Chris Wright, the fracking CEO tapped by President-elect Donald Trump as Energy Secretary, didn’t exactly have the highest-profile confirmation hearing this morning compared to some of Trump’s other Cabinet picks. And yet among a small but enthusiastic group of wonks on both the right and the left, his likely confirmation is cause for major excitement. For the loose coalition of analysts and writers pushing for an “abundance agenda” that includes more energy production no matter the type (or cost), the fossil fuel-friendly philosophy Wright described in an August op-ed as “zero energy poverty” could make a second Trump administration open to new forms, and a new pace, of energy production. Wright is a prolific energy wonk himself, and Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin summed up his mindset in a recent essay: “Energy consumption makes people better off; energy access, especially in the developing world, is a greater global challenge than climate change; and existing alternatives to hydrocarbons are not capable of replacing the status quo energy system, which still overwhelmingly relies on fossil fuels, with little prospect of a rapid transition.” While energy watchers across the political spectrum have expressed optimism about Wright (a fellow from the nonpartisan Institute for Progress cited his pick favorably to DFD in November), it’s particularly Trump’s allies on the right who are most pumped up about such an agenda. These aren’t first and foremost fossil-fuel cheerleaders, however. They’re a smaller cadre of unorthodox GOP thinkers who believe that for the party to achieve any of its goals — from beating China, to accelerating AI development, to rejuvenating the American heartland — it must first build up its energy capacity by any means necessary whether fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear or all of the above. Emmet Penney, an energy scholar and contributing editor to Compact who publishes a Substack called “Nuclear Barbarians,” wrote this morning in an essay titled “An Energy-Abundance Agenda for Trump” that Wright has the opportunity to accelerate the steps toward a nuclear renaissance that President Joe Biden’s administration has taken. “I was thrilled” when the Wright pick was announced, Penney told DFD this morning. “He gets it … this could be a very powerful DOE for unlocking energy abundance.” So who could slow it down? Actually, Republicans could. Penney’s essay in Compact outlines a series of potential challenges within Trump’s coalition to a maximalist approach to energy production, revealing just how tricky it is to build a durable new coalition around such a complex policy issue. Harnessing new energy resources, never mind developing a healthy and sustainable industry around them, requires a lot of help from the government. So on top of traditional constraints like environmental litigation or permitting policy Penney cites likely resistance from free-market think tanks to the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, which under the Biden administration pumped low-interest loans into the nuclear industry. He also worries that the right’s industrial policy wonks and China hawks “lack a sharp energy vision” for the right, citing a common complaint from some thinkers dating back to the beginning of the first Trump administration: A sheer lack of the manpower necessary to develop new conservative policy ideas and successfully get them through the Washington meat grinder. “Energy is just an exceedingly hard sector to get right, and to understand it requires a diverse skill set,” Penney said. “There’s some agreement on permitting reform overall, but to be honest, the conservative movement suffers from the same kind of factional incoherence that the Democrats do.” Of course, with new energy ideas in the mix, there are opportunities for the GOP to win new friends across the aisle, for at least parts of its energy policy. As Heatmap’s Zeitlin pointed out, during today’s hearing multiple Democratic senators nodded approvingly to Wright’s support for development of geothermal energy, or harnessing the heat from the earth’s core to generate electricity. Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) qualified Wright’s status as an “unrestrained enthusiast” for fossil fuels by noting his support for nuclear, solar and wind. Penney noted that Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) scored a commitment to continuing permitting reform from Wright during this morning’s hearings, and praised Trump’s Deputy Secretary of Energy pick James Danly, who served during president-elect's first term as head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, overseeing America’s byzantine power grid. Ultimately, Penney argued, the biggest wins for “progress” might be found in the regulatory weeds, and not with intriguing but untested new technologies like small modular or sodium reactors. “There’s enough space at the trough” when it comes to wins on permitting for fossil fuel, nuclear, and solar or wind enthusiasts, Penney said. “You never get into politics to be happy or get what you want. You do it because you want to be complicatedly sad to see if you can see some improvement. I think we can see some improvement.”
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