Trump sends fracking CEO to Europe to sell climate denial—and gas

Debunking some of Chris Wright's most egregious lies

US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in Brussels, Belgium on September 12, 2025. (Photo by Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Imagine if Donald Trump had nominated a Purdue Pharma executive to lead the FDA, and that executive took a multi-day, taxpayer-funded international trip to tell world leaders that the opioid epidemic not a big deal and the best way to make citizens healthier is actually to buy more Oxycontin.

A similar, non-hypothetical example of institutional corruption is playing out this week. Chris Wright, the massively wealthy former fracking executive who leads the DOE, is currently on a multi-day, taxpayer-funded trip to Europe to tell world leaders that the climate crisis is not really a big deal, and that the best way to protect their citizens is actually to buy more American gas.

Given the falsehoods Wright has been spreading, and the conflict of interest Wright has in spreading them, I’m surprised this hasn’t been a bigger story. It’s a staggering example of state-sponsored disinformation and regulatory capture by Big Oil.

But more than that, it’s a transparent example of a super rich guy trying to con the world into buying more of the thing that made him super rich, so he can become even richer once he leaves office.

A fracking executive peddles climate denial in Europe

This week, Wright attended the GasTech 2025 Strategic Conference in Milan, one of the world’s largest gatherings of fossil fuel industry executives and government energy ministers. He also attended a briefing at the European Union headquarters in Brussels on Thursday, and an annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna on Friday.

At all three stops, Wright denounced U.S. and EU efforts to transition away from fossil fuels, and encouraged the EU to increase exports of American liquified methane gas, or LNG.

In an interview previewing his core messages for the trip, Wright said Europe’s planned transition away from fossil fuels is useless because climate change isn’t that big a deal. “Climate change, for impacting the quality of your life, is not incredibly important,” he told the Council of Foreign Relations in a fireside chat on Friday. “In fact, if it wasn't in the news and the media, you wouldn't know it.”

Wright repeated those claims in Europe on Thursday, and said climate change could actually be a good thing because a “warmer, wetter world is more conducive to growing crops.”

Wright’s source for these claims is a 151-page report his agency issued in July, which found that climate change “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed” and “will be a net benefit to U.S. agriculture.” The report was put together by five scientists with long histories of questioning mainstream climate science—including the former chief scientist of BP. Each scientist was personally recruited to write the report by Wright.

Of course, the report has been relentlessly criticized by the rest of the scientific community—including many of the scientists whose work the report cites. In addition, a group of 85 publishing climate scientists from the U.S. and abroad issued a 439-page rebuttal, which argues that DOE report "exhibits pervasive problems" including misrepresentations, messy citations, cherry-picking, and plain old factual errors.

A post on Bluesky describes the Wired article that interviewed nine scientists cited in the DOE climate report.

In fact, Wright was forced to disband the group of contrarian scientists he recruited to write the climate report, after a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists alleged that the group’s formation violated federal law.

But Wright wasn’t challenged on any of this during his fireside chat. He also wasn’t challenged on his false claim that net-zero goals are responsible for driving up electricity prices in the U.S.—another argument he said he’d bring to Europe.

Wright falsely blames renewables for high electricity bills

To justify selling more gas to Europe, Wright said renewables were responsible for raising electricity bills in the United States.

“They're rising all in this name of climate change, in that we've shut down the things that have powered our electric grid,” Wright said said. In addition to shutting down coal plants, Wright added, ”We put a whole bunch of wind and solar and batteries on our grid, and the impact of that is … we've started to make electricity prices more expensive.”

This is an argument that only a fossil fuel executive or fossil fuel-funded politician could make, because literally no one else is making it. Instead, most reports released this summer have blamed rapidly rising electricity prices on three main factors: the expansion of power-hungry data centers to fuel artificial intelligence; Trump’s massive federal cuts to wind and solar, two of the cheapest sources of energy that could help meet rising electricity demand; and the increase of LNG exports.

Exporting American methane gas abroad increases electricity prices for U.S. consumers because it exposes gas—which supplies 40 percent of U.S. electricity—to the volatile global market, and increases demand while supply stays the same.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has stated it plainly: “Higher natural gas prices in 2025 and 2026 are the result of strong export growth that persistently outpaces U.S. natural gas production.” Moody’s, one of the major credit rating agencies, has said the same.

Wright’s goal: To hook the EU on American gas forever

And yet, Wright’s whole purpose for being in Europe this week is to sell more American LNG. On Friday, Politico reported that Wright has held several meetings with European officials, urging them to stop importing gas from Russia and instead import U.S. fuel. “We want to displace all Russian gas,” Wright said. “President Trump, America, and all the nations of the EU, we want to end the Russian-Ukraine war.”

Swiftly replacing Russian gas with American gas across the EU could hurt Russia’s war efforts. After all, gas is Russia's most lucrative export, and its revenue helps fund the conflict. That’s why Europe has already significantly decreased its consumption of Russian gas; 13 percent of its gas came from Russia this year, compared to roughly 45 percent in 2022.

But Wright has been clear that his visit is not solely about ending the war. It’s about pressuring the EU to abandon its climate goals and become dependent on American fossil fuels for the long term.

“Europe’s embrace of a climate agenda and a march to net zero was wrong,” Wright told reporters on Thursday. He said he wants the EU to loosen its climate regulations to allow more American fossil fuels to flow in permanently. “This isn’t going to be three and a half years and it’ll all be over,” he said. He added that Trump wants to eventually double the amount of LNG exported to Europe.

Securing an abundant financial future—for Chris Wright

I’ve seen a lot of coverage of Wright’s trip to Europe to sell American gas. Very little of that coverage has plainly called out Wright’s deceitful rhetoric, and none has pointed out how Wright’s rhetoric serves to enrich himself at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Wright has been the Secretary of Energy for seven months. Before that, he was a fracking executive for 32 years. To become the Energy Secretary, ethics rules required him to divest from both his fracking company and from major oil companies—a sell-off which netted him over $50 million.

But this does not eliminate Wright’s conflict of interest. Because once Wright is finished with his role as Energy Secretary—once he’s secured long-term contracts for the EU to buy American gas—there is nothing stopping him from returning to the fracking industry to cash in on the contracts he secured.

This is why no one should trust anything that comes out of Wright’s mouth about climate change. His entire life’s wealth, purpose, and identity depends on climate change not being a big deal. After all, if climate change did wind up being the existential threat that most scientists say it is, everything Wright has worked for 32 years would be net-harmful to humanity. He wouldn’t be able to bear that. No sane person could.

So in a way, I understand why Wright—and most fossil fuel executives—deny the severity of climate change. They have to be able to sleep at night. Genuinely, I think Wright believes his own con. That doesn’t mean he’s not a con artist still.

Debunking Wright’s most egregious climate lies

Here are just a few climate-related falsehoods that went unchecked during Wright’s fireside chat with the Council of Foreign Relations on Friday, and his press conference with reporters in Europe on Thursday.

• “The planet's warmed about two degrees Fahrenheit in 130 years. I could change the temperature of this room two degrees Fahrenheit warmer over 20 minutes and you wouldn't notice.”
  
  This line probably hits so hard if you’re stupid. But the localized temperature of a conference room has nothing to do with the average temperature of the entire planet. It is well-documented that small average temperature changes can throw Earth’s delicate ecosystems into disarray. As Yale Climate Connections has explained: “Every tenth of a degree that the Earth warms in the future will make a difference in the impacts that people experience worldwide and in your neck of the woods.”
  

• “One of the negative implications you hear all the time in the news is that tornadoes are getting worse, and hurricanes are worse, and floods and droughts and storms, they're more frequent and larger in magnitude. This is just simply untrue.”
  

  I would love for Chris Wright to cite one legitimate, mainstream news report that claims definitively that tornadoes are getting worse due to climate change. I would bet a lot of money he couldn’t find one, because the science around climate and tornadoes is complicated and inconclusive.
  
  As for hurricanes, droughts, and floods, however, I’m not sure where Wright is getting that information—oh wait, I am! It’s from the five contrarian scientists who he hand-picked to tell him exactly what a fossil fuel executive needs to hear to morally justify his own business activities. But anyway, all three of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense due to the burning of fossil fuels. And that’s on NASA.
  

• ”If you look at the economics as the IPCC does, they extrapolate this rate of temperature rise to the end of the century, their estimate of the reduction in per person GDP is somewhere from like 0.2% to 0.3% or 0.4%. So that means in the next 75 years, we might lose a few months, maybe a year of economic growth over 75 years. Like, that's not great, but is that a crisis?”

  
  The IPCC doesn’t actually provide a single estimate for how much it expects per capita GDP to decrease by 2100, so again, I’m not sure where he’s getting these numbers. But here are some actual, traceable estimates of potential GDP decreases under different climate scenarios.
  

  • Swiss Re, the global insurance company, predicts climate change could reduce global GDP by 11 to 14 percent by 2050 compared with a world without climate change, amounting to a $23 trillion loss.

  • The risk management experts at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries say the global economy “could face 50 percent loss in gross domestic product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken.”

  • The Council for Foreign Relations—yes, the same group that hosted Wright and didn’t fact check him—made a graphic laying out the varying estimates of global GDP loss from climate change. It ranges from a 3 percent loss by 2100 to a 85 percent loss.

    

• “Agricultural productivity continues to rise. That also from technology, but some also from more plant food in the atmosphere, and a warmer, wetter world is more conducive to growing crops.”

  This is, again, Wright cherry-picking the facts he likes and throwing out the facts he doesn’t. Yes, agricultural productivity is rising—mostly because of technology. And in some localized cases, like with wheat in Northern Europe, the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere likely helps.

  
  But in the vast majority of cases, climate change harms crop yields. Because the world as a whole is not getting just a little warmer and wetter. Some areas are getting way hotter, others are getting much drier, and others are getting way too wet. Scientists at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability estimate that every additional degree Celsius of global warming on average will drag down the world’s ability to produce food by 120 calories per person per day, or 4.4 percent of current daily consumption. Here’s a great piece on why that is, if you’d like to read more.
  

• “We've just so exaggerated what climate change is. In the media, it's a great exciting story. But worse for politicians, it's reason for greater top-down control. It's a reason to shrink the production of energy.”

  
  Literal LOLing over Wright calling climate change a “great exciting story” in the media. He has clearly never covered climate change or talked to a climate reporter.
  
  Also, it’s very funny to hear Wright complain about Democrats trying to shrink the production of energy while the Trump administration wages an all-out war on renewables. Every accusation is an admission, it seems.

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