Donald Trump continues to fine-tune his team before his inauguration on January 20. And his last choice fell on a climate skeptic, supported by American oil companies. The president-elect has appointed Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, to the position of Secretary of Energy.
“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 said. Trump.
According to Wright, “there is no climate crisis”
Chris Wright will also be a member of the brand new National Energy Council (NEC), the creation of which was announced Friday by the president-elect, and whose mission will be to “oversee the path to energy domination of the United States”. His candidacy was supported by companies in the oil sector, underlines the Financial Times.
The next holder of the Energy portfolio therefore runs the company Liberty Energy, which he founded in 2011, and specializes in hydraulic fracturing, a polluting method of extracting hydrocarbons. In a post on his LinkedIn account a year ago, he judged 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 impacts on both positive and negative about the world.
“One of the pioneers” of shale
Donald Trump, in the press release announcing this appointment, praised “a leading entrepreneur in the field of energy”, who “has worked in the fields of nuclear, solar, geothermal, as well as oil and gas. 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,” he said. he greeted again.
A graduate of the prestigious MIT and UC Berkeley, Chris Wright founded the company Pinnacle Technologies in 1992, “whose innovations helped launch commercial shale gas production and created an industry for mapping hydraulic fractures,” says the website. from Liberty Energy. He later served as chairman of Stroud Energy, “one of the first producers of shale gas, before selling it to shale pioneer Range Resources in 2006.”
