Antinuclear

Donald Trump to appoint highly unsuitable Rick Perry to lead Energy Department

OOPS: RICK PERRY TAPPED TO LEAD DEPARTMENT HE WANTED TO ELIMINATE
The brain-frozen Texas governor gets the last laugh. Vanity Fair, BY TINA NGUYEN  , 13 Dec 16,  Continuing his trend of appointing people to lead the same departments they want to destroy, Donald Trump will reportedly announce that he will appoint Rick Perry, who famously forgot during a 2011 debate that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy, to lead the Department of Energy.

Perry, the former governor of Texas, was previously briefly a frontrunner in the 2012 presidential race, until his fortunes cratered when he struggled to list the three departments he would eliminate as president. “Oops”, he offered sheepishly. Having forgotten that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy (in addition to the Commerce and Education departments) is hardly the most troublesome aspect of Perry’s nomination.

While Perry spent more than a decade as the executive of a state that is a major energy producer—promoting the expansion of fossil fuel extraction even as Texas itself became a leader in wind power, with over 10 percent of the state’s energy being drawn from wind farms—the D.O.E. is mostly concerned with nuclear energy, including the safe handling of nuclear materials, oversight of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor production, energy-related research, and developing new energy technologies…..

……Judging from his 2012 platform and his position on the board of a natural gas company, Perry, a climate-change skeptic, would tout energy independence above all and push for an increase in North American drilling and “clean coal” technologies. Trump, too, has promised to increase America’s energy production by lifting regulations limiting the extraction and production of domestic oil, coal, and gas. But neither Trump nor Perry have said much about nuclear energy, which remains the central mission of the D.O.E. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/12/donald-trump-rick-perry-energy-department

December 14, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized