Chris Wright's Energy

The incoming U.S. Secretary of Energy is an oil bro, but not a lunatic

I sat down to listen to this good, meaty podcast with Chris Wright, the soon-to-be American Secretary of Energy and was, well, surprised.

Given some of the appointments we got last week, I was expecting a straight-up lunatic.

Instead, well…you can listen for yourself.

I kept waiting for some crazy rant. It never came. Instead, Chris Wright sounds…well, he sounds disconcertingly like One Percent Brighter a lot of the time.

That’s a sign either that I’ve drifted farther to the right than I thought, or that left-wing climate orthodoxy is so out of control now that sensible centrist takes now qualify you for a seat around Trump’s cabinet table.

To be clear, my sensibilities are different than Wright’s. Wright is an oil and gas guy: he plainly loves hydrocarbons, he understands the industry in depth, and he’s not minded to apologize for it. He seems broadly pro-nuclear, but that’s just not where his focus is. But he’s thoughtful, he knows what he’s talking about, and he comes across as neither a bombthrower nor a dummy.

Wright’s basic take is that while climate change is a serious long-term problem, energy scarcity is a much bigger short-term threat. In particular in the developing world, energy poverty blights lives here and now in ways climate change simply doesn’t. Climate change strikes him as a problem for the deep future — a serious problem, yes, but far from the most serious problem facing the world today.

You might be thinking, “Quico, what the hell, you were arguing precisely that on here just a few weeks ago,” and you wouldn’t be wrong.

It’s more a question of…certainty.

I agree with Wright that the worst effects of climate change probably won’t really hit for another two or three generations. It’s just that the word probably is doing all the work in that sentence.

Climate has a way of reducing us to guessing about probabilities.

The most alarmist takes are probably overstated, but there’s some chance they’re not wrong. As Gwynn Dyer puts it, climate is like walking through a mine-field where the wind has blown the soil off of some of the mines: we can see where some of them are, but we have good reason to believe there are other mines we can’t see. It may be that some climate tipping points are much closer than we’ve grasped. We might be just about to step on a mine. It may be impossible to put numbers to that likelihood, but it’s still wreckless to ignore it.

This gets to the part of the challenge Chris Wright doesn’t seem to grasp: deep uncertainty.

Climate scientists can estimate, kinda, what emissions pathway we’re probably on, and they can project, sorta, what that will mean for future temperature and ocean chemistry. They can use those projections to forecast, very roughly, the likelihood that we will trip a given climate tipping point, which they realize will interact with other tipping points in ways they can only guess at.

There’s no agreement on the relative likelihood of different scenarios. And there’s little confidence that our models capture all the relevant interactions and risks. Which leaves us with a maddeningly imprecise understanding about how the policy decisions we make now relate to outcomes in the future.

Forecasting impacts from climate change is, in other words, an all-around shitshow. All we can really say is that the nebulously defined and impossible to quantify category of “climate risk” rises as emissions rise.

Your general political orientation explains your tolerance for this kind of aggregate climate risk better than anything climate science can bring to the table. If you’re a free market-loving oil bro like Chris Wright, you’re happy to discount the possibility that we're badly understating climate risk. If you’re a hair-on-fire activist type, you’re much more comfortable treating tail risks as virtual certainties.

One of these two attitudes will turn out to have been right. Grasping deep uncertainty means understanding that there’s no way to tell which.

You would hope for a U.S. Energy Secretary who understands that tail risks must be taken seriously even if they can’t be quantified. You’d hope for a U.S. Energy Secretary who is all-in on the Nuclear Renaissance that’s our best bet for managing those tail risks.

Chris Wright doesn’t seem to be that guy. But he doesn’t seem like a crazy person either.