Controversial Trump Energy Nominee Faces Confirmation Hearings

This week, the Trump Administration’s energy nominees will face confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, including Secretary of Energy nominee Chris Wright on Wednesday. Wright is a controversial nominee with no government experience. Instead, he comes directly from one of the industries he’d be regulating at the Department of Energy (DOE). In fact, Wright serves as CEO of the country’s second-largest fracking company, and therefore is someone with a vested interest in selling and burning as much fossil fuels as possible. 

He was reportedly supported for the role by Harold Hamm, a fossil fuel billionaire who convened a summit of oil and gas CEOs in April of 2024 that pledged $1 billion to the Trump campaign if Trump pledged to decimate clean air, water, and climate safeguards. Hamm chose well for those purposes, as Wright has been so desperate to peddle fossil fuels that he sought to assuage concerns about fracking’s demonstrated impact on clean water by actually drinking fracking fluid. 

Wright’s obvious conflicts of interest and support for gutting environmental protections are concerning enough, but his support of liquified natural gas (LNG) raises real national security worries as well. Leaders from the Vet Voice foundation have previously raised their voices about the deeply troubling expansion of liquefied natural gas exports from the US – but Wright has said he wants to take any safeguards and guardrails off of LNG exports. That is a significant concern for anyone who prioritizes US national security.

Once a source of strategic support for our allies in Europe amid Putin’s aggression in Russia, the LNG export situation has spiraled out of control. Now, the unfettered LNG exports pushed by gas CEOs are increasingly becoming national security liabilities.  As demand for US LNG drops in Europe, US LNG companies – fuelled by fracked gas that is liquefied and shipped overseas – have found buyers elsewhere. 

Specifically, US LNG is being gobbled up by companies associated with the Chinese communist party, with China now the top buyer of LNG around the world and the US the top supplier. This creates a new national security liability. A stunning report from the American Security Project – a bipartisan organization founded by fellow veterans John Kerry and Chuck Hagel – found that US LNG supplies are being bought up by China and leveraged to build the Chinese government’s strategic advantage abroad. US LNG companies sell cargoes to these companies, which allows them to seize control over the global LNG market and distribute these resources extracted in the US to build Chinese government power overseas. All the while, the Chinese government uses the resources to subsidize their own renewable energy growth. Retired Army Brigadier General Steve Anderson and Vet Voice Foundation Board Member Steve Anderson captured the same concerns in a recent op-ed published in Stars and Stripes with a clarion call for our elected leaders: “Don’t allow our liquefied natural gas resources to empower our rivals while we shoulder the burdens.”

LNG exports are a lose-lose proposition for Americans. Not only are our homegrown resources used to empower the geopolitical strategies of our rivals, but we pay the costs at home, too. Fracking to fill the LNG pipeline pollutes our air and water, while LNG facilities disrupt the economies and communities neighboring their dangerous operations. Meanwhile, US consumers pay billions in higher energy bills as gas that could be consumed at home is shipped abroad. These devastating costs for US consumers are a big part of the reason why the Biden Administration’s Department of Energy raised serious concerns about unfettered LNG exports in a recent analysis.

The risks don’t stop there. The Department of Defense has been crystal clear that the climate crisis is a threat multiplier for our military. Climate change is driving resource scarcity, migration, instability, and conflict that makes America’s geopolitical posture more uncertain and conditions for our military more dangerous. But LNG is a climate disaster, with new peer-reviewed analysis finding that it has a greenhouse gas impact 33% worse than coal. 

Wright’s nomination and support for unlimited, unchecked LNG exports demand further scrutiny from the US Senate. Therefore, with his confirmation hearing occurring this week, we wanted to share a few simple questions we hope he can answer to help illuminate his position related to these serious risks.

1. Is selling U.S LNG to Chinese companies that leverage it to build Chinese government power abroad in the public interest of the United States? Will you include these concerns in the DOE’s public interest determination to assess LNG exports?

2. The Department of Defense has regularly indicated that the climate crisis has created new threats to our national security posture. Yet, LNG exports and burning fossil fuels only exacerbates the climate crisis. What message are you sending to US troops by actively pursuing policies that make their jobs harder and more dangerous?

3. Demand for US LNG in Europe is dropping as renewables displace the demand for more gas. Meanwhile, analysis from the American Security Project indicates that the Chinese government’s leverage of cheap US LNG is helping subsidize renewable growth in China while the US lags behind. Will you continue to support policies that allow China and Europe to have a prosperous clean energy economy at a cost to US consumers?