The United States’ new energy secretary Chris Wright – an oil industry chief who calls climate science a hoax – has called the global pledge to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 a “sinister goal” that is both “unachievable” and costly.
The comments were made while he spoke via videolink to a conference held by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) in London, in a session hosted by Australian conservative pundit Chris Uhlmann.
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship counts among its advisory board a slew of conservative names from around the globe , including former Australian prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, and numerous other current and former politicians including Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Amanda Stoker, Andrew Hastie, and John Anderson.
Speakers and panelists at the 2025 include former prime minister Scott Morrison, former Treasurer Peter Costello, Warren Mundine, Murdoch columnists Peta Credlin and Greg Sheridan, Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg. In short, it is a festival for climate and renewable energy skeptics.
Wright didn’t disappoint them.
“Net zero 2050 is a sinister goal – a terrible goal,” said Wright, to immediate applause. “It’s both unachievable by any practical means but the aggressive pursuit of it – and you’re sitting in a country that has aggressively pursued this goal – has not delivered any benefits, but it’s delivered tremendous costs.”
According to Wright, the energy transition “is lunacy that is impoverishing your own citizens in a delusion that this is somehow going to make the world a better place.”
He also sought to downplay the threat from extreme weather, and suggested that climate action is part of a plot to “grow government power” and “shrink human freedom”.
The question-and-answer session between Wright and Uhlmann lasts just short of 13 minutes (available in full here), and is chock full of misdirection, obfuscation, and misleading information.
Wright claimed at one point that investment in clean energy – “most of it at [sic] wind, solar, batteries, and expanding transmission” – resulted in the delivery of only 3 per cent of global energy in 2024, adding that “everywhere it had meaningful penetration it made electricity more expensive and less reliable.”
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the share of renewables in final energy consumption – which includes the power, heat, and transport sectors – amounted to 13 per cent in 2023, and is set to reach nearly 20 per cent by 2030. Most fossil fuel promoters forget that two thirds of their energy produced is lost as waste heat.
The claim around renewables and prices is also false. The cause of rising prices in recent years has been sheeted to the soaring cost of gas, as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Multiple reports, including this one from the Australian Energy Market Commission, point to the reduction in prices brought about by renewables.
Before being appointed energy secretary, Wright, who bills himself as a “tech nerd turned entrepreneur,” has worked in the American oil and gas sector since 1992 and was the founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of Liberty Energy, one of the United States’ leading fossil fuel producers and clean energy antagonists.
Declaring to the ARC crowd that his goal was to “get out of the way” of the United States’ “export, production, and enhancement of [its] coal, oil, and gas,” Wright also dismissed energy efficiency regulations for appliances such as washing machines.
“More than half of the globe [sic] citizens are walking around in handwashed clothes; they dream about a day where they can have the labour-saving benefits of appliances – of a washing machine,” he said.
Not one to be outdone in a battle of sycophantic virtue signalling, Chris Uhlmann at one point claimed that “of course, access to cheap, abundant energy is the difference between poor nations and rich ones,” adding: “Poor nations don’t look after the environment, do they …”
Towards the end of the Q&A session, Uhlmann asked Wright to speak about the possibility of Australia and the United States working together on a nuclear supply chain.
“Australia is a source of just tremendous natural resources and great human spirit,” before adding that he would “love to see Australia get in the game of supplying uranium, maybe going down that nuclear road themselves.”
He then went on:
“I think Australia has a tremendous future, but has some of the same struggles we have in the United States – and even worse in Europe – which is the desire for top-down control for deciding what’s virtuous and what isn’t and this wholly incorrect belief that there’s somehow clean energy and dirty energy; there’s good things and bad things.
“That’s just not how the world works.”
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