United States President-elect Donald Trump has appointed climate skeptic Chris Wright, CEO of the Liberty Energy company and supported by American oil companies, as Secretary of Energy, with a roadmap of deregulation of the sector.
As Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, reducing administrative barriers, and ushering in a new golden age of American prosperity and world peace
Donald Trump said in a statement.
Chris Wright will also be a member of the brand new National Energy Council (CNE), the creation of which was announced Friday by the president-elect, and whose mission will be to overseeing the path to U.S. energy dominance
.
His candidacy was supported by companies in the oil sector, underlines the Financial Times.
Chris Wright runs the company Liberty Energywhich he founded in 2011, and specializes in hydraulic fracturing, a polluting method of extracting hydrocarbons.
This climate skeptic judged, in a publication on his account LinkedIn a year ago, that there is no climate crisis and we are not in the middle of an energy transition either
.
The term carbon pollution is scandalous
because all life depends on carbon dioxide, he added, also refuting the terms clean energy or dirty energy, all energy sources have both positive and negative impacts on the world
.
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Donald Trump, who visited the Shell Pennsylvania petrochemical complex in Monaca, Pennsylvania, during his campaign, wants to revive oil production through hydraulic fracturing.
Photo : Reuters / Jonathan Ernst
Donald Trump, in the press release announcing this appointment, welcomed a leading energy entrepreneur
Who has worked in nuclear, solar, geothermal, and oil and gas
.
Most importantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American shale revolution that fueled American energy independence and transformed global energy markets and geopolitics
greeted the president-elect again.
The names of future ministers and officials in the new Trump administration began to be revealed barely a week after the election, and have continued this week.
And the names are controversial: the presenter of Fox News, Pete Hegsethchosen to head the Ministry of Defense, and accused in 2017 of sexual assault, the vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr in Health, the defector from the Democratic Party, accused of being pro-Russian, Tulsi Gabbardto Intelligence, or even to Justice, the ultra-Trumpist Matt Gaetzwith no experience in the field and who was suspected of relations with an underage girl.
As for Elon Muskhe will head a commission for thegovernment effectiveness
.
Graduated from the prestigious MIT and UC Berkeley, Chris Wright founded the company in 1992 Pinnacle Technologies, whose innovations help launch commercial shale gas production and create a hydraulic fracture mapping industry
specifies the website of Liberty Energy.
He later served as president of Stroud Energy, one of the first producers of shale gas, before selling it to the shale pioneer Range Resources in 2006
.
Chris Wright resides in Colorado with his wife.
Hydraulic fracturing had been an important subject of the electoral campaign, Donald Trump having accused his Democratic competitor Kamala Harris of wanting to ban the process, which she had refuted.
In 2019, then a candidate in the Democratic primary, she spoke out in favor of a ban, before reversing this position, particularly damaging to voters in the key state of Pennsylvania, where the sector is important.
A text by Julie Chabanas from Agence France-Presse
