Energy Secretary Nominee Carves Out His Climate Change Delay Tactic

As protestors wearing “I won’t let my future burn” shirts were arrested by Capitol Police in the hallway, oil company CEO and energy secretary nominee Chris Wright was inside a hearing room staking claim to what will surely be his ongoing climate change delay and denial strategy.

“Energy is critical to human lives. Climate change is a global challenge that we need to solve,” he said in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday. “And the trade-offs between those two are the decisions politicians make, and they’re the decisions that will impact the future of our world.”

The sneaky bit here is to accept it is happening but call it a “global challenge.” Keeping climate change that broad lets one dismiss the localized impacts the global circulation of greenhouse gases actually has. It’s what lets him call a specific connection, like that between warmer temperatures, changes to precipitation patterns, and wildfires that get pretty local when they burn a house down, “hype,” as he did in a LinkedIn post in the past.

“Given the devastation that we’re currently Experiencing in Los Angeles, do you still believe that wildfires are just hype?” asked Alex Padilla (D—CA) during the hearing. Wright, after offering his sympathies, said once again: “Climate change is a real and global phenomenon.” Padilla pressed about the “hype.” Wright: “I stand by my past comments.”

Wright, who was present at the infamous Mar-A-Lago meeting last year when Donald Trump demanded oil executives raise $1 billion for his campaign, is the founder and CEO of oilfield services company Liberty Energy, based in Colorado. Obviously, he is in favor of the U.S. expanding its fossil fuel production beyond the record-setting levels it is already at. He reconciles that goal with the “global challenge” by arguing that it’s only with more oil and gas that people’s lives improve, again ignoring the localized impacts not just of climate change but of burning the dirty stuff itself. In fact, he’s got a rhetorical two-step for that as well:

“There isn’t dirty energy and clean energy,” he said on Wednesday. “All energies are different and they all have different tradeoffs.” This idea will, of course, offer great comfort to the victim the next time a solar panel causes an asthma attack.