Secretary Wright Joins Fox Business's Maria Bartiromo - July 2, 2026

Welcome back. Good Thursday morning, everybody. Thanks so much for joining us this morning. I'm Maria Bartiromo and it is Thursday, July 2nd. It is 8.02 on the East Coast. The kickoff to the long holiday July 4th weekend and America's celebrations. Oil prices this morning are lower going into the long weekend. The price of crude right now at 67.27, down almost 2%. National average for gasoline prices also down to $3.83 a gallon. That is down from $4.29 just one month ago. As Americans get on the road to celebrate America's 250th anniversary, the U.S. and Iran concluding a round of productive peace talks in Doha yesterday, but no clear deal was made. Joining me right now is the nation's U.S. Energy Secretary, Christopher Wright. Secretary, great to see you. Thank you so much for being here this morning. Thanks for having me, Maria. Glad to be here. Well, we're all gearing up for a long weekend to celebrate this great nation. What should we expect in terms of gasoline and electricity prices? Your colleague, Secretary Scott Besant, has been backing the president's call to gas retailers to lower prices at the pump right now. What's your expectation? Oh, they'll keep falling, Maria. You know, look, the American military, not any benign actions from Iran, but the American military has oil flowing back through the Strait of Hormuz, American productions at record levels, Venezuelan production is rising rapidly. So supply is growing, and that's driving prices down, first in oil and then gasoline. But gasoline prices are on their way down. I was in my home of Denver last weekend, and there were 299 gas stations around town. So we're headed the right direction, very excited to see it, and just in time for the peak travel season. It's absolutely terrific. You know, 250 years after the founding of this great nation, you and your colleagues, President Trump, have been doing energy breakthroughs, really, with regard to the amount of energy that we could actually use and touch into, whether it's nuclear, LNG exports, something else. How would you assess the capacity of America today? Oh, it's on the rise. American optimism, American ingenuity, and a belief in a positive future is thriving again. You know, after four years of preaching the world was about to end, making kids pessimistic, celebrating the closure of coal or natural gas power plants, we preached an age of doom and gloom. Of course, Americans didn't buy that, but it got weighed on top of them. Now Americans are free, and they're innovating, and they're driving forward. Maria, I'm sure you saw the press release yesterday. We had our third small modular reactor go critical yesterday, and we have a fourth one that may come before the 4th of July. Incredibly exciting times for American innovation, as I said, from record oil production, natural gas production, nuclear launching, seriously, we're going to see incredible activity in the nuclear space over the coming years and coming decades. And next generation geothermals on the march as well. America is going to be a land of opportunity again. I love that. And Secretary, tell me about the nuclear buildout. What are the biggest obstacles in terms of building dozens of more nuclear reactors? Because I know that that's part of the story. And also, how much do you believe with this AI revolution? How much will be used in terms of powering it, nuclear versus oil and gas versus electricity? Can you break that down for us? Well, our biggest source of electricity today, by a large margin, is natural gas. We just have an amazing abundance of natural gas in the United States, and it's extremely cheap. I call it America's energy superpower, is natural gas and pipelines. So most of the expansion that's going to happen in the next few years for the data centers being built now will be from natural gas. But nuclear is going to be close behind, close behind. Both large reactors, we had an announcement last week of a $17.5 billion loan program to get 10 large-scale reactors built that reach 1.1 gigawatts. So think of that 11 gigawatts, that's 10 million homes of electricity, but a lot of it will be used to power new data centers and new manufacturing in the United States. So just progress across the board. We stopped closing coal plants, just a little bit of a return of common sense. Very cold, I mean, very hot in the East Coast right now. If we had President Harris right now, we'd be dealing with blackouts and massive economic disruption because they would have continued to close all the coal plants. And they wouldn't have encouraged building anything new unless it was carefully blessed by the climate cult gods from above, which means nothing meaningful would be built and expanded. But fortunately, we're not in those ages. We're celebrating 250 years of the greatest nation on earth. America became a great nation by bold people taking chances and building big things. We're going back to that. I love that, Secretary. Love it so much. And your portfolio has expanded in the middle of all of this. Let me get your take on some of those bad policies that you are overturning. The Department of Energy issued a notice this morning to permanently end green New Deal era appliance mandates. Those mandates really were incredible. The new proposal is updating the current process rule used for energy conservation standards to preserve consumer choices and lower costs. Secretary, tell us about the announcement that you're leading and what people should expect now, because when Joe Biden came out with all these restrictions on our own appliances like stoves and refrigerators, people were really unnerved. Yes. I mean, this is President Trump just leaning in on common sense and trust in the American people. Look, if you want to buy a clothes dryer that costs far more and doesn't dry your clothes, you've got to run it twice. You're free to do that. But to impose that choice on all Americans, that is absolutely un-American. You see the Europeans coming over here celebrating the World Cup and they're thrilled. Oh, oh, my God, there's air conditioning here in the summer. Maybe we should have that in Europe. But President Biden, his his his goal for the United States was to be France, tear everyone's air conditioners out. I think you covered a story a year ago when I when I was down at a hot water heater factory in Georgia that was going to close because the new Biden administration policies decided this low cost, efficient hot water heater was somehow unvirtuous and was about to become illegal. People think I'm making that up. That's actually the truth. So instead of gradually rolling back these regulations, we just found the legal way to let Americans be treated as adults. Buy the appliances you want. Make the different tradeoffs you like that fit for you and your age. That's America. That's common sense. That's President Trump. That's true. For America, 250 celebrations, meanwhile, in full swing ahead of the July 4th holiday on Saturday, the great American State Fair taking over Washington's National Mall. Secretary, I know you were at the Freedom 250 Fair yesterday. Tell us about it. Oh, it is exciting. You know, at the Department of Energy booth, we have all sorts of awesome things from our national labs, scientific innovations that changed the world that we're in today. And maybe more importantly, it'll change the world we're in in the future. What we can do with artificial intelligence and additive manufacturing, basically 3D printers with metal and materials, we can just build more complex things more quickly, more cheaply and therefore it's just going to continue to make people's lives better. So it's about optimism. It's about leaning in on the future. I don't know if you saw Brooke Rawlins, our agricultural secretary, ringing around the rodeo loop, carrying a large American flag right on the mall in Washington, D.C., celebrating the West, celebrating the pioneering spirit of Americans. Absolutely. She is a real patriot. Secretary, let me get your take on the grid, because you have warned about grid reliability and it's going to be a hot weekend. We know that we just heard from the weather folks going to be 100 degrees potentially on Saturday throughout the Northeast. Where are Americans most at risk of potentially seeing power shortages? Should we be worried about that this weekend? And what about power shortages potential in the future? Well, the peak demand in this heat wave in the Midwest was yesterday. In the East Coast, Washington, D.C., where I am, that peak demand will be this afternoon or this evening. So it'll be the highest demand ever, summer demand on the PJM grid, these Northeast states. So yeah, it's going to test our system. We don't have all the new capacity on. We should, because of the previous administration. But I think we'll get through it. We've just let, again, let the utilities run their business with the interest of the rate payers in mind and not the climate cult gods. So we've given some relaxation for air permits, allow people to use backup generators, allow people to just make intelligent decisions. But it'll be close, closer than I would like. But I think we'll skate through today fine. And most importantly, we've just got to speed up the building of new capacity so we can bring new factories, new jobs, new opportunities to Americans and drive prices down instead of up. Yeah, that's right. You could also use Congress's help with some permitting, codifying the president's executive orders. Secretary, real quick before you go. If Congress gave you one permitting reform tonight, which project would you get built immediately? Oh, the Constitution Pipeline, that they'll take Pennsylvania gas through the state of New York, lower prices in all six New England states and in upstate New York. That's just a no brainer. That project should be under construction already. I hope it'll be under construction in the next six or 12 months. Just lower everyone's prices and expand people's job opportunities. It's amazing there's a constituency that wants to stand in front of that. All right. Secretary, did I interrupt you? Did you want to add one more comment? Thank you so much for being here. Now, I was just going to say the working families tax cut that we did last summer, we talked a lot about that tax reduction, but it also had significant regulatory reforms in that that are allowing us to do a lot of the positive changes we're doing today. So, yes, we need Congress working together with the administration to unleash American prosperity. Absolutely. The big, beautiful bill had an incredible impact across the board. Secretary, great to see you. Have a wonderful and safe July 4th. Thank you, sir. Thanks, Maria. Happy 250th. Thanks.