Rick Perry may have forgotten the name of the Department of Energy, but it’s clear from the questions they are asking that the Trump transition team has no idea what the DOE actually does. The Trump team has been circulating a list of questions to DOE officials and workers. Part of that list seems perfectly reasonable, if a little unnerving, such as question #1 …
1) Can you provide a list of all boards, councils, commissions, working groups, and currently active at the Department? For each, can you please provide members, meeting schedules, and authority (statutory or otherwise) under which they were created?
Okay. Sure. The incoming administration gets to know everything going on, even if the manner of asking about it does seem ominously threatening. If that first question comes with just a whisper of persecution, other questions turn that into a shout.
13) Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any lnteragency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings? Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, EPSA emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation of or as a result of those meetings?
DOE workers have, sensibly, refused to participate in this pre-inaugural witch hunt. Still, there’s a bigger issue with the list of questions that Trump’s team is asking.
Sure, they’re looking for any excuse to tear down renewable energy sources and play up oil and gas. Sure, they’re have their blacklist for scientists and bureaucrats ready and itching for names. But there’s one rather large thing they missed.
A quick look at the Department of Energy's web site is enough to show that it contains a section called the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA is …
“responsible for ensuring the integrity and safety of the nation’s nuclear weapons, advancing nuclear nonproliferation and promoting international nuclear safety.”
During the campaign, Donald Trump made multiple references to the state of America’s nuclear arsenal. Statements which often conflated the idea of aging silo-based missiles with the whole nuclear triad—statements that neatly matched the pervasive alt-white statements that President Obama was allowing our nuclear weapons to fall apart, when in fact Obama instituted a massive plan to update and improve the arsenal (though he would like to scale back that update).
But now, given a chance to ask the agency that takes care of America’s nukes about the state of the arsenal, Trump’s team asked … nothing. No questions about the stockpile of material used for bomb making, despite the chest-pounding during the campaign over Russia buying a Canadian company with interest in US uranium reserves. No questions about nuclear counter-terrorism or the threat of nuclear proliferation.
No questions at all about the most central, critical function of the DOE.
However, the Trump team did take time to ask about Trump’s most hated source of energy …
4) What is the Department's role with respect to the development of offshore wind?
In fact, it’s the first specific type of energy asked about. So, people who live on the coasts, be assured that Trump will protect you from the threat of seeing windmills out at sea (windmills that would be especially visible in the flare from terrorist nukes that Trump isn’t concerned about).
Trump’s team also took time to get a list of everything involved in a research section of the DOE that was set up by President Obama.
2) Can you provide a complete list of ARPA-E's projects?
And went knee-deep in the weeds to ask about details of how the DOE’s Energy Information Administration prepared some of its reports on energy production.
9) In the Annual Energy Outlook 2016, EIA assumed that the Clean Power Plan should be in the reference case despite the fact that the reference case is based on existing laws and EIA regulations. Why did EIA make that assumption, which seems to be atypical of past forecasts?
Yes, EIA, why did you make estimates for the near future based on the plan that the sitting president put in place for the near future?
In fact, there’s almost no question put to the DOE staff that doesn’t seem to be an attack on renewable energy or an insistence that the DOE undervalues good old oil.
10) EIA's assessments of levelized costs for renewable technologies do not contain back-up costs for the fossil fuel technologies that are brought on-line to replace the generation when those EIA technologies are down. Is this is a correct representation of the true levelized costs?
Uhh. Yes. Next question.
11) Has EIA done analysis that shows that additional back-up generation is not needed? How does EIA's analysis compare with other analyses on this issue?
Um. Yes again, and no, I’m sure the numbers don’t line up with what Breitbart, Alex Jones, or the Petroleum Institute of America is saying.
12) Renewable and solar technologies are expected to need additional transmission costs above what fossil technologies need. How has EIA represented this in the AEO forecasts? What is the EIA magnitude of those transmission costs?
Well, no. No we did not include costs that represent a talking point you simply made up. We’re funny that way.
The questions are all like that. It’s a frightening list for what’s there—an implicit and explicit attack not just on renewable energy sources, but on making calculations based on reality—and for what’s not there. In 74 questions, Trump’s transition team never got around to asking a single thing about America’s stockpile of nuclear material, Americas nuclear arsenal, or the DOE’s role in safeguarding those resources.
Which isn’t to say that the list doesn’t include questions about nuclear energy. Such as ...
34) Does the Department have any thoughts on how to reduce the bureaucratic burden for exporting U.S. energy technology, including but not limited to commercial nuclear technology?
The Trump transition team: making it easier to spread nuclear technology around the world … one way, or another.