US Secretary for Energy: It's time for reality in our Energy Policy

Chris Wright at ARC 2025

The perfect man for the job is on display with Chris Wright at the helm of the United States Department of Energy. I have had the privilege of interviewing Chris 4 times and have enjoyed our meetings. He is truly going to do great things for the United States and will be key for delivering on President Trump's Commitment to the American people to lower energy costs.

One key difference about Chris’s view on energy is to look at the data. Let’s deliver the lowest cost energy to everyone on the planet with the least environmental impact. If you have listened to the Energy News Beat podcast, you can see that I listened to Chris’s presentation on saving humanity, which is how we modeled our discussions on the podcast.

Great Job to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

Summary

Chris Wright, the U.S. Energy Secretary, about his priorities and plans for the U.S. Energy sector. Key points include:

• Focusing on increasing affordable, reliable, and secure energy production across all sources, including fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewables.

• Reversing policies that have stifled energy production and made energy more expensive and less reliable.

• Emphasizing the importance of energy security for national security and economic opportunity.

• Criticizing the "net zero 2050" goal as unachievable and detrimental to economic growth and living standards.

• Highlighting the continued dominance of fossil fuels in the global energy mix and the need for a realistic, balanced approach to energy and climate policy.

Chris ARC's Host [00:00:03] Well, I think it's fair to say that very few people have ever come to a job better qualified than the man that we're about to speak to next. Chris Wright, US Energy Secretary, welcome back to ARC.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:00:16] Thanks, Chris; I regret not being there with everyone in person. My wife and I were truly energized by ARC, the first one 15 months ago in London, and thrilled to be able to join in any way I can.

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:00:27] So congratulations on your confirmation, what's your first order of business?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:00:32] Our priority is simple, better human lives, starting with American citizens. History has shown that more affordable, reliable, secure energy allows you to expand economic opportunities and for everyone to pursue their dream, whatever that dream is. So we want to bring common sense back to Washington and grow the supply of affordable, reliable, secure energy.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:01:01] You talk about a return to US energy dominance, so what muscles do you intend to exercise in doing that?

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:01:09] So I've got a nine-point plan, and I won't go through all of it now, but number one was visible last Friday. You know, natural gas is the fastest-growing energy source on the planet and has been for decades. The United States is the largest producer there, and we had paused for a year our ability to permit new plants, sending uncertainty around the world and importers whether the United States was going to continue to grow our supply. Well, we ended the pause and approved the Commonwealth LNG export terminal last Friday and many more in the queue. My number one bullet was we're going to focus on energy addition, not energy subtraction. We're looking at appliances. We have all sorts of regulations as you do in Europe about how your washing machine or your dryer is going to work. More than half of the globe's citizens are walking around in hand -wash clothes. They dream about a day where they can have the labor -saving benefits of appliances, of a washing machine. So we're going to get out of the way on those things and we are going to focus efforts on how we can stir growth of energy production across the board of affordable, reliable, secure energy. But maybe the biggest focus on nuclear, an energy -dense, reliable technology that's just been stifled by regulation in the last several decades.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:02:32] Coal, oil, gas, nothing's off the table?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:02:36] Oh, absolutely. Look, the world today runs on coal, oil and gas and it's been a tremendous success. In fact, I should have said number one is get out of the way of the production, export and enhancement of our volumes of coal, oil and gas.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:02:55] Do you think one of the problems that we've got in the West is that people are blind to their sources of energy? In fact, if you look around this room, there is nothing that you can see in the built environment which does not contain fossil fuel. But mostly we don't know where our energy and our wealth come from. Is that one of our big problems?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:03:13] Spot on, Chris. Absolutely. Look, there's about a billion people on the planet that live lives remotely recognizable to you and I and to everyone in this beautiful room in London. And there's seven billion people that want nothing more than to live the lives we have, to have motorized transport, whether it's on a bus or a car or a plane, to visit their family, live their lives. Everything we're wearing is made out of hydrocarbons as well. And if I get, be a nerd for a second, 50 years ago, correctly counting the data, 85 % of the globe's energy came from hydrocarbons. And in 2023, the last full year of data, counted correctly, 85 % of global energy came from hydrocarbons. We've had over that 50 year period, a little over 1 % growth, compound annual growth rate from oil, about 2 % compound annual growth rate of coal and 3 % compound annual growth rate of natural gas. The world simply runs on hydrocarbons and for most of their uses, we don't have replacements. But we need to thoughtfully and reasonably look at what energy sources can add to what we get from hydrocarbons and make this pie even bigger.

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:04:29] And of course, access to cheap, abundant energy is the difference between poor nations and rich ones. And poor nations don't look after the environment, do they?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:04:40] Absolutely. You know, as Scott said before me, you look at the improvement in clean air in wealthy nations. Clean water, the return of large mammals, the improvement of wilderness, the planet, and where I grew up is so much cleaner today than when I was a kid. This is a tremendous achievement of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. The biggest stressors on our environment, as you just said, is people in lower income countries that are worried about higher priorities for them, their next meal, staying warm at night. You have to get some sort of wealth and authorship over your life before you can worry about the luxuries of the environment. We're lucky that we can, and we want the rest of the world also to have that luxury, to worry about improving our natural environment.

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:05:29] In this part of the world, in Europe and the United Kingdom, of course, everyone talks about net zero. Now, you talk about energy reality. What's the difference between the two? What kind of target is the US aiming for?

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:05:41] Oh, a totally different focus. And one is to explicitly call out, and I will right now, net zero 2050 is a sinister goal. It's a terrible goal. It's both unachievable by impractical means, but the aggressive pursuit of it, and you're sitting in a country that has aggressively pursued this goal, has not delivered any benefits, but it's delivered tremendous costs. If you make energy more expensive and less reliable, as the United Kingdom has done over the last couple decades, you lower the standard of living of your population, shrink their opportunity set, and you simply export your industry. No one's going to make an energy-intensive product in the United Kingdom anymore. It's just been displaced somewhere else, where it's going to be made in a coal-powered factory in China and loaded on a diesel-powered ship to get down the river on a bigger diesel-powered ship to be unloaded to the docks in London. This is not energy transition. This is lunacy. This is impoverishing your own citizens in a delusion that this is somehow going to make the world a better place. It's not.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:06:50] So what would you say to the Europeans and your colleagues in the United Kingdom and those in Australia who say that what you're doing and the path that you're putting the world on will destroy it?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:07:01] Look at the data, is what I would say. Look at the data. We're scaring children all the time about stories with extreme weather, and extreme weather is terrifying. Deaths from extreme weather have plummeted for 100 years. They're continuing to decline, and the majority of the remaining deaths are low-income, poorly energized countries because they can't have the robustness to survive whatever the natural world brings at us. Net zero, the focus on it has been just a colossal failure. Trillions of dollars of investment, most of it at wind, solar, batteries and expanding transmission, delivered less than 3 % of global energy last year. Less than 3%. And everywhere it had meaningful penetration, it made electricity more expensive and less reliable. And electricity is just one sector of energy. The most important and largest use of energy is manufacturing to make materials and to make systems. How do you make cars and buildings and electricity grids? You need to make materials. Today, the biggest source of energy within that sector is high temperature process heat. Does not come from electricity, it comes from combustion. Nuclear could provide more high temperature process heat. Let's be realistic. Let's be credible in our goals. Most of the climate -obsessed people I've discussed with or debated actually know very little about the climate data. I think the agenda might be different here than climate change. It's certainly been a powerful tool used to grow government power, top -down control and shrink human freedom. This is sinister.

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:08:46] So recently JD Vance did some truth talking to the leaders of Europe. So what you're telling the leaders of Europe and the UK is that essentially there's a direct correlation between their not using fossil fuel anymore and the collapse of their economies, their deindustrialization. Is that what you're telling?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:09:04] Yeah, energy realism is critical if you want to have humanism. And it isn't not using fossil fuels as you said, Chris. Germany itself has spent half a trillion dollars in attempt to revolutionize or change their energy system. They went from 80 % of their primary energy from hydrocarbons to 74%. They didn't switch away from hydrocarbons. They just invested in a whole new energy system, added tremendously to costs. They doubled more than doubled the capacity of their electrical grid and delivered 20 % less electricity at two to three times the cost. This is a proud great industrial nation in Germany. What I would love to see is the return to sobriety and it's not just in Europe. We have plenty of it in the United States as well. If you're serious about climate change, dig into the data, look at the trade -offs and let's focus on humans again and their lives.

Chris Wright 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:10:03] And if you're serious about national security, you should be serious about energy security because you can't have one without the other.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:10:13] Absolutely, Chris. Energy enables everything we do from national defense to heating our houses to making our clothes. You cannot have security without energy security. And again, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what we're seeing in Europe today, I think this proud tremendous region of our world by exporting its energy production outside and shrinking its capacity to produce energy has just shrunk the life opportunities of their citizens. I hope to see a reversal of that pivot. Too many great humans, too many large dreams to keep squelching them. We need to unleash freedom, opportunity and energy and ARC has been a tremendous platform to spread this message and to inspire people to a better future, not a scarier future.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:11:02] Now, look, I'm from Australia. I need to ask a self -interested question. You still rely for some of your nuclear fuel on Russia for the supply chain. Australia produces has access to one third of the world's uranium. We don't use it ourselves. We don't do any enrichment of it. Could you see Australia being an important part of a nuclear supply chain where we enriched fuel? Would the United States be prepared to work with Australia on that kind of fuel cycle for the energy security of both nations?

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:11:32] Absolutely. Look, Australia is a source of just tremendous natural resources in great human spirit. I would love to see Australia get in the game of supplying uranium, maybe going down that nuclear road themselves. I'm thrilled to see recent efforts in the news recently of the development of shale gas in Australia. That is a tremendous resource that could benefit the lives of Australians and the export to South and East Asia, the fastest growing regions in the world on an energy consumption basis. I think Australia has a tremendous future but has some of the same struggles we have in the United States and even worse in Europe, which is this desire for top -down control for deciding what's virtuous and what isn't and this wholly incorrect belief that somehow there's clean energy and dirty energy. There's good things and bad things. That's just not how the world works.

Chris Wright, 17th United States Secretary of Energy [00:12:28] Well, Chris Wright, the time is too short. We'd love to speak to you for much longer. I hope to see you again soon and we look forward with great interest to see what you do in the United States. So please thank the US Energy Assembly. Chris Wright, thank you.