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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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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.