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To applause from oil and gas executives, Chris Wright said natural gas was preferable to renewable energy and climate change was a “side effect of building the modern world.”
March 10, 2025, 2:14 p.m. ET
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.
