| | Climate ‘Ideology’ Hurts Prosperity, Top U.S. Officials Tell Europeans
Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said he would push Europe to loosen environmental rules and buy more gas. Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, tied fossil fuels to a need to win the A.I. race.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, left, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright at the White House in March. They are currently in Europe to press U.S. energy interests.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Max Bearak
Sept. 10, 2025
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the Trump administration’s pivot away from renewable energy in Italy on Wednesday, saying their plans to sharply expand U.S. fossil fuel exports were crucial to “peace and prosperity.”
The secretaries are swinging through Europe this week on a mission to secure contracts to sell more American fossil fuels and lobby the European Union to loosen environmental regulations that they have said are too onerous.
Mr. Wright said he would be in Brussels on Thursday to discuss the European Union’s requirements that oil and gas companies limit leaks of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, and a law requiring companies to prevent adverse human rights and environmental effects in their production process.
“There are a number of non-tariff barriers that are I think are problematic,” he said, speaking at a news conference in Italy.
The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas as well as the largest producer of oil. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Europe has largely replaced its purchase of Russian fuels with American ones, while heavily investing in wind and solar power. Renewable energy has taken off in Europe in part because many countries see it as a way of not having to rely on anyone else for their supply when they themselves don’t have significant reserves of fossil fuels.
But European policymakers have also taken the threat of climate change much more seriously. The European Union has a law that mandates a 55 percent reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and zeroing them out by 2050.
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Mr. Burgum said that such “climate ideology” had infiltrated Western policymaking and required reversal if Western countries were to compete with adversaries on artificial intelligence, which he cast as a more pressing concern than climate change.
“What’s going to save the planet is winning the A.I. arms race. We need power to do that and we need it now,” he said. “We need to worry about the humans that are on the planet today. The real existential threat right now is not one degree of climate change.”
Climate change is primarily driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases planet-warming greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There is broad scientific consensus that each tenth of a degree of global warming amplifies natural disasters such as droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, and could lead to trillions of dollars in economic losses.
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Sept. 11, 2025, 9:22 p.m. ET Sept. 11, 2025Tensions between the United States and Europe over energy policy have been ratcheting up in recent weeks. As part of the European Union’s trade deal with the Trump administration, the 27-country bloc agreed to purchase $750 billion of American energy, mostly oil and gas, over the course of President Trump’s term in office. That would require more than tripling energy trade, which many analysts said was infeasible as a practical matter.
Nevertheless, Mr. Wright and Mr. Burgum pointed to purchase agreements that they had overseen at the Gastech energy-industry conference they were attending in Milan.
Mr. Wright, a former gas executive, has been particularly combative in his stance on climate change, recently saying that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were “silly” and that in terms of people’s quality of life were “not incredibly important.”
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This year Mr. Wright handpicked a group of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to write a report downplaying global warming. Hundreds of the world’s top scientists gathered by the United Nations have found that greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and gas are heating the planet and already having profound effects on communities by increasing the frequency and intensity of heat waves, wildfires, drought, floods and other extreme weather.
To avoid those worsening effects, those scientists say that a rapid transition from deriving energy from coal, oil and gas to nonpolluting sources is necessary.
Mr. Wright said that if renewables could not compete with fossil fuels in the global marketplace, then those industries should be left to wither. He did not mention that the U.S. government plays a significant role in the success of fossil fuel companies through subsidies and diplomatic pressure.
Solar power, he said, “has a future,” but wind power, particularly offshore wind, Mr. Burgum predicted, would not survive the removal of subsidies. He repeated a claim that numerous offshore wind projects in the United States had been approved “though a very fast, ideologically driven permitting process,” despite the fact that all went through a longer process than the ones the Trump administration is fast-tracking for fossil-fuel and mine development.
A correction was made on
Sept. 10, 2025
: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the itineraries of the two cabinet secretaries in Europe. While Mr. Wright will travel to Brussels on Thursday, Mr. Burgum will not.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com. Learn more
Max Bearak is a Times reporter who writes about global energy and climate policies and new approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 12, 2025, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Officials Push Europeans to Buy More Gas. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Douglas Burgum, U.S. Politics, U.S. Department of the Interior, Energy Department, U.S., European Union
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My comments:
These morons don't have a clue how fast the transition to RE and Storage is actually happening.
Bye bye.
You are way, way too expensive and obsolete!
Eric |
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