Inside the Mind of Energy Nominee Chris Wright

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.

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.