President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for energy secretary, Chris Wright, will play a vital role in the incoming administration’s goal of increasing oil production and lowering energy costs for people.

Wright, the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield service firm, is also slated to serve on the newly formed National Energy Council. The energy council is expected to consist of all departments and agencies involving domestic energy.

“My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable, and secure,” Wright said on X. “Energy is the lifeblood that makes everything in life possible. Energy matters. I am looking forward to getting to work.”

Those in the oil industry have praised Wright’s nomination. Still, he has met opposition from environmentalists, who have called him a “climate denier” and claim he will prevent the economy from transitioning toward clean energy.

Here are his policy stances.

Nuclear

One of the renewable energy sources that Wright has expressed support for is nuclear energy. He serves on the board of Oklo Inc., a small modular reactor developer.

In a debate last year with Julio Friedmann, a former Energy Department official in the Obama administration, Wright said he is a “huge nuclear fan.” He argued that nuclear power can work in any weather condition and generate significant power without taking up much land.

“Nuclear can provide high temperature process heat,” he said. “It’s the most important thing we get from energy, because it’s from high-temperature process heat that we can make steel, and cement, and plastics, and fertilizer, and all the materials you need to make everything else. We can’t make wind turbines or solar panels without high-temperature process heat.”

Nuclear energy has bipartisan support. This year, for instance, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act, a bill to ease specific licensing application fees to help boost the construction of more reactors. The Biden administration has also sought to increase nuclear capacity, and earlier this month, it released a road map to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. Some in the nuclear sector believe the incoming Trump administration will support the industry.

Geothermal

Wright’s company, Liberty Energy, invested in Fervo Energy, a geothermal developer that uses fracking technology to extract energy from the Earth’s core.

In a press release on the company’s fourth-quarter financial and operational results, Wright said, “As we look ahead, global energy demand continues to rise as the world’s seven billion less fortunate aspire to attain the energy-rich lifestyles of the lucky one billion.”

He added that Liberty Energy’s investment into Fervo could “provide reliable, affordable energy solutions to help meet these demands.”

Solar and wind

Wright has questioned efforts to transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable sources of energy. In a video on his LinkedIn profile last year, Wright said, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either.”

When speaking with Friedmann, Wright said wind and solar have raised electricity prices and destabilized the electricity grid. He added, “It’s pushed energy-intensive manufacturing jobs out of countries that have gone that pathway.”

Regarding wind and solar energy, Wright said, “These have virtually no prospect of being meaningful contributors to [the] electricity system,” noting that these energy sources are unreliable.

He added that calling solar and wind “clean” is a “misnomer,” and that they have more significant environmental impacts than oil and gas. Instead, he called them lower greenhouse gas technologies.

Wright said solar will grow but remain a minor player in global energy. He added that more minerals would need to be mined globally to make a meaningful impact in solar, but both industries take up a lot of land.

Approach to climate change

As of today, the political approach to climate change has been to “reduce choices, mandate massive expenditures and raise the cost of energy,” Wright said in 2023 at the American Conservation Coalition.

He added that this approach is “not a winning formula.”

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Instead, Wright said that limiting energy sources harms consumers and poor communities. In 2021, on a podcast called “Power Hour,” Wright said there is a misunderstanding of energy and climate change, which is “leading to a huge human toll.”

Wright said that countries stating that they would lower greenhouse gas emissions is “just silly.” He added, “All they do is displace those emissions somewhere else. They export the jobs and import the emissions.”