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President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to be his secretary of Energy — and rare is the Cabinet nominee who makes more sense than this one.
The 59-year-old Wright is an MIT-trained engineer who since the 1990s has started and led several shale gas companies. His latest, Liberty Energy, has a multibillion-dollar valuation.
He’s an experienced and successful energy entrepreneur, just what is required to achieve Trump’s goal of making America energy dominant once again.
Wright’s qualifications stand in stark contrast to any previous Energy secretary, none of whom had any actual experience in the business of producing energy.
That’s surprising: The department was created in 1977 specifically as a response to the 1970s energy crisis.
But instead of entrusting its mission to energy experts, presidents since the department’s creation have chosen as its leader various political officials and government hacks who had accomplished exactly zero for the American energy industry in their previous careers.
Meanwhile, entrepreneurs like Wright developed and implemented the hydrofracturing, or fracking, technology that delivered the United States from the not-so-tender mercies of the OPEC-dominated global oil market during the Obama era.
That was a huge and underappreciated win for America: 90% of our oil production today involves fracking.
America was able to survive the Obama war on coal thanks to fracking.
During the first Trump administration, the US became energy dominant for the first time in decades thanks to fracking.
And even though the anti-fossil-fuel Biden administration handed back to OPEC control over the global price of oil, the US oil and gas industry was nevertheless able to produce record levels of energy through fracking during the last four years, thereby avoiding the truly catastrophic consequences of Biden’s policies.
This is all thanks to people like Chris Wright.
Not surprisingly, the left is attacking Wright not only for being pro-fossil fuel but also for questioning the climate agenda.
This is just distraction. Regardless of Wright’s views of the climate controversy, voters elected Trump to a second term, after he both campaigned under the omnipresent “Drill, baby, drill” slogan and regularly called the climate controversy what it is, a “hoax.”
So, voters have already settled the question of fossil-fuel and climate policy, at least for the next four years. Secretary Wright will be implementing President Trump’s energy policies, not his own.
Many Republicans believe the Department of Energy should be eliminated entirely.
It has no track record of significant success in promoting and expanding American energy.
Its nuclear energy and weapons responsibilities could easily be handled by other agencies, and its national laboratories produce little of value.
But shuttering it would take an act of Congress — and it’s doubtful that closely divided body will find the votes for that in the near future.
As long as we’re stuck with a Department of Energy, let’s for the first time put it in the hands of an energy expert and successful entrepreneur.
Wright, like few others, understands what energy is, how it’s produced and how it’s financed.
If there’s anybody who can turn the Department of Energy into a useful tool for making America energy-dominant again, Wright is the right choice.
Steve Milloy is a senior legal fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.