President-elect Donald Trump's Energy Secretary nominee Chris Wright is not a climate change denier as much as he is a global warming optimist.
"It's probably almost as many positive changes as there are negative changes," Wright told PragerU last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. "Is it a crisis, is it the world's greatest challenge, or a big threat to the next generation? No."
The Liberty Energy fracking CEO is breaking from even oil executives warning about the effects of global warming and climate change.
A warming planet can increase plant growth, making the world greener, boosting agriculture, and reducing temperature-caused death, Wright said.
"There is no climate crisis," Wright has said, adding that the Paris climate deal has emboldened "political actors with anti-fossil-fuel agendas."
Trump's energy secretary nominee "intends to deliver on President Trump's pledge to unleash affordable and reliable American energy to power homes, businesses, cars and factories, and secure energy independence," a Trump-Vance transition official told the Journal.
The climate "cult" is ignoring the fact slight warming of global temperatures is not necessarily a bad thing for humanity, much less a threat, and "should be treated honestly and evaluated as trade-offs, not as a religion or a cult, which unfortunately it's become," according to Wright.
"A little bit warmer isn't a threat," he told PragerU. "If we were 5, 7, 8, 10 degrees [Celsius] warmer, that would be meaningful changes to the planet."
Wright, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has remained engaged in data much differently than climate alarmists.
"A general approach in our industry has been to, you know, lay low, and too often, I think, say what people want to hear," Wright told the Journal.
The use of climate change reports and their own words, with data and evidence, has flipped environmental, social, and governance investing, according to Alex Epstein, author of "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future."
"Chris really was one of the people who flipped ESG on its head," he said.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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