Chris Wright, Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Energy, landed the job during his first encounter with the past and future president.
The founder and chief executive of Liberty Energy, a fracking services company based in Colorado, Mr. Wright was among about 20 oil and gas executives whom Mr. Trump gathered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April. Mr. Wright had not met Mr. Trump before but caught his attention by making what two people in the room described as a forceful case for fossil fuels.
“Want to be my energy secretary?” Mr. Trump asked, seemingly in jest, according to those present. Days after the election, though, Mr. Trump chose Mr. Wright to lead the agency.
On Wednesday, Mr. Wright will appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It will be the first of three confirmation hearings this week for Mr. Trump’s picks to run the agencies at the center of his plan to increase the production and use of coal, oil and gas.
Mr. Wright has been an evangelist for that cause. On podcasts and in speeches, he frequently makes a moral case for fossil fuels, arguing that the world’s poorest people need oil and gas to realize the benefits of modern life.
He also has distorted climate science, researchers and activists said. For example, Mr. Wright inaccurately claimed on a podcast last year that a top United Nations scientific body had found that climate change “is a slow-moving, modest impact two or three generations from now.”
In fact the scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has recommended that nations make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from crossing a critical global warming threshold.
Meg Bloomgren, a spokeswoman for Mr. Wright, said in a statement that he had spent his career focusing on improving lives, “including studying and determining that climate change is real and a problem we must solve together with relentless U.S. innovation and technology solutions.”
Democrats on Tuesday offered mixed impressions of Mr. Wright.
Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado described him as smart and thoughtful on energy issues but said he remained concerned about how Mr. Wright and other cabinet choices would address climate change.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said Mr. Trump’s picks were “here to loot our public treasury and pollute our public spaces.”
He noted that the Mar-a-Lago event was where Mr. Trump had asked oil industry leaders to raise $1 billion for his campaign and had promised that companies would save far more than that when he eliminated climate regulations, according to people present. “Trump’s big donors want payback,” Mr. Whitehouse said.
Senator Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who leads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the hearings would be an opportunity to discuss what he called the Biden administration’s energy policy failures.
“With high energy prices hurting Americans and restrictive policies limiting access to public lands and critical resources, it’s essential to prioritize domestic energy production and restore trust in public land management,” Mr. Lee said.
On Thursday, Mr. Lee’s committee will hear from Douglas J. Burgum, the Republican former governor of North Dakota, whom Mr. Trump has tapped for the Interior Department. Also on Thursday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will consider Lee Zeldin, a former United States representative from Long Island, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.
If confirmed to head the Department of Energy, Mr. Wright would help oversee approvals of liquefied gas export terminals, which the Biden administration has tried to slow, angering Republicans.
Mr. Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate work on solar energy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which created software to measure the motion of fluid beneath the Earth’s surface. The software helped bring about a commercial shale gas revolution.
Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked with others on geothermal energy and small, modular nuclear reactors.
Mr. Wright holds 2.6 million shares in the company, which are worth more than $55 million based on the current stock price. A recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing put his compensation last year at $5.6 million.
Mr. Wright filed a separate document with the S.E.C. after Mr. Trump tapped him for energy secretary, indicating that he intended to step down from Liberty Energy. A transition official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the financial disclosures were not yet public, said Mr. Wright intended to divest his holdings once confirmed.
Democrats sought to delay Mr. Wright’s hearing because they had not received his financial disclosure statements, documents typically made public before confirmation proceedings. Republicans declined to delay the hearings.
Senate officials said Mr. Wright’s disclosures had become available to lawmakers late on Tuesday, though they were not yet publicly available online at the Office of Government Ethics.
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