One of the most toxic, vile, repulsive and hypocritical grifters in a cabinet full of them is Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fracking millionaire who raised his profile on the right wing climate denial circuit crying performative crocodile tears about the poor children in Africa, denied the benefits of electricity by evil environmentalist who worry about, in his telling, inconsequential climate change.
So, how is he doing now that he is in a position of power?
The number of deaths of children under 5 years old is projected to rise this year for the first time in decades, the Gates Foundation, the philanthropy chaired by billionaire Bill Gates that is a major funder of global health and development causes, said in a report Thursday.
About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024, according to the projections, which were made by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which measures global-health indicators and is funded in part by the Gates Foundation.
Driving the shift, Gates said, is a 27% decline in global health aid from donors in wealthy countries, including the U.S. and some European governments. Such aid pays for medicine, health clinics and workers, food and other needs for children in poor countries.
The reductions include the Trump administration’s cutting and reorganizing of the U.S. Agency for International Development. “I believe that was a gigantic mistake, and that’s partly why we’ve had the turmoil and increase in deaths this year,” Gates said.
Across swaths of Africa, however, “our teams describe the same pattern: more children arriving at health centers sicker and in greater numbers,” said Melaku Yirga, vice president for Africa of U.S.-based nonprofit Mercy Corps. “In some clinics, every child who walks in is already malnourished.”
Khadra Hussein Ibrahim said she lost her 2-year-old son, Abdi Bari, to malnutrition a few months ago, after Mercy Corps had to cut the nutrition and other services it was providing her family because of an 80% reduction in funding the organization received from USAID for programs in Somalia.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright is expected to deliver a message about ending energy poverty at an event this week on scaling up power in Africa. But his comments will come days after the Trump administration eviscerated a 12-year-old initiative called Power Africa that was created to do just that.
“It’s going to be the elephant in the room,” said a former Power Africa official who was granted anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Power Africa’s contracts under the U.S. Agency for International Development have been canceled and staff laid off amid sweeping moves by the Trump administration to dismantle the agency. Among the cuts are a $6 million grant to expand solar power in Zambia and Senegal and a $47 million program to help bring electricity and digital connectivity to health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Scrapping the initiative has raised questions among energy and development experts about what, if anything, it might be replaced with. One concern looms high: that the U.S. could promote oil, gas and coal instead of cleaner forms of energy. That would fit with Wright’s views.
The former CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking services company, has said fossil fuels are necessary to end energy poverty in poorer countries. He has also dismissed concerns about climate change as a “mania.” He told a gathering of conservative leaders in London recently that the goal of zeroing out climate pollution by 2050 was “impoverishing citizens in pursuit of a delusion.”
That has created tension ahead of the Powering Africa summit in Washington, at which Wright will give the keynote speech.
“I think people in the energy access community are going into this event with an open mind,” said Katie Auth, a former Power Africa official who’s now the policy director at the Energy for Growth Hub. “But they’re also wary of the administration potentially turning this into a purely fossil fuel endeavor.”
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration is formally shutting down the United States Agency for International Development today, after cancelling 83% of its programs earlier this year.
The administration says the agency has misspent billions in funds and “has little to show since the end of the Cold War.”
That argument clashes with a new study published Monday in the medical journal, the Lancet. The study estimates that USAID programs have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades. The researchers also estimate that if the current cuts continue through 2030, 14 million people who might have otherwise lived could die.
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustain the programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.
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