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Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a former Colorado oil and gas executive who calls himself a climate realist. He acknowledges that the planet is getting warmer but doesn't believe it's a crisis. Now he's leading a department that's charged with developing new climate-friendly energy sources. Sam Brasch of Colorado Public Radio has this report.
SAM BRASCH, BYLINE: This spring, Wright returned to Colorado, where he built his fortune leading a company offering fracking tech for the oil and gas industry. His first stop? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.
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CHRIS WRIGHT: I had a tremendous day. Tremendous day at NREL today.
BRASCH: The lab focuses on renewables like wind and solar. That research is a core function of the Department of Energy, and it made the agency central to Biden-era climate efforts. NREL is also near the location of the 2021 Marshall Fire, the most destructive fire in Colorado history. So during the visit, a reporter asked Wright about a post where he called concern about climate-driven wildfires just hype.
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WRIGHT: The hype is climate alarmism, and it's a hundred percent. Calling climate change a crisis is just to say, I'm not going to look at the science. I'm not going to look at the economics. I'm just going to run with the politics.
BRASCH: Wright says he's more pragmatic. He acknowledges burning fossil fuels is heating the planet but says that's a manageable problem.
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WRIGHT: Like, it's a real physical phenomenon. It's worth understanding a little bit. But to call it a crisis and point to disasters and say that that's climate change, that's to say, I'm not going to do my homework.
BRASCH: Wright often argues disasters like hurricanes and wildfires haven't gotten more frequent. That's despite a scientific consensus that climate change is contributing to more extreme weather events. Wright didn't respond to multiple interview requests for this story, but he's spent years making a consistent point - the benefits of fossil fuels outweigh climate impacts. In 2021, the outdoor brand The North Face declined to sell jackets to an oil and gas firm, citing climate concerns. Wright responded with an ad campaign, calling the company hypocrites.
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WRIGHT: The great majority of North Face's products - jackets, backpacks, outdoor pants, shirts, shoes, hats, et cetera - are dominantly made out of the oil and gas that we so proudly produce.
BRASCH: And the YouTube videos and billboards carried the same message.
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WRIGHT: So thank you, North Face. And you're welcome.
BRASCH: The spat landed Wright on Fox News. In later podcasts and talks, he argued fossil fuels have pulled billions out of poverty and remain essential to modern life.
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WRIGHT: All these fancy materials, and we can fly around the planet and ride - drive a car to go visit Grandma for dinner a hundred miles away. These were just unimaginable before the arrival of fossil fuels.
BRASCH: Scott Denning is a climate scientist at Colorado State University who debated Wright in 2015.
SCOTT DENNING: What he's implying, without even really claiming it, is that the only way we can continue to live modern lives is to continue digging up 10 billion tons of carbon a year and setting them on fire forever and ever, which is simply not true. That's just malarkey.
BRASCH: Denning says the world now has more energy options, and Wright downplays the risks of living on a hotter planet.
DENNING: It's pretty naive to say, oh, no, we could just turn the temperatures up to, like, south Texas around here in Colorado, and we won't have any impacts on water, on fire, on drought, on livestock, on forestry. I mean, come on.
BRASCH: But some clean energy advocates are more hopeful about Wright, pointing out he often says the country needs abundant energy from multiple sources. Sure, his company played a key role in the recent shale gas boom, but he's also invested in more climate-friendly alternatives, like geothermal and nuclear. That's good news for Jigar Shah, who led an office focused on green tech under President Biden.
JIGAR SHAH: Chris Wright knows better than anyone that shale has plateaued, right? And so now we need to diversify where we're getting our energy from, and we need nuclear. We need geothermal. We need these other technologies.
BRASCH: And that's what the Department of Energy has been working on. But so far, the Trump administration has opposed clean energy incentives and cut staff at the DOE. So even if Wright supports alternative energy research, Shah says it's not clear if he can pursue it.
For NPR News, I'm Sam Brasch in Denver. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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