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The Interview
Chris Wright, US Energy Secretary : the problem with climate alarmism
00:22:59
Justin Rowlatt speaks to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright about his climate change views
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Chris Wright
You don't look like.
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Justin Rolatt
Hello, I'm Justin Rolatt, BBC Climate Editor, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC people shaping our world from all over the world.
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Interviewer
There have been so many disagreements between me and my family.
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Chris Wright
Putting on a show that is what it means to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy.
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Justin Rolatt
For this interview I met Chris Wright, the United States Energy Secretary, in Brussels. You're going to hear about his unconventional call up to the job from President Trump and his controversy controversial challenge to environmental orthodoxy. He tells me the threat from climate change may be real, but the scale and speed is exaggerated, that neither floods nor wildfires nor droughts are on the rise and that the rush to decarbonization by renewables has been an expensive mistake. Instead, nuclear fusion is his big hope to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future. His views have caused outrage among scientists worldwide who question his claims and the standard of the evidence behind them. But they're shared by Donald Trump, who's called climate change the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. Secretary Wright says he welcomes the debate and defends his views as well as the decisions of the US Administration to cut funding to renewable energy sources. What's needed, he says, is a whole new approach to to climate change.
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Chris Wright
A blind whatever sounds greener. We're going to do that and we're going to subsidize it, we're going to mandate it. That's just not been a winning policy. Climate change should be looked at like any other issue. If you're going to triple the price of electricity, but you're going to get massive benefits for people, that's great. But if you're not even meaningfully changing your energy mix and your industries are leaving your country and going somewhere else, now they're just made in coal power factories, loaded on diesel power ships and sent back. That's just not green.
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Justin Rolatt
Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Chris Wright.
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Chris Wright
So I'm a passionate energy entrepreneur. I write and speak about energy and I've been doing that for 10 or 20 years. So I got invited to a dinner at Mar A Lago of energy executives to sit around the table. It's the first time I met the president. And he went around the table and said, what business are you in? Tell me how that works. What does that mean? 2 hour and 15 minute dinner. He probably talked for 10 minutes and he asked questions and listened. Not the public impression I had of Donald Trump. So we engaged in a great dialogue back and forth about energy. And as he went around the room at the end, he said, you should be energy secretary. I thought it was.
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Interviewer
He said it there and then he.
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Chris Wright
Said it right then. And then you should be energy secretary. And he asked everyone in the room, should he be energy secretary? Yeah, maybe he should be energy secretary.
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Interviewer
And how did he feel about that?
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Justin Rolatt
That came out of the blue.
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Chris Wright
Then it came out of the blue. And then he walked around as we were leaving and said, would you do it? I said, if I'm asked to serve my country.
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Interviewer
So I'm really serious about this now.
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Chris Wright
He sounded really serious. He said, would you do it? I said, oh, asked to serve my country, without a doubt, I would do it. He said, be ready.
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Interviewer
Okay, so energy is very important. We will be talking a lot about energy, but I'm the climate editor. We're also going to be talking about climate change. And let me start off by asking you about the report that your department published back in July claiming that climate change is not as serious a threat to the economy as most scientists say it is. So how big a threat do you think climate change is?
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Chris Wright
So, and I wouldn't say not as serious if that as most scientists say it is. That climate report that was released, I'm incredibly proud of and very thankful for the five tremendous authors who stepped up and worked their Tails off to get a report out. 90% of what's in that report is straight from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. So it's really sort of a recounting of the sea level data, that's just public information data, of the extreme weather data, of the temperature rise data. And if you look carefully at the IPCC reports or just familiarize yourself with the data and you even look at summaries of like the IPCC's economic work, the conclusion from that is climate change is a very real physical phenomenon. It's just not close to the world's.
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Interviewer
Biggest problem at the moment. So what does that tell us, do you think, about the move towards a low carbon economy? What does the analysis that your report says tell us about the importance of moving to a low carbon economy?
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Chris Wright
We often hear in politics it's a climate emergency. And once you say something's an emergency, then all caution, all evaluation or trade offs are out the window. And that's sort of how we've treated it, right? Four or five trillion dollars in the last 20 years have been spent trying to move to a low carbon economy. And today wind, solar and batteries are 3%, a little lower than 3% of total global energy. Look, I went to college to work on nuclear and then I worked on solar and geothermal. I don't care where energy comes from. I just want it to be affordable, reliable and secure. But if climate change really was a crisis, we'd be a problem. We'd have to live in a worse energized world, much more expensive, much less reliable energy. Fortunately, it's a slow moving phenomenon, it's real and we will eventually decarbonize. It's just generations from now, not two or three decades from now.
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Interviewer
What do you say to the dozens of international scientists who reviewed the evidence that your team of five scientists presented on climate change and said it was full of errors, misrepresentations and cherry picked data? They gave a 400 page takedown, didn't they, of your report. What do you say to them?
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Chris Wright
Actually, a pretty ineffective takedown like that one cherry picked data. I thought it was just classic. Look, I've been speaking on climate change, writing on it for 10 or 15 years myself. One of the cardinal rules I follow, as did all of the authors. When we show data, we show the entire data set, the entire sea level data, the entire extreme weather set data. In fact, people in the climate movement, New York Times just does it repeatedly. They start hurricane data at a low point in the 1980s and then they show it rising. Cherry picking in climate science is in the media and in activist science and in politicians is the norm. The five authors of that report and myself do not cherry pick data. So being accused of cherry picking, I thought frankly, was kind of humorous. And the takedown that scientists say in that report, if you look at the global tide gauge data, we've had 125 years of data and we've had about 8 inches of sea level rise, and you don't see an apparent acceleration in recent years. People were up in arms about that. If we use the right statistics, you could get it. They referenced two other papers. You go to those papers, and less than 10% of the global tide gauges show an acceleration, and that could be from subsidence, pulling groundwater out or whatever. In fact, there are takedowns of us mostly just lead to places that confirm what was said in the report, although some. But it's an active dialogue and we want it.
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Interviewer
No, but subsequentists say their work was completely misrepresented. You know, Zeke Housefather, for example, said that you took his data and you just didn't represent it accurately.
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Chris Wright
That's the one scientist I've heard say that. And of course, part of his data was presented and not additional data he wanted. I don't even know the details of that one. But first of all, this is great. We have a dialogue back and forth about climate change in a public forum. I've wanted that for 20 years. We're away from the cancel culture enforcement of the church authority, and we've got a dialogue going.
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Interviewer
We should talk about these things. I mean, what the. Very broadly, for our audience, what the science says is that not taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more extreme weather. Sea level rise, as you've said, possibly mass extinctions as climate change means that species that exist in certain places can't survive. We are seeing some of this already. We're seeing some of this in the US Heat waves. We're seeing some very damaging floods. We're seeing some really serious wildfires. There are, of course, other factors involved, but there's a consensus among scientists that one of the drivers is, you know, the warming of the climate. Kind of makes, you know, kind of sense, doesn't it? A warmer climate, more heat waves, more wildfires. Aren't you worried about the risk to U.S. citizens of these changes?
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Chris Wright
There's always projections. You can project anything, and people do all the time. What we're careful about is to look at what we've actually Measured and what we actually know. Like you mentioned wildfires in the United States. Wildfires today are dramatically lower than they were 100 years ago. They're dramatically lower than the natural rate of wildfires. We implemented fire control and then we stopped thinning forests and controlling them. It was predicted decades ago. We're going to see a rise back towards natural fossils.
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Interviewer
I don't want to get too deep because it's a very complicated argument. And for example, there used to be many more grass fires. There are fewer grass fires because much of the land has been turned to agriculture. So that's changed the fire statistics, which don't typically distinguish between grass fires and forests.
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Chris Wright
But if you just look at western forest land, you'll find the same conclusion. You mentioned droughts. The world is a little bit warmer, a little bit greener, a little bit wetter. Droughts in North America and globally are on a gradual decline. And you mentioned floods, flood damage as a percent of the economy.
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Interviewer
Have you seen the drought in California? California's been going through a huge long period of exceptional drought.
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Chris Wright
Yeah, I've written a long thing about the last thousand years of drought data in the western United States. You can find it in my Bettering Human Lives 2024 report. It's an area that cyclically goes in and out of drought. The current drought is in no way out of the ordinary from what's happened there.
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Interviewer
I mean, this is debated. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this, but isn't one of the issues here that we're only just beginning, as you say, to feel the effects of climate change? The problem is that the trajectory we're means it's going to get worse, we're going to get more extreme weather. What we're doing is by moving away from a carbon economy.
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Justin Rolatt
The idea is to reduce the risk.
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Interviewer
That poses to future generations. As you know, carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time. The effect will last for not just for hundreds of years, but probably for millennia.
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Chris Wright
Oh yeah, the effects will be long lasting, which is why I think it's that we get a careful understanding of what are the effects so far. And the ink ways you increase concentration of a greenhouse gas, it's a logarithmic effect. The biggest effect is early on, it's a smaller effect for each additional 1 part per million rise in CO2. So we've already risen global CO2 concentration a little over 50%. That's probably 2/3 or 3/4 of the effect we'll get with a doubling and to get to a doubling, it'll be late this century.
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Interviewer
That's not what most of the scientists think. They think as we increase CO2, we're going to see a continued temperature rise. They think there's actually a lag in the CO2 being released into the atmosphere. And the warming that we see. So much of the warmth has been taken up by the seas. We now see seas at record temperatures. Unbelievable marine heat waves all over the world. You know, I'm kind of surprised that as a scientist, you're not worried by some of these phenomena.
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Chris Wright
There are real changes that we should study. And look at. The worst heat waves in the United States were in the 1930s. Globally, it's about a little more than a degree warmer. Globally, if you have a certain temperature threshold for heat waves, of course, we have a little bit more heat waves now. Not in the United States. Our worst heat wave decade was the 1930s.
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Interviewer
One degree of warming, it makes the extremes significantly more likely. As you know, it's a normal distribution. So if you shift it, you make the extremes more likely, which is why we see more extreme heat, more drought, more flooding as well.
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Chris Wright
Actually, not quite right. The largest warming is at the poles in cold places, and it's mostly at night. The low temperatures are warming much more than the high temperatures. The swing between the daytime high and low is actually shrinking a little.
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Interviewer
That's in the distribution across the Earth. I'm talking about the incidence of extreme temperatures happening. Look, the climate has changed in the past, no question about that. What we're seeing now is some of the most rapid climate change in the 4 billion year history of the planet. We appear to be, as you know, moving out of this period of exceptional climate stability that has endured for about what 11,000 years, scientists call the Holocene. There's an amazing coincidence. Homo sapiens, which evolved 300,000 years ago, only developed the ability to have agriculture to farm during this period of climate stability. All of the great civilizations of humanity have grown up in that time. Shouldn't we be worried if we're moving out of that period of climate stability, given how much it's gifted to our species, to humanity, it's created our civilization.
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Chris Wright
We haven't seen an increase in instability. We are changing the climate, but actually pretty modestly and pretty slowly. There hasn't been an increase. Extreme weather events there might be in the future, but we haven't seen.
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Interviewer
There's been an increase in the number of heat waves and droughts. I mean, maybe it's true that the big Storms, not in the downtown. There isn't a strong association with big storms. But look, we're back into the. It's one thing to challenge a scientific consensus, as you have to, as you put it, open up a debate. It's another thing to undermine the process of science itself. Yet the Trump administration is slashing spending research into climate and weather, as you know. Surely you believe, investing in science, in establishing the facts so we can make a judgment about the process of climate change in the world.
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Chris Wright
Absolutely. One of the problems of science is it's become so politicized in the climate world. If you deviate from the church, your funding gets cut off. Thou must say this. We're trying to restore real science, which is challenging of hypothesis, data, background. And of course, we want to continue to collect data from satellites and all these things. So there's a lot of rumors about all sorts of terrible things happening.
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Interviewer
But look at the, you know, huge reduction in the budget for noaa, which collects data on, you know, weather and climate around the world.
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Chris Wright
I think they shouldn't worry about that. We will continue to collect fantastic weather data. The quality of that will only increase as sensor network increases, artificial intelligence, and you're right, I'm passionate about that.
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Interviewer
Even spending tens of millions of dollars less than you are now, which is what the proposal is.
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Chris Wright
Absolutely. Absolutely.
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Justin Rolatt
You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. People shaping our world from all over the world. For this episode of the interview, I'm speaking to Chris Wright, the US Energy Secretary. We met in the Presidential Suite of a swanky hotel just off the grand plus in Brussels. It's one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, lined with ornate 17th century guildhalls, symbols of the economic power this mighty city once wielded. Now, of course, America is the great power. The US Energy Secretary was in town to urge Europe to buy more of its oil and gas. I'd expected him to be pugnacious and polemical, and he was certainly both of those. But what surprised me was how likable this key figure in President Trump's cabinet was. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Chris Wright.
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Interviewer
Do you have insurance on your home?
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Chris Wright
Yes, I do.
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Interviewer
You do? And you have insurance because you're worried about the effects of catastrophic risk. Isn't trying to tackle climate change a kind of insurance, a prudent way to manage the risks that climate change might pose for future generations?
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Chris Wright
So a great analogy, I love it. But if your house was worth $200,000, you wouldn't pay $200,000 a year. To insure it, you have to have a premium that's in, in line with the benefit. And by the way, global losses, insured losses from extreme weather events have on a 50 year decline. So yes, I insure my house. Fortunately, as we get a more energized, wealthier society, we build stronger things. The risk of damage to my house is actually on a decline.
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Interviewer
Is it because the world's insurers say they think climate change is one of the biggest risks the world economy faces.
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Chris Wright
They say that to appease government regulators. Look at the actual data of insured losses. It's just in the numbers again. It's in the Bettering Human Lives 2024 report. It's the actual numbers, not what people say, but the data.
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Interviewer
Come on, this isn't just one insurance company. The insurance industry says it's really worried about the risks of climate change. You know, I'm surprised you're suggesting that they're not being honest about this fundamental aspect of their business.
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Chris Wright
Nobody knows the future, but if you want to raise insurance rates, it's better to talk about fear ahead than just look at the data. We don't know the future. It's better to look back at the actual actual data all the way up to today. People said that 20 years ago. Look at what's actually happened. Insured losses as a percent of GDP in the United States and globally are on a five decade decline.
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Interviewer
The numbers I've seen show the absolute cost of insured losses going up.
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Chris Wright
But of course we're getting wealthier. And there's inflation. Of course there's more billion dollar disasters.
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Interviewer
It's not linear. It's going up very significantly.
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Chris Wright
Not when you correct it for the size of the economy, for wealth and inflation. That's another one of those, like misstated said all the time.
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Interviewer
But it's actually caught up in the weeds. Your administration has cut what, three and a half billion dollars of subsidies for renewable energy at a time when these technologies, the sales are booming. And you know who's selling this stuff? China is selling this stuff in vast quantities. I mean, this is a huge growing industry that America's greatest economic rival completely dominates.
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Chris Wright
That's what we want.
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Interviewer
Don't you want to be part of this revolution?
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Chris Wright
Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years. Isn't that enough? Solar for 25 years, that's enough. You got to be able to walk on your own after 25 to 30 years of subsidies. And again, together, wind, solar and batteries are 3% of primary energy in the United States. We've spent a lot of money on them. We haven't got a lot back.
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Interviewer
This is the point. There are investors who want to put money into wind turbines in America. Gold for it, you know, Orsted Danish companies just spent US$5 billion building a wind farm off the coast of Rhode island only to be told you've got to stop developing it because we don't think your permits are all right. They spent nine years getting those permits. What signal does it say when you pull the plug? Just before they finish their project?
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Chris Wright
It's being carefully looked at. No final decisions have been made. But I will say in general, if you go into an industry that's massively, aggressively depend upon government subsidies while elections happen and subsidy policies change, should the.
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Interviewer
UK and European countries be undertaking the effort that we're making at the moment to transition to clean energy?
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Chris Wright
I've been a critic of it for 10 years because it's been unsuccessful. Germany spent half a trillion dollars more than doubled the capacity on its electricity grid and it produces 20% less electricity today at triple the cost. So if you make energy extra expensive, as the European unit has done, that's not greenhouse gas reduction, that's just moving those emissions from Europe to where those products are made in Asia and shipping them back a blind whatever sounds greener, we're going to do that and we're going to subsidize it, we're going to mandate it. That's just not been a winning policy. Climate change should be looked at like any other issue. If you're going to triple the price of electricity, but you're going to get massive benefits for people, that's great. But if you're not even meaningfully changing your energy mix and your industries are leaving your country and going somewhere else now, they're just made in coal power factories, loaded on diesel power ships and sent back. That's just not green.
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Interviewer
What do you want to see happen here in Europe? What is the deal that you want done? Because obviously Europe made that promise, didn't they? To buy $750 billion of US energy in the next three years. Are you going to get those long term deals that you want?
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Chris Wright
Yeah, absolutely. Of course those deals will be done by businesses. But as Europe moves off Russian gas, that's to going mostly being filled by American gas. There's a lot of room for that to keep growing. As Russia moves off Russian oil and Russian refined products, US can fill that hole as well. And we're launching a Nuclear energy renaissance in the United States and we want to bring those new small modular reactor technologies over to Europe as well. I'm super excited about the growing energy trade here.
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Interviewer
What will the Trump administration do if they don't get these long term deals that have been promised by Europe? What are the consequences? Will we, like India see changes to the tariff arrangements?
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Chris Wright
It's in the EU and the United States best interest. The energy trade between our two countries are growing and will continue to grow. I have no doubt about that.
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Interviewer
You're making decisions that will have long term consequences for the levels of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere. You're the U.S. energy Secretary, one of the most important figures in energy worldwide. Those decisions will be part of the historic records. People will be able to look back and say, you know, well, you know, Chris Wright said, do this. How do you think your great grandchildren and their great grandchildren will judge the decisions that you're making today?
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Chris Wright
I'd like to think they'll be proud that I stopped the world going in a direction of impoverishing its citizens. They'll think, what were you thinking? Tripling your electricity prices and not even meaningfully changing the energy system. So the premise, your question, that it's going to make great differences in greenhouse gases, I don't believe that people are not going to adopt at large scale expensive, unreliable energy. The decisions I make are not meaningfully going to change the trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions. Only energy technology will do that. The biggest driver of decarbonization in the US and globally has been the rise of natural gas out competing coal. The second probably big driver of greenhouse gas reductions will be the renaissance of nuclear power, fission and the arrival of fusion. Those are going to move global greenhouse gas emissions.
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Interviewer
Fusion. I mean people have been talking about.
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Justin Rolatt
Fusion for decades and it's still decades.
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Interviewer
Away from being delivered, isn't it?
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Chris Wright
No. With artificial intelligence and what's going on at the national labs and private companies in the United States, we will have the approach about how to harness fusion energy within the next five years.
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Justin Rolatt
Five years.
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Chris Wright
I'll hold you to account on that. The technology, it'll be on the electric grid, you know, in 8 to 15 years.
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Interviewer
Fusion in 8 to 15 years.
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Chris Wright
Fusion, 8 to 15 years. We can have a friendly bet on that.
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Interviewer
Yeah, absolutely. Listen, if we get that secretary, then the climate change is solved.
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Chris Wright
It isn't solved because only about 20% of global energy is delivered electricity. So just changing the electricity grid, that'll reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The most important and biggest use of energy is process heat to make materials. Plastic, steel, fertilizer. Today those only come from combustion, but nuclear in the next generation can deliver process heat. Another reason I'm excited about it.
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Justin Rolatt
Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in depth conversations on the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with music legend Stevie Wonder, German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz and godfather of AI Yeshua Bengio. Until the next time.
- [24:04]
Interviewer
Bye for now.
- [24:09]
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