Jan. 15 (UPI) — Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump‘s pick to lead the U.S. Energy Department, faced lawmakers for confirmation hearings and called for efforts to “unleash” America’s energy sector.
“The challenges you will face as energy secretary are significant,” Utah’s Republican Sen. Mike Lee, chair of the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said at the start of Wright’s hearing.
On Wednesday, Wright was on Capitol Hill to answer questions by senators, along with Trump nominee for attorney general Pam Bondi and his pick for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., among other nominees.
“America has an historic opportunity to secure our energy systems, deliver leadership and scientific and technological innovation, steward our weapon stockpiles and meet Cold War legacy waste commitments,” he said.
Wright, 59, the CEO of Colorado-based Liberty Energy, began Senate confirmation hearings at about 10 a.m. local time.
A protester yelling about California’s ongoing wildfires and fossil fuel use interrupted Wright’s opening statement.
Wright, as head of the Energy Department, would signal a major shift in U.S. policy, especially because he is a known denier of the science of climate change and its devastating effects worldwide.
Energy, he stated, is an “essential agent of change that enables everything that we do. Everything,” he said, adding that “a low energy society is a poor society.”
He calls himself “a science geek” and “lifelong energy entrepreneur” whose fascination with the energy sector started in Denver “at a young age.”
If confirmed, Wright will replace outgoing U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and after “historic” Biden administration investments in clean and renewable energy projects.
According to records, Wright donated to a number of Republican-affiliated causes and Trump’s presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, Wright stated his belief in a 2023 video posted to LinkedIn that “there is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either.”
“A highly energized society can bring health, wealth and opportunity for all,” he told senators as he committed to work with Congress.
Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., indicated he has known Wright for several years.
“Clean energy is driving economic growth,” added Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.
Hickenlooper has been working on climate change issues for years, he added, and called for a “comprehensive approach” to U.S. energy policy.
Wright was called a “practitioner and innovator around geothermal” energy by the ex-Colorado governor, and a “scientist who is open to discussion” with an ability to “assess what is possible and what isn’t.”
But Wright also is “an energy innovator who laid the foundation for America’s fracking boom,” Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, a ranking Republican on the committee, previously stated on Trump’s pick.
Wright on Wednesday said he wants to be a steward for “all sources of affordable, reliable and secure American energy” and outlined “three immediate tasks where I’ll focus my attention.”
“The first is to unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore the energy dominance of our nation,” he said, which “begins with energy previous administrations have viewed as a liability instead of the immense asset that it is to compete globally.”
His company lists among its services the controversial hydraulic fracking techniques used to extract natural gas and oil from below the surface in state’s like Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
However, the United States “must expand energy production, including commercial nuclear and liquefied natural gas,” Wright said. “Second, we must lead the world in innovation and technology breakthroughs” and “we must protect and accelerate the work of the department’s national laboratory network” to secure America’s competitive advantage.
But on Tuesday, President Joe Biden took aim at the incoming Trump administration’s energy policies in a farewell State Department speech in Washington and called on the global community to continue its clean energy transition despite a temporary switch in White House occupants.
“Some are skeptical of the need for clean energy,” said Biden. “They think climate changes isn’t real. They are wrong, they are dead wrong.”
The outgoing president stated that China is taking steps to “dominate” the clean energy industry, but added how “the clean energy transition is already happening.”
Meanwhile, the nomination did not come without other outside criticism over Wright’s climate denialism.
“It is not surprising, but still appalling that Trump’s pick for Secretary of Energy is a climate-denying Big Oil executive,” Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs of the League of Conservation Voters, said in November.
“With the nomination of Chris Wright, Trump is following through on the $1 billion offer he made to Big Oil at a dinner this spring,” he added in a statement.