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Wright Discusses Common Sense Climate and Energy Policy in Brussels, Sep. 12, 2025

September 12, 2025 · U.S. Department of Energy · 1:00:08

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

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined Christian Egenhofer for a public conversation on common sense climate and energy policy in Brussels, in the Department of Energy’s upload of the September 12, 2025 session. Wright opened with the case that runs through his tenure: energy transforms human lives, and the modern world’s leap in life expectancy — from about 30 years throughout history to 73 today, as he stated it — rests on two changes, the rise of human liberty and the explosion in available energy that began with coal, oil, and natural gas.

Wright stressed how unfinished that transformation is: more than half of humanity still washes clothes by hand, and two billion people — a quarter of humanity — cook over wood, dung, and agricultural waste indoors, an indoor air pollution burden he put at two to three million deaths a year, as he stated the figures. His stated passion, carried from his career as an entrepreneur into the department, is more energy, cheaper energy, and better energy for the people who do not yet have it.

Why it matters

The Brussels conversation is Wright making the administration’s energy case on European ground, in dialogue form: the moral argument — energy poverty as the world’s standing emergency — presented to the policy capital whose climate-first approach he has spent the year arguing against.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: Secretary Wright’s energy-poverty figures in Brussels on September 12, 2025 — two billion people cooking with polluting indoor fuels and two to three million deaths a year attributed to indoor air pollution, as he stated them. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright & Christian Egenhofer on Common Sense Climate & Energy Policy – September 12, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; conversation as delivered by Secretary Wright and Christian Egenhofer).