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Newly elected US President Donald Trump on Saturday nominated fracking magnate and climate change skeptic Chris Wright as energy secretary, tasking him with “cutting red tape” that the new administration hopes will boost fossil fuel investment.
“As Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader driving innovation, cutting red tape and ushering in a new ‘Golden Age of American prosperity and global peace,’” Trump said in a statement.
Wright is the founder of Liberty Energy, which serves the energy companies that have dramatically increased U.S. fossil fuel production in recent years by extracting oil and gas from shale fields in a process known as “fracking.”
A year ago, Wright denied in a LinkedIn post that there was a “climate crisis.”
“There is no climate crisis and we are not in the middle of an energy transition,” he said, adding that “the term carbon pollution is outrageous” because all life depends on carbon dioxide.
“There is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy; all energy sources have both positive and negative impacts on the world,” he added.
Trump called him “one of the pioneers who helped launch the American shale revolution that fueled American energy independence and transformed global energy markets and geopolitics.”
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