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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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Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.
They don’t have much to lose, Heiko Burow, an attorney at Baker & Mackenzie, tells me.
This week, since this edition of The Fight was so heavy, I tried something a little different: I interviewed one of my readers, Heiko Burow, an attorney with Baker & Mackenzie based in Dallas, Texas. Burow doesn’t work in energy specifically – he’s an intellectual property lawyer – but he’s read many of my scoops over the past few weeks about attacks on renewable energy and had legitimate criticism! Namely, as a lawyer who is passionate about the rule of law, he wanted to send a message to any developers and energy wonks reading me to use the legal system more often as a tool against attacks on their field.
The following conversation has been abridged for clarity. Let’s dive in.
So Heiko, you reached out to me after my latest scoop about how the Trump administration is now trying to create national land use restrictions on wind projects through the Department of Transportation. In your email, you said the Trump administration “cannot invent a setback requirement by executive fiat.” What does this mean?
Something you need to understand from my point of view is, there’s all these things coming out of the White House, the executive. Like the setback requirement: If the law says they have the right to do that, then okay. But the viewpoints of the administration do not replace the law.
There’s no requirement in the law that the Secretary of Transportation can require a setback. He can’t just come in and say here’s a required setback. The government can only do what the law allows a government to do.
For example, a CEO can’t come into a company and say all the contracts are null and void. The president, in the same way, can’t say everything that’s legally binding is no longer legally binding. There are two ways that creates a problem: one is that it is a breach of contract, and the courts will say there’s a different remedy for that. But there’s also a constitutional problem with that.
Why did you reach out to me about this story, in particular?
I’m just concerned about the environment, and our country, and our democracy.
As someone who works with corporations navigating the legal system under Trump, why do you think companies – like renewable developers – aren’t suing left and right in this moment?
I think they’re timid.
It’s not just companies – it’s stakeholders in general. In 2017, there was pushback on Trump. That is missing. Look at the tech industry – and a lot of investments in renewable energy come from the tech area – and how they lined up with Trump on Inauguration Day.
That is fear. I’d say other stakeholders too are now ruled by fear.
As someone who advises companies in other areas of law, what posture do you think renewable energy companies should take?
Band together. Renewable energy companies, you don’t have much to lose. He’s persecuting you.
I know people stay under the radar, like community solar entities that he could have forgotten about. But he didn’t forget about them. So they need to band together and fight.
Everybody’s just lying low and being afraid. But how much more can renewable energy companies lose? Right now they’re still surviving, because the business case for renewable energy works and states are supporting it. But they’re quiet about it on the national level.
If people start believing what Trump says is the force of law, then it’ll just be that way. And I don’t see a coordinated response to that.