Gregory Wrightstone

Credentials

Background

Gregory R. Wrightstone is a geologist who spent decades working for the natural gas industry.³ He is the author of a self-published 2017 book titled “Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.”

According to a bio on Wrightstone’s website inconvenientfacts.xyz, he “believes that we should use all of the Earth’s resources for the betterment of mankind and do it as good stewards.”⁴ This echoes comments made by the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation,,⁵ a Christian evangelical group founded by Calvin Beisner that describes environmentalism as “one of the greatest threats to society and the church today.”

Wrightstone is a senior fellow and contributing writer to the Cornwall Alliance.⁶

According to business registration records, Gregory Wrightstone created Wrightstone Energy Consulting in December 2013, and co-owns the business with Julia V. Wrightstone.⁷

A profile on the now-defunct Wrightstone Energy Consulting website describes him as an American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG)-certified petroleum geologist who “has been deeply involved in the exploration and exploitation of unconventional Appalachian Basin reservoirs for 35 years.” The profile notes “a debt of gratitude to the late Dr. Michael Economides who provided support for Greg’s early work and introductions to key players in the shale arena.”⁸

The late Michael J. Economides was former chairman of the board of Paleon Oil and Gas,⁹ and made a presentation on “Economic Shortcomings of Alternative Fuels” at the Heartland Institute‘s First International Conference on Climate Change in 2008.¹⁰

Wrightstone has been a policy advisor at the Heartland Institute. In 2021, he became the executive director of the Koch-funded CO2 Coalition.¹¹ The Coalition has described its purpose as “educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide and fossil fuels to our lives and the economy.”¹² ¹³

According to his resume:

From 2011 to 2013 Wrightstone was the vice president of geology at Mountaineer Keystone, LLC.

From 1999 to 2011, he was director of geology at Texas Keystone, an oil and gas company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,¹⁴ where he focused on oil and gas exploration in the Utica and Marcellus regions.¹⁵

¹⁶ .¹⁷

From 1996 to 1999, Wrightstone was a full-time oil and gas consultant for Statoil Energy.

One of Wrightstone’s earliest positions was as a geologist at Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation.¹⁸

Stance on Climate Change

September 24, 2020

Wrightstone appeared in Marc Morano‘s Climate Hustle 2 movie, where he suggested “modest” global warming would be beneficial:¹⁹

“Well, actually, I’m. I’m a climate realist. I live in the real world. And I see what’s actually going on today. What we’re being told we’re being warned of a climate apocalypse events in the future, 50 or 80 years in the future, based from failed climate models. If we look at what’s actually going on today, we find that the earth is thriving, prospering and greening and humanity’s benefiting from the rise, slight modest rise in temperature and the increase in CO2. And that’s a good thing.”

April 17, 2020

In an op-ed for the BizPac Review, Wrightstone criticized comparisons of the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic to the scope of “the non-existent problem” of climate change:²⁰

“Make no mistake, there will be a redoubled effort in the media in the coming months to tie outcomes of the coronavirus to climate change and to focus even more fear on any and all events that can be portrayed as being out of the ordinary.
“Fear may be the greatest motivator for humanity. It has been wielded very effectively by some who are at least as interested in damaging our economy as in blunting the spread of COVID-19. Their efforts are a road map to promote ‘solutions’ for the non-existent problem of man-made climate change.”

May 16, 2018

In an op-ed for Townhall headlined “I Love Carbon Dioxide and You Should Too,” Wrightstone wrote:²¹

“During nearly all of Earth’s history, carbon dioxide concentration was at many multiples of our current level, averaging 2,600 ppm, or 6.5 times our current measurement. Forerunners of most of the plants we rely on for sustenance first appeared around 150 million years ago when CO2 levels were more than 2,000 ppm. Since that time CO2 has fallen steadily and precipitously.
“In fact, at the end of the last ice age, carbon dioxide reached the dangerously low level of 182 ppm, thought to be the lowest since the Pre-Cambrian time period more than 600 million years ago. Why is it dangerous? Because 150 ppm is the lowest level at which plant life can survive. We came within a whisker of breaching that ‘line of death.’ Until we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere, there was no guarantee that this horrific threshold would not be crossed in the future.
“Rather than spreading fear of increasing carbon dioxide, we should be thankful that both the Earth and humanity are thriving, in part due to more CO2.
[…]
“Although I do not pretend to speak for the planet’s flora, I am quite certain that, if plants had a say in the matter, they would not lobby for reductions in CO2 levels. For plants, CO2 is food. They need more of it, not less.”
2017
The jacket copy for Wrightstone’s newly-released book, titled “Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know,” promoted the book as a response to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”:
“Gregory Wrightstone presents the science to assess the basis of the threatened Thermageddon. The book’s 60 “inconvenient facts” come from government sources, peer-reviewed literature or scholarly works, set forth in a way that is lucid and entertaining. The information likely will challenge your current understanding of many apocalyptic predictions about our ever dynamic climate. You will learn that the planet is improving, not in spite of increasing CO2 and rising temperature, but because of it. The very framework of the climate-catastrophe argument will be confronted with scientific fact.”

Key Quotes

November 11, 2020

In a Facebook post, Wrightstone described CO2 as “plant food,” and rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere as “leading to a thriving and prospering planet”:

March 20, 2020

“Ocean acidification was just – it was a made up terminology used to scare people. And the people that did it have admitted to that,” Wrightstone commented on an episode of The Heartland Institute’s Daily Podcast.²²
“It’s in the ocean water, usually at depth, and that any of the surface water or surface of the air that interacts with the surface, the CO2 that gets absorbed there, is rapidly used by algae and we get the big algal blooms and it really is driving -that’s the basis of the ocean life is this use of increased CO2,” Wrightstone claimed.

January 2, 2019

In part of a video series based on his book, Inconvenient Facts, Wrightstone commented:²³

“[O]ur planet is flourishing precisely due to rising temperature and increasing carbon dioxide. Increasing plant growth due to CO2 fertilization effect appears to be the primary driver of increases in vegetation for most of the Earth’s non-arid areas.”

June 9, 2018

In an op-ed for Townhall, Wrightstone claimed that Pope Francis was wrong about the urgency of climate action: ²⁴

“The Pope has it exactly backwards. A prospering of the human condition requires full use of all of God’s Creation. Reliable, inexpensive energy is part of the solution which can lift billions of God’s creatures out of systemic poverty and disease. Instead of promoting fruitless and harmful policies to control global temperature, Christian leadership should embrace responsible environmental stewardship, make energy and all its benefits more affordable, and thereby free the poor to rise out of poverty,” Wrightstone wrote.

February 23, 2014

“I don’t view natural gas as a bridge to another source of energy. This is the other source,” Wrightstone was quoted as saying in an article published by Marcellus.com.²⁵

Key Actions

December 14, 2020

In an op-ed for Townhall, Wrightstone claimed that LinkedIn had censored his post linking to a CO2 Coalition paper on “The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record,” by Richard Lindzen and John Christy. Wrightstone said the post was removed because LinkedIn reported that it “goes against our Professional Community Policies.”²⁶

“Although LinkedIn did not identify the broken rules, the only possible ‘violation’ of their terms and conditions was an admonition to ‘not share false or misleading content’,” Wrightstone wrote.

November 10, 2020

In a guest appearance on a Heartland Institute podcast, Wrightstone discussed “recently released papers by the CO2 Coalition claiming that rising carbon dioxide emissions were not causing ocean acidification but instead “helping sea life flourish.” He also claimed on the program that LinkedIn had “censored” him for “speaking the truth about climate change.”²⁷

October 27, 2020

Wrightstone defended the CO2 Coalition in an commentary for The Daily Signal, claiming the group and its chairman had faced “censorship” by the Washington Examiner when fact checkers labeled one of their pieces as false on Facebook.²⁸

“The attempts at censorship were not limited to the group itself but extended to its chairman, Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. His PragerU video, ‘What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change,’ which has more than 3.6 million views, was ‘fact-checked’ by Climate Feedback as ‘misleading.’ Moore’s supposedly misleading statement was: ‘Of course the climate is changing. It always has. It always will’,” Wrightstone claimed.

September 27, 2020

Wrightstone was featured in Climate Hustle 2, a movie produced by the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) starring Climate Depot’s Marc Morano. As DeSmog has reported, CFACT‘s funding sources have included the Charles Koch Foundation and Institute, as well as Murray Energy. Many donors are unknown because their contributions have been made via “dark money” conduits such as DonorsTrust (DT) and Donors Capital Fund (DCF).²⁹

In the movie, Morano asks, “Do we face a climate emergency?” to which Wrightstone responds:³⁰

“Well, actually, I’m a climate realist. I live in the real world. And I see what’s actually going on today. What we’re being told we’re being warned of a climate apocalypse events in the future, 50 or 80 years in the future, based from failed climate models. If we look at what’s actually going on today, we find that the Earth is thriving, prospering and greening and humanity’s benefiting from the rise, slight modest rise in temperature and the increase in CO2. And that’s a good thing.”

In the film, Morano asks Wrightstone why he thinks activists are using the term “climate emergency.” Wrightstone responds:
“Well, they’re going to need this climate of fear. They need to raise alarm and fear in order to enact these otherwise economically crippling and onerous regulations, rules, loss of freedom that are associated with the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate accord. They need a frightened population to accept these otherwise onerous regulations.”
Wrighstone downplays the significance of climate change, stating:
“If we look at what’s actually going on today, we find that the Earth is thriving, prospering, and greening and humanity’s benefiting from the rise, slight modest rise in temperature and the increase in CO2. And that’s a good thing.”
He also claims that politicians “need to raise alarm and fear in order to enact these otherwise economically crippling and onerous regulations, rules, loss of freedom that are associated with the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate accord. They need a frightened population to accept these otherwise onerous regulations.”

March 20, 2020

Wrightstone was interviewed by The Daily Signal Morning Bell, a podcast of The Heritage Foundation, for a segment titled “Fact or Fiction: Addressing the Talking Points of Climate Activists.”³¹

Wrightstone commented:

[00:04:26] “We’re being told, ‘oh my God, oh, my God, oh, my God’ we can’t let it get a degree and a half or two degrees or three degrees, degrees warmer; we’re all going to die. But that’s not what human history tells us. We’ve already been there. We’ve been there during the Minoan warm period, the Roman and the Medieval Warm Periods. We’ve experienced those higher temperatures and life thrived.”

He discussed a forthcoming CO2 Coalition white paper discussing ocean acidification:

“Ocean acidification was just it was a made up terminology used to scare people. And the people that did it have admitted to that.”

October 13, 2019

Wrightstone appeared on a “climate change panel discussion” organized by the Ohio Geological Society, at the Eastern Section of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (ESAAPG) meeting in Columbus, Ohio.³²

When asked if climate change was “really the crisis that some alarmists make it to be or is it not such a crisis or is it nothing to worry about at all?” Wrightstone responded:

“I look back through human history and relate that to the other warming periods, if we see similar warming that we’ve seen in the past and I’m often asked what’s going to happen with the temperatures? And I’m, as a geologist, I like to look back at what’s happened in the past and say well it’s probably going to happen again. If this warming period is like the others, we’ll probably have another degree or two or whatever degree and a half of warming.
“Maybe it’ll last another 80 years. On the other hand, there are people I respect greatly that that are promoting a cooling coming up here. But I’m a big, big, big proponent of the relationship between warming, and we’ve seen it in the past through historical relationships, the relationship between rising temperatures, increasing crop production. We didn’t see catastrophic events occur in the last four or five thousand years of history. And I don’t think we’re going to see them now. These are projections made on climate models about what might happen 50 or 80 or 100 years in the future. And I what I do is I look at what’s actually happening today and I see an Earth that’s thriving, prospering, greening and humanity’s benefiting because of it.”

November 13, 2019

Wrightstone debated Dr. Charles Greene, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and fellow at the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University. Wrightstone claimed in a post at the Cornwall Alliance website that “Professor Greene holds radically extreme views on future warming and its effects.”³³

October 28, 2019

Wrightstone testified against Pennsylvania joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state, cooperative cap and trade program, before the Pennsylvania House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.³⁴

Below are some excerpts from Wrightstone’s testimony:

[00:03:16] “What I talk a lot about and present is facts, is the overwhelming evidence of rising temperature and increasing CO2, having tremendously beneficial aspects to the Earth. I’m not going to get into all that this morning. The science behind that is stark and overwhelming. What we’re seeing is an earth and its ecosystems that are thriving and prospering and humanity’s benefiting, and it’s not even close.” [00:03:42]
[00:03:42] “The other thing we heard about today was a 97 percent consensus that the DEP secretary must have misstated. He got information wrong. That was not from NOAA. It was from a study by John Cook. David Gates, Dr. Legates spoke earlier. He was a he wrote the peer reviewed study that completely disputed that, showing that actually the same studies reviewed by the Cook study showed that less than one percent of the scientists actually agree with catastrophic manmade warming.” [00:04:14]
[00:04:14] “Also, we’ve heard that CO2 is a pollutant. That was based on the Obama administration endangerment studies. I expect that to be overturned. CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s a miracle molecule.” [00:04:28]
[…]
[00:05:02] “We are actually today we don’t have too much CO2. We don’t have enough. We’re actually CO2 impoverished.” [00:05:08]
[…]
[00:10:26] “I think we can actually make the statement rather than the alarmist scenarios proposed today, I think we could all agree, looking at this data, that global warming would save lives.” [00:10:38]
[…]
[00:13:52] “We’ve seen the justification stated for joining the RGGI are not supported by the facts of the science. Any reductions in Pennsylvania’s carbon dioxide emissions are so small as to be indistinguishable from zero. This proposal would infringe on the freedoms of people, make them significantly poorer for virtually no advancement of the stated intention to avert global warming. The legislature, the business community and all right, thinking citizens should stand against this economically crippling and unneeded proposal. In short, it’s a solution in search of a problem.” [00:14:27]

October 2019

Lowman Henry, head of the Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion & Research, interviewed Gregory Wrightstone for an episode of his radio show. ³⁵

The Energy and Policy Institute has reported that the Lincoln Institute was part of a “tangled web of individuals and groups representing business interests and conservative think tanks” opposing Pennsylvania’s attempt to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).³⁶

March 27, 2019

Wrightstone was invited by Pennsylvania State Representative Daryl Metcalfe, a Republican and chair of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, to testify at a committee meeting.³⁷ Metcalfe’s office put out a press release noting that he chose Wrightstone to “debunk modern climate change myths.”³⁸

In his testimony, Wrightstone brought up the Little Ice Age and argued that subsequent warming has been natural. “This cold period was marked by crop failure, famine, and mass-depopulation because of naturally-occurring global cooling,” he said. “Earth and humanity have benefited greatly from what’s been called the long, slow thaw.”

Reporting on Wrightstone’s testimony, State Impact Pennsylvania noted that “Wrightstone’s broader conclusion, that current warming trends are natural and untethered to CO2 emissions, is directly contrary to the scientific consensus” on the realities of climate change. Michael Mann, an atmospheric science and geoscience professor at Penn State, commented to State Impact Pennsylvania:

“While climate does change naturally, we are warming the planet at an unprecedented rate, putting carbon into the atmosphere a million times faster than the natural geological increases in carbon dioxide that were responsible for e.g. the warmth of the early Cretaceous period.”

Affiliations

Oil & Gas Affiliations

Wrightstone Energy Consulting — President, co-owner⁴⁵
Mountaineer Keystone, LLC — Vice president, geology, 2011 – 2013.⁴⁶
Texas Keystone Incorporated — Former geological advisor and director of geology. According to his resume, Wrightstone “supervised and led geologic staff in evaluation, planning and drilling” and was “responsible for guiding the exploration and development efforts of Texas Keystone, Inc., a mid-size independent oil and gas exploration company.” He also provided “geologic support” for a “sister company,” Gulf Keystone Petroleum..⁴⁷ ⁴⁸
Statoil Energy — Full-time oil & gas consultant, primary geological consultant, 1996 – 1999)⁴⁹
Eagle Resources Corporation — Vice president of exploration, 1994 – 1996⁵⁰
Oil and Gas Consultant — Consulted “to a variety of companies and was a major consultant for Castle Exploration (Mid-continent) and Penn Virginia,” 1993-1994⁵¹
Mark Resources Corporation — Senior exploration geologist, 1984 – 1993.⁵²
Morris Exploration Company — Geologist, 1981 – 1984⁵³
Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation — Geologist, 1979–1981⁵⁴

Publications

Wrightstone authored the self-published (via Silver Crown Productions LLC) book Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know.

According to his Heartland Institute profile, “the book’s contrarian position on climate reveals that, contrary to the ‘consensus opinion,’ the Earth and humanity are flourishing and goes on to challenge the predicted apocalyptic forecasts of pending climate doom.”⁵⁵

Gregory Wrightstone has regularly contributed commentary to Hart Energy, a Houston-based energy industry publisher, and spoken at Hart Energy conferences. ⁵⁶

He has also written op-eds for a variety of other oil and gas publications, such as: