Chris Wright is a fossil fuel evangelist who nevertheless supports both geothermal and nuclear power.
Just don’t call them clean energy.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Energy secretary has spent years claiming fossil fuels can combat poverty, improve women’s rights and increase American productivity. At the same, the fracking executive has waged a public campaign to distort climate science and spread falsehoods about global warming on podcasts, televised debates and before Congress.
“The real facts of climate change, it’s a real issue that is slow-moving, its impacts are quite modest today compared to so many other bigger issues,” Wright said on a podcast called “Power Hour,” which is hosted by a fossil fuel supporter. “And I think the scientists working on it, they know that, too, but … it’s a source of funding for them.”
Yet even as he has downplayed the consequences of a warming planet, Wright has expressed support for low-carbon-emission technologies. His company, Liberty Energy, invested in Fervo Energy, an advanced geothermal company that uses fracking technology to unlock the Earth’s heat to make power. And Wright sits on the board of Oklo, a startup developing small modular nuclear reactors.
In that, Wright represents the new sort of oilman: One who says climate change is a problem, just not one that requires fixing immediately. He embraces low-carbon technologies, but lambastes traditional renewables such as wind and solar. In short, Wright believes the benefits of burning fossil fuels far outweigh the costs.
“He frames the problem in a way that a big chunk of the climate action world doesn’t like,” said Bobby Tudor, who did business with Wright’s company as the founder and former CEO of Tudor, Pickering, Holt and Co., an investment bank active in the oil field.
“He frames the problem as a dual challenge,” he added. “We have to provide reliable, affordable and secure energy while at the same time innovating and driving down [carbon dioxide] emissions in the system. If we don’t get the first part, then we’ll never get to the second part. I am entirely sympathetic to that framing.”
If confirmed, Wright’s next stop will be the Department of Energy, which has a more limited role over the country’s energy system than its name might suggest. The agency traditionally has focused on early stage technological research, oversight of the country’s nuclear stockpile and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wright will not be opening federal lands to oil drilling if confirmed by the Senate — that job will fall to the possible incoming Interior secretary, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R). Much more likely, Wright will fulfill Trump’s agenda by lifting a permitting pause on new liquefied natural gas terminals.
The Trump transition did not respond to a request for comment on Wright or make him available to speak with a reporter.
The bigger question facing Wright is how he approaches a department that underwent significant changes under President Joe Biden.
During Biden’s term, DOE has played a more prominent role in trying to commercialize existing technologies. The department has handed out a wave of grants and loans to build new transmission lines, electric vehicle factories, hydrogen hubs and restart nuclear power plants in the last four years.
Wright provided some hints on his approach to the job in a debate last year with Julio Friedmann, a former DOE official in the Obama administration. Wright said he believes there is “a key government role” in basic research.
“What Julio is doing in carbon sequestration, on next generation nuclear, on next generation geothermal technologies — that can play a meaningful role going forward,” Wright said.
But Wright made clear his feelings don’t extend to technologies such as wind and solar. He called terms like clean energy “very deceptive” and a “destructive misunderstanding.” And he argued the government had gone too far in its attempts to green the economy by subsidizing renewables.
“What I think the government’s doing catastrophically wrong is the vast majority of their money and subsidies are not for research, not for making technologies better,” Wright continued. “They’re deploying politically popular, low-energy density, intermittent, unreliable energy sources that have just destabilized our electricity, made energy more expensive, don’t really have a prospect of being a meaningful solution in the future.”
The sentiment includes a peppering of fact and falsehood.
Wind and solar are low-energy density, meaning they require large tracts of land to generate large amounts of electricity. That has prompted land-use conflicts over solar developments in the Desert Southwest to offshore wind projects off New England.
But renewables are now major players in the U.S. electricity industry. Wind and solar combined generated 16 percent of U.S. electricity production through Nov. 17, the same percentage as coal and exceeding hydro (6 percent), according to preliminary U.S. Energy Information Administration figures.
Renewables also flexed their reliability muscles earlier this year, as new solar and battery installations combined with existing fossil fuel facilities to ease reliability concerns in California and Texas during searing heat waves.
While acknowledging the challenge of Trump’s victory to climate action, some clean energy proponents see Wright’s personal holdings in low-carbon technology companies as a sign the incoming administration might not be overtly hostile to such technology.
“With Chris Wright, I think oftentimes that what someone says is less revealing than where they’re putting their money,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for the climate and energy program at Third Way, the centrist think tank. “That shows an openness to clean energy that is more specific and detailed than what anyone is going to say on the campaign trail.”
Travis Fisher, a DOE official during Trump’s first term, said Wright’s appointment represents a chance to reframe the public debate around climate change, and placing the issue within wider discussions about how to improve human welfare.
“Is climate change an existential crisis for human beings right now? The answer, you almost have to conclude, is there are things that we should be worried about. But the answer right now is no,” said Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “I’m probably naive about this, but I’m optimistic that we at least need a new conversation, and that he at least brings that to the table and makes it a possibility.”
Downplayed concerns about global warming is out of line with the overwhelming majority of climate research, which shows that increasingly extreme weather is already devastating agriculture, real estate and energy systems.
And some see Wright’s habit of debating climate science and policy as a chance to push industry talking points without acknowledging challenges to his argument.
In one 2015 example, Scott Denning, a climate scientist at Colorado State University, publicly debated Wright and fossil-fuel-proponent and “Power Hour” host Alex Epstein in an hourlong special on a Denver television station. Denning said Wright’s style is to flood the conversation with climate falsehoods so his opponents can’t keep up — something he called a “propaganda technique.”
“It’s not really a conversation, it’s like he’s making a speech. He’s got his points, and he doesn’t respond to mine,” Denning said. “There’s a technique where you just repeat so many falsehoods in a row that there’s no chance for the scientists to actually refute all those points in the time that you have allotted.”
In that 2015 debate, Wright falsely claimed that climate models were wrong and they had overestimated the Earth’s warming.
“When you look at the data, the climate prediction models have all significantly overpredicted the actual temperature behavior the last 25 years,” he said.
In fact, climate models have proven to be accurate. The year of the debate, 2015, turned out to be the hottest year in recorded history, according to NOAA. At least it was then. Now, NOAA data shows, 2015 has fallen to No. 6 on the hottest years list, and will likely fall to seventh place after 2024 is recorded.
Wright has discussed the influence on his thinking by the writings of Epstein, the author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” who also pushes back on the idea of a “climate crisis.”
The two met at the Denver television show debate in 2015. Epstein said Wright’s views were “much more nuanced” than other energy industry CEOs who completely deny the reality of climate change. Like Epstein, Wright acknowledges that humans are warming the planet, but severely downplays the impact of fossil fuels.
Epstein said Wright was his top pick for any energy-related Cabinet position in Trump’s administration. Even though issues around energy production are a small part of the Energy Department’s day-to-day work, Wright can be valuable — in particular pushing for more production and use of fossil fuels and other forms of energy.
“In any Cabinet position, it’s a big asset to be a very good communicator. With energy in particular, it’s incredibly important because there’s such intense emotion that people have about these issues and so many common, oversimplified ways of characterizing and mischaracterizing people.”
Reporter Timothy Cama contributed.
This story also appears in Energywire.
