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Former Texas governor Rick Perry, who as a candidate for president infamously vowed to eliminate the Department of Energy but (“oops!”) couldn’t remember its name, raised alarms throughout the scientific community in December when President-elect Donald Trump tapped him to lead it. Perry, after all, has denied the scientific consensus on climate change, a potentially apocalyptic force that threatens to make the world inhospitable to human life if carbon emissions continue unchecked. More terrifying, however, is the fact that the Department of Energy actually has little to do with oil, or wind, or solar power, although it has some bearing on all three. In fact, the primary directive of the Department of Energy is to oversee America’s vast nuclear arsenal, with nearly two-thirds of the department’s $30 billion budget spent on maintaining the world’s most dangerous weapons.
Rick Perry, it seems, was not fully cognizant of that. Neither, apparently, was Donald Trump.
According to The New York Times, Perry accepted the nomination under the assumption that he would be a cheerleader for deregulating the energy industry, boosting oil and gas, and touring the world promoting American energy—a job that, as the former governor of Texas, he believed himself qualified to do. Within days, however, he learned that his chief responsibilities as energy secretary would be maintaining nearly 1,400 nuclear inventories, including several thousand active nuclear warheads, at a time when Russia and China are modernizing their nuclear capabilities and North Korea is working to perfect its own.
“If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy,’” Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist formerly part of Trump’s energy department transition team, told the Times. “If you asked him now, he’d say, ‘I’m serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.’ It’s been a learning curve.”
In a Trump transition office statement announcing Perry’s nomination in December, Perry used the word “nuclear” only once. Trump himself said Perry would “make sure we take advantage of our huge natural resource deposits to make America energy independent,” a task that generally falls under the purview of the secretary of the interior.
If confirmed by the Senate, before whom he will sit for a confirmation hearing Thursday, Perry would have big shoes to fill at the department. Current Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz was the former chairman of M.I.T.’s physics department and oversaw an actual particle accelerator, and former secretary Steven Chu won a Nobel Prize for his work on atomic physics. Perry, on the other hand, got two Cs, a D, and an F when he took Chemistry in college, according to his transcript from Texas A&M. He received a C in Physics.
Perry’s backers argue that he is not entirely without experience dealing with nuclear policy. As governor, Perry advocated for the construction of a nuclear waste repository in his home state, giving him insight into the process of disposing of nuclear waste, one of the main problems facing the department in recent years. “He really understands this stuff,” Charles McDonald, a spokesman for the Dallas-based company Waste Control Specialists, told the Times, citing their work with him in bringing the only state-licensed nuclear waste facility to Texas. Nor would Perry be the first energy secretary without academic expertise. Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson also led the department in the 1990s, under then president Bill Clinton, after serving as ambassador to the United Nations.
From Vanity Fair
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