Chris Wright, Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, got the job during his first meeting with the former and future president.
Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking services company based in Colorado, was among about 20 oil and gas executives gathered by Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April. Mr. Wright had not met Mr. Trump before, but caught his attention by making what two people in the room described as a strong case for fossil fuels.
“Do you want to be my Secretary of Energy?” Mr. Trump asked, apparently jokingly, according to those in attendance. However, days after the election, Mr. Trump chose Mr. Wright to lead the agency.
On Wednesday, Mr. Wright will appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It will be the first of three hearings this week for Mr. Trump’s pick to run the agencies at the heart of his plan to increase the production and use of coal, oil and gas.
Mr. Wright has been an evangelist for this cause. In podcasts and speeches, he often makes the ethical case for fossil fuels, arguing that the world’s poorest people need oil and gas to achieve the benefits of modern life.
It also distorted climate science, researchers and activists said. For example, Mr. Wright inaccurately claimed in a podcast last year that a top U.N. scientific body had found that climate change would have a “slow-moving and modest impact two or three generations from now.”
In fact, the scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has recommended that countries make an immediate and radical transition away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from crossing a critical global warming threshold.
Meg Bloomgren, a spokeswoman for Mr. Wright, said in a statement that he had spent his career focused on improving lives, “including studying and determining that climate change is real and a problem we must solve in collaboration with America’s relentless technological innovations and solutions.” “
Democrats on Tuesday offered mixed impressions of Mr. Wright.
Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado called him smart and thoughtful on energy issues, but said he remained concerned about how Mr. Wright and other Cabinet members would handle climate change.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said Mr. Trump’s choices were “here to plunder our public treasury and pollute our public places.”
He noted that the Mar-a-Lago event was where Trump asked oil industry leaders to raise $1 billion for his campaign and promised that companies would save much more when he rolled back climate regulations, according to people in attendance. “Trump’s major donors want revenge,” Mr. Whitehouse said.
Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah who leads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the hearings would be an opportunity to discuss what he described as the Biden administration’s energy policy failures.
“With high energy prices hurting Americans and restrictive policies limiting access to public lands and critical resources, it is imperative to prioritize domestic energy production and restore confidence in public land stewardship,” Mr. Lee said.
On Thursday, Mr. Lee’s committee will hear from Douglas J. Burgum, the former Republican governor of North Dakota, who was appointed by Trump to the Interior Department. Also on Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will select Lee Zeldin, a former U.S. representative from Long Island, to head the EPA.
If appointed to head the Energy Department, Wright will help oversee approvals for liquefied gas export terminals, which the Biden administration has tried to slow, angering Republicans.
Mr. Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate work in solar energy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which created software to measure the movement of subsurface fluids. The program helped revolutionize the shale gas business.
Mr. Wright founded Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked with others on geothermal energy and small nuclear reactors.
Mr. Wright owns 2.6 million shares in the company, worth more than $55 million based on the current share price. A Recent SEC filing His compensation last year was estimated at $5.6 million.
Mr. Wright filed a separate document with the Securities and Exchange Commission after Mr. Trump appointed him energy secretary, indicating that he intended to step down from Liberty Energy. A transition official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because financial disclosures were not yet public, said Mr. Wright intends to liquidate his holdings as soon as they are confirmed.
Democrats sought to delay Mr. Wright’s hearing because they had not received his financial disclosure statements, documents that are typically made public before confirmation proceedings. Republicans refused to postpone the hearings.
Senate officials said Mr. Wright’s revelations became available to lawmakers late Tuesday, although they were not yet publicly available online at the Office of Government Ethics.
