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u.s. department of energy
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 Wednesday. "His track record shows he's unfit to serve as secretary of energy."
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'A Disastrous Mistake': Trump Taps Fracking CEO Chris Wright for Energy Secretary
"This is going to be the oiliest administration since George W. Bush," lamented one environmental campaigner.
Nov 16, 2024
In a move that alarmed green groups, Republican President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday tapped Chris Wright—the CEO of a fracking company who denies the climate emergency—as his energy secretary.
Wright, who leads the Denver-based oil services company Liberty Energy, is a Republican donor whose nomination to head the Department of Energy is backed by powerful fossil fuel boosters including oil and gas tycoon and Trump adviser Harold Hamm.
"Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy. He has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas," Trump said in a statement announcing his choice. "Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics."
"Not surprising but still appalling that Trump's pick for Energy Secretary is a Big Oil CEO."
Trump—who has promised to increase fossil fuel production beyond the record-setting levels of the Biden administration—also said Wright would serve on a new Council of National Energy led by Doug Burgum, his pick to run the Interior Department.
In a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Wright said that he is "honored and grateful for the opportunity" to be nominated by Trump.
"My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable, and secure," he added. "Energy is the lifeblood that makes everything in life possible. Energy matters. I am looking forward to getting to work."
Wright calls himself "a lifelong environmentalist" and said last year that "climate change is a real problem." However, he also said in 2023 that "there is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy" and that "there is no climate crisis and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either."
While fossil fuel proponents cheered Wright's nomination, climate and environmental defenders voiced alarm over the pick.
"Not surprising but still appalling that Trump's pick for Energy Secretary is a Big Oil CEO," League of Conservation Voters senior vice president for government affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld wrote on X.
Natural Resources Defense Council senior vice president for climate and energy Jackie Wong blasted Wright as "a champion of fossil fuels" whose nomination was "a disastrous mistake."
"The Energy Department should be doing all it can to develop and expand the energy sources of the 21st century, not trying to promote the dirty fuels of the last century," Wong said in a statement reported by The Associated Press. "Given the devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters, DOE's core mission of researching and promoting cleaner energy solutions is more important now than ever."
Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the Center for Biological Diversity, lamented that "this is going to be the oiliest administration since George W. Bush."
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Biden Urged to 'Follow the Facts' as Study Shows LNG Emissions 33% Worse Than Coal
"The science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals," said one campaigner.
Sep 12, 2024
More than 125 climate, environmental, and health scientists and researchers on Thursday implored the Biden administration to "follow legitimate science and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs," pointing to a new study showing liquefied natural gas has a 33% greater greenhouse gas footprint than coal.
"As U.S. scientists and researchers we are closely following efforts by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Treasury to develop greenhouse gas analyses of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and hydrogen, and implore you to use the best available science when conducting this analysis," the scientists wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
"The stakes could not be higher," the letter asserts. "The choices that you make relating to modeling assumptions for the heat-trapping potential of natural gas will determine if the federal government will make decisions based on climate science or wishful thinking."
The scientists continued:
The main constituent in natural gas is methane, a powerful climate-disrupting pollutant that traps more than 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years, the relevant timeframe in which we must act. We agree with President [Joe] Biden's declaration to world leaders that this is the decisive decade. As the climate crisis becomes more urgent, we are rapidly approaching planetary thresholds that, once breached, cannot be reversed.
The fossil fuel industry wants you to distort the scientific evidence and asserts, falsely, that decisions to expand natural gas production and consumption are consistent with U.S. and global climate goals. They are advocating for flawed modeling assumptions that would hide the true climate impact of gas. It is imperative that the Departments of Energy and Treasury reject these efforts.
The letter's signers cite a study published this month by Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth which—when properly accounting for LNG's full life cycle, including extraction, liquefaction, transportation, and end-source combustion—found that the fracked gas has a 33% greater greenhouse emissions impact than coal.
"An abundance of scientific evidence now shows that natural gas is at least as damaging to the climate as coal and may be worse due to inevitable leaks and disproves the claim that natural gas can serve as a 'bridge fuel' while renewable energy sources ramp up," the scientists wrote.
Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that "the science is clearer than ever: LNG exports and natural gas-sourced hydrogen pose grave risks to our planet and will undermine President Biden's own climate goals."
"This administration must ignore industry propaganda, follow legitimate science, and reject the expansion of fossil fuel programs like LNG exports and gas-sourced hydrogen," Walsh added.
Noting that "over 20 years, methane is a far more powerful climate villain than ever previously appreciated," Science & Environmental Health Network senior scientist Sandra Steingraber said that "methane is the Houdini of greenhouse gasses, escaping into the atmosphere from all parts of the natural gas system at a pace that far exceeds earlier estimates."
"Taken together, these findings mean that the stakes for the modeling assumptions chosen for estimating the climate impacts of LNG and hydrogen fuels could not be higher," Steingraber stressed. "It's imperative that our Departments of Energy and Treasury base their climate modeling assumptions on the abundance of scientific evidence and not the distorted claims and wishful thinking of the fossil fuel industry."
Despite campaign pledges to center climate action—including by banning new fossil fuel drilling on public lands—Biden oversaw the approval of more new permits for drilling on public land during his first two years in office than former President Donald Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee, did in 2017 and 2018.
The Biden administration has also held fossil fuel lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and has approved the highly controversial Willow project and Mountain Valley Pipeline. Biden also increased liquefied natural gas production and export before pausing LNG exports earlier this year.
Despite the pause—which activists are calling on the Biden administration to make permanent—the president has also overseen what climate defenders 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 that, if all completed, would make U.S. exported LNG emissions higher than the European Union's combined greenhouse gas footprint.
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