Photo: Will Toor, the director of the Colorado Energy Office, is making some point to Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, March 2024. Courtesy Allen Best.
Oh my, the world is indeed upside down.
In March, I took this photo in Louisville, Colorado, at the factory where Alpen makes some of the world’s most energy-efficient windows. Will Toor, the director of the Colorado Energy Office, is making some point to Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, as Mark Silberg, the climate and energy advisor to Gov. Jared Polis, listens.
I have no idea what was being said, and the only reason I share it is because Ms. Granholm will soon be gone from DOE. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Chris Wright, the founder of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based company, to replace her. I think it’s fair to say he has a very different world view.
He’s an interesting guy. He grew up in Colorado, went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Berkley, has been a serial entrepreneur in the fossil fuel sector and, according to the Liberty website, is an enthusiastic skier, cyclist and rock climber even while being a grandfather. His hair has whitened but his frame remains lithe.
The New York Times says that he and his wife, Liz Wright, each donated $175,000 to the Trump campaign this year.
I heard him talk in Greeley in 2021 and yesterday listened to an interview in 2023 hosted by the Heritage Foundation. His messages changed very little.
In Greeley, he said that climate change is real and that temperatures are rising because of human-induced greenhouse gases. “It is very real. It is global. It’s a thing we should keep our eyes on.” He said we should invest in innovation. But renewables have made energy more costly and less reliable, he said.
“I have no doubt we will be decarbonized in 100 to 200 years from now. But is that going to happen in 30 years? There’s just no chance.”
Wright discounts the risk posed by a warming climate, even challenged the validity of surface temperature records. Satellite measurements, he said, give a more accurate view than land-based measurements.
“Is that worth impoverishing billions of people today, needlessly leading to premature deaths of millions?” he asked.
For the record, I’ve heard pioneers of energy change in Colorado say that we are likely to still have fossil fuels in our electrical generation mix at mid-century. For the United States as a whole, it’s now 43%, according to the EIA. Indeed, we still depend upon fossil fuels for a great many purposes.
Wright speaks brightly of what fossil fuels can do. The headquarters of his company in downtown Denver left me slack-jawed when I visited for a meeting on a sunshine-filled morning in May that was sponsored by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. It’s full of glass windows that allow you to look down on what was the tallest building in the city when I was a child. He’s a success story — a success based on human ingenuity.
So why such a dark view of human ingenuity? Why can’t the same ingenuity that allows us to extract massive amounts of oil and gas deposits also be used to create a future without emissions?
In his presentations, Wright cites facts and figures frequently. But I look forward to his grilling by a Senate committee — provided that Trump and new congressional leaders don’t pull a stunt and declare a recess. How much will his facts and figures hold up when hard, not marshmallow, questions got lobbed at him?
Colorado’s senators, who have also had offices in downtown Denver in their careers, might have some juicy questions.
(Footnote: Liberty Energy in 2022 invested $10 million in Fervo, the geothermal company that has been delivering some impressive results in Utah).
Allen Best publishes the e-journal Big Pivots, which chronicles the energy transition in Colorado and beyond.