April 04, 2025 12:21 PM UTC

Energy Secretary Chris Wright Makes Cringeworthy Visit To NREL

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Ishan Thakore reports for Colorado Public Radio, Energy Secretary Chris Wright returned home to Colorado yesterday to visit the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, one of the nation’s leading research centers for alternative sources of energy and other strategies to address the issue of human-caused climate change.

A visit made more than a little awkward given Secretary Wright’s unscientifically dismissive view of human-caused climate change, which now that he has made it through the confirmation process has been unmasked like a Scooby-Doo villain:

The department oversees a vast portfolio of national laboratories, maintains the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile and funds an innovation office to support new technology. The renewables laboratory in Golden has thousands of employees and has made key innovations in solar, wind and other clean-energy technologies meant to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Wright praised the lab’s work during remarks to staff. But during remarks with reporters, Wright, the former head of the Denver-based fracking company now called Liberty Energy, said that calling climate change a crisis was a form of political theater that led to destructive policy choices.

“The biggest barrier in energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” Wright said. [Pols emphasis]

Colorado Newsline’s Lindsey Toomer with further elaboration:

Talking to reporters after he spoke to staff, Wright said “emotional, not-fact-based stuff” like targeting hydrocarbons — the main components of climate change-causing fossil fuels — for reductions is “disruptive” and led to higher electricity and energy prices during the Biden administration.

Wright said that attributing the Marshall Fire — which in 2021 destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, burned over 6,000 acres, caused more than $2 billion in property damage and killed two people — to climate change is “simply to not look at the data.” He said wildfires “peaked over 100 years ago” and that the U.S. government could better manage wildfire devastation through forest management to control wood fuels.

“Calling climate change a crisis is just to say ‘I’m not going to look at the science, I’m not going to look at the economics, I’m just going to run with the politics,’” Wright said.

Needless to say, or at least it should be, rejecting out of hand that human-caused climate change is even a crisis to address flies in the face of overwhelming global scientific consensus. Wright’s sweeping denial of the problem, and his galling suggestion that the benefits of unfettered fossil fuel development are worth the damage to the planet from climate change, are nothing less than antithetical to the mission of NREL. All of which combines to make NREL employees naturally very concerned about their vocational future and the future of the projects they’ve devoted their careers to. Wright’s visit yesterday did absolutely nothing to allay those fears.

As the living embodiment of the Trump administration’s “Drill Baby Drill” agenda, Chris Wright is as big a threat to the fight against climate change as RFK Jr. is to public health or Pam Bondi is to the rule of law. Or for that matter, Donald Trump and global trade.

A homegrown worst-case scenario.