Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Friday that his agency would not cut research on climate science despite “some reduction in total head count.”
“I don’t think you’ll see any reduction in the science that we do regarding climate change or any of these other world’s big questions. No change in that,” Wright said during a press conference Friday after a visit to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The future of DOE’s climate policy has been uncertain after Wright said in his first secretarial order that net-zero emission policies raise energy costs and have done little to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, he told reporters that he believed that climate change has become politicized and divorced from the science behind it.
“It’s a real thing, but nothing in the science of climate change or in the economics of climate change shows it to be the world’s biggest problem, and particularly using the word crisis,” said Wright, who ran fracking services firm Liberty Energy prior to joining DOE.
