Chris Wright, US Energy Secretary: The problem with climate alarmism

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1:15Hello, I'm Justin Rowlatt, BBC Climate Editor, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. people shaping our world from all over the world. There have been so many disagreements between me and my family. Putting on a show, that is what it means to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy. For this interview, I met Chris Wright, the United States Energy Secretary in Brussels.

2:02You're going to hear about his unconventional call-up to the job from President Trump and his controversial challenge to environmental orthodoxy. He tells me the threat from climate change may be real, but the scale and speed is exaggerated, that neither floods nor wildfires nor droughts are on the rise and that the rush to decarbonisation by renewables has been an expensive mistake. Instead, nuclear fusion is his big hope to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future. His views have caused outrage among scientists worldwide who question his claims and the standard of the evidence behind them.

2:44But they're shared by Donald Trump, who's called climate change the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world. Secretary Wright says he welcomes the debate and defends his views, as well as the decisions of the US administration to cut funding to renewable energy sources. What's needed, he says, is a whole new approach to climate change. A blind, whatever sounds greener, we're going to do that and we're going to subsidise it, we're going to mandate it. That's just not been a winning policy. Climate change should be looked at like any other issue. If you're going to triple the price of electricity, but you're going to get massive benefits for people, that's great.

3:24But if you're not even meaningfully changing your energy mix and your industries are leaving your country and going somewhere else, now they're just made in coal power factories, loaded on diesel power ships and sent back. That's just not green. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Chris Wright.

3:44So I'm a passionate energy entrepreneur. I write and speak about energy and I've been doing that for 10 or 20 years. So I got invited to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago of energy executives to sit around the table. It's the first time I met the president and he went around the table and said, what business are you in? Tell me how that works. What does that mean? A two hour and 15 minute dinner. He probably talked for 10 minutes and he asked questions and listened. Not the public impression I had of Donald Trump. So we engaged in a great dialogue back and forth about energy. And as he went around the room, at the end, he said, you should be energy secretary.

4:18I thought it was. He said it there and then. He said it right then and then. You should be energy secretary. And he asked everyone in the room, should he be energy secretary? Yeah, maybe he should be energy secretary. And how did you feel about that? It came out of the blue then. It came out of the blue. And then he walked around as we were leaving and said, would you do it? I said, if I'm asked to serve my country. So I'm really serious about this. Now he sounded really serious. He said, would you do it? I said, asked to serve my country, without a doubt, I would do it. He said, be ready. OK, so energy is very important.

4:46We will be talking a lot about energy, but I'm the climate editor. We're also going to be talking about climate change. And let me start off by asking you about the report that your department published back in July, claiming that climate change is not as serious a threat to the economy as most scientists say it is. So how big a threat do you think climate change is? So, and I wouldn't say not as serious as most scientists say it is. That climate report that was released, I'm incredibly proud of and very thankful for the five tremendous authors who stepped up and worked their tails off to get a report out.

5:2290 % of what's in that report is straight from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports. So it's really sort of a recounting of the sea level data. That's just public information data, of the extreme weather data, of the temperature rise data. And if you look carefully at the IPCC reports or just familiarize yourself with the data, and you even look at summaries of like the IPCC's economic work, that the conclusion from that is climate change is a very real physical phenomenon. It's just not close to the world's biggest problem. At the moment. So what does that tell us, do you think, about the move towards a low-carbon economy?

5:59What does the analysis that your report says tell us about the importance of moving to a low carbon economy? We often hear in politics, it's a climate emergency. And once you say something's an emergency, then all caution, all evaluation or trade-offs are out the window. And that's sort of how we've treated it, right? Four or five trillion dollars in the last 20 years have been spent trying to move to a low carbon economy. And today, wind, solar and batteries are 3%, a little lower than 3 % of total global energy. Look, I went to college to work on nuclear, and then I worked on solar and geothermal.

6:33I don't care where energy comes from. I just want it to be affordable, reliable, and secure. But if climate change really was a crisis, we'd be in a problem. We'd have to live in a worse energized world, much more expensive, much less reliable energy. Fortunately, it's a slow-moving phenomenon. It's real, and we will eventually decarbonize. It's just generations from now, not two or three decades from now. What do you say to the dozens of international scientists who reviewed the evidence that your team of five scientists presented on climate change and said it was full of errors, misrepresentations and cherry picked data?

7:09They gave a 400 page takedown, didn't they, of your report? What do you say to them? Actually, a pretty ineffective takedown like that one. Cherry picked data. I thought it was just classic. Like I've been speaking on climate change, writing on it for 10 or 15 years myself. One of the cardinal rules I follow, as did all of the authors, when we show data, we show the entire data set, the entire sea level data, the entire extreme weather set data. In fact, people in the climate movement, New York Times just does it repeatedly. They start hurricane data at a low point in the 1980s and then they show it rising.

7:39Cherry picking in climate science is in the media and in activist science and in politicians is the norm. The five authors of that report and myself do not cherry pick data. So being accused of cherry picking, I thought, frankly, was kind of humorous. And the takedown that scientists say in that report, if you look at the global tide gauge data, we've had 125 years of data. We've had about eight inches of sea level rise. And you don't see an apparent acceleration in recent years. People were up in arms about that. If we use the right statistics, you could get it. They reference two other papers.

8:14You go to those papers and less than 10 percent of the global tide gauges show an acceleration. And that could be from subsidence pulling groundwater out or whatever. In fact, their takedowns of us mostly just lead to places that confirm what was said in the report. But it's an active dialogue, and we want that. No, but some scientists say their work was completely misrepresented. You know, Zeke Housefather, for example, said that you took his data and you just didn't represent it accurately. That's the one scientist I've heard say that. And, of course, part of his data was presented and not an additional data he wanted.

8:48I don't even know the details of that one. But first of all, this is great. We have a dialogue back and forth about climate change in a public forum. I've wanted that for 20 years. We're away from the cancel culture, you know, enforcement of the church authority. And we've got a dialogue. Now, we should talk about this. Right. I mean, what very broadly for our audience, what the science says is that not taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more extreme weather. Sea level rise, as you've said, possibly mass extinctions, as climate change means that species that exist in certain places can't survive.

9:25We are seeing some of this already. We're seeing some of this in the US. Heat waves. We're seeing some very damaging floods. We're seeing some really serious wildfires. There are, of course, other factors involved, but there's a consensus among scientists that one of the drivers is, you know, the warming of the climate kind of makes, you know, kind of sense, doesn't it? a warmer climate, more heatwaves, more wildfires. Aren't you worried about the risk to U.S. citizens of these changes? There's always projections. You can project anything, and people do all the time. What we're careful about is to look at what we've actually measured and what we actually know.

10:01Like you mentioned wildfires. In the United States, wildfires today are dramatically lower than they were 100 years ago. They're dramatically lower than the natural rate of wildfires. We implemented fire control, and then we stopped thinning forests and controlling them. It was predicted decades ago we're going to see a rise back towards natural fires. I don't want to get too deep because this is a very complicated argument. And for example, there used to be many more grass fires. There are fewer grass fires because much of the land has been turned to agriculture. So that's changed the fire statistics, which don't typically distinguish between grass fires and forests.

10:33Yeah, but if you just look at western forest lands, you'll find the same conclusion. You mentioned droughts. The world is a little bit warmer, a little bit greener, a little bit wetter. Droughts in North America and globally are on a gradual decline. And you mentioned floods. Flood damage as a percent of the economy is declining. Have you seen the figures for drought in California? California has been going through a huge, long period of exceptional drought. Yeah, I've written a long thing about the last thousand years of drought data in the western United States. You can find it in my Bettering Human Lives 2024 report.

11:06It's an area that cyclically goes in and out of drought. The current drought is in no way out of the ordinary from what's happened there. I mean, this is debated. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this. But isn't one of the issues here that we're only just beginning, as you say, to feel the effects of climate change? The problem is that the trajectory we're on means it's going to get worse. We're going to get more extreme weather. What we're doing is by moving away from a carbon economy, the idea is to reduce the risk that pros is to future generations. As you know, carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time.

11:40The effect will last for not just for hundreds of years, but probably for millennia. Oh, yeah. The effects will be long lasting, which is why I think it's that we get a careful understanding of what are the effects so far. And the increased concentration of a greenhouse gas. It's a logarithmic effect. The biggest effect is early on. It's a smaller effect for each additional one part per million rise in CO2. So we've already risen global CO2 concentration a little over 50%. That's probably two-thirds or three-quarters of the effect we'll get with a doubling. And to get to a doubling, it'll be late this century.

12:12That's not what most of the scientists think. They think as we increase CO2, we're going to see a continued temperature rise. They think there's actually a lag in the CO2 being released into the atmosphere and the warming that we see. So much of the warmth has been taken up by the seas. we now see seas at record temperatures. Unbelievable marine heatwaves all over the world. You know, I'm kind of surprised that as a scientist, you're not worried by some of these phenomena. There are real changes that we should study and look at. The worst heatwaves in the United States were in the 1930s. Globally, it's about a little more than a degree warmer globally.

12:45If you have a certain temperature threshold for heatwaves, of course, we have a little bit more heatwaves now. Not in the United States. Our worst heatwave decade was the 1930s. One degree of warming, it makes the extremes significantly more likely, as you know. It's a normal distribution. So if you shift it, you make the extremes more likely, which is why we see more extreme heat, more drought, more flooding as well. Actually, not quite right. The largest warming is at the poles in cold places, and it's mostly at night. The low temperatures are warming much more than the high temperatures. The swing between the daytime high and low is actually shrinking a little.

13:21That's in the distribution across the earth. I'm talking about the incidence of extreme temperatures happening. Look, the climate has changed in the past, no question about that. What we're seeing now is some of the most rapid climate change in the four billion year history of the planet. We appear to be, as you know, moving out of this period of exceptional climate stability that has endured for about, what, 11 ,000 years, scientists call the Holocene. There's an amazing coincidence. Homo sapiens, which evolved 300 ,000 years ago, only developed the ability to have agriculture to farm during this period of climate stability.

13:53All of the great civilizations of humanity have grown up in that time. Shouldn't we be worried if we're moving out of that period of climate stability, given how much it's gifted to our species, to humanity? It's created our civilization. We haven't seen an increase in instability. We are changing the climate, but actually pretty modestly and pretty slowly. There hasn't been an increase in extreme weather events. There might be in the future, but we haven't seen it. There has been an increase in the number of heat waves and droughts. I mean, maybe it's true that the big storms, there isn't a strong association with big storms.

14:27But look, we're back into the it's one thing to challenge a scientific consensus, as you have to, as you put it, open up a debate. It's another thing to undermine the process of science itself. Yet the Trump administration is slashing spending on research into climate and weather, as you know. Surely you believe investing in science in establishing the facts so we can make a judgment about the process of climate change in the world. Absolutely. One of the problems of science is it's become so politicized in the climate world. If you deviate from the church, your funding gets cut off. Thou must say this.

15:01We're trying to restore real science, which is challenging of hypothesis data. And of course, we want to continue to collect data from satellites and all these things. So there's a lot of rumors about all sorts of terrible things happening. But look at the huge reduction in the budget for NOAA, which collects data on weather and climate around the world. I think they shouldn't worry about that. We will continue to collect fantastic weather data. The quality of that will only increase as sensor network increases, artificial intelligence. And you're right, I'm passionate about that. Even spending tens of millions of dollars less than you are now, which is what the proposal is.

15:34Absolutely. Absolutely.

15:39You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

16:58For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Chris Wright, the US Energy Secretary. We met in the presidential suite of a swanky hotel just off the Grand Place in Brussels. It's one of the most beautiful squares in Europe, lined with ornate 17th century guild halls, symbols of the economic power this mighty city once wielded. Now, of course, America is the great power. The US Energy Secretary was in town to urge Europe to buy more of its oil and gas. I'd expected him to be pugnacious and polemical, and he was certainly both of those. But what surprised me was how likeable this key figure in President Trump's cabinet was.

17:45OK, let's return to my conversation with Chris Wright. Do you have insurance on your home? Yes, I do. You do. And you have insurance because you're worried about the effects of catastrophic risk. isn't trying to tackle climate change a kind of insurance, a prudent way to manage the risks that climate change might pose for future generations. So a great analogy. I love it. But if your house was worth$200 ,000, you wouldn't pay$200 ,000 a year to insure it. You have to have a premium that's in line with the benefit. And by the way, global losses, insured losses from extreme weather events have on a 50-year decline.

18:23So, yes, I insure my house. Fortunately, as we get a more energized, wealthier society and we build stronger things, the risk of damage to my house is actually on a decline. Is it? Because the world's insurers say they think climate change is one of the biggest risks the world economy faces. They say that to appease government regulators. Look at the actual data of insured losses. It's just in the numbers. Again, it's in the Bettering Human Lives 2024 report. It's the actual numbers, not what people say, but the data. Come on. I mean, this isn't just one insurance company. The insurance industry says it's really worried about the risks of climate change.

18:58You know, I'm surprised you're suggesting that they're not being honest about this fundamental aspect of their business. Nobody knows the future. But if you want to raise insurance rates, it's better to talk about fear ahead than just look at the data. We don't know the future. It's better to look back at the actual data all the way up to today. People said that 20 years ago. Look at what's actually happened. Insured losses as a percent of GDP in the United States and globally are on a five-decade decline. The numbers I've seen show the absolute cost of insured losses going up. Of course, we're getting wealthier and there's inflation.

19:31Of course, there's more billion-dollar disasters. It's not linear. It's going up very significantly. Not when you correct it for the size of the economy, for wealth and inflation. That's another one of those misstated, it's said all the time, but it's actually just not true. I don't want to get caught up in the weeds. Your administration has cut, what,$3.5 billion of subsidies for renewable energy at a time when these technologies, the sales are booming. And you know who's selling this stuff? China is selling this stuff in vast quantities. I mean, this is a huge growing industry that America's greatest economic rival completely dominates.

20:06Don't you want to be part of this revolution? Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years. Isn't that enough? Solar for 25 years. That's enough. You've got to be able to walk on your own after 25 to 30 years of subsidies. And again, together, wind, solar and batteries are 3 % of primary energy in the United States. We've spent a lot of money on it. We haven't got a lot back. This is the point. There are investors who want to put money into wind turbines in America. Go for it. Go for it. You know, Orsted, the Danish company, has just spent$5 billion U.S. building a wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island, only to be told you've got to stop developing it.

20:43because we don't think your permits are all right. They spent nine years getting those permits. What signal does it say when you pull the plug just before they finish their project? It's being carefully looked at. No final decisions have been made. But I will say in general, if you go into an industry that's massively dependent upon government subsidies, well, elections happen and subsidy policies change. Should the UK and European countries be undertaking the effort that we're making at the moment to transition to clean energy? I've been a critic of it for 10 years because it's been unsuccessful.

21:13Germany spent half a trillion dollars, more than doubled the capacity on its electricity grid, and it produces 20 % less electricity today at triple the cost. So if you make energy expensive, as the European unit has done, that's not greenhouse gas reduction. That's just moving those emissions from Europe to where those products are made in Asia and shipping them back. A blind, whatever sounds greener, we're going to do that and we're going to subsidize it. We're going to mandate it. That's just not been a winning policy. Climate change should be looked at like any other issue. If you're going to triple the price of electricity, but you're going to get massive benefits for people, that's great.

21:48But if you're not even meaningfully changing your energy mix and your industries are leaving your country and going somewhere else, now they're just made in coal power factories, loaded on diesel power ships and sent back. That's just not green. What do you want to see happen here in Europe? What is the deal that you want done? Because obviously, Europe made that promise, didn't they, to buy$750 billion of U.S. energy in the next three years. Are you going to get those long-term deals that you want? Yeah, absolutely. Of course, those deals will be done by businesses. But as Europe moves off Russian gas that's mostly being filled by American gas, there's a lot of room for that to keep growing.

22:21As Russia moves off Russian oil and Russian refined products, U.S. can fill that hole as well. And we're launching a nuclear energy renaissance in the United States. And we want to bring those new small modular reactor technologies over to Europe as well. I'm super excited about the growing energy trade here. What will the Trump administration do if they don't get these long term deals that have been promised by Europe? What are the consequences? Will we, like India, see changes to the tariff arrangements? It's in the EU and the United States' best interest. The energy trade between our two countries are growing and will continue to grow.

22:54I have no doubt about that. You're making decisions that will have long-term consequences for the levels of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere. You're the U.S. Energy Secretary, one of the most important figures in energy worldwide. Those decisions will be part of the historic records. People will be able to look back and say, you know, well, you know, Chris Wright said do this. How do you think your great-grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will judge the decisions that you're making today? I'd like to think they'll be proud that I stopped the world going in a direction of impoverishing its citizens.