Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Friday defended the Trump administration’s decision to block a nearly completed $6.2 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island by saying offshore wind increases electricity prices and by downplaying the jobs at stake.
Energy experts accused Mr. Wright of oversimplifying the economics of offshore wind energy, noting that while it requires a significant amount of upfront capital to build a project, it was expected to create more than 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade and enough electricity to inexpensively power 22 million homes before the Trump administration took steps to throttle the nascent industry.
A former fracking executive, Mr. Wright said the focus in the United States to transition away from fossil fuels had hurt the country. It’s a message he said he intended to take on a multileg trip next week to Europe, where he will encourage countries to buy more American gas. The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas as well as the largest producer of oil.
“Europe is in the midst of almost completely deindustrializing the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,” Mr. Wright said, referring to Europe’s commitments to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet. He delivered those remarks on Friday to the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington research organization.
He called the 2015 Paris agreement, in which the United States and nearly every other country pledged to reduce greenhouse gases, “silly.”
“Climate change, for impacting the quality of your life, is not incredibly important,” Mr. Wright said. “In fact, if it wasn’t in the news, in the media, you wouldn’t know.”
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.
Earlier this year Mr. Wright handpicked a group of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to write a report downplaying global warming. On Friday he argued that renewable energy projects developed with the aim of reducing fossil fuels were not beneficial to the United States.
He likened the Trump administration’s decision to throttle the offshore wind industry to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would have transported carbon-heavy oil from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast. Keystone was blocked by the Obama administration and later the Biden administration because of climate change concerns.
“The difference is, in that example, that’s a huge amount of oil that would be jobs for America,” Mr. Wright said.
According to America’s Clean Power, a renewable energy industry group, the offshore wind sector supports 25,000 jobs in the United States.
On Friday, Mr. Wright said that European nations powered by offshore wind turbines had high electricity prices. “We don’t want to be in the race for the most expensive electricity in the world,” he said. “We want to be in the race for the most affordable electricity in the world.”
Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor of energy at Princeton University, called Mr. Wright’s arguments facile.
“He’s doing the classic correlation equals causality,” Mr. Jenkins said. “The reasons these places have turned so heavily to renewables is that they lack access to cheap fossil fuels and they don’t want to have to rely entirely on imported resources.”
Mr. Jenkins said that Mr. Wright’s assertion that wind and solar had led to higher electricity prices in the United States was false. “There’s no evidence for that,” he said, adding that in many parts of the country, the opposite was true, with renewables lowering the cost of electricity.
Revolution Wind was expected to generate electricity for more than 350,000 homes at 9.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, a rate that would be locked in for 20 years and is cheaper than the average cost of electricity in New England, according to America’s Clean Power.
Eric Hines, who directs the offshore wind energy graduate program at Tufts University, acknowledged that offshore wind projects currently required substantial subsidies to be successful. But he argued that states had determined that offshore wind would bring significant benefits.
“There’s an opportunity for an enormous number of jobs that are sustainable, and an opportunity to build this infrastructure that can last for generations, at which point electricity will be far less expensive than anybody can imagine,” Mr. Hines said, referring to wind power.
Mr. Wright said the abrupt stop-work order for the Revolution Wind project in Rhode Island was issued because the Biden administration acted hastily when it issued its permits, something the company leading the project and state leaders said was untrue.
Orsted, the Danish developer of Revolution Wind, is suing the Trump administration over the work stoppage, calling it capricious and arbitrary. Separately, Connecticut and Rhode Island are also suing the administration to overturn the stop-work order.
Mr. Wright suggested, without citing evidence, that a damaged wind turbine blade from a different project, Vineyard Wind, that washed up on beaches of Nantucket last year occurred because those approvals were rushed. Mr. Wright blamed what he described as a misplaced emphasis in the Biden administration on tackling climate change and promoting clean energy.
“These were permitted rather quickly,” Mr. Wright said. “If you do something fast and quickly, because we’re in a crisis and it must happen, bad things happen.”
Vineyard Wind, in Massachusetts, applied for permits in 2017 and was approved in 2021. Revolution Wind went through nine years of federal and state reviews before it was approved in 2023.
Mr. Wright’s remarks came as the Trump administration has radically fast-tracked permits for oil, gas and mining because the president has asserted the United States faces an energy crisis.
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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