First things first. Rick Perry is stupid and terrible at his job.
As Obama put a nuclear physicist and Nobel-prize winner in the post of Energy Secretary, Trump put a man who, upon taking the job, famously, (and embarrassingly), admitted that he didn’t even understand what the job entailed.
Perry thinks his main duty as Energy Secretary is to sell oil, and he even sucks at doing that. (He once explained the law of supply and demand as: “You put the supply out there and the demand will follow.”)
Dumb as a lump of coal.
On a recent selling trip that included Northern Africa, the last place in the world that needs oil, Rick Perry brought back this word salad:
It’s going to take fossil fuels to push power out into those villages . . . But also from the standpoint of sexual assault, when the lights are on, when you have light that shines, the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts
Yup, that’s not out of context. He actually said fossil fuels prevent rape.
For a man who’s known for saying dumb things, trying to use the threat of sexual assault as a ploy to sell oil has to be a new record of stupid.
Putting aside for the moment that Rick Perry was no friend of rape victims while acting as governor, his statement isn’t just idiotic. It’s completely wrong.
First of all, the problem isn’t that Africa needs oil shipments—it actually has plenty of oil and coal. The problem is that large swaths of the continent don’t have the massive hydrocarbon grid infrastructure needed to get the energy from burning fossil fuels. However, one inexpensive solar panel on a house can give the light that Perry said is critical.
Second, as environmental groups point out, if anything, Rick Perry has it backwards. Right now, one of the worst civil wars on Earth is happening in the oil-rich nation of Sudan. The war is being fought over oil, its proceeds, and its distribution. Horrifyingly, a recent UN report shows that mass rape is being used as weapon of war in the conflict.
It’s not the only one. The same is true for the current war within the Niger Delta of southern Nigeria.
There has never been a war fought over, nor any mass rape carried out, over a wind or solar farm. No group on the planet is capable of controlling wind or solar power. Oil is a different, and often tragic, story.
I can’t believe I have to explain this to a man who is our Energy Secretary. But at least Rick Perry seems to know that sexual assault is wrong.
That’s more than I can say for his boss.