On the heels of Vice President JD Vance challenging Europe’s regulatory, energy, and security environments in Paris and Munich, President Donald Trump’s newly minted energy secretary, Chris Wright, piled on in a virtual address at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London.
Wright particularly called out Net Zero 2050 in his conversation with Chris Uhlmann of Sky News. “Net Zero 2050 is a sinister goal,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
Energy policies like Net Zero 2050, “have not delivered any benefits, but it’s delivered tremendous costs,” Wright said.
The energy secretary suggested these costs go far beyond the gas pump or a family’s energy bill. It materializes in the form of large-scale deindustrialization, which impoverishes workers and increased inequality. He cited the United Kingdom as an example:
If you make energy more expensive and less reliable, as the United Kingdom has done over the last couple of decades, you lower the standard of living of your population, shrink their opportunity set, and you simply export your industry.
No one’s going to make an energy-intensive product in the United Kingdom anymore. It’s just been displaced somewhere else. It’s going to be made in a coal-powered factory in China, loaded on a diesel-powered ship to get down the river, on a bigger diesel-powered ship to be unloaded at the docks in London.
Wright said this cycle “is not energy transition.”
“This is lunacy,” he said. “This is impoverishing citizens for the delusion that this is somehow going to make the world a better place.”
Wright fielded a question from Uhlmann about Vance’s remarks Friday.
“Energy realism is critical if you want to have humanism,” he said, specifically addressing Vance’s critique of European energy policy.
“Germany itself has spent a half a trillion dollars in an attempt to revolutionize or change their energy system,” Wright explained. “They went from 80% of their primary energy from hydrocarbons to 74%. They didn’t switch away from hydrocarbons; they just invested in a whole new energy system that added tremendously to costs.
“[Germany] doubled—more than doubled—the capacity of their electrical grid, and delivered 20% less electricity at two to three times the cost,” he added. “This is a proud, great industrial nation in Germany.”
“What I would love to see is the return to sobriety,” Wright told the crowd assembled in London. “And it’s not just in Europe. We have plenty of it in the United States as well.”