The Senate voted Monday to substantiate Chris Wright because the nation’s seventeenth secretary of the Division of Vitality.
Eight members of the Democratic caucus joined 51 Republicans to approve the previous fracking govt’s bid to guide an company that, regardless of its title, focuses way more on analysis, science and the administration of the nation’s nuclear arsenal than on the fossil fuels Wright spent the majority of his profession drilling for. Two Republicans ― Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) ― and one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), abstained.
Together with Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump’s decide to guide the Environmental Safety Company, Wright, 60, was extensively seen as one of many new, right-wing administration’s least controversial Cupboard nominees.
A Democrat from his dwelling state, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), launched Wright at his affirmation listening to earlier than the Senate Vitality and Pure Sources Committee final month. By way of the three-hour public interview session earlier than the Senate’s vitality committee, Wright mentioned he acknowledged the risk local weather change poses however ranked an absence of regular, low cost vitality as a better precedence.
He pledged to place a selected deal with stemming the tide of worsening blackouts on the U.S. energy grid and modernizing the nation’s nuclear weapons.
Wright is finest generally known as the founding father of Liberty Vitality, a Denver-based pioneer in hydraulic fracturing, the drilling method generally known as fracking that sparked a U.S. oil and gasoline increase at first of the 2010s.
However the govt repeatedly cited his previous work on photo voltaic panels and battery storage, and emphasised his longstanding curiosity in nuclear energy, probably the most environment friendly supply of zero-carbon electrical energy and one of the crucial climate-friendly applied sciences the Trump administration is predicted to champion. Wright sat on the board of Oklo, a California-based reactor startup, and studied nuclear fusion in school.
“Do I wish we could make faster progress? Absolutely,” he mentioned throughout the listening to. “Are there things we can do … through the Department of Energy to accelerate development of new energy technologies that are really the only pathway to address climate change? Absolutely.”
TING SHEN/AFP through Getty Photos
Nonetheless, he insisted that fossil fuels had been right here to remain and pushed again towards an Vitality Division examine issued in December that discovered growing exports of pure gasoline threatened greater vitality costs at dwelling. Fuel supplies the majority of U.S. electrical energy, and GE Vernova, the nation’s main producer of gasoline generators, is seeing a spike in orders as information facilities proliferate to serve the rising computing calls for of synthetic intelligence software program.
Talking Monday earlier than the Senate, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) credited the expertise Liberty pioneered with reworking his state into one of many nation’s most efficient oil producers, going from “100,000 barrels per day when I started as governor” again in 2000 to a excessive of 1.5 million barrels per day.
“Our nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas are not a liability, they’re strategic assets,” Hoeven mentioned.
Throughout final month’s listening to, Wright insisted to Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.), whose sun-soaked state is among the many fastest-growing customers of solar energy, that he remained dedicated to ramping up the buildout of extra photovoltaic vegetation.
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When Trump returned to workplace every week later, nonetheless, he issued a flurry of govt orders concentrating on wind vitality specifically and barring new permits on generators in waters or on land the federal authorities controls.
Solar energy seemingly made the lower — that is, till a Division of the Inside memo issued a 60-day pause on new approvals for all renewable vitality improvement on public lands, together with solar energy.
