New US Energy Secretary’s Idiotic Press Release

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Elections don’t matter. They’re all the same. That’s the nonsense you hear far too often. Elections do matter, and they result in massive differences in policy and in the future.

The new US Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, has signed his first Secretarial Order. It directs the US Department of Energy to “take immediate action to unleash American Energy in accordance with President Trump’s executive orders.” The press release about this, to be frank, is idiotic. But this is where they will be taking the US Department of Energy for the next 4 years at least. (Frankly, I’m not optimistic that we aren’t at the beginning of an autocoup, but we’ll have to leave that for another time.)

The Secretarial Order is full of lies and misinformation, as well as idiotic plans for where to take the country’s energy systems. For example, in item #1 of 9, here’s 4 lies in one sentence: “Net-zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of our energy system, and undermine our energy and national security.”

In actuality, renewable energy brings down energy costs, provides greater grid reliability, and definitely provides much better energy and national security.

Item #6: “Modernize America’s nuclear stockpile: We urgently need to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons systems. The Department will continue its critical mission of protecting our national security and nuclear deterrence in the development, modernization, and stewardship of America’s atomic weapons enterprise, including the peaceful use of nuclear technology and nonproliferation.” Brilliant. Back to promoting the threat of nuclear war and encouraging others to develop nuclear weapons. Smart politics, that is.

Item #7 is a great way to throw a ton of money down the drain while accomplishing nothing: “Unleash Commercial Nuclear Power in the United States.” Secretary Dumbass Wright writes: “The long-awaited American nuclear renaissance must launch during President Trump’s administration. As global energy demand continues to grow, America must lead the commercialization of affordable and abundant nuclear energy. As such, the Department will work diligently and creatively to enable the rapid deployment and export of next-generation nuclear technology.” Nuclear power is extremely expensive, ridiculously slow to develop, slow to ramp up and ramp down, dangerous, and completely unnecessary. They are saying that we are going to throw money at a much more expensive, less flexible, less safe electricity generation source because … oh yeah, because we are now letting morons run the USA.

There’s more stupid stuff in there, and maybe there’s a bit of good stuff in there, but it’s vague and one can’t know what they actually mean by much of it.

Yes, Elon Musk is now the shadow president, and one would hope that he would at least find ways to get more battery storage and renewables on the grid. But Musk has also gone full loon on some topics, such as claiming that global heating and climate change are not such a big risk after all since it’s a long time until the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would make us braindead. (I can’t even begin to explain how stupid that comment was….) Of course, Musk is also pouring tons of CO2 and methane emissions into the atmosphere by using unpermitting portable fossil gas power plants to power AI data centers, so we are far, far past the point where Tesla didn’t include natural gas hookups at Gigafactory 1 so they wouldn’t be tempted to use them. Musk has been on the wrong side of obvious science for a while and has been parroting Republican talking points that specifically go against Tesla’s mission and business interests. I expect he’ll get some battery storage contracts out of this, but I don’t expect him to save US energy policy from corrupt fossil fuel and nuclear interests.

RIP, American leadership on energy and technology. It was nice knowing you. Good morning, Idiocracy 2.0.