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Wright Speaks with the Council on Foreign Relations, Sep. 5, 2025

September 5, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:43:25

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

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright spoke with the Council on Foreign Relations in the Department of Energy’s upload of the September 5, 2025 conversation. Wright argued that energy is not a sector of the economy but the sector that enables everything else, and that the modern leap in life expectancy — about 30 years at birth throughout history, 73 today, as he stated it — was driven by human liberty and abundant energy together. A billion people, he said, live fully energized lives, and seven billion want to; the only path from here to there is massively more energy.

Wright said the world got off track through what he called a complete misinterpretation of climate change — a real phenomenon, in his account, that humans will solve with technology over generations, not by driving up electricity prices and impoverishing societies. He pointed to Europe as, in his words, in the midst of almost completely de-industrializing, and traced his own path from teenage fusion studies through solar research to an accidental entry into oil and gas and a role in the shale revolution, whose lesson he gave as the willingness to risk money on ideas that cannot be planned in advance.

Why it matters

The Council on Foreign Relations conversation is Wright’s longest-form statement of his governing philosophy to a foreign-policy audience: energy abundance as the precondition of prosperity, climate policy judged by its effect on prices and industry, and innovation — not planning — as the engine.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Chris Wright speaks with the Council on Foreign Relations – September 5, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; conversation as delivered by Secretary Wright).