NEWS Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous
Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous
Chris Wright, Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, says oil, gas and coal are key to solving global poverty. Some call that misleading.
Lisa Friedman — Dec. 12, 2024
Original article citation, click here.http://Trump’s Choice to Run Energy Says Fossil Fuels Are Virtuous
Chris Wright, the fracking magnate and likely next U.S. energy secretary, makes a moral case for fossil fuels.
Chris Wright, the founder and chief executive of Liberty Energy, in 2018.
Credit Andy Cross/The Denver Post, via Associated Press
His position, laid out in speeches and podcasts, is that the world’s poorest people need oil, gas and coal to realize the benefits of modern life that Americans and others in rich nations take for granted. Only fossil fuels, he says, can bring prosperity to millions who still burn wood, dung or charcoal for basic needs like cooking food and heating homes.
“It’s just, I think, naïve or evil, or some combination of the two, to believe they should never have washing machines, they should never have access to electricity, they should never have modern medicine,” Mr. Wright said on the “Mission Zero” podcast last year. “We don’t want that to happen. And we simply don’t have meaningful substitutes for oil, gas and coal today.”
The argument offered by Mr. Wright, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to run the Energy Department, ignores the fact that wind, solar and other renewable energy are cleaner and increasingly cheaper than fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency says clean energy is coming online globally at an “unprecedented rate” and will play a significant role in the future. In some places, renewable energy has been able to displace fossil fuels.
Mr. Wright also skates past the climate impacts from burning more fossil fuels. Climate change is already having a disproportionate impact on poor nations, which are less able than rich countries to handle the rising seas, extreme weather, drought and other consequences of global warming.
“It’s pretty self-serving by the fossil fuel industry to assume the future is going to look exactly like the past,” said Joseph Curtin, a managing director on the power and climate team at the Rockefeller Foundation, which is working on expanding clean energy access in poor countries.
“That’s not based on any analytical rigor,” Mr. Curtin said. “It’s perhaps based in the need to sell fossil fuels and shroud it in a moral framework.”
Jody Freeman, the director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law, called Mr. Wright’s position “misleading, warped and selective.”
“It is not an intellectually serious argument,” she said. “It’s about creating a permission structure for not pursuing a more responsible energy policy.”
But by sheathing fossil fuels in humanitarian language as a solution to global poverty, Mr. Wright has emerged as one of the right’s most savvy salesmen for oil and gas. “His is the newest and freshest point of view I’ve seen,” Jeff Peeples, the host of “Mission Zero.” He said the oil and gas industry has been on the defensive when it comes to climate change.
“If a lot more executives in the oil and gas industry would make this argument, and make this intellectual case for the use of fossil fuels, I think the energy industry as a whole would have a lot better PR success,” Mr. Peeples said.
A self-described “nerd turned entrepreneur” and outdoor enthusiast who is often photographed in a fleece vest, Mr. Wright runs a fracking services company and frequently talks about his travels through Africa as informing his desire to tackle poverty.
“People that are burning wooden dung in their huts and want to have a propane stove, they want to get off their feet, ride on a bus or a motor scooter,” Mr. Wright said on the podcast “PetroNerds” last year.
The Trump transition team did not make Mr. Wright available for a telephone interview.
Mr. Wright’s views on developing nations are important; as energy secretary, he would not only oversee oil and gas exports from the United States but also partnerships with poor countries to create renewable energy.
The share of people gaining access to electricity has steadily grown globally, and fossil fuels are largely responsible. About 800 million people now lack access to electricity, down from more than 1.5 billion in 1998.
A new solar project in Gabon. A solar array can start producing electricity in months, while it can take years to build a gas-powered plant.Credit…Nao Mukadi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But Ian Muir, head of insights at Catalyst Energy Advisors, a consulting firm, pointed out that renewables were now cheaper than fossil fuels in most countries where people lack electricity. Moreover, a solar array can start producing electricity in months, while it can take more than two years to build a gas-powered plant, he said.
The World Bank has found that solar mini grids could provide basic electricity to 380 million people in Africa by 2030 who do not currently have access to power. A Rockefeller Foundation study in 2021 found that investing in distributed renewable energy like rooftop solar panels, small-scale wind turbines and home battery storage systems could create 25 million jobs by the end of the decade in Asia and Africa. That is about 30 times the number of jobs that would be created by investments in oil, gas or coal in that period, the study found.
Daniel M. Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked on energy access throughout Africa and Asia, said coal was responsible for hundreds of thousands of premature deaths around the world annually.
Moreover, he said, big fossil fuel plants in developing nations often tend to favor industries like mining rather than people who need electricity in their homes, so that their children can study at night or they can charge a cellphone.
Technologies like mini grids and rooftop solar can often move faster to provide the electricity access Mr. Wright talks about, he said.
While the coal industry for years presented its product as an antidote to poverty, Mr. Wright has become the new master of an old playbook.
His rhetoric echoes Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author who gained prominence in 2001 with the English publication of his book “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” in which he accepted the reality of climate change but said governments should focus on reducing poverty rather than greenhouse gases. Mr. Lomborg was accused of cherry-picking data and misrepresenting science, but Mr. Wright called the book “fantastic” and has referred to Mr. Lomborg a friend.
In 2014, Alex Epstein, who argues against climate science and is a favorite of Fox News, published “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,”which described coal, oil and gas as humanity’s best chance to thrive. (Mr. Wright has appeared on Mr. Epstein’s podcast, “Power Hour.”) That same year, Peabody Energy, then one of the world’s leading coal companies, began an ad campaign that extolled the virtues of coal for the world’s poor.
“Its déjà vu all over again,” said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Brown University who studies fossil fuel misinformation campaigns. “They’re drawing on old tropes that have been around for 20, 30 years.”
Over the years, Mr. Wright built a reputation with gimmicks like drinking a shot of fracked water in a toast to environmental critics. In 2021, he commissioned billboards around Denver to heckle the outdoor clothing maker North Face after the company — whose products, like many other goods, contain petroleum — declined to brand a jacket with an oil company.
“That North Face puffer looks great on you. And it was made from fossil fuels,” read the signs.
Those who have worked with Mr. Wright described him as someone who sincerely wants to improve living standards.
“He’s a good person who wants to make the world better,” said Tisha Schuller, an energy consultant in Colorado and past president of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association who has worked closely with Mr. Wright.
After receiving a diploma from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Wright did graduate work on solar energy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which created software that Mr. Wright called “super nerdy” to measure the motion of fluid beneath the earth. It helped bring about a commercial shale gas revolution. Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has partnered with others on small modular nuclear reactors and geothermal energy.
Mr. Wright’s stake in Liberty Energy is worth $50 million, according to Forbes, and a recent SEC filing put his compensation last year at $5.6 million. He helped establish a charity, the Bettering Human Lives Foundation, to promote cookstoves using liquefied petroleum gas in Kenya and elsewhere. They are considered better for the environment and health than traditional cooking fuels of kerosene, biomass and coal. Records show the foundation started in 2023 with $11,450 in assets and spent all of it on administrative costs. The foundation did not respond to a request to discuss its work.
Some who work on energy poverty said Mr. Wright’s views had merit.
Todd Moss, executive director of the Energy for Growth Hub, a research organization, said tackling climate change was not the responsibility of the world’s poorest countries who have done little to cause the problem. In some countries, fossil fuels may still be needed to power factories and industries to spur economic prosperity, he said. Any effort that is too strict and “puts climate above development” would hurt poor countries, Mr. Moss said.
But scientists have maintained that Mr. Wright has selectively used data to downplay the impacts of climate change.
While he acknowledges that the planet is warming, Mr. Wright has inaccurately said that it is a modest and distant threat. He has denied the well-established connection between climate change and extreme weather, wrongly claiming that hurricanes, droughts and floods are not becoming more intense.
“We’re impoverishing people today, those least able to bear it and afford it, for what the economic work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows is a slow-moving, modest impact two or three generations from now,” Mr. Wright said on the “WOW Factor” podcast last year. “That’s not a good trade-off.”
In fact, the I.P.C.C., the United Nations’ top scientific body, found last year with very high confidence that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” It recommended nations make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from crossing a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade.
Mr. Wright “may not have read an I.P.C.C. report since 1990,” said Robert E. Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and a lead author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published in 2021.