Trump’s agenda won’t let his energy secretary achieve ‘energy abundance’ todayheadline

Chris Wright, a Colorado fracking executive, was confirmed on Monday by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 59 to 38 to become the Secretary of Energy.

Wright’s nomination hearing, held last month before the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was a relatively amiable affair. Though there were interruptions by Sunrise Movement protesters and a heated exchange with California senator Alex Padilla over Wright’s past comments dismissing the link between climate change and wildfires, Wright was not subjected to the contentious questioning that some of President Trump’s other cabinet nominees have faced. He was introduced by Senator John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, as a personal friend, and four of the committee’s Democrats voted for his confirmation.

While he acknowledged that “climate change is a real and global phenomenon,” Wright also insisted that “there isn’t dirty energy and clean energy; all energy is different and they all have different tradeoffs.” He pledged “to unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore our energy dominance,” to “lead the world in innovation and technology breakthroughs,” and to “build things in America again and remove barriers to progress.” Pressed on the policy particulars by the committee members, he expressed support for expanding nuclear power, renewables, and liquefied natural gas, and said he believed the nation’s transmission system needs to be expanded, and that this should be prioritized in future permitting reforms.

Part of the reason for Wright’s friendly reception was that he articulated a coherent, if tendentious, version of the “energy abundance” theory of how increasing the domestic production of energy in all forms — including fossil fuels — could enable the U.S. to adequately address the climate crisis. The vision Wright laid out broadly overlaps with a set of ideas that has gained prominence among energy policy thinkers in both parties — as well as in some sectors of the climate movement who see an opportunity for permitting and transmission reforms and nuclear subsidies as a reasonable tradeoff for increased oil and gas production.

In the committee hearing, Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy — a Republican and the lead sponsor of a bill to tax imports of carbon-intensive goods — told Wright, “I like your emphasis upon abundance.” And both the committee’s Republican chair, Mike Lee, and Democratic ranking member, Martin Heinrich, asked Wright to describe how he would promote energy abundance.

“The term ‘energy abundance’ is definitely having a moment,” said Katie Auth, policy director of the Energy for Growth Hub and a former USAID official. “I have heard it used in many different contexts by many different people who are coming at this from different ideological angles.”

But what, exactly, does it mean?

Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute — the climate think tank perhaps best associated with the term, and a longtime gadfly of the environmental movement — said a core idea of his organization is that “technology and abundant energy can help solve ecological problems, not just cause them.”

Perhaps the most obvious example is the hope that nuclear energy can help speed our transition away from fossil fuels without sacrificing reliability, but self-described “ecomodernists” like Trembath dream of a wide range of possibilities that would be unlocked by sufficient energy. 

“If you had really abundant solar or nuclear, then energy-intensive industrial processes like water desalination or indoor agriculture start to look a lot more economical,” Trembath said. “You could imagine desalinating seawater and not having to deplete rivers and aquifers. You could imagine sparing land that could grow produce and other water-intensive crops.”

To Auth, the term doesn’t just encompass futuristic hopes of unlocking miracle solutions by increasing electricity supply; it has immediate importance for the world’s hundreds of millions who lack access to electricity, and the even greater numbers whose countries’ development is hampered by inadequate power infrastructure.

“Outside of the U.S. and Europe, across Africa and Southeast Asia, we need a lot more power,” Auth said. “People need not only basic electricity services, but they need to build competitive economies, they need to build modern industry, they need to build manufacturing facilities, and to be climate resilient. They need electricity for air conditioning and all sorts of infrastructure. So I think abundance to me means that we need to be extremely ambitious in the scope and speed at which we try to build out energy infrastructure around the world.”

In Wright’s confirmation hearing, he spoke eloquently of the tragedy of energy poverty and the need for electrification in developing countries. “I think we’re going to see more abundant energy resources coming out of our country and hopefully out of the world so that everyone else can live lives like we do,” he said.

“I appreciated Chris Wright drawing attention to the fact that, here in the U.S., we take for granted that the lights will be on and that we have refrigerators and televisions, and that’s just simply not the reality for millions and millions of people,” said Auth, of the Energy for Growth Hub.

But Wright’s commitment to energy abundance stood in marked contrast to the agenda, augured in Project 2025, that seems to underlie Trump’s executive orders so far, which would make it very difficult for Wright to act on his stated priorities of increased energy supply and funding for research and development.

Trump started off his second administration by declaring an “energy emergency” — but followed this up by unilaterally freezing all new permitting and leasing for wind energy in federal lands and waters. The president then attempted last week to freeze many federal grants and loans — an order that threw the government into chaos and whose current status is contested. And Trump’s blanket freeze of foreign aid has already gouged the administration’s ability to make good on Wright’s vision of helping the developing world electrify: Programs like Power Africa, which directed USAID funds toward ending energy poverty in Africa, are now in question and, according to Auth, may have already been halted.

The president’s moves raise the question of how exactly Wright, as energy secretary, can ensure “energy abundance” if his boss isn’t on board.

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“From day one, the incoming Trump administration dispelled any pretense of supporting energy abundance,” said Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special adviser at the Department of Energy, in an email. “Instead, it is taking the unprecedented step of leveraging the executive’s emergency powers to block energy resources the president dislikes. To the extent Mr. Wright favors energy abundance, he faces a steep uphill battle against a White House controlled by ideologues who appear more focused on waging tribal energy warfare than solving real-world problems.”

“You see shades of energy abundance in both parties,” Trembath said. On the Republican side, he pointed to the emergence of the term “‘energy dominance’ — which I think is really a Trumpy spin on the idea of energy abundance.” And among Democrats, energy abundance can practically be described as the guiding vision of the last four years’ American energy policy, which combined massive federal investments in green technology with record levels of oil and gas production. “The Biden administration and Democrats in the Department of Energy and Congress had their own vision of abundance articulated in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,” Trembath said.

But both parties also have their corners of resistance to the energy-maximization agenda, for motivations ranging from conservationism on the part of environmental groups to profit on the part of fossil fuel companies who see renewables as an existential threat. And while liberals and the regulations they pass often get cast as the villains in the endlessly proliferating laments about America’s lost industrial age, the new administration is showing its ability to use the same tools to its ends. 

“A very cogent argument could be made that Trump’s executive orders so far are not in the spirit of energy abundance or energy dominance; they’re draping more red tape over projects they don’t like,” Trembath said. “This is the NIMBY proceduralism that Republicans complain about with drilling for oil and gas, but when the shoe’s on the other foot they’re happy to weaponize the National Environmental Policy Act against projects they don’t like.”

Wright’s ability to increase energy production will be hobbled by the fact that the Energy Department simply doesn’t directly control the building or permitting of most new energy infrastructure, or write the rules that govern it. The most substantial portion of the department’s budget is spent on the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The DOE’s primary levers of influence over the nation’s electricity grids are the purse strings for investments in new technologies and subsidies for project developers — and even in those areas, the money must be approved by Congress and, politically speaking, ultimately subject to the president’s agenda. 

“EPA actually has more say over regulating energy infrastructure than DOE; the Interior Department has more say over leasing of public lands,” said Trembath. “In terms of building and regulating and permitting infrastructure, it’s largely out of the remit of the DOE. Likewise, Congress is in charge of what gets spent at the DOE.”

There are some arenas in which Wright will have the power to enact his ambitions, like liquefied natural gas terminals, for which Trump has lifted a Biden administration moratorium and the DOE issues permits. Another is buying and selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in order to stabilize energy prices, a practice heavily used by Biden’s energy secretary Jennifer Granholm. Finally, the Department of Energy controls a once-obscure energy financing agency called the Loan Programs Office, which came into the public eye as the most prominent vehicle for the Biden administration’s climate investments under the leadership of Jigar Shah, a former solar developer who likes to talk about “energy abundance” (the phrase appears in his Twitter bio).

One signal of Wright’s intentions arose during his confirmation hearings, when the energy committee’s Republican chair, Mike Lee, asked him to commit to immediately suspending the issuance of new Loan Programs Office loans on the basis of a Trump-appointed inspector general’s report alleging conflicts of interest in the contracts the office had awarded. Wright said he was aware of the report, but did not commit to suspending new loans.

However, the question — and Wright’s authority to decide how to proceed — was soon preempted by the administration’s funding freeze. For the time being, the office is effectively shut down.