Obama's Energy Secretary Defends His Legacy Against Trump
Ernest Moniz is the antithesis of Donald Trump. As the head of the Department of Energy throughout much of President Obama’s second term, he was responsible for championing the Paris Climate Accord, negotiating the Iran nuclear deal with former Secretary of State John Kerry, and diligently pursuing a broad-based energy strategy often called the “all of the above” option. He is as comfortable testifying before the Senate as he is leading rigorous research efforts into the future of energy systems. There are few theoretical physicists who seem to enjoy the grind-it-out politics of Congressional appropriations, but Moniz is one of them.
Perhaps it is not a surprise that Moniz’s accomplishments have come under attack by Trump’s administration. The biggest move was the president’s announcement that the United States would pull out of the Paris treaty, much to the dismay of the international community and American business leaders.
When I spoke to him recently, Moniz spelled out his legacy, as he sees it, and the various ways that the current administration is undermining the very programs that, as he put it, “have clear track records of tremendous success.”
For Moniz, that includes the Loan Programs Office, which made capital available for the deployment of energy technology. After—and despite—the well-publicized Solyndra debacle, that program has experienced few losses and generated substantial returns for taxpayers. Also on Trump’s chopping block are ARPA-E, a research program modeled on the famous Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, and a new structure Moniz created at the Department of Energy called the Energy Policy and Systems Analysis Office, which he says was designed to and received bipartisan support.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who understands the politics, policy, science, and technology of energy as well as Ernie Moniz, so the discussion covers a lot more: the growth of solar, government support for drilling technology, the continued sluggishness of innovation in nuclear power, and the current Department of Energy “review” of base-load power, which has renewable-energy advocates worried.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Moniz calls attention to the fact that the job losses in the coal industry have been primarily driven by technological change in fossil-fuel extraction, namely the development of fracking and other drilling technologies. That allowed for a massive ramp in the production of natural gas, which made it less expensive than coal. And he is founding a new organization that he calls The Roosevelt Project to try to address, on a community-scale, the dislocations that workers will face in a deeply decarbonized world, underpinned by new energy technologies.
A lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation follows.
How did you think about your overall remit at the DOE?
