U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright Delivers Remarks at CPAC

I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you all for being here. I'm also thrilled to work for President Donald J. Trump.

And I can breathe. I don't have a tie on today. I've worn a tie more in the last two or three weeks than I have in my whole life, and I feel liberated right now. When I'm on TV, my mom doesn't recognize me in a tie. "Someone looked like you, but it wasn't you."

So, who am I? I'm a passionate guy about energy. From a kid in high school, I was passionate about energy sources, energy technology. I've spent, after schooling, my entire career as an entrepreneur in energy. Why? It's energizing.

Oh, and also, it's what controls the limits in what's possible in our lives. Not just us, but everyone around the world. We had 30-year global life expectancy at birth throughout all of human history, all the way up to less than 200 years ago.

Today, it's 73 years. From 30 to 73. Two things catalyze that change. The growth of human liberty-bottom-up social organization, what we're all passionate about-and the explosion in available energy from hydrocarbons. These two things just transformed the human condition. Not everyone in the world has access to the liberty and energy we have, but in our own country, both of those concepts have been under great threat in the last four years.

Maybe that's why my political career started. Liberty under threat. Energy resources under threat. President Trump was elected partially on this very issue, and he was elected to get rid of the nonsense and bring back common sense.

[Applause]

What do I mean by nonsense? Look at the last four years. What have we seen? Every possible new barrier implemented to make it harder to produce oil and gas. Note, that doesn't change the demand for oil and gas. You just make it harder to produce. What do you get? You get less supply and higher prices. We've seen a 30% rise in electricity prices, just in the previous administration.

During President Trump's first term, almost no change in national average electricity prices. All of a sudden, a huge rise in electricity prices, rising gasoline, rising energy across the board. Well, so what was the response to that? Well, the United States is the dominant producer of natural gas, and we have a booming industry exporting natural gas to our allies around the world.

Well, let's stop that. Let's ban new permitting of LNG export terminals. That's just- and then to add insult to injury, a whole bunch of regulations were rolled out to limit your ability to buy the appliances you want. You may want to buy that appliance, but the new appliance you're allowed to buy costs more and works worse.

My dishwasher has to run for two hours now. And at the end, I got to clean the dishes. My clothes dryer works at half the power. In theory, this is saving energy. It just takes twice as long to dry our clothes. Like, these are just nonsense things that have hurt people's lives and driven prices up.

President Trump came in and he is strong, and he is bold, and he gets energy. His goal was we're going to bring back common sense.

So, what's the plan? Drill baby drill and build baby build.

To produce more energy, you need the infrastructure to move that energy to customers. Think of the consumers in New England, you know, they don't have enough access for natural gas there, and they have sky-high electricity prices. And you don't get industries placed in those states. Every state that's driving up the price of energy not only impoverishes their citizens, but it makes it so businesses don't want to locate there.

Those businesses are going to located in another state. And frankly, over the last four years, a lot of those businesses are going to locate in another country. We don't want that. We want things build in America. We want those jobs in America, which means we need that energy produced and consumed in America.

We're on the cusp of a brand-new industry, an energy intensive manufacturing industry called artificial intelligence. This is an industry we want to lead in. This is American technology. It matters, not just for the efficiency of our economy. It matters from the enormous benefits that will come in drug discovery, in product manufacturing, and frankly, in driving costs down.

And it also matters for national security. We want China to lead the way in AI? I would feel naked if their AI was better than ours. What does that say about the balance of power and the security of our country? We need to lead and win the competition in AI, and the only way to do that is to have tremendous energy production.

That way we can both grow our electricity production, which is what AI runs on, but stop the price rises. They had almost no demand growth and they raised prices. This administration needs to do the opposite. We need to have demand growth and supply growth and not raising prices. Everything we can do to push prices down. That's how we can better human lives.

Better opportunities for Americans. Lower cost of living. More industries that want to invest and build things here in the United States. That is this president's agenda.

And as I dig into my job and my colleagues in other Cabinet positions, there is an immense amount of barriers to making things happen. Our country has become a place where it's very hard to build something, and unfortunately, it's very easy to stop something. One regulation, one protest. Our government is littered with inefficiency and traps that can be exploited to prevent people from building things.

So, the task before us is big. It's not modest, it's not simple. But we have a committed team who are working every day to get these barriers out of the way. Let America grow our energy production, build our energy infrastructure, bring jobs and investment back to our country, raise American wages and lower American prices.

And back to those appliances. Who here is in favor of more expensive, lower performing appliances? How many votes do we have for that one?

[Boos]

So, under this administration, in my Department and actually in many other departments in the Trump administration, we are working feverishly to remove these regulations, to free American producers, to build the appliances people want to buy.

We have a factory in the southeastern part of the United States that employs hundreds of people to build a particularly popular product these days. It is a tankless water heater powered by natural gas. It's among the cheapest ways to heat your water, takes the least space, lower cost, burns natural gas, our lowest cost thermal energy we can have in our houses. It's a win on every box. That's why they've been selling like hotcakes and an emerging product.

So, what did the Biden administration do? They see a hot product; all Americans are voting yes. They passed a regulation that would make that product illegal. And that company would be dead. In fact, that company is very fearful for the jobs and opportunity of those workers.

Now, that's hundreds of American jobs. I care personally about that, but it's much bigger than that. It's all Americans would not have available to them a low-cost, efficient option to have hot water for their showers and their washing machines and everything else we use it for. That's just completely nuts.

But again, President Trump, fix that problem. Fix that problem. We found a fix and we are fixing that problem.

That factory staying open. Those products are going to be built en masse, and they're going to be shipped all across the country for the American consumers that want to buy them. We're not going to tell you what to buy. We want to enable you to buy what you want to buy. That's that crazy freedom idea.

I'll end with saying America is back, baby. Thank you all.