Chris Wright:
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here at this fabulous Atlantic Council event. Energy is the most important industry in the world. And I can say that without qualification and without any reservation, because every other industry—whether it’s artificial intelligence, or manufacturing, or your Little League baseball team—every other activity is enabled by energy. Without energy, all the other industries are impossible. So the quality of the energy system, the affordability of the energy system in your country, in your state, in your region, it’s what enables or sets limits on the economic activity and the quality of life possible. So energy is just central.
The previous administration, the Biden administration, didn’t get this. They thought energy was some necessary evil that they wanted to constrain and shrink, and hopefully eventually shrink globally. That, to me, is just to totally miss the boat. A billion people live fulsomely energized lives, like all of us in this room. It’s awesome. We love the modern world. Seven billion people, they want to live the lives we live—fly around the world to conferences and events, and wear fancy clothes, and always be in climate-controlled rooms. That’s pretty awesome. Seven billion other people want what we have. And God bless them, they should and they will achieve that.
