Trump picks fracking firm CEO Wright to be energy secretary

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he has selected Chris Wright, the head of fracking company Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy and to serve on a new National Energy Council.

In his announcement, Trump credited Wright as “one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution,” adding that “as Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape.”

Trump on Friday tapped North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) to serve as interior secretary and as “energy czar” to oversee the new National Energy Council. The president-elect said the council will comprise all agencies and departments involved in the production, regulation and transportation of “ALL forms of American Energy.”

In Wright, Trump has chosen a skeptic of mainstream science on global warming who argues the “climate crisis” is a myth. The fracking executive runs a foundation focused on dispelling the conventional wisdom on climate change and promoting expanded fossil energy production as a solution to many of the world’s problems, an approach others say would drive dangerous levels of warming.

“There is no ‘climate crisis,’” Wright said in a video he posted on LinkedIn last year, adding that “the only thing resembling a crisis with respect to climate change is the regressive, opportunity-squelching policies justified in the name of climate change.”

Those assertions conflict sharply with the conclusions of the world’s leading climate scientists affiliated with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its latest report concluded the world is quickly running out of time to avoid catastrophic warming, and nothing short of a “quantum leap” in the energy transition would contain climate change to levels manageable by society.

While other oil and gas companies acknowledge such findings and say they are working to align with international goals to cut emissions, Wright is among the industry executives who take a defiant approach, attacking policies that call for shifting away from fossil fuels.

But Wright emerged as a front-runner for the job at the behest of one of Trump’s closest allies, oil tycoon Harold Hamm. Hamm, who has been advising Trump on energy, told the publication Hart Energy that Wright is his top pick for the job and “he is one of the most articulate people that I know of in energy and from our industry.”

After Trump asked oil industry executives to help steer $1 billion toward his campaign during an April dinner at his Mar-a-Lago Club, Hamm and Wright both helped court oil donors. Wright and his wife co-hosted an August fundraiser for Trump at a golf and ski resort in Big Sky, Montana.

Wright is an MIT graduate who developed new techniques for fracking – extracting natural gas by creating cracks in the Earth’s bedrock – that helped advance the shale gas revolution.