Tag: department of energy
While Abbott Traffics Migrants, Texas Electric Grid Freezes Again

While Abbott Traffics Migrants, Texas Electric Grid Freezes Again

Before and on Christmas Day 2022, much of the United States suffered extreme weather — from record snowfall and blizzard conditions in Buffalo to severe cold in Colorado and Kansas. Temperatures fell to 9F in Atlanta, 8F in New York City and 12F in Washington, D.C. Thousands of flights had to be canceled, and weather-related fatalities occurred everywhere from upstate New York to Tennessee.

Texas suffered effects from the weather as well, bringing back memories of the February 2021 blackout and once again reminding Texans of the vulnerability of their energy grid.

On Christmas Day, Newsweek’s Fatma Khaled reported, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is facing a grid ‘emergency’ this holiday weekend due to an electric energy shortage as an arctic blast causes failures at power plants in the state. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on Friday, (December 23) declared that an emergency exists in Texas ‘due to a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electric energy, and other causes.’”

On December 23, according to Khaled, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) “requested” an “emergency order” that it be allowed to “exceed the usual federal air quality restrictions” that day because of the weather and the energy demands it was facing.

In February 2021, Texas suffered a major crisis when it experienced unusually cold weather and a widespread blackout occurred — leaving millions of Texans without heat or electricity during freezing temperatures. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and other far-right media pundits claimed that green energy caused the blackout because it couldn’t handle the colder weather, which was nonsense; the vast majority of Texas’ energy comes from fossil fuels, not green energy.

Moreover, Scandinavian countries that typically get much colder than Texas during the winter months use green energy extensively without any problem. Texas’ problem in 2021, rather, was that its power grid had not been properly winterized. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Texas’ 2022 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, sounded the alarm about Texas’ energy problems during his campaign and stressed that GOP incumbent Abbott was dropping the ball; regardless, Abbott was reelected, defeating O’Rourke by 11 percent.

Khaled reported that on December 23, “Reliant Energy, which serves over 1.5 million Texans, urged its customers to reduce their energy usage by limiting the use of large appliances. Temperatures in some parts of Texas reached a low of 1 degree by Thursday night, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). Meanwhile, wind gusts reached up to 40 miles per hour in areas in North Texas, The Texas Tribune reported.”

Khaled added, “Many Texans experienced power outages on Friday amid strong winds and the brutally cold temperatures, with more than 77,000 customers losing power, according to PowerOutage.us. As of Sunday afternoon, a little more than 5000 customers were without power. Still, Texas officials assured residents that the power grid is up and running despite the challenges, and that the grid will not be severely impacted as it was in February 2021 when three severe winter storms and frigid temperatures stressed the grid.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Engulfed In Ukraine Scandal, Perry Resigns As Energy Secretary

Engulfed In Ukraine Scandal, Perry Resigns As Energy Secretary

Energy Secretary Rick Perry told President Donald Trump on Thursday that he will be resigning from the administration shortly, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the New York Times. The reports did not say when, precisely, he will be leaving government, but the Times said it would be “soon.”

Perry, once a high-profile GOP candidate for president and governor of Texas, faded into the background as a member of Trump’s Cabinet and managed to avoid the big scandals that touched nearly every other top official — until recently. As Trump’s Ukraine scandal exploded, Perry was quickly swept up in the chaos.

In a recent Wall Street Journal report, Perry confirmed he was involved in Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2016 election.

The Journal reported:

Mr. Perry also said he never heard the president, any of his appointees, Mr. Giuliani or the Ukrainian regime discuss the possibility of specifically investigating former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential contender, and his son Hunter Biden. Mr. Trump’s request for a probe of the Bidens in a July 25 call with Ukraine’s president has sparked the impeachment inquiry in the House.

However, the claim that Perry was unaware of potential Biden probe, a claim echoed by many Trump officials, is unconvincing. Giuliani was quite public about the intent to get Ukraine to investigate Biden — he talked about it in the New York Times. His discussion of the plan last May even led to a backlash from Democrats, which prompted Giuliani to cancel his trip to the country.

A Political Hustler To Run The Department Of Energy

A Political Hustler To Run The Department Of Energy

Reprinted with permission from The Washington Spectator.

Rick Perry might have been a safe pick as Energy Secretary, but it’s hard to argue that he was a smart one. There are valid reasons—beyond the fact that he once argued that the U.S. Department of Energy should be shut down—that would, in a healthy democracy, disqualify Perry as the CEO of a federal agency with 13,000 employees, plus 93,000 contract workers, and an annual budget of $30 million.

Perry is, to put it kindly, not that bright. He lacks the experience to lead a large bureaucracy, despite the fact that he served as governor of Texas for 14 years. And he’s corrupt.

Trump was onto Perry’s questionable intelligence quotient when the Republican primary field was shaping up in July 2015 and Perry was a fresh and eager contender, just leaning into what would become his second failed attempt to win his party’s presidential nomination.

“He should be forced to take an IQ test before being allowed to enter the GOP debate,” Trump tweeted in mid-July 2015.

“He put glasses on so people will think he’s smart. And it just doesn’t work. People see through those glasses,” Trump said at a South Carolina rally a week after his Twitter swipe at Perry.

Trump was aiming at Perry’s Achilles heel: his head.

There was the “Oops” moment during a debate that undermined Perry’s 2012 primary campaign, when he could only name two of the three federal agencies he had promised to eliminate. The one that slipped his mind was the Department of Energy.

There was the college transcript, which his appointment to lead the DOE again brings into high relief.

The two men who preceded Perry as Energy Secretary were Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize- winning physicist on the faculty at Stanford University, followed by Ernest Moniz, who earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Stanford and chairs the physics department at M.I.T. Perry struggled to obtain an undergraduate degree in animal science at Texas A&M, a struggle evident in a college transcript riddled with Cs and Ds, and one F (in organic chemistry).

And there was the fact that Perry had, indeed, failed an IQ test of sorts, four years before being muscled out of the 2016 primary by Donald Trump.

Today’s American presidential primary is its own test of intelligence (and stamina), although the 2016 race was exceptional, with Trump’s thuggish assaults on the other candidates, and their determination that they could rope-a-dope the heavyweight, absorbing all the punishment Trump could direct at them until an establishment candidate emerged and the vanity candidate punched himself out.

Perry’s IQ test was a “normal” Republican primary in 2012, when a much more agile (and intelligent) Mitt Romney prevailed as Perry stumbled again and again, incapable of holding his own in debates, then staggering through painfully histrionic speeches at CPAC in February 2011 in Washington, and nine months later in New Hampshire, where a bizarrely manneristic soliloquy began with Perry theatrically whipping a four-by-six facsimile flat-tax application out of his jacket pocket and waving it about, then concluded with his embrace of a can of maple syrup.

As chairman and CEO of Exxon, Texan Rex Tillerson has at least run a large organization. Rick Perry has not. The 1876 Texas Constitution created a plural executive, dividing authority among more than 20 independently elected statewide officials. The governor, as defined by the Constitution, doesn’t have a lot of power, while the independently elected lieutenant governor does.

The Texas governor’s power derives from the constitutional authority to make thousands of appointments to the boards and commissions that make the rules and render the decisions by which the state is governed. Perry used his 15 years in the governor’s mansion to enhance the power of the office, appointing every state board member and commissioner, sometimes twice—all of whom were indebted to him.

Many of those debts were paid off as Perry’s campaigns were financed, in part, by $17,115,865 in campaign contributions from 921 political appointees or their spouses, according to the non-profit Texans for Public Justice.

An appointment to the Texas A&M Board of Regents went for $610,000, the largest one-day contribution in the state’s political history, as former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm donated what remained in his campaign fund after Perry appointed Gramm’s wife Wendy Lee Gramm. San Antonio Spurs owner Peter Holt contributed $450,000 to Perry after being named to the Parks & Wildlife Board, a commission whose appointees donated $2 million to Perry during his tenure as the state’s chief executive.

Other contributors purchased agency rulings or permits. For $1,120,000, Perry’s second largest career contributor, Dallas billionaire investor Harold Simmons, got expedited approval of a nuclear waste disposal site situated in West Texas and underlain by four major aquifers. Eight of Perry’s environmental staffers were opposed to permitting the dump, because the massive Ogallala Aquifer flows 14 feet below the lower extremity of the excavated pit. Three staff members (not political appointees) of the state’s Texas Commission of Environmental Quality resigned when Simmons, known before his death in 2013 as the “king of superfund sites,” secured his permit in 2011.

Perhaps there is a logic to Trump’s appointment of Perry. Texas is the sort of unregulated, small government, tort-reformed, low-tax state that provides a model for what the United States would look like at the end of a Trump presidency. Perry’s years of experience in a state where political money greases the granting of government contracts could be useful at an agency that in the 2015 fiscal year handed out $26 billion to private contractors, an embarrassment of riches in potential political contributions for the national Republican Party.

The friendships Perry cultivates with contractors at the DOE might be helpful in the future, when he begins to raise money for a Senate race against Ted Cruz in 2018. As Texas singer/songwriter Robert Earl Keen might observe, for old political hustlers like Rick Perry, “the road goes on forever and the party never ends.”

IMAGE: Former Texas Governor Rick Perry is sworn in  before testifying at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on his nomination to be Energy secretary on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 19, 2017 REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Child’s Play: Team Trump Rewrites Department Of Energy Website For Kids

Child’s Play: Team Trump Rewrites Department Of Energy Website For Kids

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica. This story was originally co-published with The Atlantic.

Almost 20 years ago, the U.S. Energy Information Administration had an idea: Make an educational website for children about energy sources and the science behind them.

In short order, the EIA created “Energy Kids,” which now features energy-themed sudoku and crossword puzzles, colorful pie charts, and a know-it-all mascot called Energy Ant. Images of a school bus parked between a coal plant and an oil rig adorn the bottom of the web page, along with drawings of wind turbines, solar panels, and an energy-efficient lightbulb.

During the Obama administration, Energy Kids even won multiple international awards for its content and design, as well as one from a digital publishing company that hailed it as “the best of the best in open and engaging government.”

The Trump administration, it seems, wasn’t altogether impressed with the site or its awards. In recent weeks, language on the website describing the environmental impacts of energy sources has been reworked, and two pie charts concerning the link between coal and greenhouse gas emissions have been removed altogether.

On a page dedicated to coal, the following sentences were deleted: “In the United States, most of the coal consumed is used as a fuel to generate electricity. Burning coal produces emissions that adversely affect the environment and human health.”

The two pie charts that were axed showed that although coal generated only 42 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2014, it created 76 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions linked to electricity generation.

“Impact” seems to have been a word the new administration disliked in particular.

The sentence “Reuse and recycling can also reduce coal’s environmental impact” was changed to “Reuse and recycling can also reduce the environmental effects of coal production and use.” “Underground mines have less of an impact on the environment compared to surface mines” became “Underground mines generally have a lesser effect on the landscape compared to surface mines.” “Impacts of coal mining” was changed to “Effects of coal mining,” and “Reducing the environmental impacts of coal use” became “Reducing the environmental effects of coal use.”

In a section on oil, the sentence, “There are environmental concerns associated with hydraulic fracturing” became “Hydraulic fracturing has some effects on the environment.”

On a separate kids’ page for greenhouse gases, a paragraph detailing the U.S. share of global carbon dioxide emissions was also deleted:

“The United States, with 4 percent of the world’s population, produced about 17 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels in 2011, the most recent year for which global data are available. The United States has the world’s largest economy and meets 83 percent of its energy needs by burning fossil fuels.”

Another change involved shrinking a paragraph into footnote-sized font. The minimized text includes a description of methane as “a strong greenhouse gas” that results from coal mining. In the same paragraph, the sentence “Learn more about greenhouse gas emissions” — along with a link to the EIA’s page on “Where Greenhouse Gases Come From” — was deleted.

The changes on the website for kids were flagged by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group including scientists, lawyers, and archivists that started tracking changes to federal websites and data after Trump’s election. ProPublica independently confirmed the timing and nature of the website changes by examining previous versions of the EIA website captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

“Control of the stream by which we educate the young, that’s how you control the future understanding of generations, of how the world works,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jamieson said that while it’s hardly surprising that information about energy has been shifted toward the pro-fossil fuel views of this administration, “You expect that in the explicit messaging of those talking about the policy, rather than in deleting things that we know.”

Since Trump took office, various government websites have been changed or taken down — such as climate change information on the Environmental Protection Agency’s site and an entire page dedicated to LGBT issues on whitehouse.gov.

But subtle changes to government pages directed at children had so far escaped notice. Last year, the kids’ page drew about 950,000 page views from more than 410,000 unique visitors, according to the EIA.

The EIA, which is part of the Department of Energy, bills itself as a “statistical and analytical agency” that distributes “independent and impartial energy information” for use in policymaking and in educating the public. According to the EIA’s website, the agency’s “data, analyses, and forecasts are independent of approval by any other officer or employee of the U.S. government.”

On the campaign trail, Trump appealed to key segments of working-class voters by promising to bring back coal jobs. The flagging industry has faced steep competition from cleaner and often cheaper natural gas, as well as renewable sources of energy.

Trump’s “America First” energy plan, as touted on the White House website, affirms the administration’s commitment “to reviving America’s coal industry, which has been hurting for too long.” The plan also promises to tap into domestic reserves of oil, shale and natural gas, while at the same time rolling back “burdensome regulations” on the energy industry.

This month, President Trump signed off on the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that would have limited coal companies’ ability to dump potentially toxic mining debris into waterways. The Interior Department had estimated that the rule would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests, but opponents of the rule said it would only further harm the already struggling coal industry.

“These websites are actually giving us clues as to what this administration is going to do, much more so than the very public media show that we are getting through the White House press secretary, through President Trump tweeting or through Kellyanne Conway on ‘Meet the Press,’” said Jennifer Wingard, an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Houston. “It is intentional, these shifts in words are meaningful, and it’s smart to pay attention to them.”

The EIA’s Office of Communications manages the Energy Kids page and aims to update the content with the most recent data, according to Jonathan Cogan, a spokesman for the agency. The office also tries to review all of the pages at least once a year, he said.

“If you’ve seen any changes to it, it’s just part of the ongoing update process,” Cogan said. “When a trend is up in the previous years, and then all of a sudden there’s a downturn, you have to change the wording in the sentence to make the sentence fit the numbers. That’s the only type of thing we would have been doing here.”

However, many of the changes since Trump’s inauguration involve wholesale deletions of older data, as opposed to updates, as well as language edits that seem unrelated to changing trends. When asked about these specific alterations to the Energy Kids webpages, Cogan said that “for the most part, the information that you talk about being deleted is still there, either in a different place or worded slightly differently.”

“I really don’t see a lot there,” he said.

Cogan emphasized that the EIA is a “policy-neutral statistical agency” that is not required to submit its analyses for approval by any part of the executive branch. “We’re not in the position that other agencies might be in,” he said.