President-elect Donald Trump has nominated the CEO of oilfield services company Liberty Energy as the head of the Department of Energy (DOE).

Chris Wright has denied the scientific consensus of climate change, and in 2019 drank a fracking fluid cocktail that contained bleach in an effort to claim that it is not harmful.

The Department of Energy is in charge of US energy diplomacy, oversees the nuclear weapons complex, national research labs, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

US oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under President Biden, but Trump has promised to increase it further. The majority of oil production comes from private companies on private land.

The DOE has also been one of the largest supporters of early-stage renewable energy efforts.

Through the Solar Energy Technologies Office, it funds R&D into solar power, as well as integrating the technology with the grid. Similar offices exist for geothermal, wind energy, and water power technologies, as well as biofuels, hydrogen, and fuel cells.

The DOE also works to reduce energy use in US buildings, including data centers.

Under the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, it funds the National Renewable Energy Laboratory - home to the world's most efficient data center.

The 17 national labs under the DOE's purview operate some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, including the top two (Frontier and Aurora). Those systems are used for nuclear weapons simulation, climate modeling, and broader scientific research efforts.

The DOE has been heavily involved in encouraging data centers to use renewable energy, be more efficient, and site at former coal plants.

Earlier this year, the DOE said that it was considering building an AI data center testbed, setting data center standards, and levying grid upgrade tariffs.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) plans to release a report on current and near-future data center energy consumption and water use at the end of 2024.

The last report, published back in 2020, is considered one of the best studies of data center power consumption in the world.

The DOE has also pushed for nuclear power to triple by 2050 to support AI data center growth.

Chris Wright currently serves on the board of fast fission small modular reactor company Oklo. Backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, it has signed a number of data center contracts.

Beyond his ties to Oklo, Wright has primarily pushed fossil fuel projects.

"There’s no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy," Wright said in a 2023 video. “All energy sources have impacts on the world both positive and negative.”

He also said that “there is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either. Humans and all complex life on earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide. Hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous.”

Humans, who also need water to live but can drown if given too much, are widely understood to be behind record carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution.

This rise in greenhouse gases absorbs more of the sun's heat that radiates from the Earth's surface, slowly increasing the overall temperature of the planet. This causes a number of cascading climactic effects, including an increase in natural weather disasters.

“We have seen no increase in the frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods” as a result of climate change, Wright said in his video. This is incorrect.

Three-quarters of extreme events analyzed were made more intense or likely due to climate change, an analysis of attribution studies by Carbon Brief found.

Many of those models were run on DOE supercomputers.

The science behind anthropogenic climate change is well understood, and modern climate models have proved accurate in tracking the impact of rising emissions. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an eight-year study into the causes and effects of climate change. At 8,000 pages, it drew on the findings of 234 scientists on the physical science of climate change, 270 scientists on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability to climate change, and 278 scientists on climate change mitigation.

Wright will also be a part of the newly formed National Energy Council, run by Doug Burgum.