U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright had a message for Europe as it baked beneath a record heat wave last week: Stop your whining.
“Always more people die in the winter than die in the summer, because cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is,” he said last week in video remarks delivered to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering of influential conservative figures, many of whom dispute the facts of climate change.
Wright zeroed in on European deaths in the winter of 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine drove up energy prices, saying “the mortality impacts of that are devastating.” His comments came as governments across Europe warned that last week’s record-high temperatures posed life-threatening risks, echoing the dangers of a 2022 heat wave that killed more than 60,000 people on the continent.
Among those attending the conference were Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K.’s populist right-wing party, Reform U.K., and Steve Koonin, who was handpicked by Wright to co-author a U.S. government report that misrepresented mainstream climate science. House Speaker Mike Johnson also delivered video remarks to an audience that included Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of Britain, and Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer. (Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, the owner of POLITICO, also spoke at the conference.)
