I am pretty sure that no group of leftists are more despondent with Donald Trump’s election and staffing picks than the climate alarmist crowd – and they should be – because based on Trump’s picks, it seems that climate realism is coming to the White House.
Most notably, Trump’s pick of Chris Wright as his energy secretary is an absolutely inspired choice if you are concerned with energy security and costs, which all of us should be. Detractors have already begun to complain that Wright is a “climate denier,” but that is false. Wright does not deny that the planet has been modestly warming for the past hundred-plus years. His strength is that he rightfully points out that the innumerable catastrophes we have been warned about for decades have not come to pass, and indeed society is experiencing significant benefits from the modest warming thus far.
He is cautious and measured in his statements, unlike many leftist media pundits.
I recently rebutted an MSNBC article on Wright’s climate views, a seething post written by Ja’han Jones titled, “Trump’s pick for energy secretary thinks climate change is good, actually.”
Jones characterizes Chris Wright as a “Big Oil CEO who has downplayed the risks of rising global temperatures and argued that climate change might actually be good for the world.”
I don’t really know what the term “Big Oil” means anymore if it applies to Wright’s company the way it applies to British Petroleum or similar multinationals. Liberty Energy is an oilfield services company located in Denver, Colorado, which provides services to other oil companies at well sites. Yes, Liberty Energy is successful and probably qualifies as a major company, but keep in mind that its competitors are the likes of Halliburton and Schlumberger. As a comparison, MarketWatch reports Halliburton’s total revenue was $23 billion last year, while Liberty’s was $4.8 billion.
The specific claims Wright makes that Jones takes issue with are pretty remarkable:
“For the record, the things Wright lists as positives of rising atmospheric carbon – like more plant growth and a boost in ‘agricultural productivity’ – don’t always occur in climate change scenarios, and when they do, they aren’t always positive developments.”
Jones is conflating real world observations of increases in plant growth and crop productivity, which are what Wright is referring to, and climate computer model scenarios, which are counterfactual. Jones places quotes around agricultural productivity as though it is some mysterious or novel concept, but it should be obvious even to MSNBC that crop gains are a big deal for human health and survival.
Crop production has increased globally, and research attributes a large part of that increase to rising carbon dioxide levels and better growing conditions. A prime example would be major world cereal crops (wheat, rice, corn, etc.) data show that yields have increased by around 52%, and production grew by 57% from 1990 to 2022. This kind of trend varies regionally, of course, but overall, this is a big benefit in the fight against world hunger.
One point that really stood out was that Jones tried to argue that “contrary to Wright’s claim about temperature-related deaths, the Environmental Protection Agency reported this year that dramatic increases in heat-related deaths are closely associated with the occurrence of hot temperatures and heat waves.”
Here Jones is just being deceptive, using a bait and switch tactic: Jones focuses on heat deaths, but that’s not what Wright said. He said temperature related deaths, the facts about which Wright is right again. Temperature related deaths have declined, both in the United States and globally, because although the number of heat related deaths has risen, the number of cold related deaths dropped by a much greater count, making a net-improvement in survival. Globally, the number of cold deaths outnumber heat related deaths by about 10 to one.
The attempted hit piece is so full of buzzwords and millennial-like snark that it seemed rather unbecoming of a mainstream news website, until I realized that it actually isn’t a normal MSNBC post, but rather a post on the Joy Reid blog page of MSNBC. Now it all makes sense.
I strongly recommend people go to the Liberty Energy website and read their ESG (environment, social, and governance) report, which turns usual ESG reports upside down. It is a fantastic document detailing all the ways fossil fuels make the world safer and healthier. The purpose of this wasn’t to just beat up on MSNBC and their writers, but rather to show how a smart pick like Wright actually knows more about the subject of climate change and energy than the mainstream media does. Journalists will smugly insult and scoff at his points, but the truth is on his side, not theirs.
Wright is a great pick by President-elect Trump, we should all be very optimistic.
