United Nations, March 6: The only way to better the lives of hundreds of millions of people living in poverty is to massively increase energy production, according to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
At a briefing on “Energy, Critical Minerals, and Security” on Thursday, he invoked the problems faced by the poor in the Global South as he criticised “aggressive climate policies” and expounded on President Donald Trump’s administration’s gospel of “energy abundance”.
Looking around the Security Council chamber, he said that only one billion people in the world live lives of plenty like those there.
“Seven billion people aspire to the lives we have,” he said. “The only road from here to there is massively more energy”.
He gave the example of “two billion people, one-quarter of humanity today” who don’t have clean cooking fuels and burn wood, charcoal, and dung, indoors to cook and heat.
“The indoor air pollution from this alone kills over two million people, as estimated by the United Nations health agency,” he said.
The “aggressive climate policies”, he asserted, “have been unrealistic and poorly planned”.
“The energy delusions implicit in climate policies represent real and growing threats to nations and peoples around the world,” he said.
Those were an appeal to developing countries and barbs flung against previous Democratic Party administrations, most European countries and the UN itself that have hectored the Global South about stopping the development of fossil fuel-based energy development.
“These are giant problems, and we can’t take our eyes off of them,” Wright said.
Criticising developed countries that cut back on energy produced by fossil fuels at home, he said they sent “their own energy-intensive industries outside of their own borders”.
He said those who restricted domestic energy supply “increased their dependence on unfriendly sources beyond their borders”.
“We saw what happened four years ago when our European friends faced energy problems because they heavily relied on Russian oil and gas”, he said, referring to the problems that arose when Moscow invaded Ukraine.
“Energy is too important, too central to life to get wrong, and it is the same with critical minerals,” he said.
“It is in the security interest of the United States and our allies to not overly depend on any single country for materials critical to our economies and national security,” he added.
–IANS