The doublespeak of Energy Secretary Chris Wright

For Chris Wright, there may be no simple truths. At his Senate confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, the man poised to take control of the U.S. Department of Energy and its vast apparatus of technological research and development sat behind a walnut desk wearing a gray suit and a crisply knotted red tie. Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a $3 billion natural gas fracking company, harkened back to his days as a solar energy researcher and offered lawmakers a vision of open-mindedness and innovation. Climate change is an urgent challenge, he reassured them, and he would address it.

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“It is a global issue. It is a real issue. It’s a challenging issue. And the solution to climate change is to evolve our energy system,” he told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. “I am for improving all energy technologies that can better human lives and reduce emissions.”

Since his confirmation as the secretary of energy on Feb. 3, though, Wright has outlined an anti-climate agenda. Speaking to conservative audiences, he is charismatic, animated and far more zealous. Wright dismissed the transition to renewable energy as nonexistent in a Feb. 18 speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering associated with the podcast host Jordan Peterson, and called global efforts to boost the use of renewables, which he said drive up the price of energy, “lunacy.”

“The world simply runs on hydrocarbons,” he told the group, “and for most of their uses, we don’t have replacements.”

Before Congress, he pledged to listen and learn and then chart his course. Before Peterson’s group, he announced he already had “a nine-point plan” that would more than double the world’s consumption of the very fuels causing the planet to overheat. “Number one is, get out of the way of the production, export and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas,” he said. Yes, they cause climate change, he has repeatedly acknowledged, but it amounts to an inconvenient complication.

Over the past several weeks, Wright has delivered speeches not just at Peterson’s conference but also at the Conservative Political Action Conference and at CERAWeek, widely seen as the oil industry’s most influential business event, during which he continued to assert that the world’s economy is primarily dependent on the expansion of hydrocarbons and that alternatives like solar and wind have proved both costly and a failure — characterizations that ignore the swiftly falling costs and rapid adoption of both technologies. “I think the agenda might be different here than climate change,” he mused at Peterson’s forum, referring to “the climate-obsessed people” he’s spoken with. Then he hit on a theme that he emphasized again in the weeks that followed: “It’s certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top-down control and shrink human freedom. This is sinister.”

As Wright’s views have become more public, it suggests that he and the rest of Trump’s cabinet will embrace the premise of climate change but downplay its threat, even building a case that it is a benefit to society. The White House is seeking to reverse the legal definition of carbon dioxide as a climate pollutant and undo scores of rules addressing the economic costs of the extreme warming it causes. “Recently I’ve been called a climate denier or climate skeptic,” Wright told attendees at CERAWeek. “This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist.”

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world,” he continued. Global life expectancy has soared. Poverty has sharply declined. Modern medicine and telecommunications and airplanes have all resulted. And in the process, “We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50%.”

“Everything in life involves trade-offs,” he added. “Everything.”

Such a jarring claim amounts to more than a philosophical difference about the priorities of the world. It is unambiguously dismissive of a climate crisis that the vast majority of global scientists warn will prove devastatingly disruptive. It has given some of the people he addressed in Congress whiplash. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who sits on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, wrote through a spokesperson in response to questions from ProPublica that Wright stated a willingness to “support all energy sources,” but now that he is prioritizing a fossil fuel agenda, it is “deeply disappointing.”

The one thing it is not, however, is new.

In 2024, Liberty Energy published a little-noticed, 180-page manifesto called “Bettering Human Lives,” connected to the similarly named poverty-alleviation foundation his company created that year to bring cooking fuels to Africa. The document amounts to a spirited moral argument for how energy produced from oil and gas has advanced the developed world and how essential it will be to raise undeveloped countries out of poverty. Wright’s premise is that communities that lack electricity or modern fuels should get the immediate benefit from the cheapest existing energy source available to them. He says that recent climate policies prohibiting U.S. investment in infrastructure that could provide that energy using oil and gas does enormous human harm. But the “Bettering Human Lives” report goes further, suggesting that there is little role for non-hydrocarbon technologies and arguing that if oil and gas production are not expanded globally, billions of people will be held in poverty.

At his senate confirmation, Wright was asked several times to explain his embrace of “all sources” of energy. During one exchange, in which Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., pushed him to expand on what he meant, Wright listed them: wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydropower. “And if I didn’t say solar, it was an oversight.”

The statement is a sharp contrast to what Wright has told his investors in Liberty Energy’s earnings calls, where he has blamed many of those renewables for rising poverty and declining growth and has criticized “the incessant repeating of the simply false term,” referring to “the so-called energy transition.” He argues that for all the years and dollars invested in lowering carbon and subsidizing a transition to cleaner energy, hydrocarbons still fuel roughly the same 85% of global energy supply that they have for decades. Renewables, he says, still account for less than 3%. (The remainder being nuclear and hydroelectric energy, among other sources.)

According to the Energy Institute’s “Statistical Review of World Energy,” the energy industry’s trusted source for global market trends, though, hydrocarbons have dropped to 81.5% of global energy consumption, and renewables now account for roughly 8% of global energy use — more than twice what Wright claims — and are projected to grow sharply over the next few years. Moreover, the report states that solar and wind capacity grew by 67% in 2023, adding more wind and solar capacity than ever before and driving the vast majority of the world’s increase in electricity generation for the year.

Wright, whose office did not respond to a detailed list of questions, has said he rejects similar calculations on methodological grounds.

He also ignores the ways in which the energy transition in the U.S. is already well underway. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the government’s primary energy data office, wind and solar are responsible for substantial growth in American electricity generation while generation from natural gas is forecast to decrease. South Dakota, for example, gets 80% of its electricity from renewables, and Vermont relies on them nearly 100%.

Facts aside, Wright, in his recent remarks, has begun to present his agenda in ideological terms, drawing a straight line between fossil fuel use and conservative fears that Americans’ freedom is under assault. At CPAC, liberated from the necktie he said he’d been compelled to wear since his confirmation hearing, roaming the brightly lit stage with his arms outstretched, he reframed oil and gas not as the cause of climate change the way he’d previously conceded but as a fuel that is patriotic and moral. “Not everyone in the world has access to the liberty and energy we have,” he told the audience. “But in our own country, both of those concepts have been under great threat in the last four years. Maybe that’s why my political career started. Liberty under threat, energy resources under threat.”

It was a whole different message from the one Wright delivered before the Senate.