Energy Secretary Chris Wright doesn’t deny climate change exists.
He just considers global warming to be less important than other issues, such as poverty or human health. And in his view — despite abundant evidence that both are worsened by climate change — the solution to the other problems often means one thing: more energy. Or to be more specific: more fossil fuels.
“Climate change is a real and global challenge that we should and can address,” Wright wrote last year. “However, representing it as the most urgent threat to humanity today displaces concerns about more pressing threats of malnutrition, access to clean water, air pollution, endemic diseases, and human rights, among others.”
Or put another way: “Affordable, reliable energy is the road out of poverty,” he declared in a report called “Bettering Human Lives” that was published by his fracking services company, Liberty Energy.
Much of Wright’s worldview is informed by the work he did before entering the Trump administration. In 2011, he founded Liberty Energy, whose fortunes (along with his own) have risen and fallen with the fossil fuel industry.
But this alone doesn’t explain Wright’s position. The Colorado native has become an enthusiastic evangelist for the Trump administration’s energy policies, and many of his talking points spring from a broad network of conservative activists and influencers.
Their approach has been described by critics as a new kind of climate denialism. One that doesn’t dispute that global warming is real but rather frames it as a lesser problem — often with the use of cherry-picked data and a misrepresentation of scientific findings. And that kind of thinking carries its own risk, detractors say, as scientists broadly agree that climate change is expected to exacerbate many of the problems Wright says are a higher priority, such as food insecurity.
“He pretty much claims that there is no evidence that burning fossil fuels would lead to, you know, deleterious effects, bad effects on the climate, and it’s just not true,” said Scott Denning, a climate scientist at Colorado State University who debated Wright on a television show in 2015.
“Nobody on the clean energy side is trying to say that we should stop using energy and go back to 1750 and, you know, have horses and buggies and chamber pots,” he added. “Rather, we’re trying to say that we can still have that sense of growing human flourishing, we just have to do it without setting carbon on fire.”
But those who align with Wright’s perspective see it differently.
Here are four influencers who have helped shape Wright’s approach to climate and energy.
Bjørn Lomberg
Lomborg, a political scientist from Denmark, has been called a “friend” by Wright and was cited in his “Bettering Human Lives” report.
Frequently published in The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section, Lomborg acknowledges that climate change is occurring but he has made a career of attacking clean energy by making claims that it is unreliable and “hurts the poor.”
Lomborg recently downplayed the need for climate policy that meaningfully addresses rising emissions by claiming humanity would simply adapt to warmer temperatures and more extreme storms.
“Alarmist campaigners and credulous journalists fail to account for the simple fact that people are remarkably adaptable and tackle most climate problems at low cost,” he wrote in the New York Post.
That’s in direct contrast to the findings of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which includes the work of hundreds of climate scientists from across the globe.
It found that climate change has left developing countries suffering from “high vulnerability and low adaptive capacity.” And it is already causing considerable strain on the finances of those countries — and will only get worse, the research found.
“The rising public fiscal costs of mitigation, and of adapting to climate shocks, is affecting many countries and worsening public indebtedness and country credit ratings at a time when there were already significant stresses on public finances,” the IPCC states.
Lomborg has no climate training and no published climate research, noted Bob Ward, a spokesperson for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Ward has been debunking Lomborg’s claims for years.
“Lomborg’s many media pronouncements on climate change are often demonstrably inaccurate and misleading, and he cherry-picks and misrepresents information in order to deny the scale of risks from inaction and exaggerate the costs and challenges of the transition away from fossil fuels,” Ward said. “It would be dangerous for any decision-maker to act on Lomborg’s advice about climate change.”
Lomborg’s approach can be summed up in the title of his book, “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet”
He is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank that lists its address at a neighborhood parcel shipping store outside of Boston, and does not disclose its donors. Lomborg is also listed as a visiting fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, which has received millions of dollars from foundations that oppose regulations.
Lomborg did not respond to a request for comment.
Roy Spencer
Spencer, whose work was cited as a resource in Wright’s report, is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and is listed as an adviser to the Heartland Institute, which promotes climate misinformation.
While some of Spencer’s work on atmospheric temperatures and other areas of study has been funded by NASA and the Energy Department, he has attacked federal climate researchers as being biased because they receive taxpayer money, and he has claimed that people alive today won’t experience global warming.
Spencer also served as a visiting fellow for the Heritage Foundation, which produced the Project 2025 policy proposal that has guided the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The groups Spencer has been affiliated with have received millions of dollars in donations from foundations that oppose regulations, but he claims the American public has “been misled by the vested interests who financially benefit from convincing the citizens we are in a climate crisis.” That includes environmental groups and journalists, in his telling.
“Climate change is big business for a lot of players,” he wrote in a Heritage Foundation publication. “That includes a marching army of climate scientists whose careers now depend on a steady stream of funding from governments.”
For years, Spencer has worked with organizations that have received funding from an interlinked network of fossil fuel companies — a multitrillion-dollar global industry — as well as wealthy foundations with billions of dollars in holdings that support groups opposing climate and energy regulations.
He states on his website that he has not been paid by oil companies, but a court filing in 2016 revealed that he received funding from Peabody Energy, the coal giant that for years spent millions of dollars on funding climate denial groups.
Spencer has appeared before Congress a number of times, typically as a Republican witness attacking climate policy and downplaying climate risks. He served as the climatologist for the late conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh, who regularly promoted climate denialism on his show.
Like Lomborg, Spencer claims climate policy will hurt the poor even as science has overwhelmingly shown the effects of global warming would disproportionately affect the world’s most vulnerable populations.
He authored a book entitled: “Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies That Hurt the Poor.”
Spencer did not respond to a request for comment.
Alex Epstein
Epstein has called for burning more oil and gas and claims global warming will benefit humanity.
Like Wright, he likes to use the phrase “human flourishing” when discussing oil and gas. And he sees clean energy as an enemy of industrial progress. Wright has appeared on Epstein’s podcast, “Power Hour.”
For years, Epstein has served as a Republican witness in congressional hearings, where he minimizes the threat of climate change while pushing for an increase in the use of fossil fuels. He also has consulted for the fossil fuel industry and interest groups.
In a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week, Epstein downplayed the role of carbon emissions in driving the deadly Los Angeles wildfires and noted the “death rate from climate-related disasters has fallen 98 percent over the last century.”
“As a longtime resident of Southern California, I’ve long been frustrated that our leading politicians blame our fire problems on rising CO2 levels, which is a factor but a minor factor,” he said.
The death rate has declined substantially in the last century primarily because the technology used for storm and disaster prediction has vastly improved, as have the methods of communication. Epstein’s claims about wildfires also run counter to the findings of hundreds of climate scientists that produce the National Climate Assessment; they found that “in recent years, climate change has contributed to very large and severe fires.”
Epstein runs the Center for Industrial Progress, a “for-profit think tank,” and recently registered to lobby federal officials with the Energy Freedom Fund to push his message against renewable energy subsidies. He claims climate goals, such as net zero by 2050, would “radically increase climate danger and ruin billions of lives.”
In 2023, he said that if former President Joe Biden declared a climate emergency, it would result in “endless dictatorship.”
Epstein said he and Wright have held similar beliefs for a long time.
“Chris has had views in my general vicinity for a long time,” Epstein said in a statement. “I’m not sure to what extent I’ve influenced his thinking, but I’ve long valued having a fellow outspoken energy humanist in such important roles — first as a courageous CEO and now as Secretary of Energy.”
John Constable
While less known in the United States, Constable sits on the advisory board of the United Kingdom-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, which has promoted climate misinformation for years.
Wright hosted Constable for a 2022 event in which he noted that Constable has a Ph.D. in English, but called him an “energy scholar” and said he was a top analyst of the energy system. He said Constable was an editor for his “Bettering Human Lives” report.
In his presentation, Constable suggested that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which contained almost $400 billion in clean energy incentives and spending, could create conditions in the U.S. within a decade that would be akin to the Great Depression.
Constable also has warned that increasing the share of clean energy, and cutting energy consumption, could lead to the downfall of the West. He claimed that intelligence agencies had failed the U.K. and the United States by not warning about the alleged dangers of more wind and solar.
“The stakes are very high because not all the world is doing this, western societal independence is in jeopardy,” he said. “If we carry on doing this, we will not be defensible states.”
The Inflation Reduction Act created a boom in manufacturing jobs throughout the country, adding tens of thousands of jobs in red states. It has helped create new opportunities in some areas that were in economic decline, such as Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia district, where solar production is now flourishing.
Wright enthusiastically introduced Constable before he spoke, praising Constable for his willingness to change his mind on climate policy.
“You have ideas, if you get data and find out they’re wrong, you should change your ideas, and that’s what John has done,” Wright said.
This story also appears in Energywire.
