What does he know about energy!

h/t Bookworm

"Keep calm and drawl."

Trump has picked Rick Perry to lead the Department of Energy. Ace of Spades has this:

Governor Rick Perry, Who Once Considered Scrapping the Energy Department, Will Now Lead It
—Ace

The liberal media is aghast at the irony.

I'm not. The most important attribute for the exercise of power is an understanding of the restraint that must be imposed on any exercise of power -- and feeling that a department is kind of bullshit is an excellent start to knowing that restraint.

It should be noted that under Obama, many agencies were perverted, Orwell-like, to perform the exact opposite function of their original mission. The Department of Energy, created to promote the generation of energy, was perverted into an agency largely considered with strangling initiatives to generate energy.

I don't think Rick Perry will roll that way.

Drill, baby, drill.

President-elect Donald Trump has selected former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to be his nominee for energy secretary, the transition team announced Wednesday, which would make him head of an agency he once sought to eliminate.
...

If confirmed by the Senate, Perry will inherit a department that has focused on promoting clean energy and reducing dependence on fossil fuels, but has also seen domestic production of oil explode. And his selection is a nod to the traditional GOP emphasis on energy sources like coal and oil.

"As the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry created created a business climate that produced millions of new jobs and lower energy prices in his state, and he will bring that same approach to our entire country as Secretary of Energy," Trump said in a statement. "My administration is going to make sure we take advantage of our huge natural resource deposits to make America energy independent and create vast new wealth for our nation, and Rick Perry is going to do an amazing job as the leader of that process."

"I've never understood why, with all of our own reserves, we've allowed this country to be held hostage by OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries, some of which are hostile to America," Trump wrote in his book "Crippled America."

The article notes the current "controversial" policy of DoE loans to boondoggles like Solyndra.

I think Perry might be interested in some accountability on that front. And I don't think he'll be interested in more boondoggle loans.

Read more here.

Credibility?

Ralph Vartabedian reports in the LA Times,

When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations.

The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste.


Drums of nuclear waste in a salt shaft at New Mexico's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.

The Feb. 14, 2014, accident is also complicating cleanup programs at about a dozen current and former nuclear weapons sites across the U.S. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste that were headed for the dump are backed up in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and elsewhere, state officials said in interviews.

Read more here.