Trump’s Energy Secretary Pick Chris Wright: Climate Denier Or Energy Pragmatist?
The climate industrial complex and its mainstream media supporters are nothing if not predictable in their response to what they see as threats to their global agenda to ‘fight climate change’.
Within a day of President-elect Trump’s announcement of Chris Wright as Secretary of Energy-designate, the knives were out against him.
The Telegraph stated that “Donald Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary called Net Zero a ‘sinister goal’ and drank bleach on camera”. Sky News claimed that ‘Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary [is] “disastrous” for the fight against climate change‘.
The Washington Post headlined the nomination with ‘Climate crisis sceptic is Trump’s top energy pick‘. According to the Sierra Club, “Chris Wright is a climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”
These hostile reactions from climate change advocates and their allies in the legacy media were like those that followed Mr. Trump’s nomination of J.D. Vance as his VP and running mate during the Presidential campaign in July.
Like Chris Wright, Mr. Vance is accused of ‘climate denialism’ for having been open about his sceptical views on the Biden administration’s “green energy fantasy”.
The climate industrial complex is a broad tent that includes scientists, bureaucrats, businessmen and NGO activists convinced of an impending climate cataclysm that demands global governance solutions such as the Paris Agreement. It has great concerns, indeed fears, that a Trump Presidency would present a fatal blow to the West’s climate change agenda.
A Fracking Champion
Chris Wright is CEO of Liberty Energy, North America’s second largest hydraulic fracturing (fracking) company. Armed with science and engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of California, Berkeley, he founded Pinnacle Technologies in 1992 to engage in commercial shale gas production.
He served as an advisor to the late legendary Texas billionaire George P. Mitchell, who played a pioneering role in the U.S. shale oil and gas boom which combined horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas molecules from previously worthless shale rock formations.
Unlike Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm – a lawyer who previously served as the Attorney General and then as Governor of Michigan – Mr. Wright knows how energy markets work from the bottom up as an entrepreneur.
While Ms. Granholm was better known for placing regulatory obstacles on oil and gas production in the country, Mr. Wright is all-in on promoting the Trumpian agenda of “drill, baby, drill” and U.S. energy dominance.
In 2019, he made headlines when he drank fracking fluid with colleagues after toasting the “long lives and healthier lives of billions of people all around the world from oil and gas”.
In a video posted to his LinkedIn account last year – which was taken down briefly by the social media’s censors before being re-instated – he said “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition.”
He has not shied away from making known his views on the larger picture of energy, climate and human welfare. Liberty Energy recently published the third edition of a book called Bettering Human Lives.
In it, Wright makes the case for why the U.S. should produce more oil and gas as part of global efforts to lift hundreds of millions of human beings out of energy poverty.
The 180-page book covers a range of topics on energy and the modern world, energy poverty, climate change and climate economics before concluding with a chapter on Liberty Energy’s achievements and activities.
Anyone interested in a summary of Mr. Wright’s views on how conventional energy fuels play a critical role in human flourishing need only read his one-page preamble covering 10 “key takeaways”. These may be paraphrased as follows:
Energy, made up primarily of hydrocarbons, is essential to life and the world needs more of it. Hydrocarbons are essential to improving the wealth, health and life opportunities for the seven billion people in the developing countries who aspire to live like the world’s rich one billion.
The American shale revolution transformed energy markets, energy security and geopolitics for the better. There is no energy transition yet, as solar and wind energy do not replace the most critical uses of hydrocarbons. Making energy more expensive or unreliable compromises people, national security and the environment.
Climate change, a global challenge, is far from being the world’s greatest threat to human life. Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a superior goal to Net Zero by 2050.
Do these views, based on what seem to this author to be an appreciation of empirical data and a concern for the real needs of many people aspiring for better lives, merit the charge of ‘climate denier’?
Denying Climate Denialism
The use of abusive epithets and invectives in competitive politics is nothing new, and in recorded history goes all the way back to ancient Rome and its greatest orator Cicero. In the polarised world of U.S. Presidential campaigns, Donald Trump has been subject to accusations of xenophobia, sexism, Islamophobia and racism.
His followers have been called “deplorables” (Hillary), as those who “cling to guns and religion” (Obama) and “garbage” (Biden). Mr. Trump has not been slow in using his own invectives against Joe Biden (“slow Joe”), Hillary Clinton (“crooked Hillary”) and Kamala Harris (“dumb person”).
Accusing someone with a derogatory epithet is a rhetorical tactic designed to trap the accused into responding defensively, thereby yielding unintended validity to the accusation.
By labelling someone with a negative epithet, the accuser shifts the burden of proof onto the accused to disprove the claim. The accused feels compelled to defend his or her character or actions, thereby engaging with the accusation on the accuser’s terms.
Even if the accused successfully refutes the charge, the act of defending against the label often reinforces an association between him or her and the accusation in the minds of the audience. This ensures that the accusation sways people regardless of its truth.
When an individual focuses on disproving an epithet, he or she loses control over the narrative and by forcing the accused to be on the defensive, it deflects discussion on substantive arguments.
Common slurs of ‘racism’ or ‘sexism’ question the accused person’s morality.
The ‘climate denier’ invective is particularly pernicious in its obvious reference to Holocaust denial, equating the two as personal moral failings of those holding such beliefs. Steve Koonin, previously Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy in the Obama administration, finds it “particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific discussion [on climate change] equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed more than 200 of my relatives in Eastern Europe”.
The purpose of the ‘climate denier’ epithet, then, is to shut down rational debate on climate change with misleading claims about ‘settled science‘ and the personal moral failings of the accused. The term is thus intended to convey that the ‘climate denier’ has no concern for a clean environment, the fate of the planet or its inhabitants, or for the future of posterity.
Yet, there is nothing in Mr. Wright’s “key takeaways” to suggest that he is not concerned about the planet or its inhabitants. Indeed, if anything, he puts the focus on the seven billion people of the developing countries.
But good intentions alone often pave the road to hell. He reminds his audience that aspirations for higher standards of living are only possible with greater access to hydrocarbons.
The dilute and intermittent nature of solar and wind technologies, their enormous requirements for land area (or sea in the case of offshore wind) and dependence on government subsidies mean that they can only play a bit role in electricity generation.
Interestingly, Forbes magazine ran an article on Chris Wright that argues that he is not a climate denier but a pragmatist.
Noting that Mr. Wright agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that plays a role in global warming, Forbes author Chris Helman seemingly concurs with Mr. Wright that: “To make the world a better place, to solve the global problems, you need more reliable, affordable, secure energy… You have to have a successful, wealthy society to do that.”
There is an extensive list of eminent, credentialled scientists who have been ostracised and demonised with the epithet ‘climate denier’.
Yet it would be difficult to find anything in their work which would disagree with Mr. Wright’s “key takeaways”. Scientists such as John Clauser, Steve Koonin, William Happer, Richard Lindzen, Roger Pielke Jr., Judith Curry, Ian Plimer and Willie Soon have all rejected unvalidated models of impending climate doom.
The UN IPCC’s assessment reports, supposedly the gold standard for journalists, have little confidence in projections of extreme weather due to climate change. This is a theme the mainstream media have been amplifying in alarmist headlines for the past two decades.
Indeed, as has been the case since the industrial revolution, it is continual adaptation to ever-changing and often harsh environments made possible by fossil fuels and improving technologies that is the way forward.
The unceasing push by global elites for mitigating carbon emissions whatever the costs in today’s false ‘believer-denier’ debate is, as Holman Jenkins Jr. of the Wall Street Journal argues, a language effectively developed and deployed to promote climate “pork” not human betterment.
The Businessman Hero
As a businessman, Mr. Wright could have taken the well-trodden path of least resistance, paid obeisance to the demands of green ideologues and perhaps exploited Government programmes offering subsidies in favoured industries as many of his counterparts in the private sector have done. Instead, he bravely adopted a combative approach towards promoting energy abundance as the true path to human flourishing.
Earlier this year, Liberty Energy together with Nomad Proppant Services filed a litigation to challenge the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Climate Rule which would force public companies to divulge details regarding greenhouse gas emissions and weather-related risks. The rule also forces companies to discuss the strategies they plan to adopt to transition towards a low-carbon future.
Liberty Energy’s suit challenges the rule, stating that it will increase the burden of costs on the energy industry, which will result in potentially higher energy costs for U.S. consumers. It further stated that the rule exceeded the SEC’s authority and applied increased costs on the energy sector without any clear, foreseeable benefit.
It is also claimed that the Climate Rule infringes on the First Amendment rights of companies by compelling them to comment on a controversial political issue of climate change.
In the event, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted an administrative stay of the SEC’s Climate Rule pending further litigation. The court’s decision was received “with gratitude” by Chris Wright as CEO of Liberty Energy.
Chris Wright, a committed evangelist for “energy sobriety”, need not deny the false charge of climate denialism. Instead, if confirmed as Secretary of Energy under the in-coming Trump administration, he can look forward to working to dismantle the administrative state’s stranglehold over America’s energy abundance.
This will not only help make America great again; it would benefit the seven billion people aspiring for a better life.
*Full disclosure: I wrote an article on J.D. Vance when he was chosen by Mr Trump as his VP nominee arguing precisely the same thing, that Mr.Vance was not a ‘climate denier’ but rather an energy pragmatist.
The article was later deleted by Forbes, on the grounds that I did not follow Forbes’s editorial guidelines against “advocacy, opinion, polemic and rumour-mongering”. The article was later published in full by the Daily Sceptic here.
See more here Daily Sceptic
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