Before a packed crowd of oil and gas executives on Monday, Chris Wright, the new U.S. energy secretary, delivered a scathing critique of the Biden administration’s energy policies and efforts to fight climate change and promised a “180 degree pivot.”
Mr. Wright, a former fracking executive, has emerged as the most forceful promoter of President Trump’s plans to expand American oil and gas production and dismantle virtually every federal policy aimed at curbing global warming.
“I wanted to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy,” Mr. Wright said as he kicked off the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, the nation’s biggest annual gathering of the energy industry. “The previous administration’s policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage.”
Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
It was quite different from a year ago, when Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary during the Biden administration, told the same gathering that the transition to lower-carbon forms of energy like wind, solar and batteries was unstoppable. “Even as we are the largest producer of oil and gas in the world,” Ms. Granholm said, “the expansion of America’s energy dominance to clean energy is striking.”
Mr. Wright, however, was dismissive of renewable power, which he said played only a small role in the world’s energy mix. Natural gas currently supplies 25 percent of raw energy globally, before it is converted into electricity or some other use. Wind and solar only supply about 3 percent, he said. He noted that gas also had a variety of other uses — it could be burned in furnaces to heat homes or used to make fertilizer or other chemicals — that were hard to replicate with other energy sources.
“Beyond the obvious scale and cost problems, there is simply no physical way wind, solar and batteries could replace the myriad uses of natural gas,” Mr. Wright said.
Mr. Wright has argued that there is a moral case for fossil fuels, saying they are crucial for alleviating global poverty and that moving too quickly to cut emissions risks driving up energy prices around the world. He has denounced efforts by countries to stop adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere by 2050, calling that a “sinister goal.”
At a conference in Washington last week, Mr. Wright said that African countries needed more energy of all kinds to lift themselves out of poverty, including coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. “We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” he said. “That’s just nonsense.”
In Houston on Monday, other oil and gas executives echoed Mr. Wright’s remarks, pitching oil and gas as the best solution to energy poverty around the world.
“There are billions of people on this planet that still live sad, short, difficult lives because they live in energy poverty, and that’s a shame,” said Michael Wirth, chief executive of Chevron. “It should be unacceptable but affordability had left the conversation, at least in the West.”
In recent years, much of the world has been investing heavily in renewable energy. Last year, nations invested roughly $1.2 trillion in wind, solar, batteries and electric grids, slightly more than the $1.1 trillion they spent on oil, gas and coal infrastructure, according to the International Energy Agency.
But Mr. Wright warned against a shift to renewable energy that he said was likely to prove costly. “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices went up,” he said.
That is not always true. Texas has seen its electricity prices decline slightly over the past decade as wind and solar have grown rapidly and now supply more than one-quarter of the state’s power. The costs of wind turbines and solar panels have dropped precipitously in the last decade. But some places, like California and Germany, have seen electricity prices rise significantly at the same time they ramped up their use of renewable energy.
Some energy executives at the conference were more optimistic about renewable energy. John Ketchum, the chief executive of NextEra Energy, the largest producer of wind and solar power in the United States, said that renewables were essential for meeting growing demand for electricity in the United States over the next few years — especially since there was a large backlog for new turbines that burn natural gas.
Renewable energy “is cheaper and it’s available right now,” Mr. Ketchum said. “When you look at gas as a solution, as an example, to get your hands on a gas turbine and to actually get it built throughout the market, you’re really looking at 2030, or later.”
In his speech, Mr. Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration for slowing the growth of natural gas exports. Last year, the Energy Department paused approvals of new terminals that export liquefied natural gas, saying that it was concerned about the environmental and price impacts of shipping more gas overseas. Despite the pause, the United States was still the world’s largest exporter of natural gas in 2024.
On Monday, Mr. Wright signed the fourth export approval since Mr. Trump took office, extending an approval for the Delfin terminal off the coast of Louisiana. He said the Biden administration’s review of gas exports had found only modest impacts on global emissions and domestic U.S. prices.
On the topic of climate change, Mr. Wright said he didn’t deny that the planet was warming, calling himself a “climate realist.”
But he added that rising greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels — which have increased global average temperatures to their highest levels in at least 100,000 years — were a “side effect of building the modern world.”
“We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50 percent in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting millions of the world’s lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine,” he said. “Everything in life involves trade-offs.”
Mr. Wright did not dwell on the downsides of climate change, which include the growing risks of heat waves, drought, floods and species extinction. He also did not address the costs of adapting to a hotter planet, which experts estimate could reach trillions of dollars for developing countries alone this decade.
Instead, Mr. Wright rebuked Britain for slashing its greenhouse gas emissions faster than any other wealthy country, saying that doing so had driven key industries overseas.
“I find it sad and a bit 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,” Mr. Wright said. “The net result is higher prices and fewer jobs for U.K. citizens, higher global greenhouse gas emissions, and all of this is termed a climate policy.”
Mr. Wright said he was not against low-carbon energy and supports advanced forms of nuclear power and geothermal power, which multiple startups in the United States are pursuing.
But he said that the administration’s “all-of-the-above” approach to energy likely would not extend to wind farms, citing opposition in some communities. President Trump has railed against wind farms, saying falsely they cause cancer. The administration has stopped approvals for wind farms on public land and in federal waters and has threatened to block projects on private land.
“Wind has been singled out because it’s had a singularly poor record of driving up prices and getting increasing citizen outrage, whether you’re a farm or you’re in a coastal community,” Mr. Wright said. “So wind is a little bit of a different case.”
The Trump administration’s policies are not uniformly popular among oil and gas producers. Many companies have warned that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum could raise prices for essential materials like pipes used to line new wells, while the constant threat of tariffs on Canadian oil could raise prices for refineries in the Midwest.
Mr. Wright mostly sidestepped questions on the tariffs, saying that “it’s very early on” and pointing out that inflation was low during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Ivan Penn contributed reporting