Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who recently called pledges to reduce greenhouse gases “silly” and said that climate change is “not incredibly important,” will speak at The New York Times’ “Climate Forward” event tomorrow — a forum about climate solutions meant to hold “newsmakers ... accountable in front of a live audience.” The Times should take the opportunity to hold Wright accountable for his commentary.

Wright often appears in supportive media, having appeared across Fox’s networks at least 57 times since his confirmation as head of the Department of Energy. Regularly giving interviews on networks known to be safe spaces for Trump administration officials has allowed Wright to shape the discourse around climate and energy issues while uncritically spinning some of the administration's most controversial actions, including its effort to overturn the endangerment finding and its all-out assault on clean energy.

And during a rare non-Fox appearance on CNN on August 5, Wright was allowed to spew climate denial, asserting that “nobody who is a credible economist or scientist” sees climate change as a major threat and characterized carbon dioxide as just “a fertilizer” that benefits plant growth. 

But climate journalists at The New York Times who have covered these issues for years should be better positioned than TV anchors to challenge climate denial arguments, misinformation, and false narratives. And they must, as this interview represents a rare opportunity to set the record straight on the climate crisis, its impacts, and what we can do to mitigate them by demanding direct, public-facing accountability outside of the protective ecosystem Fox News creates for Trump administration officials.

Here are 3 things Secretary Wright recently said on Fox that The New York Times should hold him accountable for during his appearance at Climate Forward:

On its July 29 episode, Fox News’ America Reports hosted Wright and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin to discuss the Trump administration's proposal to repeal the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which affirmed that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and the Department of Energy’s recently released “critical review” of climate science. 

To author that report, which would serve as the basis for the endangerment finding’s repeal, Wright tapped five climate contrarians whose discredited and debunked arguments have been promoted by right-wing media in order to manufacture doubt about the science that compels climate action.

During the interview, Wright claimed that the goal of repealing the endangerment finding was to “restore confidence in science, in data, in rationalism.” He then touted his agency’s climate report as a key objective in reaching that goal, saying, “So at the Department of Energy, we released a report, which is sort of a critical overview on what do we know today about climate science, about climate data, and what impacts that might have on the American people.”

But the DOE’s climate report has been widely criticized by the scientific community, including by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, whose work was cited and reportedly “cherrypick[ed]” by the authors. On September 3, in response to a lawsuit alleging that the group’s formation violated federal law “in several ways,” Wright dissolved the working group, but he notably did not withdraw the report. 

Meanwhile, the agency “dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship analysis of how climate change is affecting the country,” known as the National Climate Assessment, and “deleted all previous congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment reports from government websites.”  As The New York Times reported:

On the August 31 edition of Varney & Co., Fox Business host Stuart Varney invited Wright to respond to a Washington Post article on “Trump’s crusade against wind power,” asking, “Will the president’s approach to wind lead to higher costs?”  

Wright dedicated substantial time in his response to the “environmental impacts” of the projects, as well as local opposition, claiming, “The problem with wind turbines, particularly offshore wind turbines, is their environmental impacts are pretty massive. You know, they’re out there in these critical fisheries, these breeding grounds for whales. Fishermen and local people who live near these projects do not like them. Those people were ignored and shut out of the conversation before.”  

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is moving to expand offshore drilling, including by opening up 625 million acres along the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines for drilling. Offshore drilling, however, is significantly more harmful to the environment than offshore wind. 

As the BBC reported: “Decades of research from around the world suggests that oil production affects birds, whales and other wildlife in many different ways. Apart from the climate factor, there is the risk of oil spills as well as smaller, chronic leaks, scientists say, which can harm seabirds, whales, dolphins and other wildlife.”  

Politico reported that one oil and gas effort in particular, for example — a $44 billion Alaskan project to expand exports of liquefied natural gas — will harm the Beluga whale, resulting in “the same type of marine mammal disruption that Trump and his administration falsely claim is killing whales on the East Coast as developers build wind turbines.” 

Pollution and spills are another risk associated with offshore drilling. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, thousands of oil spills occur annually in the U.S. alone, and the impacts of oil spills extend well beyond marine life. They are far-reaching, can last for decades, and include both harm to those exposed to the polluting materials and economic losses for coastal communities and industries that depend on clean beaches and oceans.

On the September 4 edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle, Wright responded to a question from host Laura Ingraham about rising electricity prices: “President Obama came in, told us the world was ending and we had to change how we got electricity somehow to save the world. … Biden doubled down on it and drove electricity prices up. That's not rocket science. That was guaranteed to happen.”  

But Politico reports that states where wind and solar produce the greatest share of electricity are “among the 20 cheapest states for electricity, according to federal data,” and as Time reported, “A recent analysis by Heatmap found that, in states with higher adoption of renewables, prices have risen more modestly than average or even fallen." 

In fact, per Forbes, solar energy combined with battery storage is the “cheapest and fastest-to-build option” to meet rising electricity demand. Clean energy technologies constituted 93% of the new energy generation capacity added to the grid last year, and solar is the fastest growing source of new electricity generation — not only in the U.S., but across the globe. 

In reality, a number of factors are impacting supply and demand in the electricity sector and driving up prices, including climate-fueled extreme weather events. 

According to Heatmap: “In the Southeast, for instance, severe storms and hurricanes have knocked out huge swaths of the distribution grid, requiring emergency line crews to come in and rebuild. Those one-time, storm-induced costs then get recovered through higher utility rates over time.” 

The New York Times also noted that, besides absorbing some of the costs incurred by data centers, utilities are also “spending billions of dollars to harden their systems against wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, winter storms and other extreme weather.”