During the week of September 8, 2025, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright attended three international events—the GasTech 2025 Strategic Conference in Milan, a briefing at the European Union headquarters in Brussels, and an annual conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna—at which he reportedly made false or misleading statements about climate change. Secretary Wright’s statements included the following:
- “[Y]ou hear all the time in the news that tornadoes are getting worse, and hurricanes are worse, and floods and droughts and storms, they're more frequent and larger in magnitude. This is just simply untrue.”
- “Agricultural productivity continues to rise” in part because there is more "plant food in the atmosphere.”
- “We've just so exaggerated what climate change is."
Secretary Wright’s statements run contrary to a significant body of scientific evidence demonstrating that climate change is impacting the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.