Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump selected Chris Wright to run the Department of Energy, demonstrating that climate realism and U.S. energy dominance will be front and center when the new administration assumes power next year.
Chris Wright is not a household name but he will soon play a pivotal role for the American people, who have suffered immensely under four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s climate alarmist policies.
According to Trump, “As Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape, and ushering in a new ‘Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace.’”
Unlike Biden’s Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, Wright does not buy into the pseudoscience claiming that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity.
“There is no climate crisis,” Wright plainly stated last year in a video on his LinkedIn page.
“We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists,” he also said. “The only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”
Wright is spot-on. Despite a flood of misinformation and scaremongering perpetuated by the left and their allies in the mainstream media, academia, and other influential institutions, the data clearly show that climate change is not creating more frequent nor more deadly weather events or trends.
In fact, a strong argument can be made that the slight warming that has occurred in recent decades has made life better for humanity, particularly in terms of higher crop yields and what some call a global greening effect.
Perhaps more importantly, Wright understands that the policies that have been put in place to mitigate the non-existent climate crisis are nothing but a farce that have made life appreciably worse for the vast majority of Americans.
As the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, Wright has an in-depth knowledge of how crucial the fossil fuel industry is to our modern way of life. Although many on the left would like Americans to believe that fossil fuels are an archaic form of energy that can be immediately replaced with so-called green energy, that could not be further from the truth.
In actuality, modern society would grind to an immediate halt and poverty would skyrocket if the net zero agenda were to be fully implemented. For instance, the Department of Energy’s own website states, “Petrochemicals derived from oil and natural gas make the manufacturing of over 6,000 everyday products and high-tech devices possible… Modern life relies on the availability of these products.”
Moreover, Wright’s vast experience in the energy industry, specifically with regards to his expertise with fracking, validates that the United States is once again on the cusp of achieving energy dominance.
During Trump’s first term, the United States became a net exporter of energy for the first time in 75 years. Of course, this played a big role in the major decline of domestic energy prices that occurred throughout Trump’s first term. However, U.S. energy production also has a profound effect on the global economy and international relations.
It is all but assured that Wright will greenlight the export of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) to our allies in Europe, throwing a giant wrench into the Russian war machine that is dependent on selling LNG to continental Europe. What’s more, increased U.S. energy production and exportation poses a vital threat to rogue regimes like Iran, which have made billions of dollars and funded terrorism across the Middle East, by selling oil to nations like China.
Back at home, Wright’s approach to unleashing the production of oil and natural gas will be a boon for the U.S. economy as it will foster the creation of tens of thousands high-paying jobs while reducing the stubborn inflation that has gripped the U.S. economy since Biden declared war on fossil fuels.
It also should be noted that Wright is an advocate of next-generation nuclear energy; he is a board member of Oklo, which “is designing and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy.”
Ignore the mainstream media, which is desperately trying to tar-and-feather Wright as an evil fossil fuel CEO who could not care less about the environment. The opposite is true. Wright is a reasonable man with ample commonsense and a clear-eyed viewed of the future of U.S. energy policy.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.