| Former
Texas Governor To Be Trump’s Energy Secretary
By Patrick
Martin
December 14,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "WSWS"
- In
nominating former Texas Governor Rick Perry as secretary
of energy, President-elect Donald Trump is continuing
the pattern of selecting enemies of consumer protection
and regulation of business to run the federal agencies
charged with these responsibilities.
Perry is on
record as a supporter of the complete elimination of the
Department of Energy. It was the third of three federal
departments he called for abolishing during a Republican
presidential debate in 2011, the one whose name he
forgot, leading to the widely ridiculed “Oops” moment
that helped torpedo his campaign for the 2012
nomination.
The Department
of Energy has two major functions: regulatory oversight
of energy industries, including fossil fuel, wind, solar
and nuclear; and production, storage and replenishment
of the US nuclear weapons stockpile. The latter
function, including massive cleanup costs involved in
disposing of nuclear waste, accounts for two-thirds of
the department’s budget.
When Perry and
other right-wing Republicans and think tanks such as the
Heritage Foundation call for the abolition of the
Department of Energy, they have in mind its regulatory
functions and programs for promoting non-fossil-fuel
energy sources such as wind and solar, not its nuclear
weapons operations, which would be transferred to the
Pentagon.
The direction
that Trump intends for the Department of Energy was
indicated by a questionnaire sent by Trump’s transition
team to the agency, which sought, among other things, “a
list of all Department of Energy employees or
contractors who have attended” certain meetings related
to climate change. Energy Department officials declined
to provide such a list, but the request led to
widespread complaints from workers in the agency that
the incoming administration was preparing a witch-hunt
against those who upheld the scientific case for the
dangers of global warming.
Perry’s signing
on with the government of Donald Trump is a remarkable
act of political cynicism on both sides. During the
campaign for the Republican presidential nomination,
Perry made some of the most scathing comments as Trump
began to emerge as the frontrunner. Perry described
Trump as a “cancer on conservatism” whose campaign was
“a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and
nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to
perdition if pursued.”
Now this
cancerous demagogue has offered Perry a position of
considerable power, commanding a department with 100,000
employees and contractors and a $30 billion budget, with
influence over policies critical to the business
interests Perry has long represented politically, and
Perry has leapt at the chance.
As the governor
for 14 years of the state with the highest oil and gas
production, Perry has the closest ties to the industry,
invariably taking its side on issues such as
antipollution regulation, legally required cleanup
efforts and workers’ safety.
After the BP
oil spill polluted much of the Gulf of Mexico in 2010,
the worst environmental disaster in US history, the
Texas governor alibied for the giant corporation even as
tar balls were washing up on Texas beaches. He called
the explosion on the Deep Horizon oil platform an “act
of God.”
BP was also
responsible for one of the worst industrial disasters on
land, which occurred during Perry’s governorship. This
was the May 2005 Texas City refinery explosion, which
killed 15 workers and injured 170 others.
After leaving
office, Perry immediately signed on as a shill for the
oil and gas industry. He is currently on the board of
directors of Energy Transfer Partners, the company that
is building the Dakota Access Pipeline, the target of
mass protests by Native Americans and environmentalists
near the Standing Rock Reservation.
Perry is an
adamant opponent of climate science, going even beyond
Trump. While the president-elect has alternately
denounced climate change as a “hoax” perpetrated by
China and declared that he has an “open mind” on the
subject, the former Texas governor has claimed that
climate change is a scam by “a substantial number of
scientists who have manipulated data so that they will
have dollars rolling into their projects.”
As energy
secretary, Perry will be in charge of major nuclear
weapons facilities, including Hanford, Washington; Los
Alamos, New Mexico; and Savannah, Georgia. At all of
these facilities there are pressing issues of worker
safety and the safety of the populations living near the
sites.
One of the most
important issues for the next energy secretary will be
the ongoing preparations for a permanent storage site
for nuclear waste generated by the military and the
civilian nuclear power industry. The facility is to be
built at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Its completion was long
blocked by Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of
Nevada.
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