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For Immediate Release
January, 15 2025, 10:28am EDT
Contact:
Shannon Van Hoesen, shannon.vanhoesen@sierraclub.org
Sierra Club Statement on Chris Wright Confirmation Hearing for DOE
Today, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing to consider the nomination of Chris Wright, an outspoken critic of policies aimed at curbing climate change and the transition to renewable energy sources, to run the Department of Energy. Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a leading oil and fracked gas company.
In response, Sierra Club Director of Beyond Fossil Fuels Policy Mahyar Sorour released the following statement:
“Chris Wright is the personification of ‘conflict of interest.’ He’s spent decades getting rich from polluting, dangerous fracking for methane gas and has denied the impacts to our health and the climate along the way. Wright made it clear that, if confirmed, he’d hinder clean energy investment and promote fossil fuels like LNG exports, further enriching himself and his fellow oil and gas CEOs while we continue to pay the price with more pollution and higher energy costs. As Americans from coast to coast are living with the catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis, the last thing we need is a climate-denying fossil fuel executive at the helm of our nation’s energy policy.”
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
(415) 977-5500LATEST NEWS
'Win for Public Health' as FDA Bans Carcinogenic Red Dye No. 3 in Food and Drinks
"At long last, the FDA is ending the regulatory paradox of Red 3 being illegal for use in lipstick, but perfectly legal to feed to children in the form of candy," said one advocate.
Jan 15, 2025
It's been used to color everything from candy to soft drinks to even watermelon—but after decades of knowing that it causes cancer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is finally banning erythrosine, popularly known as Red Dye No. 3, in foods and beverages.
Red Dye No. 3—commonly used to color maraschino cherries, fruit cocktails, toaster pastries, sodas, seasonal candies, cough syrups, and many other orally consumed products—has been known to cause cancer in animals since the 1980s. It has been banned in cosmetics since 1990. Manufacturers have until January 2027 to remove the toxic additive from products subject to the ban.
"This is exactly the action we need to see from the FDA."
"Because the FDA failed to uphold its legal obligation to fully ban cancer-causing additives, Red 3 remained permitted in foods, supplements, and oral drugs more than 34 years later," the Center for Science in the Public Interest said in a statement Wednesday. "That changed on January 16, 2025, thanks to a color additive petition filed by CSPI in 2022."
CSPI called the ban "a win for public health."
"At long last, the FDA is ending the regulatory paradox of Red 3 being illegal for use in lipstick, but perfectly legal to feed to children in the form of candy," Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a statement. "The primary purpose of food dyes is to make candy, drinks, and other processed foods more attractive. When the function is purely aesthetic, why accept any cancer risk?"
In addition to CSPI, numerous other groups and activists including the Center for Food Safety, Environmental Working Group (EWG), and Food & Water Watch (FWW) had petitioned the FDA for the ban.
"We wouldn't be celebrating this historic decision today without the relentless leadership of public health champions like Michael Jacobson and others who took up this fight decades ago on behalf of consumers," EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook said in a statement hailing the ban. "We all owe a debt of gratitude to Michael and the other early leaders who pushed the FDA to remove toxic chemical ingredients from the nation's food supply."
FWW senior food policy analyst Rebecca Wolf said that "this move by the FDA is long overdue, but represents a step in the right direction for consumer safety from harmful, cancer-causing chemicals."
"This is exactly the action we need to see from the FDA," Wolf added. "If the incoming FDA is serious about food safety and system reform, they should build on this win by endorsing scientifically sound policies and regulatory changes that Food & Water Watch has supported for years. These include ending the GRAS loophole that companies use to pollute our food system, removing antibiotics from animal feed, and supporting a ban on harmful chemicals in food."
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How Big Oil Lobbied Its Way Out of Accountability for the LA Fires
"Accountability is an existential threat to their business model, and their business model is an existential threat to all of us, and that’s the bottom line," said Meghan Sahli-Wells, the former mayor of Culver City.
Jan 15, 2025
As devastating wildfires continue to burn in the Los Angeles region on Wednesday—placing tens of thousand of Californians under evacuation orders and causing over $250 billion in economic damages by one estimate—a pair of new reports highlight how fossil fuel companies have dodged responsibility for their role in the destruction and hampered the state's ability to fight back by depriving it of funds.
Two new reports highlight how fossil fuel companies hampered the state's ability to fight back by depriving it of funds.
California's fossil fuel industry deployed lobbying muscle to kill legislation that would compel polluters to pay into a fund that would help prevent disasters and aid cleanup efforts, and has taken advantage of a tax loophole to deprives the state of corporate tax revenue, thereby "putting climate and social programs in peril." In the case of the former, California's biggest fossil fuel trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, recently launched a digital campaign that appears aimed at throwing cold water on any such legislative efforts.
According to The Guardian, the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act of 2024 appeared on 76% of the 74 lobby filings submitted in 2024 by the oil company Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Association.
The legislation—which didn't make it out of the state senate in 2024—would, if enacted, create a recovery program forcing fossil fuel polluters to pay their "fair share of the damage caused by the sale of their products" during the period of 2000 to 2020, according to the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters.
According to The Guardian, the filings from those two firms that included this specific bill totaled over $30 million—though lobbying laws do not require a breakdown that would make clear how much was spent specifically on the "polluter pay" law.
With Los Angeles burning, there's renewed interest in passing the bill, The Guardian reports, citing supporters of the legislation. But Western States Petroleum Association isn't sitting idly by. On January 8, the group launched ads that suggest measures like the "polluter pay" bill would force them to increase oil prices. The ads, which appear to have been taken down, do "not specifically mention the polluter pay bill, it echoes the 2024 campaign that did," wrote The Guardian.
"Accountability is an existential threat to their business model, and their business model is an existential threat to all of us, and that’s the bottom line," said Meghan Sahli-Wells, the former mayor of Culver City who currently works for the environmental advocacy group Elected Officials To Protect America, told the paper.
Meanwhile, another report from The Climate Center—a think tank and "do-tank" focused on curbing pollution—has thrust a tax loophole long used by multinational oil and gas companies, into the spotlight.
The report released last week details how "years of litigation and lobbying by oil and gas majors like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell Oil" are responsible for a large corporate tax avoidance policy that is known as the "Water's Edge election" that became law in 1986.
The law allows multinational corporations to "elect" avoid taxes on earnings they designate as beyond the "water's edge" of the borders of states in which they operate, according to The Climate Center.
"Closing the loophole as it applies to the oil and gas industry could put anywhere between $75 to $146 million per year back into the state’s budget," the report states.
For context, California closed a $46 billion budget shortfall last year, including by enacting cuts to climate and clean air programs.
"The water's edge tax loophole allows multinational fossil fuel corporations to dodge paying their fair share of taxes that can help fund vital environmental projects, which could include wildfire preparedness," California Assemblymember Damon Connolly (D-12) told the progressive outlet The Lever, the first outlet to report on the findings.
California lawmakers last year passed a bill that took aim at some aspects of the loophole, but an advocacy group whose board of directors includes representative from the oil and gas industry has filed lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the reform, according to the The Climate Center.
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Climate Liar and Fracking CEO Chris Wright Pilloried Ahead of Confirmation Hearing
"As fires level entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the last thing we need is to put an oil CEO in charge of energy policy," said organizers.
Jan 15, 2025
With the U.S. Senate holding confirmation hearings for several of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees on Wednesday, climate organizers were joined by progressive lawmakers outside the Capitol to speak out against one potential administration official in particular—who they warned poses "a threat to our democracy and our future."
The subject of the press conference, organized by the Sunrise Movement, was Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright, whom Trump nominated to be secretary of energy.
"As fires level entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the last thing we need is to put an oil CEO in charge of energy policy," said the group, referring to deadly wildfires that have destroyed an estimated 12,300 buildings, including thousands of homes, in recent days.
The press conference was just the latest expression of outrage over Trump's selection of Wright, who contributed $400,000 to Trump's campaign in what Sunrise said was an effort "to buy the energy secretary role."
The Sierra Club called Wright the "personification of 'conflict of interest,'" noting that he has spent decades denying the connection between his company's work and the climate emergency while "getting rich from polluting, dangerous fracking for methane gas."
"Wright made it clear that, if confirmed, he'd hinder clean energy investment and promote fossil fuels like LNG exports, further enriching himself and his fellow oil and gas CEOs while we continue to pay the price with more pollution and higher energy costs," said Mahyar Sorour, director of Beyond Fossil Fuels policy for Sierra Club. "As Americans from coast to coast are living with the catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis, the last thing we need is a climate-denying fossil fuel executive at the helm of our nation's energy policy."
In 2021, Wright said on a podcast that planetary heating "is not" fueling wildfires—a claim directly at odds with scientists' warning that the changing climate, driven by fossil fuel extraction, is increasing the frequency and intensity of wildfires in Western states as well as areas that have historically faced far less destructive fire seasons.
He doubled down on the claim in 2023 as smoke from intense wildfires in Canada drifted across the U.S. East Coast, writing in a post on LinkedIn that "the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify" Democratic climate policies, and last year he told the House Financial Services Committee that "it is popular today to suggest that somehow in the next 10 or 30 years we are going to 'transition' fully away from fossil fuels. This cannot and will not happen."
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday shared a video Wright posted to LinkedIn last year, in which he asserted, "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."
"What on Earth is this man talking about?" asked Schumer. "Is he such an idealogue that he doesn't see the truth of the world around him?"
Should he be confirmed to lead the Department of Energy (DOE), said Allie Rosenbluth, United States program manager at Oil Change International (OCI), on Monday, Wright would "do his best to put a rapid end to President [Joe] Biden's pause on new authorizations for liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports." The move would raise the price of electricity, increasing prices for U.S. households by 30%, according to a recent analysis by Public Citizen, and would increase greenhouse gas emissions.
"While these actions will face stiff legal challenges and public outrage, if allowed to go forward, they will harm public health and safety for the sake of fossil fuel industry profits," said Rosenbluth. "According to the International Energy Agency, any new fossil fuel development is incompatible with meeting our climate goals and protecting our communities from devastating climate disasters like the Los Angeles fires."
Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs of the League of Conservation Voters, said Trump's nomination of Wright is a signal that the Republican president-elect "is following through on the $1 billion offer he made to Big Oil at a dinner this spring," when he urged executives to donate to his campaign in return for rolled back climate regulations once Trump is in office.
"It is not surprising, but still appalling that Trump's pick for secretary of energy is a climate-denying Big Oil executive," said Sittenfeld.
Accountable.US called on senators weighing Wright's nomination to consider several facts about his career in the fracking industry before voting to confirm him as energy secretary, including:
- Liberty Energy has seven subsidiaries, several of which have business interests before the DOE;
- One subsidiary, Liberty Oilfield Services, operates facilities that the Environmental Protection Agency has cited for repeat Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) violations and noncompliance with Clean Water Act (CWA) reporting standards;
- Wright sits on the board of directors of the Western Energy Alliance, which has spent $675,000 on oil and gas lobbying during his tenure; and
- The Western Energy Alliance submitted a public comment in 2023 regarding the DOE's gas stove rule raising fuel efficiency requirements.
"Chris Wright's confirmation would be a win for Big Oil and a loss for climate action, environmental justice, and clean energy progress," said Accountable.US on Wedneday. "His track record shows he's unfit to serve as secretary of energy."
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