Mr . Wright is wrong : Energy secretary beams with bias against renewables

berkshireeagle.com · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

Full Article

On Feb. 6, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright detailed how the power demand for heat and light during the late January storm and cold made the case for natural gas over renewable energy. Whereas President Donald Trump mocks climate change, Wright’s view prevailed in the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory decision Feb. 12 that climate change doesn’t endanger human health and the environment.The president is wrong. The EPA is wrong. Mr. Wright is wrong.Wright’s remarks revealed his thinking. Those who lost power during the storm were victims not of insufficient energy sources but of downed poles and wires, he said. To those who thought the nation needed more electricity, he asserted we have plenty. The only time that really counted, he added, was peak demand.He displayed posters depicting power we could count on at the January peak. They showed that wind and solar productivity diminished during the storm, hydro and nuclear were level but gas and coal capacity could be ramped up to meet the need. He pointed out that, unlike the rest of the Eastern U.S., New England had to ramp up with oil due to the lack of gas pipelines.He noted that oil was more expensive and dirtier than natural gas and belonged “to my mother’s generation.” And he complained that in spite of the enormous amount of money being spent on wind and solar, they still only contributed a miniscule amount to the grid at peak. He might have been thinking about the several judicial rulings favoring the offshore wind in the Northeast that President Trump has tried to stop. Wright allowed that he could find a better use for the money.Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate work at Berkeley and MIT. He founded Pinnacle Technology, which created the hydraulic fracture mapping industry, with other innovations launching commercial shale gas productions in the late 1990s. As chair of Liberty Energy, he helped expand the shale revolution to include oil as well as natural gas. This work led him to explore geothermal energy, which uses similar drilling techniques.My credentials are thin compared to his. On the other hand, I may not be as biased. I don’t doubt the numbers on his posters. Nevertheless, I see a different path. His claims represent a certain point in time: now. His conclusion? There’s nowhere near enough renewables even to bother about, so spending on fracked natural gas makes more sense.But if, for example, those offshore wind projects do come online, they would provide more energy. And when those wind turbines shut down because the wind is too strong, rotors would be merrily spinning in locations out of the storm. As in his comments about peak wind, Wright’s figures on solar only included local generation — excluding drawing power from places where the sun shone. Scientists say that panels covering three percent of the globe would provide all the power the world needed. That’s still a lot of panels, but there are also a lot of rooftops and parking lots where panels could be functioning nicely.He revealed his game in the following from his Feb. 6 speech as recorded on YouTube: “We can do almost nothing to change the greenhouse gas emissions.” Parsing his statement: 1. Yes, climate change is happening; 2. It is caused by humans burning fossil fuels; 3. We can’t do anything about it; so, 4. Let’s enjoy our oily lives. Voters elected Trump, he said, to get away from worrying about climate change and focus on “enhancing people’s lives.”He means, of course, only people here and now. There is no concern about people elsewhere or in the future or about the natural world we enjoy. We do know what we need to do: Reduce burning fossil fuels. God save the world, because Mr. Wright and the Trump EPA won’t.At least, that’s how it looks from the White Oaks.