Wildfires are still ‘just hype’: Trump’s Energy pick stands by his past comments

Chris Wright, an oil and gas executive who’s Donald Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary, faced questions about his climate change denialism during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

Throughout his decades-long career, Wright has called for more fossil fuel use, said there is “no climate crisis,” and has denied the link between climate change and more severe wildfires. During Wright’s confirmation hearing, Senator Alex Padilla of California called out the last comment directly, saying to Wright, “You’ve written ‘the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify more impoverishment from bad government policies.’ Given the devastation that we’re currently experiencing in Los Angeles, do you still believe that wildfires are just hype?”

Wright began by responding that he’s been watching the fires with “great sorrow and fear.” After Padilla reiterated his question, Wright said “I stand by my past comments.”

Wright made the original statement in the summer of 2023, when smoke from Canadian wildfires was blanketing the East Coast. He wrote the sentence on LinkedIn while sharing a link from Wall Street Journal opinion writer Bjorn Lomborg that argued “climate change hasn’t set the world on fire.”

Climate experts, understandably, took issue with Lomborg’s op-ed, calling his argument—that the total acreage burned by wildfires has been declining, which shows that climate change isn’t igniting the planet— misleading. “Acreage does not tell the whole truth,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, told the Washington Post.

Scientists have also consistently found that climate change does play a role in making wildfires more frequent and more extreme. The warming of the world is fueling something scientists call “weather whiplash,” which creates perfect fire conditions. In 2022 and 2023, L.A. saw record-breaking rain after years of drought, which spurred vegetation growth. Then another drought hit, drying out all that vegetation and turning it into fuel for the fires.

“Wildfires are not ‘just hype,’ as Wright has claimed; they are catastrophic events fueled by the worsening climate crisis,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of the climate nonprofit Evergreen Action, said in a statement. “His refusal to acknowledge the real forces contributing to the profound toll of these disasters—on families, first responders, and communities—is deeply troubling.”

Amid the L.A. fires, Trump and other Republicans have threatened to withhold disaster aid from California, and also discussed tying wildfire aid to the debt ceiling.

During his hearing, Wright did concede that climate change is a “real issue.” However he also said that he would “work tirelessly” to pursue Trump’s agenda to expand fossil fuel use. It is widely understood that fossil fuels are the leading driver of climate change.