The Energy Secretary’s Pick Has Been a Fossil Fuel Evangelist

Chris Wright, Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, was named during his first meeting with the former and future president.

Mr. Wright, the founder and chief executive of Liberty Energy, a Colorado-based fracking services company, was among about 20 oil and gas executives whom Mr. Trump gathered at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April. Mr Wright had not met Mr Trump before but caught his attention by making what two people in the room described as a strong case for fossil fuels.

“Do you want to be my energy secretary?” Mr. Trump asked jokingly, according to those present. Days after the election, Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Wright to lead the agency.

Mr. Wright will appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday. It will be the first of three confirmation hearings this week for Mr. Trump’s picks to lead agencies central to his plan to increase production and use of coal, oil and gas.

Mr. Wright has been an evangelist for this purpose. In podcasts and speeches, he often a the moral case for fossil fuelsarguing that the world’s poorest people need oil and gas to realize the benefits of modern life.

According to researchers and activists, he has also distorted climate science. For example, Mr. Wright inaccurately claimed on a podcast last year that the United Nations’ top scientific body had determined that climate change was a “slow-moving, modest effect two or three generations from now.”

In fact, the scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has recommended that countries immediately and drastically move away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from crossing a critical global warming threshold.

Mr. Wright’s spokeswoman, Meg Bloomgren, said in a statement that he has spent his career improving lives, “including learning and identifying that climate change is real and a problem that we must tackle with America’s relentless innovation and technology solutions.” “

Democrats on Tuesday had mixed feelings about Mr. Wright.

Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado described him as smart and thoughtful on energy issues, but said he was concerned about how Mr. Wright and other cabinet picks would address climate change.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said Mr. Trump’s choices “are here to loot our public treasury and pollute our public spaces.”

He noted that the Mar-a-Lago incident is where Mr. Trump asked oil industry leaders raised 1 billion dollars for his campaign and promised more savings after companies scrapped climate rules, people there said. “Trump’s big donors want to pay back,” Mr Whitehouse said.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the hearings would be an opportunity to discuss the Biden administration’s energy policy failures.

“With high energy prices hurting Americans and restrictive policies limiting access to public lands and critical resources, it’s important to prioritize local energy production and restore trust in the management of public lands,” said Mr. Lee.

On Thursday, Mr. Lee’s committee will hear from Mr. Trump’s Interior Department nominee, the Republican former governor of North Dakota, Douglas J. Burgum. Also Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will consider former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldi of Long Island to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

If confirmed to lead the Energy Department, Mr. Wright would help oversee the approval of liquefied natural gas export terminals, which the Biden administration has sought to slow, angering Republicans.

Mr. Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a graduate degree in solar energy from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which developed software to measure fluid movement beneath the earth’s surface. Software has helped usher in a commercial shale gas revolution.

Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked on geothermal power and small, modular nuclear reactors, among others.

Mr. Wright owns 2.6 million shares in the company, which is worth more than $55 million based on the current share price. A A recent filing by the Securities and Exchange Commission last year his compensation was 5.6 million dollars.

Mr. Wright filed a separate filing with the SEC after Mr. Trump appointed him as energy secretary, indicating that he intended to resign from Liberty Energy. A transition official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because financial disclosures have not yet been made public, said Mr. Wright intends to divest his holdings once he is confirmed.

Democrats sought to delay Mr. Wright’s hearing because they had not received his financial disclosure statements, documents that are usually made public before the confirmation process. Republicans refused to delay the hearings.

Senate officials said Mr. Wright’s statements were made available to lawmakers on Tuesday, although they were not yet publicly available online at the Office of Government Ethics.