Energy Humanism’s Most Valuable Player Award — Week of August 18, 2026

Energy Humanism’s Most Valuable Player Award — Week of August 18, 2026

Inaugural Recipient: Secretary of Energy Chris Wright

This week the Energy Humanism’s Most Valuable Player Award goes to its first recipient: Chris Wright, the 17th United States Secretary of Energy.

Wright has spent a career building and defending the energy systems that actually power human progress. As founder and long-time CEO of Liberty Energy he helped expand the shale revolution. As Secretary he has moved decisively to restore American energy abundance, reliability, and common sense.

In recent months he has kept critical coal generation online when reliability demanded it, advanced the American nuclear renaissance (including the first non-light-water reactor to reach criticality in more than four decades), ended new federal subsidies for intermittent wind and solar, canceled three proposed National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors that prioritized climate ideology over local communities and ratepayers, and repeatedly chosen affordable, dispatchable power over the expensive theater of net-zero timelines.

Wright’s path to the Department of Energy was not through politics or activism. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from MIT and did graduate work in electrical engineering at both UC Berkeley and MIT. In the 1990s he founded Pinnacle Technologies, the company that created the hydraulic-fracture mapping industry and helped turn shale gas from a technical curiosity into commercial reality. In 2011 he founded what became Liberty Energy, one of North America’s largest pressure-pumping companies, and led it as Chairman and CEO. Along the way he also served on the board of Oklo, the advanced nuclear company, and never lost sight of the larger purpose: expanding the supply of energy that lifts human lives.

He has long described himself as an energy humanist in everything but name. His company’s stated mission was “to better human lives through energy.” He has argued for years that the real moral crisis is not climate models but energy poverty—the billions of people still cooking over open fires and living without reliable power. He treats natural gas, nuclear, coal where it is needed, and any other source that is abundant, affordable, and reliable as tools for human flourishing rather than ideological trophies. That practical, results-first outlook is exactly what the Energy Humanism award is meant to recognize.

Energy humanism is simple: abundant, reliable, affordable energy is the foundation of health, prosperity, and freedom. Chris Wright has treated that principle as operational policy rather than rhetoric. For that consistent record—and for the practical results it is producing—he is the clear choice for the inaugural award.

The plaque carries his official portrait and the citation.

Stephen Heins

The Word Merchant

Sheboygan, Wisconsin

steve@heins.net

920-917-8644