With Donald Trump due to take office in less than a week and a Republican Congress already sworn in, much of the Biden administration’s effort to advance clean and especially renewable energy is now in doubt. The fate of the Inflation Reduction Act is likely to be a major flashpoint — and yet the confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a literal fracking executive, for Secretary of Energy proved to be relatively low-key and collegial among senators from both parties.
Here are three takeaways from the day’s proceedings:
1. Wright is essentially a shoo-in for the job
Wright is not one of Trump’s more controversial nominees, so it’s no surprise that his hearing went smoothly — and that Wright was introduced by his fellow Coloradan, Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper, was an early strong signal that will likely pass through confirmation with ease. To the extent there were any fireworks, they came not from the legislators on the dais but rather from several quickly muffled protests in the hearing room. One protester shouted, “I'm 18 years old and I want a future!" before being removed, while another one yelled, “Will your fracking liquid put out fires in L.A.?”
The questioning before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was a mix of parochial concerns from senators about their own states — the committee’s ranking Democrat, Martin Heinrich, for instance, asked if Wright would visit Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, located in his home state of New Mexico, while Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick, a Republican, asked about the prospects of a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Pennsylvania.
That’s not to say climate change didn’t come up. Wright repeatedly avowed that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, although he demurred that it was a “global” problem and turned his responses repeatedly to developing energy resources in the United States.
“If you shut down industry, those emissions don’t go away, they go somewhere else,” Wright claimed. “The only pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve quality of life is energy innovation.”
2. Everyone in the room could agree on geothermal (and nuclear)
Wright generally stayed away from specifics on spending levels or individual programs, aside from expressing generalized enthusiasm for the Department of Energy’s network of national laboratories and the importance of its work maintaining the nuclear stockpile. In his opening statement, he identified one of his goals as to “unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore energy dominance.”
Over the course of the hearing, what he meant became at least marginally clearer. Under questioning from McCormick about the Department’s Office of Fossil Energy — renamed the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management under outgoing President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — Wright lamented that fossil fuel had “fallen out of fashion and out of favor. There’s less interest in investing in it and less interest in talking about it,” he said, before declaring, “I don’t share that aversion.”
He did, however, expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal (“It’s an enormous, abundant energy resource below our feet”) and nuclear power. He also went along with Democratic senators who asked about reforms to existing federal permitting regulations to facilitate the buildout of long-distance energy transmission, a focus of the last Congress’s failed permitting reform bill and a key precursor to cleaning up the grid. (Nuclear and geothermal are also two areas where Wright’s company, Liberty Energy, has investments.)
To the extent Wright was willing to talk about solar — there was barely any mention of wind in the entire hearing — he had to be prodded by Democrats in sun-rich states, such as Heinrich and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto. Wright also called into question some estimates of how cheap renewables are, arguing that a popular measure for comparing energy resources with each other, the levelized cost of energy, “misses the boat on electricity generation because it’s like, would you take Uber that was 10% cheaper in cost if you didn’t know when the Uber would pick you up or where it would drop you off?” essentially arguing that the low price of energy generated by renewables doesn’t take into account their unavailability during certain times of day or in certain weather conditions.
3. It’s hard to dislike an Energy Secretary
Wright’s relatively easy reception reflects the fact that there actually are wide areas of bipartisan agreement on the kind of energy research and technology development work the Department of Energy does. Members on both sides of the aisle saw their enthusiasm for nuclear power — especially small modular reactors — reflected back by Wright, with Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego saying “I appreciate your enthusiasm for nuclear energy.”
The Energy and Natural Resources Committee is also stocked with Senators who represent states where the DOE has a substantial presence, including New Mexico, California, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Washington, which can lead to more collegial hearings if the nominee, as Wright does, affirms the importance and value of the Department’s national laboratories. Agencies that spend money broadly across the country tend to be popular with lawmakers.
But Wright is just the first nominee for a major energy and environment related post to face the Senate. Other nominees, including Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and Lee Zeldin for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, may endure more contentious hearings, as they will likely face questions on issues that are sharply divisive, like opening up public lands for fossil fuel extraction and rules on power plant and tailpipe emissions.
