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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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Expanding LNG Over Renewable Energy Is Economic and National Security Failure: Report
"When comparing natural gas and renewables for energy security, renewables generally offer greater long-term energy security due to their local availability, reduced dependence on imports, and lower vulnerability to geopolitical disruptions."
Jan 17, 2025
As Republican President-elect Donald Trump prepares to further accelerate already near-record liquefied natural gas exports after taking office next week, a report published Friday details how soaring U.S. foreign LNG sales are "causing price volatility and environmental and safety risks for American families in addition to granting geopolitical advantages to the Chinese government."
The report, Strategic Implications of U.S. LNG Exports, was published by the American Security Project, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and offers a "comprehensive analysis of the impact of the natural gas export boom from the advent of fracking through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and provides insight into how the tidal wave of U.S. exports in the global market is altering regional and domestic security environments."
According to a summary of the publication:
The United States is the world's leading producer of natural gas and largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Over the past decade, affordable U.S. LNG exports have facilitated a global shift from coal and mitigated the geopolitical risks of fossil fuel imports from Russia and the Middle East. Today, U.S. LNG plays a critical role in diversifying global energy supplies and reducing reliance on adversarial energy suppliers. However, rising global dependence on natural gas is creating new vulnerabilities, including pricing fluctuations, shipping route bottlenecks, and inherent health, safety, and environmental hazards. The U.S. also faces geopolitical challenges related to the LNG trade, including China's stockpiling and resale of cheap U.S. LNG exports to advance its renewable energy industry and expand its global influence.
"When comparing natural gas and renewables for energy security, renewables generally offer greater long-term energy security due to their local availability, reduced dependence on imports, and lower vulnerability to geopolitical disruptions," the report states.
American Security Project CEO Matthew Wallin said in a statement that "action needs to be taken to ensure Americans are insulated from global price shocks, the impacts of climate change, and new health and safety risks."
"Our country must also do more to protect its interests from geopolitical rivals like China that subsidize their growth and influence by reselling cheap U.S. LNG at higher spot prices," Wallin asserted. "U.S. LNG has often been depicted as a transition fuel, and our country must ensure that it continues working towards that transition to clean sources instead of becoming dependent on yet another vulnerable fuel source."
Critics have
warned that LNG actually hampers the transition to a green economy. LNG is mostly composed of methane, which has more than 80 times the planetary heating power of carbon dioxide during its first two decades in the atmosphere.
Despite President Joe Biden's 2024 pause on LNG export permit applications, his administration has presided over what climate campaigners have called a "staggering" LNG expansion, including Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and more than a dozen other projects. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy acknowledged that approving more LNG exports would raise domestic energy prices, increase pollution, and exacerbate the climate crisis.
In addition to promising to roll back Biden's recent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of U.S. coastal territory, Trump—who has nominated a bevy of fossil fuel proponents for his Cabinet—is expected to further increase LNG production and exports.
A separate report published Friday by Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen examined 14 proposed LNG export terminals that the Trump administration is expected to fast-track, creating 510 million metric tons of climate pollution–"equivalent to the annual emissions of 135 new coal plants."
While campaigning for president, Trump vowed to "frack, frack, frack; and drill, baby, drill." This, as fossil fuel interests poured $75 million into his campaign coffers, according to The New York Times.
"This research reveals the disturbing reality of an LNG export boom under a second Trump term," Friends of the Earth senior energy campaigner Raena Garcia said in a statement referring to her group's new report. "This reality will cement higher energy prices for Americans and push the world into even more devastating climate disasters. The incoming administration is poised to haphazardly greenlight LNG exports that are clearly intended to put profit over people."
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'I Won't Let My Future Burn': Protesters Arrested at Fracking CEO Chris Wright's Senate Hearing
"The climate crisis is here. Oil and gas CEOs like Chris Wright have blood on their hands, and they have no place in our government," said Sunrise Movement's Aru Shiney-Ajay.
Jan 15, 2025
While senators questioned Chris Wright—the CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking company, and President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be the next secretary of energy—10 activists were arrested for disrupting Wright's confirmation hearing on Wednesday, according to a statement from the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate group.
"I am 18 years old and I want a future, but wealthy and powerful special interests are selling that future to make a profit," said Adah Crandall, one of those arrested, according to the statement. "That's why I stood up today, for myself and all the young people right now who are terrified about the world we will live in when we are Chris Wright's age."
Protestors with the Sunrise Movement stationed outside of the confirmation hearing wore shirts that said "I WON'T LET MY FUTURE BURN" and held up banners that read "Oil CEOs Profit, LA Burns"—in references to the ongoing wildfires ravaging the Los Angeles area.
"The climate crisis is here. Oil and gas CEOs like Chris Wright have blood on their hands, and they have no place in our government,” said Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay, in the statement. "Fossil fuel CEOs knew—before we were born—that burning fossil fuels would cause disasters like these fires in LA. They condemned us to die."
Wright's nomination, which appears likely given that Republicans hold a 53-47 majority Senate, has drawn the ire of climate and watchdog groups more broadly.
Mahyar Sorour, a director at the Sierra Club, recently calledWright the "personification" of a 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."
In 2021, Wright—who has been a longtime evangelist for fossil fuels—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.
Wright's past remarks resurfaced during his hearing Wednesday. During a tense exchange, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said that Wright had once written on social media that "the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify more impoverishment from bad government policies." Padilla asked Wright if he still believes wildfires are just hype. Wright said that he watched the fires unfold with "sorrow and fear" but didn't retract his past statement when pressed by Padilla.
"I stand by my past comments," Wright said.
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