The appointment of a fracking industry veteran points to an emphasis on US fossil fuel production over preventing damage to the environment.
A giant in the fracking industry may soon be keeping the US nuclear arsenal in working order. This weekend’s nomination of Chris Wright, chief executive of Liberty Energy Inc., an oilfield services firm, to be President-elect Donald Trump’s energy secretary sent a thrill through the oil and gas industry. But most of what they want, centered on access to more resources on federal lands or easing environmental rules, is in the purview of the Department of the Interior or the Environmental Protection Agency. The Department of Energy can help with some things, such as new liquefied natural gas terminals, but it is mostly about keeping warheads working and funding science and innovation; almost two-thirds of its budget relates to defense.
Even so, Wright will join a constellation of other picks that signal Trump’s priorities on energy and climate change: More of the former and less talk, and even less action, about the latter. Specifically, Wright’s appointment points to greater emphasis on coping with climate change rather than preventing it.
Wright doesn’t deny climate change is happening. Rather he just says it isn’t that big of a deal. He concluded a recent presentation at an industry conference by saying “there is no climate crisis,” and the substitution of “crisis” there for “change” is notable. His thesis echoes, if distantly, the work of William Nordhaus, Nobel laureate and pioneer of climate change economics, whose cost-benefit modeling has suggested a tolerance for higher temperatures in optimizing economic outcomes (although Nordhaus is a big proponent of a carbon tax).
Yet the inherent difficulty of modeling not one but two complex global phenomena — climate and economics — and marrying them together, while also factoring in major disruptions such as ice-shelf collapse, demands humility. As three prominent economists argued recently here, “Many or most categories of climate damage — migration, conflict, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, etc. — are not included in state-of-the-art models.”
Wright’s view, however, is that the immediate, tangible problems of energy poverty outweigh the uncertain long-term risks of climate change. Running an oil-services firm, he perhaps naturally points to the “lucky” 1 billion people, including Americans, consuming an average of 13 barrels of oil each per year versus the 7 billion getting by on a paltry average of three. He calculates that getting those masses even halfway to the level of the 13-barrel elite would require doubling global oil production which a) even OPEC doesn’t think will happen; and b) doesn’t address the enormous potential to shrink those 13 barrels without sacrificing well-being, similar to what happened after the 1970s oil shocks.
Wright has also speculated recently on his LinkedIn profile that climate change is “the left’s” replacement excuse for top-down control of people since the collapse of Soviet communism, which rather elides the warnings of climate scientists, including those at major oil companies, that predated the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Yet all this fits neatly with Trump’s broader “energy dominance” theme, prioritizing domestic fossil fuel production and exports, as well as the cost-of-living concerns that played a prominent role in Republicans’ election win. There is a thread of isolationism running through all of this, with a model of the US that digs its own energy, raises tariffs against imports (perhaps including energy goods) and breaks with the global scientific consensus on the urgency of addressing climate change.
This points to a de-emphasis of efforts to mitigate climate change, expressed most tangibly in the Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for clean technologies. Not all may suffer. Carbon capture, a favored technology of the oil industry, since it holds the promise of extending demand, may benefit. Wright is also a fan of nuclear power, with a board seat at Sam Altman’s small modular reactor developer Oklo Inc. His oversight of the Loan Programs Office and national laboratories, as well as the ear of his seemingly nuclear-ambivalent boss, offer levers to help that sector.
But the emphasis looks set to swing toward adaptation, or dealing with the impacts of climate change rather than investing to prevent them in the first place. Liberty said as much in a report published earlier this year, noting that “likely the main response for decades to come, is adaptation,” reasoning that “pre-modern humans survived multiple glaciations with simply massive temperature and climate swings” and we’re a lot smarter than cavemen these days.
In short, tax credits for EVs may be out and more Department of Energy grants for solar radiation management experiments may be in. It is a beguiling position, demanding no immediate change to our energy consumption habits while still emphasizing our capacity for technological prowess, in this case to deal with climate consequences that will mostly accrue long after this administration has come and gone.
It also fits with a creeping fatalism about the impossibility of keeping the average temperature increase below 1.5 degrees, even if that fatalism is fed by the political choices we make. It is the policy of having your cake and eating it, provided your dining room, or your grandkids’ dining room, enjoys ample elevation above sea level and rock solid storm windows. But don’t just take my word for it. As Nordhaus said in his Nobel lecture in 2018 on the fallacy of geoengineering versus abating emissions: “No responsible doctor would prescribe salvage therapy for a patient who has just been diagnosed with the early stage of a treatable illness.”
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