WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 14: U.S. President Donald Trump, accompanied by (L-R) Environmental … [+] Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, speaks before signing an executive order establishing the Energy Dominance Council led by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in the Oval Office at the White House on February 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump signed a second executive order withholding federal funding from schools and universities that impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
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The markets are not 100% efficient. Evidence supporting the previous claim can be found in the hundreds of unicorns out in Silicon Valley. The existence of all these billion-dollar plus companies is a reminder that the future is being invented all the time, and in ways that run counter to how the leading lights of commerce see things today.
The above truths would be worthwhile ones for Energy secretary Chris Wright to internalize. Wright recently observed that “Everywhere wind and solar penetration have increased significantly, prices went up.” The latter is Wright’s way of saying that the fundamentals of wind and solar are unequal to the U.S.’s enormous and growing energy needs, at which point he’s putting the federal government in the position of picking and choosing what is equal.
Forget for a moment that electricity prices have fallen slightly as wind and solar usage in Texas have risen, and just think about what Wright’s saying. He’s substituting his own surely abundant knowledge of energy for that of the broader marketplace. About this, it doesn’t insult Wright one iota to say that knowledgeable as he is, he’s not smarter than the markets.
Yet Wright is implicitly dismissing the “right to try” when it comes to inventing our energy future. That’s unfortunate, and worse, it’s dangerous. See the unicorns. With each one, readers can rest assured that preceding each billion-dollar valuation was all manner of skepticism that well exceeded Wright’s own about wind and solar. Which is the point, or should be.
No one leaves billion-dollar+ opportunities lying around untaken, which means the abundant existence of unicorns is a sign that the present is a lousy predictor of the future. Remember this with energy and its future top of mind.
As evidenced by the fortune amassed by John D. Rockefeller in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a time when skepticism about oil as the undisputed catalyst of the world’s energy future was substantial. Every fortune is preceded by a great deal of naysaying. Does anyone remember Amazon’s long-time “Amazon.org” nickname?
The simple truth is that things change in commerce, and from this we can conclude how foolish it would be to presume that tomorrow’s energy consumption will resemble today’s. Exactly because oil and its byproducts are so instrumental to our commercial present, we can rest assured that capable replacements for oil will eventually be discovered.
What will they be? There’s obviously no way of knowing. Better yet, assuming a replacement for fossil fuels hides in plain sight as you’re reading this opinion piece, read on fully confident that whatever this replacement is, it would presently be rejected by nearly every energy expert.
Looked at through the prism of wind and solar, right now neither threatens oil. Which is logical. What threatens the existing commercial order never appears imposing at the time. See the proliferation of unicorns yet again.
After which, stop and consider wind and solar not as energy concepts that require federal subsidies, but concepts that should be allowed to compete in marketplaces free of proverbial government thumbs on proverbial scales. While wind and solar may not threaten today, tomorrow in commerce is, as they say, another century.
Which calls for Chris Wright and the Trump administration not to pursue the fatal conceit of “energy policy,” rather their policy should be to allow all would-be competitors to compete. Precisely because everything that shines commercially now formerly didn’t, let’s replace government as the judge of what the energy markets want and will want with free markets. They work better.
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