Trump's pick for energy secretary is the final boss of climate skepticism

It would be easy to overlook Chris Wright. The fracking company CEO, tapped this week by the Trump administration as its nominee for energy secretary, doesn’t have anywhere near the same public profile or reputation as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, or some of Donald Trump’s other controversial selections. His nomination will almost certainly get approved by the Senate without much controversy or consternation. But when it comes to his potential impact on (and in) the rest of the world, he should not be overlooked. 

Wright’s company, after all, is no mere fracking operation. Liberty Energy is an unapologetic proselytizer for the glory and virtue of fossil fuels, and its mission extends well beyond the borders of the United States. In a glossy 180-page treatise released this year, Liberty makes the case that fossil fuels are central to our prosperity and quality of life, and that they can — no, must — be used to lift up the billions of people who still live in less fortunate circumstances. “Our mission,” Wright says, “is to better human lives.”

Wright’s manifesto is a masterclass in fig leaf creation. It talks earnestly about the challenges in the developing world and the human cost that poverty inflicts on those living there. His “Bettering Human Lives Foundation” is led by a nurse-midwife with decades of experience in humanitarian aid and assistance in the developing world. Heck, he even name checks Vaclav Smil, the professor emeritus in the University of Manitoba’s faculty of environment who counts Bill Gates among his biggest fans, as “our greatest living energy scholar.” 

Most importantly, his manifesto does not deny the existence of man-made climate change or the underlying scientific realities. Instead, it simply brushes all of it aside and suggests there are other, more pressing issues that deserve our attention. “We cannot achieve this aggressive climate goal without exacerbating widespread suffering and limiting opportunity for everyone. The narrow focus on Net Zero 2050 threatens immediate life-saving interventions. The cure is far worse than the disease.”

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is essentially the same thesis that Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg has been advancing for more than two decades now, one that seeks to deprioritize climate change as an issue rather than deny its existence. Indeed, Wright cites Lomborg repeatedly in his manifesto, hitting on some of his favourite talking points. More people dying of extreme cold than extreme heat? Check. Disaster-related deaths down nearly 90 per cent compared to a century ago? Check. 

But Wright’s argument has a level of political polish — and, now, power — that Lomborg could never summon as a mere gadfly. It transforms the transparently self-interested tactic of endless delay on climate action into an apparent act of virtue. The climate slow-walkers here in Canada now have a powerful ally with a potent message, one they will almost certainly begin deploying with more frequency and volume in their own efforts to push climate policy as far into the future as possible. If you thought Danielle Smith was hard to stomach before, I’d suggest stocking up on Tums.

Now, it’s easy to poke holes in this argument if you know where to look. For all the gloss in Wright’s presentation, it doesn’t take much scratching of the surface to reveal the tinfoil underneath. In a recent LinkedIn post he described climate change as “the new North Star of leftism,” one he compared to the Soviet Union. On the same platform last year he shared a video in which he proclaimed that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

His tender concern for the lives and wellbeing of people in the developing world starts to look decidedly less noble when you realize his solution revolves around increasing exports of the products he gets paid to extract. It’s the 21st century version of a 1990s-era landline company CEO suggesting that only wired telephones can give people in the developing world the same access to telecommunications that we enjoy in North America.

Mobile phones, of course, came along and made those landlines we all relied upon largely moot — with poorer countries leapfrogging directly into the mobile era for communications and banking. The same is almost certainly going to be true of renewable energy, given the massive improvements in their cost and the clear preference most developing countries would have for developing their own wind and solar rather than paying to import someone else’s oil and gas. 

As a recent report from RMI (formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute) noted, “the global south controls 70% of global solar and wind resources and 50% of critical minerals.” That same report also underscored the fact that in many parts of the developing world new wind and solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels — and it will only get cheaper as things like battery storage technology continue to scale.  

Ironically, Wright’s new boss might be the biggest impediment standing in the way of his plan to export fossil-fueled prosperity to the developing world. If President-elect Donald Trump hits China with the massive tariffs he’s promised, China will be heavily incentivized to turn its own economic attention to the rest of the world. That will mean expanding influence in the global south by selling technologies like low-cost electric vehicles, wind and solar — market segments that China already dominates. The more America turns inwards, the more China will look past it. 

In time, and maybe not that much of it, those low-cost EVs and solar installations will obliterate the demand growth that fossil fuel companies like Wright’s treat as their own divine right. In the meantime, those who care about good climate policy will have to reframe their own efforts away from a scarcity mindset and towards one defined by abundance and optimism. They — we — have to remind people that renewable energy is a pathway to more human flourishing, not just less human suffering. The enemies of climate action have leveled up. The rest of us have to as well.