Justice takes part in first U.S. Senate committee
CHARLESTON – U.S. Sen. Jim Justice made his debut as West Virginia’s junior senator Wednesday, questioning Department of Energy cabinet secretary nominee Chris Wright.
Justice, R-W.Va., participated in Wednesday morning’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Capitol Hill, which was considering the nomination by incoming President Donald Trump of Wright to serve as cabinet secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Wright, the CEO and founder of Colorado-based Liberty Energy, has more than two decades of experience in the oil and natural gas industry in the field of fracking.
Multiple media reports have highlighted Wright’s skepticism about man-made contributions to global climate change and the viability of transitioning from fossil fuel energy to renewable energy to meet targets by the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden to get the nation to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the next 25 years.
Justice asked Wright whether he was open to considering an all-of-the-above approach to energy production, including a combination of traditional fossil fuels and renewable energy.
“Chris, are you in a position of thinking of embracing all the energy forms, solving the whole riddle?” Justice asked.
“We share a passion for energy, and the reason I sit in front of you today is because President-Elect Trump shares a passion for energy and an instinctual understanding that energy is not a sector of the economy, it’s THE sector of the economy that enables everything else we do,” Wright answered. “I agree with you 100%. Energy is core, it’s central. We want energy from all sources that can add to our pile of affordable, reliable, secure American energy.”
“Chris, that pleases me,” Justice said. “America has a big, big crisis right in front of it. If we don’t solve this riddle in a year and a half from today, we will have a crisis like you can imagine. With all that being said, we’re sitting, we’re sitting on a, on the answer in America, for America to be the footprint of the world and we got to do it.”
Justice – the former two-term governor of West Virginia – was sworn in for his first six-year term in the U.S. Senate Tuesday after a 11-day delay between the start of Congress on Jan. 3 and the swearing in of Justice’s successor, Gov. Patrick Morrisey, Monday.
Justice was appointed to four committees: the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry; the Senate Special Committee on Aging; the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee; and the ENR Committee.
“I’m a new kid on the block. That’s for dadgum sure,” Justice said at the beginning of his remarks Wednesday. “I’m not a politician. I’m a business guy, and I’m hung up … on honor and truth and respect and reason and logic, and you’ll find that as we go forward with me.”
The owner of multiple coal mining companies, Justice has been a vocal supporter of West Virginia coal, oil, and natural gas industries. But as governor, Justice also supported several renewable energy projects, such as the Weirton Form Energy battery project and the BHE Renewable’s solar microgrid project.
“Energy is everything … If we think less than that, we are thinking absolutely wrong,” Justice said. “We have to have a real energy strategy, and we’ve got to solve this … We need to embrace all the energy forms. But with that being said, the moment in time when you absolutely believe that we can do without fossil fuels in this world today, you’re living in a cave.”