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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.”
Wright, a former fracking executive, has
emerged as the most forceful promoter of President Donald 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.” 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.”
Wright was dismissive of renewable power,
which he said played only a small role in the world’s energy mix. Natural gas
supplies 25% of raw energy globally, before it is converted into electricity or
some other use. Wind and solar only supply about 3%, 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.
On Monday, Wright signed the fourth export
approval since Trump took office, extending an approval for the Delfin terminal
off the coast Louisiana. He said the Biden administration’s review of gas exports
had found only modest impacts on global emissions and domestic U.S. prices.
On the topic of climate change, Wright said
he didn’t deny that the planet was warming, calling himself a “climate realist.”
“We have indeed raised global atmospheric CO2
concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy,
lifting almost all of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern
medicine,” he said. “Everything in life involves trade-offs.”
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