Donald Trump names fracking tycoon as energy minister

The wave of appointments initiated by Donald Trump for his future administration continues – he will enter the White House on January 20. The Republican president-elect announced on Saturday, November 16, his intention to place Chris Wright, CEO of the company Liberty Energy, specializing in hydraulic fracturing, as energy secretary, with deregulation of the sector as his roadmap.

“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.

The winner of the presidential election greeted “a leading energy entrepreneur”Who “has worked in nuclear, solar, geothermal, and oil and gas”.

Chris Wright founded the company Liberty Energy in 2011. Hydraulic fracturing, a polluting method of extracting hydrocarbons, was an important issue in the electoral campaign, with Donald Trump having accused his Democratic competitor, Kamala Harris, of wanting to ban the proceeded, which she had refuted.

In 2019, then a candidate in the Democratic primary, she certainly spoke out in favor of a ban, before reversing this position, which was damaging in particular to voters in the key state of Pennsylvania, where the sector is important.

Trump hails “one of the pioneers” of the shale revolution

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 America’s path to energy dominance”.

A graduate of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (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 of hydraulic fracture mapping”specifies the Liberty Energy website. He later served as chairman of Stroud Energy, “one of the first producers of shale gas, before selling it to the pioneering group in this sector, Range Resources, in 2006”.

Donald Trump voit and Chris Wright “one of the pioneers who helped launch the American shale revolution that fueled American energy independence and transformed global energy markets and geopolitics”.

“No climate crisis”

Climate sceptic, Chris Wright judged, in a post on his LinkedIn account 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 qualifications “clean energy or dirty energy, all energy sources having both positive and negative impacts”.

The names of future ministers and officials in the new Trump administration began to be revealed just a week after the election.

Several are controversial. The presenter of the conservative Fox News channel, Pete Hegseth, chosen to head the Department of Defense – and accused in 2017 of sexual assault –, the health vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the defector from the Democratic Party, accused of being pro-Russian, Tulsi Gabbard, in intelligence, or even, in justice, the ultra-Trumpist Matt Gaetz, who was suspected of relations with an underage girl. As for Elon Musk, he will head a commission for“governmental efficiency”.