Oil and gas are a personal matter for Trump's US energy secretary pick Chris Wright

Mr Wright is a vocal advocate of fossil fuel development and shares the new president's disputed views on climate change

Chris Wright has been nominated to become the new US energy secretary. Getty Images

Donald Trump has set a combative tone for his coming second presidency's policies by nominating veteran oil executive Chris Wright as US energy secretary.

During his election campaign, Mr Trump pledged to maximise America's crude oil production and continued to deny climate change.

Mr Wright, who has been chief executive of Colorado-based Liberty Energy since 2011, seems to fit the job description. He is a vocal supporter of oil and gas development and shares Mr Trump's disputed views on the global climate emergency.

The appointment of Mr Wright still needs to be confirmed by the US Senate, but that appears certain to happen as Mr Trump's Republicans have seized control of the chamber.

The oil executive joins several divisive personalities appointed to the Trump cabinet, the most notable of whom are Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Elon Musk as head of Doge – not the memecoin, but the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.

Career energy leader

Mr Wright graduated with engineering degrees from University of California, Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.

His first major career endeavour came in 1992 when he founded Pinnacle Technology in San Francisco, which claims to have "created the hydraulic fracture mapping industry and its innovations [that] helped launch commercial shale gas production in the late 1990s". He was its chief executive until 2006.

In the middle of that stint, in 2000, he became chairman of Texas-based Stroud Energy, an "early shale gas pioneer", a position he would hold until 2006.

It was in 2010 that he joined Liberty as the executive chairman of Liberty Resources. He became chief executive of the group the following year and executive chairman of Liberty Midstream Solutions in 2016. He remains in all three positions to this day.

A 180-degree reversal

If confirmed, Mr Wright will take over from Jennifer Granholm, who has championed tapping renewable energy sources, including wind, solar and nuclear, and transitioning to electric vehicles, an industry the US has heavily supported with government subsidies.

As with his first administration, Mr Trump is lining his cabinet with people who often share his views on disputed issues.

As energy chief, he said, Mr Wright would "be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape, and ushering in a new golden age of American prosperity and global peace".

Mr Trump praised Pinnacle's role in launching the "American shale revolution that fuelled American energy independence, and transformed the global energy markets and geopolitics".

The president-elect is seeking to further boost America's leadership in energy production. The US is the world's largest crude-producing nation, with annual output just under 14.84 billion barrels per day, about a fifth more than Saudi Arabia's, data from Worldometer shows.

This is expected to support US companies and government revenue, and ensure security for the world's biggest energy consumer.

'Impossible without carbon' view

Mr Wright is not afraid to share his contrarian views on climate change. In a video posted on his LinkedIn account, he stresses that climate crisis, energy transition, carbon pollution, clean energy and dirty energy are "five commonly used words around energy and climate that are both deceptive and destructive".

In the same video, his denial is front and centre: "There is no climate crisis and we're not in the midst of an energy transition either."

He also touts the benefits of carbon dioxide, claiming that "humans and all complex life on Earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide", while lambasting the term "carbon pollution" as "outrageous".

Mr Wright's strong support for crude is also a personal matter: in an emotional podcast posted on Our American Stories in 2020, he said "if not for fossil fuels, I wouldn’t have celebrated my 14th birthday".

Mr Wright was referring to how the energy industry has contributed to the advancement of several key sectors, such as medicine; he was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes when he was around 13, and argues he would not have lived longer if not for those innovations spurred by energy.

Climate change legitimacy

Scientific information taken from natural sources, such as ice cores, rocks, and tree rings, and from modern equipment, all show the signs of a changing climate.

But in 2017, Mr Trump infamously pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement, which is the foremost global effort to tackle climate change. That was completely reversed in 2021 when President Joe Biden, who defeated Mr Trump in a bitter 2020 election race, rejoined the cause in his first day in office.

Now back in power, Mr Trump has hinted that he plans to, again, pull out of the accords. However, certain corners, including Russia and ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods have encouraged him to remain in the group, arguing that instead of going against it, it may be better to make the agreement more efficient.

International action remains too slow to achieve the Paris 2015 goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to not more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, despite the annual meetings between global leaders, owing to politics and other realities. This year is expected to be the hottest on record and would break the 1.5°C limit.

Much remains to be seen on how the second Trump administration will deal with climate change and energy. But one thing is certain: America is poised for another unpredictable four years, which may have significant effects long after that.