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Wright Delivers Remarks at CPAC 2025, Feb. 20, 2025

February 20, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:10:19

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright delivered remarks at CPAC 2025, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the February 20, 2025 address. Wright joked that he was thrilled to work for President Donald J. Trump and liberated to be without a tie, and said he had been passionate about energy since high school and had spent his career after schooling as an energy entrepreneur, because energy controls the limits of what is possible in people’s lives. He credited two forces with lifting global life expectancy at birth from 30 years, where he said it stood throughout human history until less than 200 years ago, to 73 years today: the growth of human liberty and bottom-up social organization, and the explosion in available energy from hydrocarbons.

Wright said both liberty and energy had come under threat in the previous four years, citing what he described as every possible new barrier to producing oil and gas, a 30% rise in electricity prices during the previous administration, as he stated the figure at CPAC, the pause on new LNG export permitting, and appliance regulations that he said left consumers paying more for products that work worse. He said the government’s task was to remove the barriers that make it hard to build and easy to stop projects, and he gave the example of a southeastern factory employing hundreds of people building a popular natural-gas tankless water heater: a previous-administration regulation, he said, would have made the product illegal and the company dead, and the new administration had found a fix and was fixing the problem, so the factory would stay open and the products would be built and shipped across the country. He closed by saying the administration would not tell Americans what to buy, and ended, in his words, America’s back, baby.

Why it matters

CPAC is the conservative movement’s home crowd, and Wright’s first movement-stage address as secretary fuses his two themes into one argument — liberty and hydrocarbons as the twin engines of longer lives — with the tankless-water-heater factory as the concrete deregulation story he would return to at the plant itself in May.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: Secretary Wright’s CPAC statement on February 20, 2025 that the administration had found and was applying a fix for the appliance regulation affecting the tankless water heater factory he described. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright delivers remarks at CPAC 2025 - February 20th, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; address as delivered by Secretary Wright).