits preserved, they never specified what they would do if their wishes were disregarded. Unlike the handful of Republicans who threatened to tank the bill over expanding the deduction for state and local taxes (each of whom signed one of the tax credit letters, at some point), or the Freedom Caucus, who tend to vote no on any major fiscal bill that doesn’t contain sizable spending cuts (so, until now, every budget bill), the tax credit Republicans never threatened to kill the bill entirely.
Ultimately, the only Republicans to outright oppose the bill did so because it didn’t cut the deficit enough. All of the House Republicans who signed letters or statements in support of clean energy tax credits voted yes on the legislation, with a single exception: New York’s Andrew Garbarino, who reportedly slept through the roll call. (He later said he would have voted for it had he been awake.)
“The coalition of interests effectively persuaded Republican members that tax credits were driving investment in their districts and states,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me in a text message. “Where advocates fell short was in convincing them that preserving energy tax credits — especially for mature technologies Republicans often view skeptically — should take precedence over preventing Medicaid cuts or addressing parochial concerns like SALT.”
The Inflation Reduction Act itself was, after all, advanced on a party-line basis, as was Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Combined, those two bills received a single Democratic no vote and no Republican yes votes.
In the end, Moyer said, Republican House members in the current Congress were under immense political pressure to support what is likely to be the sole major piece of legislation advanced this year by President Trump — one that contained a number of provisions, especially on SALT, that they agreed with.
“There are major consequences for individual house members who vote against the president’s agenda,” Moyer said. “They made a calculation. They knew they were going to take heat either way. They would rather take heat from clean energy folks and people affected by the projects.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
White House officials and outside analysts frequently touted job creation linked to IRA investments in Republican House districts and states as a tangible benefit of the law that would make it politically impossible to overturn, even as Congress and the White House turned over.
“President’s Biden’s policies are leading to more than 330,000 new clean energy jobs already created, more than half of which are in Republican-held districts,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told reporters last year, previewing a speech President Biden would give on climate change.
Even after Biden had been defeated, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Bloomberg that “we have grown the political consensus around the Inflation Reduction Act through its execution,” citing one of the House Republican letters in support of the clean energy tax credits.
One former Biden White House climate official told me that having projects in Republican districts was thought by the IRA’s crafters to make the bill more politically sustainable — but only so much.
“A [freaking] battery factory is not going to save democracy,” the official told me, referencing more ambitious claims that the tax credits could lead to more Democratic electoral victories. (The official asked to remain anonymous in order not to jeopardize their current professional prospects.) Instead, “it was supposed to make it slightly harder for Republicans to overturn the subsidies.”
Congresspeople worried about jobs weren’t supposed to be the only things that would preserve the bill, either, the official added. Clean energy and energy-dependent sectors, they thought, should be able to effectively advocate for themselves.
To the extent that business interests were able to win a hearing with House Republicans, they were older, more traditionally conservative industries such as nuclear, manufacturing, agriculture, and oil and gas.The biofuels industry (i.e. liquid Big Agriculture) won an extension of its tax credit, 45Z. The oil and gas industry’s favored measure, the 45Q tax credit for carbon sequestration, was minimally fettered. Nuclear power was the one sector whose treatment notably improved between the initial draft from the House’s tax-writing committee and the version voted on Thursday. Advanced nuclear facilities can still claim tax credits if they start construction by 2029, while other clean energy projects have to start construction within 60 days of the bill’s passage and be in service by the end of 2028.
“I think these outcomes are unsurprising. In places where folks consistently engaged, things were protected,” a Republican lobbyist told me, referring to manufacturing, biofuels, and nuclear power, requesting anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. “But assuming a project in a district would guarantee a no vote on a large package was always a mistake.”
“The relative success of nuclear is a testament to the importance of having strong champions — predictable but notable show of political might,” a second Republican lobbyist told me, who was also not allowed to speak publicly about the bill.
But all hope isn’t lost yet. The Senate still has to pass something that the House will agree with. Some senators had made noises about how nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal were treated in the initial language.
“Budget reconciliation is, first and foremost, a fiscal exercise,” Venkatakrishnan told me. “Energy tax credits offer a path of least resistance for hitting lawmakers’ fiscal targets. As the Senate takes up this bill, the case must be made that the marginal $100 billion to $200 billion in cuts seriously jeopardizes grid reliability and energy innovation.” Whether that will be enough to generate meaningful opposition in the Senate, however, is the $600 billion question.
A loophole created by the House Ways and Means text disappeared in the final bill.
Early this morning, the House of Representatives launched a full-frontal assault on the residential solar business model. The new language in the budget reconciliation bill to extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed Thursday included even tighter restrictions on the tech-neutral investment tax credits claimed by businesses like Sunrun when they lease solar systems to residential buyers.
While the earlier language from the Ways and Means committee eliminated the 25D tax credit for those who purchased home solar systems after the end of this year (it was originally supposed to run through 2034), the new language says that no credit “shall be allowed under this section for any investment during the taxable year” (emphasis mine) if the entity claiming the tax credit “rents or leases such property to a third party during such taxable year” and “the lessee would qualify for a credit under section 25D with respect to such property if the lessee owned such property.”
This is how you kill a business model in legislative text.
“Expect shares of solar companies to take a significant step back,” Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning, calling the exclusion “scathing.” Investors are “losing the now false sense of security that we had 'seen the worst' of it with the initial House draft.”
Joseph Osha, an analyst for Guggenheim, agrees. “Considering the fact that ~70% of the residential solar industry is now supported by third-party (e.g. lease or PPA) financing arrangements, the new language is disastrous for the residential solar industry,” he wrote in a note to clients. “We believe the near-term implications are very negative for Sunrun, Enphase, and SolarEdge.”
Shares of Sunrun are down 37.5% in mid-day trading, wiping off almost $1 billion worth of value for its shareholders. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Shares of fellow residential solar inverter and systems Enphase are down 20%, while residential solar technology company SolarEdge’s shares are down 24.5%.
“Families will lose the freedom to control their energy costs,” Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, said in a statement, in reference to the last-minute alteration to the investment tax credit.
When the House Ways and Means Committee released the initial language getting rid of 25D by the end of this year but keeping a limited version of the investment tax credit, analysts noted that Sunrun was an unexpected winner from the bill. It typically markets its solar products as leases or power purchase agreements, not outright sales of the system.
The reversal, Dumoulin-Smith wrote, “comes as a surprise especially considering how favorable the initial markup was” to the Sunrun business model.
“Our core solar service offerings are provided through our lease and power purchase agreements,” the company said in its 2024 annual report. “While customers have the option to purchase a solar energy system outright from us, most of our customers choose to buy solar as a service from us through our Customer Agreements without the significant upfront investment of purchasing a solar energy system.”
The new bill, Dumoulin-Smith writes is “‘leveling the playing field’ by targeting all future residential solar originations, whether leased or owned.” The bill is “negative to Sunrun with intentional targeting of the sector.
Last year, Sunrun generated over $700 million from transferring investment tax credits from its solar and storage projects. The company said that it had $117 million of “incentives revenue” in 2024, which includes the tax credits, out of around $1.4 billion in total revenue.
But the tax credits play a far larger role in the business than just how they’re recognized on the company’s earnings statements. The company raises investment funds to help finance the projects, where investors get payments from customers as well as monetized tax credits. Fund investors “can receive attractive after-tax returns from our investment funds due to their ability to utilize Commercial ITCs,” the company said in its report. Conversely, the financing “enables us to offer attractive pricing to our customers for the energy generated by the solar energy system on their homes.”
Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Perocco wrote to clients that “this is a noteworthy change for the residential solar industry, and Sunrun in particular, which dominates the residential solar [third-party owned] market and has recognized ITC credits under 48E.”
Current conditions: A late-season nor’easter could bring minor flooding to the Boston area• It’s clear and sunny today in Erbil, Iraq, where the country’s first entirely off-grid, solar-powered village is now operating • Thursday will finally bring a break from severe storms in the U.S., which has seen 280 tornadoes more than the historical average this year.
1. House GOP passes reconciliation bill after late-night tweaks to clean energy tax credits
The House passed the sweeping “big, beautiful” tax bill early Thursday morning in a 215-214 vote, mostly along party lines. Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no, while House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland voted “present;” two additional Republicans didn’t vote.
The bill will effectively kill the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has written — although the Wednesday night manager’s amendment included some tweaks to how, exactly, as well as a few concessions to moderates. Updates include:
The bill now heads to the Senate — where more negotiations will almost certainly follow — with Republicans aiming to have it on President Trump’s desk by July 4.
2. FEMA cancels 4-year strategic plan, axing focus on ‘climate resilience’
The combative new acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, rescinded the organization’s four-year strategic plan on Wednesday, per Wired. Though the document, which was set to expire at the end of 2026, does not address specific procedures for given disasters, it does lay out goals and objectives for the agency, including “lead whole of community in climate resilience” and “install equality as a foundation of emergency management.” In axing the strategic plan, Richardson told staff that the document “contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission.”
A FEMA employee who spoke with Wired stressed that while rescinding the plan does not have immediate operational impacts, it can still have “big downstream effects.” Another characterized the move by the administration as symbolic: “There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself.”
3. Energy Department redirects Puerto Rican rooftop solar investment to upkeep of fossil fuel plants
The U.S. federal government is redirecting a $365 million investment in rooftop solar power in Puerto Rico to instead maintain the island’s fossil fuel-powered grid, the Department of Energy announced Wednesday. The award, which dates to the Biden administration, was intended to provide stable power to Puerto Ricans, who have become accustomed to blackouts due to damaged and outdated infrastructure. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority declared bankruptcy in 2017, and a barrage of major hurricanes — most notably 2017’s Hurricane Maria — have destabilized the island’s grid, Reuters reports.
In Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s statement, he said the funds will go toward “dispatching baseload generation units, supporting vegetation control to protect transmission lines, and upgrading aging infrastructure.” But Javier Rúa Jovet, a public policy director for Puerto Rico’s Solar and Energy Storage Association, added to The Associated Press that “There is nothing faster and better than solar batteries.”
4. EDF, Shell, and others to collaborate on hydrogen emission tracker
The Environmental Defense Fund announced Wednesday that it is launching an international research initiative to track hydrogen emissions from North American and European facilities, in partnership with Shell, TotalEnergies, Air Products, and Air Liquide, as well as other academic and technology partners. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas that, through chemical reactions, can affect the lifetime and abundances of planet-warming gases like methane and ozone. Despite being a “leak-prone gas,” hydrogen emissions have been poorly studied.
“As hydrogen becomes an increasingly important part of the energy system, developing a robust, data-driven understanding of its emissions is essential to supporting informed decisions and guiding future investments in the sector,” Steven Hamburg, the chief scientist and senior vice president of EDF, said in a statement. Notably, EDF took a similar approach to tracking methane over a decade ago and ultimately exposed that emissions were “a far greater threat” than official government estimates suggested.
5. The best-selling SUV in America will now be available only as a hybrid
Toyota
The bestselling SUV in America, the Toyota RAV4, will be available only as a hybrid beginning with the 2026 model, Car and Driver reports. The car will be available both as a conventional hybrid and as a plug-in that works with CCS-compatible DC fast chargers, meaning “owners can quickly fill up its battery during long road trips” to minimize their fossil fuel mileage, The Verge adds. The RAV4 will also beat the Prius for electric range, hitting up to 50 miles before its gas engine kicks in.
Toyota’s move might not come as a complete surprise given that the automaker already introduced a hybrid-only lineup for its Camry. But given the popularity of the RAV4, Car and Driver notes that “if you ever wondered whether or not hybrids have entered the mainstream yet, perhaps this could be a tipping point.”
Nathan Hurner/USFWS
The Fish Lake Valley tui chub, a small minnow threatened by farming and mining activity, could become the first species to be listed as endangered under the second Trump administration.