“… my passion for bettering human lives via improved access to energy is unwavering.” (- Chris Wright, below)
It is a topsy-turvy new energy world where reality bats last. With the physics of energy overcoming the ‘magical thinking’ of renewables and deep decarbonization, and with a push in the U.S. under Trump, the Paris Accord (‘a fraud really, a fake‘) is going the way of the Kyoto Protocol. The forced smiles of Climate Week in New York City last month will be harder to maintain at COP 29 in Brazil. Perhaps it will be the last one as more and more countries exit, just as businesses have from the decarbonization alliances.
The new reality and politics has a central world figure in Donald Trump. But behind Trump is the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, Chris Wright. Some of his important quotations follow.
“The Paris Agreement is silly. To agree to get to net zero 2050, it’s just a crazy, bad idea. No. 1, it’s impossible, and to try to even nudge in that direction just makes everyone poorer and makes their lives worse.” (- Chris Wright, quoted in Sara Schonhardt, “Wright Dismisses Global Climate Efforts: ‘Silly‘,” ClimateWire (September 8, 2025)
Keynote Remarks, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, 43rd annual CERAWeek, March 10, 2025
Energy is the enabler of everything that we do. Everything. Energy is not a sector of the economy, it is the sector that enables every other sector. Energy is life.
I’m honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change with people as simply collateral damage.
Renewables
Wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3% of global primary energy. (You often hear larger numbers quoted but that is because of a thermal equivalent scale-up. I don’t believe that scale-up is justified, hence I stick with the actual energy produced.)
Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down. Is this pathway really going to put natural gas in the rearview mirror?
Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way that wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas. I haven’t even mentioned oil or coal yet. I spent my whole career as an entrepreneur and student of energy.
Climate Change/Politics
Recently I’ve been called a climate denier or climate skeptic. This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist. I’ve been studying, speaking and writing about climate change for over 20 years.
The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world. We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting … almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains and automobiles too. Everything in life involves trade-offs. Everything.
Responses to climate change bring their own set of trade-offs. The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.
Running the math of what might have been the benefits from these policies yields perhaps only a few hundredths of a degree reduction in global temperatures in the year 2100. The Trump administration intends to be much more scientific and mathematically literate. The previous administration’s climate policies have been impoverishing to our citizens, economically destructive to our businesses and politically polarizing.
The cure was far more destructive than the disease. There are no winners in that world except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups. The only interest group that we are concerned with is the American people.
Human Betterment
Our focus will be steadfast on the American people and our allies abroad. Let’s do a quick survey of energy access today. Roughly one billion people live lives remotely recognizable to us in this room. We wear fancy clothes mostly made out of hydrocarbons. We travel in motorized transport. The extra lucky of us fly across the world to attend conferences. We heat our homes in winter, cool them in summer, store myriad foods in our freezers and refrigerators and have light communications and entertainment at the flip of a switch. Pretty awesome. This lifestyle requires an average of 13 barrels of oil per person per year.
What about the other 7 billion people? They want what we have. The other 7 billion people on average consume only 3 barrels of oil per person per year versus our 13. Africans average less than one barrel.
We need more energy…. Over half of people today are wearing hand-washed clothes. They have yet to realize the time-saving and women-liberating joys of a washing machine…. Over two billion people today cook their daily meals and heat their homes burning wood. The indoor air pollution from this activity alone is estimated to kill over two million people annually. We need more modern energy. Two million readily preventable deaths. Where is the COP conference for this far more urgent global challenge?
None of this will be possible without thoughtful, rational policies on energy and a truly honest assessment of climate change. We are entering truly exciting times for human progress if we play our cards right, if we can get out of the way and unleash the human spirit. I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.
Electricity Prices
Back in our own country, over 20 percent of Americans struggle to pay their energy bills and roughly 10 percent have received a utility disconnection notice in the last 12 months. Think about that for a moment.
Over the last four years, American electricity prices rose by over 20 percent, with only about 2 percent demand growth. Clearly, that trajectory is a train wreck waiting to happen as we enter a period of rapid demand growth for electricity. Our 180-degree pivot will have to work at warp speed to enable the needed growth in electricity supply without saddling consumers with ever-rising electricity prices.
Consumers are rightly upset with the price rises over the last four years. This is a daunting challenge. Success will require significant regulatory changes, massive private capital deployment and innovative partnerships.
The last administration recklessly pursued policies that were certain to drive up electricity prices, knowing full well that millions of additional Americans would have to look in their kids’ eyes and tell them that their lights might be going out. That sends a chill down my spine.
We are reversing policies that force consumers to pay more for clothes washers and dryers, hot water heaters and dishwashers that deliver inferior performance. Our goal is lower cost and higher performance. Is that radical? We also plan to reverse the destructive mandates, forcing everyone to buy EVs that have been wreaking havoc on our auto industry and forcing higher prices and reduced choices on consumers.
The expensive energy or climate policies that have been in vogue among the left in wealthy western nations have taken a heavy toll on their citizens.
Making energy more expensive has impoverished citizens and displaced energy-intensive manufacturing, along with the well-paying blue-collar jobs. Expensive energy policies do not reduce demand for energy-intensive materials. They simply move where those products are produced and therefore who benefits from their production.
Foreign Energy Demand
China now consumes nearly three times as much energy in manufacturing than the United States. Three times. We have outsourced far too much manufacturing and our allies in Europe have gone much further in this destructive direction.
I find it sad and ironic that once mighty steel and petrochemical industries of the United Kingdom have been displaced to Asia, where the same products will be produced with higher greenhouse gas emissions, then loaded on a diesel-powered ship back to the United Kingdom. The net result is higher prices and fewer jobs for UK citizens, higher global greenhouse gas emissions, and all of this is a climate policy? President Trump was elected to bring back common sense to Washington DC. Let me hit a few of the highlights of America’s common sense pivot in energy.
No more all-of-government approach to making energy more expensive, less reliable, and making it nearly impossible to build more scale things in our country. We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less. Our goal is to re-industrialize America, not de-industrialize America.
Natural Gas/LNG
Natural gas is the largest source of home heating in the United States. It is central to the rapidly growing petrochemical industry and the largest supplier of processed heat for manufacturing steel, cement, countless metals, gypsum, semiconductors, polysilicon and thousands of other materials. Oh yes, and natural gas is also responsible for 43% of U.S. electricity.
My predecessor was on this stage one year ago saying that LNG exports would soon be in the rear view mirror. Think about that for a moment. Natural gas today supplies 25% of global primary energy and has been the fastest growing source of energy over the last 15 years.
President Trump immediately ended a pause on LNG export permits. Today I can announce our fourth action in this regard, improving the Delphi Offshore Louisiana LNG export terminal. This is in addition to previous actions on the Commonwealth and Golden Pass LNG projects and our actions to enable the bunkering of LNG from powering tanker ships.
Hard to believe there was opposition to these policies that so clearly benefit America, our allies, and our environment. We are working to launch the long-awaited American nuclear renaissance, fission and fusion. We want more reliable, affordable, secure energy.
AI is going to be truly transformative, many of the ways in which we can’t even foresee today. We are already experiencing the impact, the benefits in consumer services and education and also in business efficiencies. his is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Keynote remarks, Inaugural Session of the Three Seas Business Forum, Warsaw, Poland (April 28, 2025)
This is a “time for choosing”, to quote the late, great President Ronald Reagan…. On one side is energy for the sake of human flourishing. Energy that is abundant, secure, affordable and reliable. Energy that comes from innovation and choice. This is the road to economic growth, advancing the interests of our citizens and securing the economic and national security of our nations. A simple realization that energy’s true purpose is to better human lives. Full stop.
The other side of the fork deprives citizens, consumers of choice. It is top-down imposition of mandates for the energy system. This top-down imposition of enforced “climate policies” is justified as necessary to save the world from climate change. Might the causation actually run in the opposite direction? Could it be instead that a desire to grow centralization and re-establish top-down control is best served by climate alarmism? Is it the chicken or the egg? I don’t know.
” … climate alarmism has clearly reduced energy freedom, and, hence, prosperity and national security across Western Europe.
Climate alarmism has reduced freedom, prosperity, and national security.
… top-down diktats have not been successful in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. They have indeed reduced local Western European greenhouse gas emissions. Europe, however, represents only 8% of global emissions, and this impoverishing energy model is unlikely to spread globally because the emissions reductions are mainly due to two highly undesirable factors:
Germany has more than doubled its electricity generation capacity over the last 15 years, yet German electricity production today is 20% below where it was 15 years ago. And each unit of electricity has tripled in cost. Is that success?
In 2010, the U.S. and the EU each represented roughly 25% of global consumption. Today, U.S. consumption has risen to 28% of global consumption and EU consumption has declined to only 18% in dollar terms. This data is from 2023, but I have not seen any recent reversal of this trend.
Surely many things are responsible for this dramatic divergence. It is my belief that diverging energy pathways has been the largest driver of economic outcomes. Affordable, reliable, secure energy is essential to economic prosperity and national security.
The previous U.S. administration worked hard to move the United States onto that same fork. The fork with mandated, top-down, expensive, unreliable energy that would drive de-industrialization of America. The American people rejected this pathway after seeing the ruinous toll that lay down that road. Instead, they re-elected President Trump to bring back freedom and prosperity.
I have been engaged in the climate discussion for over 20 years, mostly in the areas of physical science and economics. Unfortunately, most of the climate action we hear today in the media has been in the politics and social science areas of climate change. I urge a little more focus on the science and economics [for] a more balanced and beneficial approach.
While climate change is a real physical phenomenon, nothing in the data indicates that climate change is even close to the world’s most urgent problem.
… Net Zero 2050 is absolutely the wrong goal. Not only is it unachievable, but the blind pursuit of it will cause, is causing, far more human damage than climate change itself.
Over two billion people today still lack access to basic energy services like clean cooking fuels. Millions annually die from indoor air pollution from burning wood and dung indoors. More than half of humanity is still living their lives in hand washed cloths still not utilizing the enormous time-saving and women-liberating benefits of washing machines.
Today, folks struggling to pay their bills while aspiring to live highly energized lifestyles like you and I is a far bigger global challenge than climate change. Energy access is far too important to get wrong. Only a billion people live the highly energized lifestyles of the people in this room traveling to conferences, having custom controls on our temperatures, turning off our cooking stoves when we want, driving around in motorized transport or riding in motorized transport. Seven billion people only aspire to what we have. Fulfilling their energy aspirations is the energy challenge of our time.
It turns out to be very hard to transform energy systems. Decarbonization will likely take generations. Only time and innovation will deliver the low-carbon affordable, reliable secure energy that will gain widespread adoption.
Central Europe faces a time for choosing. You all have a long history of choosing freedom and sovereignty for your citizens. We warmly welcome you to join us on Team Energy Freedom and prosperity for citizens. President Trump’s agenda of prosperity at home and peace abroad is a team sport! God bless you all.
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Remarks, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, London, UK. Quoted in E&E News, October 8, 2025
[Wind and solar] raise the system cost of electricity. If they could deliver reliably at peak demand times, they’d be value added.
The wind subsidies and solar subsidies are 33 years old, so it’s about time for industries to walk on their own.
Wind is the opposite of natural gas. People that live near wind farms don’t like them. People that live far away, love them … people that live in oil fields, love it. People that live far away, hate it.
I’m going to suggest you might, five years from now, give President Trump the hero of the climate award, because in the Trump administration, you will see more downward movement in greenhouse gas emissions globally and in the United States than any other leader in history.