U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright downplayed the dangers of Europe’s record-breaking heat wave this week, telling the continent to stop complaining about rising temperatures.
Wright delivered video remarks to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering that includes many conservative figures who dispute mainstream climate science.
“Always more people die in the winter than die in the summer, because cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is,” Wright said in his address to the conference, as quoted by Politico.
His comments arrived as European governments issued life-threatening warnings over record-high temperatures, mirroring a 2022 heat wave that killed more than 60,000 people across the continent.
Wright pointed to winter 2022 in Europe, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices soaring and caused widespread heating shortages, calling the mortality impact “catastrophic.”
The conference was attended by notable figures including Nigel Farage, leader of U.K. populist right-wing party Reform U.K., and Steve Koonin, whom Wright personally selected to co-author a U.S. government report accused of misrepresenting mainstream climate science.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also delivered a video address to the same audience, which included former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Bayer CEO Bill Anderson.
The ARC conference is funded by oil and gas investors and donors to President Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and Wright used his remarks to praise fossil fuel energy as beneficial to both the economy and society.
Wright told the conference: “Understand climate change for what it is: a slow-moving phenomenon that ultimately will be addressed by better technologies.”
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated it is “unequivocal” that human influence has caused “unprecedented” global warming, increasing the threat of floods, drought, and heatwaves globally.
While cold-related deaths currently outnumber heat-related ones in Europe by roughly 8 to 1, experts warn that heat represents an acute and escalating threat as climate change intensifies and prolongs deadly heatwaves.
In the United States, heat is already the leading weather-related cause of death, surpassing cold, a fact that contrasts sharply with Wright’s framing during the conference.
During his appearance, Wright was asked about Europe’s lack of air conditioning, and he responded by arguing that a “shale gas revolution” in the UK could have delivered an “industrial renaissance,” cutting electricity bills and creating jobs for “blue-collar workers.”
Fracking is currently banned in the UK, and before joining Trump’s cabinet in 2025, Wright served as CEO of fracking services company Liberty Energy.
Wright previously declared in a LinkedIn video posted in January 2023 that “there is no climate crisis,” a position he has continued to advocate from his position atop the U.S. Department of Energy.
