From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright sharply criticized the Biden administration’s restrictive energy policies during a keynote speech to energy industry leaders Monday, explaining how the Trump administration’s approach is oriented around unlocking human flourishing.

Wright made the speech to kick off the 2025 CERAWeek conference, one of the premier annual summits for the energy industry. He characterized the Biden administration’s maniacal focus on climate change as counterproductive and impoverishing for ordinary people, pledging to take a radically different approach than his predecessor by unleashing U.S. energy and private sector innovations to make life better and more affordable for Americans, announcing that he is approving a liquefied natural gas (LNG) permit during the speech to prove his point.

“The previous administration’s ‘climate’ policies have been impoverishing to our citizens, economically destructive to our businesses, and politically polarizing. The ‘cure’ was far more destructive than the disease,” Wright said. “There are no winners in that world, except for politicians and rapidly growing interest groups. The only interest group that we are concerned with is the American people. Our focus will be steadfast on the American people and our allies abroad.”

Wright explained how much of the world’s population lives in poverty in large part because they do not have access to the cheap, efficient energy that powers modern life and its conveniences that only a fraction of humanity enjoys at present. The new energy secretary — who has worked with nuclear, oil, gas, solar and geothermal energy over the course of his private sector career — argued that the U.S. can and should play a leading role in proliferating prosperity with energy instead of regulating the sector too aggressively in the name of climate change.

“Recently I have been called a climate denier or climate skeptic. This is simply wrong. I am a climate realist. I have been studying and writing about climate change for over twenty years. The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is: a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” Wright said. “We have indeed raised atmospheric CO2 concentration by 50% in the process of more than doubling human life expectancy, lifting most of the world’s citizens out of grinding poverty, launching modern medicine, telecommunications, planes, trains and automobiles too. Everything in life involves trade offs. Everything.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens. Running the math on what might have been the benefits from these policies yields perhaps only a few hundredths of a degree reduction in global temperatures in the year 2100,” Wright continued. “The Trump administration intends to be much more scientific and mathematically literate.”

While former President Joe Biden said that climate change poses a threat to humanity that exceeds that presented by nuclear war, Wright’s remarks make clear that the Trump administration will not be treating climate change as an existential threat that takes precedence over other priorities.

The vision Wright laid out in his speech represents a stark departure from the positions of the Biden administration on nearly all fronts, including on the issue of approvals for LNG export projects. The Biden administration unilaterally froze approvals in January 2024, keeping the pause in place for most of the year, in what critics characterized as an election year move to shore up support from the well-funded climate lobby.

To drive home his point that American energy is open for business with the Trump administration leading in Washington, Wright announced that he will be approving a LNG permit extension for the Delfin LNG project, a major development proposed for construction off the Louisiana coast and a victim of the Biden administration’s January 2024 freeze on approvals.

“I am honored to play a role in reversing what I believe has been a very poor direction in energy policy. The previous administration’s energy policy was focused myopically on climate change, with people as simply collateral damage. My predecessor was on this stage one year ago saying that LNG exports would soon be in the rear view mirror. Think about that for a moment,” Wright said during his speech. “Natural gas today supplies 25% of global primary energy and has been the fastest growing source of energy over the last 15 years. Wind and solar, the darlings of the last administration and so much of the world today, supply roughly 3% of global primary energy … Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices on the grid went up and stability of the grid went down.”

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum held a joint appearance in south Louisiana Thursday to tout the restart of the growth of America’s liquefied natural gas(LNG) industry.

The event celebrated the kickoff of a planned $18 billion expansion of the existing Plaquemines Parrish LNG export facility operated by Venture Global. It also served to symbolize the end of what was frankly one of the dumbest policy actions ever invoked by executive order – then-President Joe Biden’s “pause” on permitting for new LNG export infrastructure.

Reversed by President Donald Trump on day 1 of his second term in office, Biden invoked the year-long pause in January 2024 on the flimsiest of pretenses, a preposterous claim by anti-natural gas activist researchers that US LNG emissions exceed those of coal-fired power plants. Worse, that claim was not made in findings of a peer-reviewed scientific study, but in an early “preview” of a study that fell apart on close inspection.

The unpleasant task of defending this dumb policy action fell largely on the shoulders of Biden’s hapless Energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, who assured the attendees of the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston in March 2024 that the “pause” would be “in the rearview mirror” when they met again in 2025. That prediction turned out to be accurate, but not due to any action taken by her or Biden. Instead, Granholm did her best to hype the Department of Energy’s(DOE) own study when it was released in November, making claims about its findings in a letter leaked to The New York Times the day before that turned out to not be accurate.

Even more concerning, Democrat nominee Kamala Harris consistently supported the pause and concerns increased throughout the campaign that, if elected, she would most likely move to turn the pause into permanent policy, thus ending America’s dominant position in the global LNG export business. But voters had different ideas, choosing instead to elect Trump for a second time in November, bringing his plans for American Energy Dominance along with him.

Burgum, who chairs Trump’s newly-created American Energy Dominance Council in which Wright also participates, told workers and executives assembled for Thursday’s event that, “One of our pathways to energy dominance is just unleashing the incredible resources that we have in this country: getting the red tape, getting the federal government off the back of the worker, off the back of companies.”

In an interview from the Venture Global site with Will Cain on Fox News, Wright, pointing to an LNG tanker behind him, said, “In less than 24 hours it’ll be loaded and sailing back to Germany; 100,000 homes in Europe can be heated and supplied with gas for a full year just in that one tanker behind us. This is unleashing American energy to the benefit of Americans and to the benefit of our friends and allies abroad. This is the way to peace.”

And so, Biden’s absurd pause comes to a richly-deserved end. Again, this entire fake controversy had zero basis in fact or real science. That’s how close America came to losing what has been one of its major growth industries of the last decade.

It is almost unimaginable that this could have happened in the United States of America, with its supposed system of checks and balances. But, as Elon Musk’s DOGE operation is revealing on a daily basis, so much of Biden’s administration appears to have been built on a foundation of a complex web of scams and money laundering schemes, with his energy and climate policies playing a leading role. This LNG pause episode almost pales in comparison to some of the multi-billion-dollar grants handed out by both DOE and the EPA in the administration’s final months.

But it’s all in Granholm’s imagined rearview mirror now, as is Granholm herself. America’s LNG industry is back, poised for rapid expansion and ready to resume its place as the dominant player in the global market.

Elections do matter.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.