What the world needs now is more fossil fuels, says Trump’s energy secretary

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

Wright, a former fracking executive who was picked by Trump to the crucial cabinet position, also attacked the Joe Biden administration for focusing “myopically on climate change”.

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” he said at the conference, for which tickets cost upward of $10,000. “The cure was far more destructive than the disease.”

Related: US exits fund that compensates poorer countries for global heating

Wright has been called a climate skeptic, for instance for repeatedly denying that global heating is a crisis.

“This is simply wrong: I am a climate realist,” he said.

“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,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

Though he admitted fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet, he said “there is no physical way” solar, wind and batteries could replace the “myriad” uses of gas – something top experts dispute. Further, a bigger and more immediate problem was energy poverty, Wright said.

“Where is the Cop conference for this far more urgent global challenge,” he said, referring to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties (Cop). “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”

The night before his CERAWeek plenary session, Wright had a meeting with top executives of fossil fuel firms including TotalEnergies, Freeport-McMoRan, Occidental Petroleum, and EQT, Axios and Reuters reported. Trump’s interior secretary, Doug Burgum, who will address CERAWeek attenders on Wednesday, also attended the dinner meeting.

Trump obtained record donations from the fossil fuel industry in his 2024 campaign. In April, he came under fire for a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, at which he reportedly asked more than 20 executives, from companies including Chevron, Exxon and Occidental, for $1bn and promised, if elected, to slash climate policies.

Under Biden, Wright said, ordinary Americans suffered. “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,” he said, putting the word “climate” in scare quotes.

US citizens “heat our homes in winter, cool them in summer, store period foods in our freezers and refrigerators and have light, communications and entertainment at the flip of a switch,” he said – a lifestyle that “requires an average of 13 barrels of oil per person per year”.

Meanwhile poorer countries lack energy, he said, meaning they need more fossil fuels.

“The other 7 billion people on average, consume only three barrels of oil per person per year,” he said. “Africans average less than one barrel.”

The comments came after Wright addressed the Powering Africa Summit in Washington DC on Friday, saying that it would be “paternalistic” and “100% nonsense” to encourage Africa to halt coal development because of climate concerns.

“Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities,” he said.

The comments came under fire from climate advocates globally.

“One of the transformations caused by American fossil fuels was destroying our previously well-balanced climate and plunging some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Africa into a life dealing with extreme weather and lost homes and livelihoods,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, a non-governmental organization and thinktank based in Nairobi.

The African continent also had huge potential to expand renewable energy, “but lacks the right investments to exploit these resources”, said Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African group of negotiators and Kenya’s special envoy for climate change.

At CERAWeek, Wright said the Trump administration was embracing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

“Anything that adds affordable, reliable energy, we are in favor of,” he told reporters in a press conference after his speech, where he also announced the extension of a permit for the company Delfin, which is developing a floating liquefied natural gas project off the coast of Louisiana.

But domestic oil and gas production soared to record levels under Biden. And Trump has launched a war on renewable energy, temporarily suspending all clean energy development on federal lands and attacking wind and solar in speeches.

Wright’s speech was not made available to the public via live stream, sparking outrage from climate advocates.

“As energy secretary, Chris Wright is supposed to serve the American people, not the fossil fuel industry,” said Allie Rosenbluth, a campaign manager at the non-profit Oil Change International. “It’s unacceptable, though not surprising, that this former fracking CEO is depriving the public of the chance to see what he’s saying to fossil fuel executives.”

Wright has long been a fixture at the CERAWeek fossil fuels conference. Before joining the Trump administration, he led the oil and gas company Liberty Energy for 13 years.
Ahead of his press conference, one representative from an oil industry podcast said the energy secretary was “brilliant”.

“He’s one of us,” the person said. “He gets us.”

Additional reporting by Oliver Milman