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climate justice
No Chris Wright, Destroying the Planet Won’t Solve Energy Poverty
Trump’s new energy secretary would like you to believe that “Zero Energy Poverty” and Net Zero emissions by 2050 are incompatible goals, but this could not be further from the truth.
Feb 06, 2025
Chris Wright, who was recently confirmed as the new secretary of energy, has been famous for years as one of the more unapologetic proponents of fossil fuels. In 1992, Wright founded Pinnacle Technologies, an early leader in the hydraulic fracking business, and later made his fortune as the CEO of Liberty Energy, one of the largest oilfield service firms in North America. In 2023, he made headlines for a series of inflammatory statements disputing the science of climate change.
Now Wright has taken a different tack on climate—less outrageous, but no less dangerous. At his Senate confirmation hearing last week, Wright claimed that he didn’t deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change; he only denied that climate change warranted any reductions in fossil fuel production. To make his case, Wright spoke in abstractions about “tradeoffs” and “complicated dialogue.”
Then came the doozy: Poor countries like Kenya suffered from sparse access to propane fuel, Wright said, and only fracking could deliver the low prices to make up for those shortfalls.
Wright claims to be working on behalf of the global poor, but if he were, he might heed their repeated calls for emission reductions in the United States and other wealthy countries.
Wright has been quietly developing this specious argument for years: that addressing energy poverty, especially in the Global South, requires untrammeled fossil fuel production, no matter the damage to the planet. In Liberty Energy’s 2024 annual report, Bettering Human Lives, Wright laid out his case for hydrocarbon extraction. “Only a billion people today enjoy the full benefits of a highly energized lifestyle,” Wright wrote, while “7 billion striv[e] to achieve the lifestyles of the more fortunate 1 billion.” Without access to reliable natural gas, “over 2 billion people still cook their daily meals and heat their homes with traditional fuels, [including] wood, dung, agricultural waste, or charcoal,” putting them at risk of acute respiratory disease from air pollution. The only remedy, according to Wright, is more fossil fuels like gas.
This weaponization of global energy poverty is so insidious because it takes a legitimate issue—inadequate access to reliable energy for billions of people around the world—and turns it into a neat talking point for the destruction of the planet. Energy insecurity is a real challenge for the Global South, with over 3 billion people estimated to suffer from energy poverty of some kind. But so is climate change, which the World Bank projects will push up to 135 million people into poverty by 2030, and which is already fueling extreme weather, conflict, and migration, from Micronesia to the Sahel.
Wright would like you to believe that “Zero Energy Poverty” and Net Zero emissions by 2050 are incompatible goals. According to Wright, “solar, wind, and batteries… will not, and cannot replace most of the energy services and raw materials provided by hydrocarbons.”
But this could not be further from the truth.
In a 2021 report, the Rockefeller Foundation report found that renewable energy could end energy poverty worldwide at a cost of just $130 billion a year, less than a sixth of what the United States currently spends on defense each year. Moreover, the report found that such a transformation would create 25 million jobs across Africa and Asia, more than 30 times the number of jobs created by a comparable investment in fossil fuels.
Wright’s case for hydrocarbons is based on a bad faith conflation of existing realities with possible futures. In Bettering Human Lives, Wright claims that electricity currently “delivers only 20% of total primary energy consumption” in order to challenge clean energy’s viability as a substitute for hydrocarbons. But as Wright himself knows, a central feature of the green transition will be the electrification of everything, from transportation to home heating to heavy industry. Present shares of energy usage for electricity do not provide an accurate picture of future consumption patterns .
In the case of the Global South, where energy poverty is most acute, the key will be the implementation and scaling of distributed renewable energy (DRE) systems. Unlike traditional grids, which often carry power over vast distances, DREs generate electricity from clean energy sources close to home. With the cost of batteries and solar PV both falling over 90% in the past decade, these systems are more affordable than ever. The Roosevelt Foundation sees DREs driving the clean energy transition across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with mini-grids providing power for a dizzying array of technologies: “solar lanterns, ice-making factories used by fishing communities, milk chillers and irrigation pumps for farmers, refrigerators and life-saving medical equipment in clinics and hospitals, and more.”
Some elements of the climate movement have pushed a degrowth agenda that fails to reckon with the energy needs of many countries in the Global South. Calls for developing nations to abruptly cut off coal consumption, for example, ring hollow if they are not accompanied by meaningful assistance to pay for more expensive alternatives. But for the most part, the climate movement has recognized the inequities in historical development and emissions patterns, and placed the burden squarely on the Global North to drive the decarbonization process.
Wright claims to be working on behalf of the global poor, but if he were, he might heed their repeated calls for emission reductions in the United States and other wealthy countries. For years now, developing countries have been asking the nations most responsible for the climate crisis to decarbonize fastest, in order to buy time for poorer countries to catch up. They have also called for additional climate finance to assist with mitigation and adaptation efforts. At COP29 in November, rich countries pledged $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035, but research suggests developing nations need closer to $1 trillion a year to protect their most vulnerable populations. If Wright were sincere in his concern for the plight of the global energy poor, he would support these initiatives.
Of course, he will do no such thing. Wright’s patron in the White House has already made the new administration’s policy clear. On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords—and froze all foreign aid for 100 days. Now Trump appears to have shuttered USAID entirely. To those observing from abroad, Wright’s bad faith appeals to global poverty must appear as one more indignity from an administration inclined to offer little else.
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Survivors of Deadly LA Wildfires Seek Criminal Charges for 'Reckless' Big Oil
"While these deaths and injuries are unspeakably tragic, they aren't just tragedies, they're also crimes," said one attorney.
Jan 16, 2025
Victims of the deadly wildfires still devastating large swaths of Los Angeles County were joined Thursday by scientists and legal experts at a press conference demanding criminal accountability for the fossil fuel industry over its role in the climate crisis.
"The disasters we are seeing today are not natural. They are crimes," Danielle Levanas, who grew up in Pacific Palisades and whose parents' home was destroyed by the Palisades Fire, said during the press conference attended by Common Dreams. "My elementary and middle school, our rec center, our library, the local community theater, the banks, the post office where we voted, the grocery stores, our favorite restaurants—they have all been taken out."
"How do you communicate the value of your deceased mom's journal from 1981, when she was pregnant with you, or the textiles you collected when you worked in West Africa in your mid-20s, or the boxes of home videos carefully labeled and organized, but not yet digitized, that captured moments with your family you had hoped to one day share with your own kids?" she asked. "Losing that house in some ways feels like losing my mom all over again."
"The severity of these fires has escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of Big Oil companies that have exacerbated this crisis."
Sam James, a 24-year-old Santa Monica resident, watched the Palisades Fire rage from her window. James grew up in Altadena, where the Eaton Fire destroyed the homes of her grandfather and other relatives.
"Our roots in Altadena and Pasadena go back to at least 1890, with a legacy of building opportunities for Black generational wealth primarily through home ownership," she explained. "Much of this progress has been destroyed by recent wildfires including the Eaton Fire."
"While we always understood the risks of living in this area, the severity of these fires has escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of Big Oil companies that have exacerbated this crisis," James said. "Their reckless pollution and disregard for the environmental impact have directly contributed to climate change and the intensification of natural disasters like these wildfires. They must take responsibility for the harm that they've caused, pay reparations to the affected communities… and take immediate steps to mitigate further damage."
"The science is clear," she added. "We've seen the writing on the walls. Climate change is here, and it's only getting worse. Our communities cannot continue to bear the physical and emotional toll of this crisis caused by the actions of a powerful few. It's time for Big Oil to be held accountable and take real, measurable steps toward a more sustainable future."
Kristina Dahl, vice president of science at Climate Central, told reporters at the news conference that "we are up against a very deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry that has made it very difficult to address the crisis."
However, "California has held corporations accountable for their role in wildfires, and yet much of the financial burden is still falling on taxpayers and ratepayers," she added, "and the companies that are shaping the conditions under which these fires are occurring are largely let off the hook."
Wildfire evacuee Maya Golden-Krasner, the deputy director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, said during the press conference: "Having inflicted as much as—or maybe more than—$250 billion in damages, the LA fires already rank as one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Yet the fossil fuel polluters who rake in massive profits and have created the conditions for the fires, the floods, and the other disasters have faced no responsibility to pay for the consequences, and that leaves the rest of us stuck with the multibillion-dollar tab."
Golden-Krasner continued:
So one of my and my organization's top priorities this legislative session is to pass a climate superfund bill. The bill is modeled on federal law that requires hazardous waste polluters to clean up their toxic messes and also on California's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act. It would make the largest fossil fuel polluters pay a portion of their huge profits to address the climate consequences they helped create and help California adapt to future disasters. Vermont and New York have actually already passed similar bills last year. And in California we're already paying for Big Oil's climate destruction not just with money but with our lives.
"That's why we need our own climate superfund bill, to put billions of dollars in climate costs back on corporate polluters where they belong," she added.
While unable to share details about which state lawmakers will sponsor it or exactly when it will be introduced, Golden-Krasner told reporters that new California climate superfund legislation is likely to be released "within the next few days."
"Please stay tuned for that," she said. "There was a bill last session that made it through three committees in 60 days and the fossil fuel industry pushed really hard against it. So we're hoping that this year folks will come out and support it and we'll be able to pass it."
Noting that "climate change didn't happen out of the blue," attorney and Public Citizen Climate Program Accountability Project director Aaron Regunberg said that "the climate effects driving these fires are the direct and foreseeable—and in fact foreseen—consequences of the actions of a small number of fossil fuel companies that knowingly generated a huge portion of all the greenhouse gasses that caused this crisis and fraudulently deceived the public about the dangerousness of their products specifically in order to block and delay the very solutions that could have avoided these catastrophes."
"What's more, they did all of this with full knowledge of just how lethal their conduct really was, having long predicted that the continued burning of their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, 'catastrophic' climate harms," he continued.
"We have a concept in the law for when someone consciously disregards a substantial risk of causing harm to another person," Regunberg said. "That is called recklessness. And that's what we mean when we say that, while these deaths and injuries are unspeakably tragic, they aren't just tragedies, they're also crimes."
"The victims and survivors of climate disasters deserve justice, and fortunately we have mechanisms to give it to them," he stressed. "We have new legislative frameworks like the climate superfund. We have the civil justice system, which is designed to repair harms and compensate those who have been injured."
"The victims and survivors of climate disasters deserve justice, and fortunately we have mechanisms to give it to them."
"And that's exactly what cities and states all across the country including California are seeking with their climate accountability lawsuits, which continue to move forward and just this week overcame another dismissal attempt by Big Oil at the [U.S.] Supreme Court," Regunberg said. "And we also have the criminal justice system, which is designed to protect citizens from harm and hold wrongdoers accountable."
Regunberg last year co-authored a legal memo laying out how local or state prosecutors could bring criminal charges against Big Oil for deaths from extreme heat.
"Did you know that it's a felony in California to recklessly cause a fire?" he added. "It's involuntary manslaughter to recklessly cause a death. Local prosecutors should consider whether Big Oil's conduct here amounts to violations of these kind of criminal laws."
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'Frontlines of a Crisis We Did Not Create': Low-Lying Nations Make Climate Case to ICJ
"What started in the Pacific is now a historic climate justice campaign, as the world's most urgent problem of climate change reaches the worlds highest court," said one campaigner.
Dec 02, 2024
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) heard arguments Monday in the largest climate case ever brought before it as a coalition of low-lying and developing nations demanded larger polluting nations be held to account under international law for causing "significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment" with runaway fossil fuel emissions over recent decades.
In the first day of hearings in The Hague that could last weeks, multiple representatives from the Pacific island of Vanuatu, which is leading the coalition of over 100 countries and allied organizations, laid the blame for the climate crisis at the feed of a small number of states that are large emitters of greenhouse gases.
"We know what the cause of climate change is: a conduct of specific States ... Vanuatu's contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions is negligible, and yet we are among those most affected by climate change," said Arnold Kiel Loughman, attorney general of the Republic of Vanuatu.
"We find ourselves on the frontlines of a crisis we did not create," said Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu's special envoy for climate change and environment, told the court.
Monday's historic moment at The Hague follows years of work on the part of Pacific Island nations, particularly Vanuatu, to push for the ICJ to take up the issue of global warming and human rights. The stakes of the planetary emergency are particularly high for these countries, which are under threat from rising seas and other climate impacts.
Ilan Kiloe, legal counsel for the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a regional subgroup that includes Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, issued a stark warning during his remarks to the court: "Climate change is now depriving our peoples, again, of our ability to enjoy our right to self-determination in our lands. The harsh reality is that many of our people will not survive."
Last year, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution calling on the ICJ to issue an advisory opinion on climate change and human rights. The measure, which was introduced by Vanuatu and co-sponsored by more than 130 governments, requested that the world's highest court outline countries' legal responsibilities for combatting fossil fuel-driven climate change and the legal consequences of failing to meet those obligations.
Over the next two weeks, the court will hear statements from nearly 100 nations, including wealthy developed countries such as the United States. Advisory opinions, unlike judgments, are not binding—but Vanuatu and other supporters hope that a forthcoming opinion would accelerate action around the climate emergency.
The country began pushing for the ICJ resolution in 2021, following a campaign launched in 2019 by a group of students from the University of the South Pacific.
"What started in the Pacific is now a historic climate justice campaign, as the world's most urgent problem of climate change reaches the world’s highest court," said Shiva Gounden of Greenpeace Australia Pacific.
"The next two weeks of hearings are the culmination of collective campaigning from 2019, powerful advocacy, and mobilizing the world behind this landmark campaign, to ensure the human rights of current and future generations are protected from climate destruction, and the biggest emitters are held accountable."
Polly Banks, Vanuatu country director for Save the Children, who travelled to The Hague for the proceedings, said that "the hearing before the Court goes to questions about the efficacy, equity and fairness of the current responses to climate change, which are particularly relevant for children, who have contributed the least to climate change but will be most affected by its consequences."
"Currently, only 2.4% of climate finance from multilateral funding sources is child-responsive. Even without the Court's opinion, we know that states need to do far more to protect children from the worst impacts of this crisis, by significantly increasing climate finance to uphold children’s basic rights and access to health, education and protection," Banks added.
The start of hearings at The Hague come on the heels of a COP29 climate summit that was heavily criticized. The summit focused heavily on climate finance, but the resulting deal was panned by critics as rich nations agreed to voluntarily provide just $300 billion to help developing nations decarbonize and deal with the impacts of the climate emergency. Poor nations and climate campaigners had demanded over a trillion dollars in funding in the form of debt-free grants and direct payments.
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