https://www.cpr.org/2025/05/05/climate-change-trump-secretary-of-energy-chris-wright/
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Excerpt:
It’s not hard to pinpoint when U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright catapulted himself—and his views on climate change—into the national spotlight.
It started with a corporate dust-up over jacket logos. In late 2020, a Texas oil and gas firm tried to order company jackets from The North Face, but the outdoor apparel giant refused because it didn’t want its brand associated with fossil fuels.
At the time, Wright worked as the CEO of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based fracking services firm he founded a decade earlier. The company’s corporate headquarters are less than a mile from the VF Corporation, the parent company overseeing The North Face.
Fossil fuel advocates enlisted Wright to help call out the jacket rejection as a bit of hypocritical virtue signaling. He already had a reputation for using humor to confront his critics, having once filmed himself taking a shot of fracking fluid with his staff to show critics the solution was safe.
Wright worked with the Colorado Oil and Gas Association group to present The North Face with an “Extraordinary Customer Award,” lauding the company for making so many of its products out of hydrocarbons. He later amplified the message in viral YouTube videos and billboards in downtown Denver in the summer of 2021.
The campaign earned no shortage of local and national media coverage. Wright, a self-described “tech nerd turned entrepreneur,” leveraged the exposure to advance one of his favorite arguments: fossil fuels contribute the raw material and energy behind almost everything good about living in the 21st Century — including high-end puffy jackets.
“You can’t make a windmill, a solar farm, a nuclear power plant or a hydroelectric dam, for that matter, without oil and gas,” he told Fox News’ host Greg Gutfeld during an interview about the jacket spat. “I’m proud of that.”
Wright has a different message on climate change
The incident offered a preview of the rhetoric and showmanship Wright has brought to energy policy in the new Trump administration.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Wright recalled how his initial interest in energy started with a passion for nuclear fusion. He left Denver to study the topic at MIT before researching solar energy during graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wright later made his fortune in the oil and gas industry after returning to Colorado. In 2011, he founded Liberty Energy, a company offering the kind of fracking services that have fueled the recent boom in fossil fuel production across North America. At the same time, he maintained an interest in alternative energy sources, investing in geothermal energy startup Fervo and sitting on the board of Oklo, a pioneer in advanced nuclear fission.
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As a member of President Trump’s cabinet, Wright has found his biggest platform yet for the environmental views he detailed in countless past TED Talks, podcast appearances and op-ed pieces. He’s also given his thinking a new name: climate realism.
“Recently, I’ve been called a climate denier or climate skeptic,” he said during a keynote address at CERAWeek, a major oil and gas conference held in Houston in March. “This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist.”
He explained that the label categorizes him as someone willing to acknowledge the trade-offs of non-fossil fuel energy sources. By prioritizing wind and solar development, Wright said former President Joe Biden saddled U.S. residents with higher energy bills, and his administration made it harder for poorer countries to raise their standard of living by denying permits for liquefied natural gas export terminals.
Wright has worked to reverse those policies during the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term. As a part of a broader directive to “unleash American energy,” he’s approved new LNG export terminals, undone efficiency rules for home appliances and trumpeted the benefits of alternative energy sources like geothermal and nuclear.
His CERAWeek speech demonstrated a new way for Trump administration officials to discuss climate change, distilling ideas he’d explored at length in an 180-page Liberty Energy report last year.
