The US Senate on Monday confirmed Chris Wright, a fracking executive, to be Donald Trump’s energy secretary.
The vote was 59-38.
Wright, 60, the CEO of Liberty Energy since 2011 has said he will step down from the company once confirmed. He wrote in a Liberty report last year that he believes human-caused climate change is real, but that its hazards are “distant and uncertain”. He has also said that top-down governmental policies to curb it are destined to fail.
However, Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile in 2023.
Wright recently faced criticism from California senators when, shortly after the Palisades and Eaton fires devastated Los Angeles, he disputed the ties between climate change and more recent or severe wildfires, the Washington Post reported.
During Wright’s US Senate confirmation hearing, the California senator Alex Padilla accused Wright of downplaying the real and deadly effects of wildfires. When the senator asked whether Wright stood by those comments in light of the catastrophic blazes in his home state, Wright responded that he believed that climate change was a global phenomenon and that he stood by his past comments.
Scientific studies contradict Wright’s claims. Climate change has, in fact, contributed to the increased frequency and severity of wildfires, including those in Los Angeles.
Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.
He made a media splash in 2019 when he drank fracking fluid on camera to demonstrate it was not dangerous.
Wright will be in charge of an agency that has about a $50bn budget with about half of that going to maintain the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
The Department of Energy handles US energy diplomacy, administers the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – which Trump has said he wants to replenish – and runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, such as the loan programs office.
Wright will be in charge of the ageing US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear energy waste disposal and 17 national labs.
Wright will replace Jennifer Granholm, a supporter of electric vehicles and emerging energy sources like geothermal power, and a backer of carbon-free wind, solar and nuclear energy.
