President Trump’s choice of Chris Wright for Secretary of Energy was excellent. Chris made a name for himself in the energy industry, most recently as founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, the second-largest oilfield services company in the U.S. His inspiring speeches have been posted in videos on LinkedIn and other online sites for years.
His academic background was in engineering. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His graduate work was in electrical engineering at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. His philosophical leaning toward the humanism aspect of fossil fuels is legendary. He is passionate about fossil fuels being the key to reducing poverty in the world.
On March 6, 2025, he delivered an impassioned speech at the Powering Africa Summit in Washington, D.C. The Summit focused on the future of the U.S.-Africa energy partnership and included representatives from African countries and U.S.-based investors. His remarks emphasized Africa’s freedom to develop its energy resources, particularly fossil fuels, without external interference, a stance well-received by the African Energy Chamber and other attendees.
Chris’ speech covered a lot of territory in just eleven minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and I highly recommend watching it in its entirety. Below are a few clips that encapsulate the essence of his speech:
Energy is what makes human lives different from our ancestors, just dramatically different. If you trace the evolution of energy on the world or on a country, it is the evolution of human possibility, human opportunity, and the quality of life. It's just, if you get energy wrong, nothing else matters. Treating energy as one sector of the economy is just nonsense. Energy is the sector of the economy that enables everything else.
Over politicizing energy, which has been done for 10 or 20 years now, I think is just horrible. It's misdirected, it's wrong, and it's been wildly destructive.
Life expectancy at birth for humanity was around 30 years, as good as we can tell, from way before the invention of agriculture till 200 years ago. That was it. Life expectancy at birth, about 30 years. Today, it's 73 years. Like, what happened? Something dramatic happened. I say it's the growth of human liberty, bottom-up social organization.
I used to say that enabled the expansion of energy, but I think the causation at least as much goes the other way. When you have a different energy system, you can have a different social system. If you look at where bottom-up social organization, the empowerment of women, ending of slavery, it still exists, but it's in the shadows now.
Today, we have about one billion people that live a lifestyle remotely recognizable to us. We wear these fancy clothes. We fly to go to conferences. We turn on light switches and get in motorized transport. That's awesome. One billion out of the world's eight billion people live like that. Nothing is more important, and I've not met any of people in that 7 billion that don't want what we have. To me, it's just blatantly obvious the world needs more energy, much more energy.
We have today half, more than half of the people in the world are walking around in hand-washed clothes, right? Because their family has not yet got the incredible, time-saving, women-liberating technology of a washing machine and a dryer. Like, that is transformative. We have 2 billion people that don't have clean cooking fuels, right. And, of course, that's a large percent in Africa. It's game-changing for your life. That's 2 to 3 million premature deaths that are easily fixable. It is women and children in traditional communities that are gathering that wood, that are around those smoky fires, that live different lives than if they had a stove they could turn on and go, and more time to read, more time to develop literacy, more time to get economic empowerment. So to me, our goal, and I felt it in the dialogues I had with all the ministers before we got here, is that Africa needs massively more energy.
Climate change is a real thing, but to put it not only on par with human lives, but superior to human lives. Look, I'll tell you, this administration will not do that. We will be the most climate-knowledgeable administration we've had because weactually look at numbers and data and science and economics and trade-offs. But are we going to continue the days of climate change is more important than human lives and human opportunity? Absolutely not.
There is a lot of work and a lot of study on how best to advance, but the answer then has always been government-to-government aid with top-down mandates has just been a disaster. It just doesn't work. If you want a better human lives, we need business, mutual benefit collaborations. We're not going to decide what you want. You decide. Your citizens, your people decide what they want. We want to be your partners in technology and providing capital and partnering in any way we can to pursue that goal. My dream is that four years from now, when I've got to get another job, we have a wildly better energized Africa, more empowerment in those countries, more energy, more middle-class citizens, more dynamism, more entrepreneurship.
God bless what you all do every day. I am honored and thrilled to be here.
Thank you for having me.
My Take: The politicization of energy policy, which casts renewable energy as the sole defense against 'catastrophic climate change,' has deliberately stalled progress in underdeveloped nations, particularly across Africa. Organizations like the World Bank and USAID have pushed a neo-Malthusian agenda, pressuring and incentivizing leaders to adopt intermittent wind and solar over dependable fossil fuels. This has left billions of people without reliable power, hindering economic growth. With Chris Wright now leading the U.S. Department of Energy, this will change, clearing the path for these countries to have the fossil fuels they need to develop economically.
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