Rejoice. Something worked right in gov't.

photo:   Alex Wong, Getty Images                                                When President Trump appointed Rick ("Oops") Perry as Secretary of Energy, many of us thought this can't be a good thing.   Rick Perry (and probably Donald Trump, too) didn't know what the job entails -- you know, oil and gas and coal, stuff that people drill out of the ground and get rich on.

Perry had been governor of Texas, where they do have a lot of oil drilling.  And Trump had promised the miners in West Virginia that he would bring back their coal mining jobs.   So together they had this energy thing, a done deal.

The truth is a little more complex, which is why President Obama's first and second Energy Secretaries were both brilliant nuclear research physicists, one with a Nobel Prize.

Because, the truth is, the job of Secretary of Energy has much more these days to do with nuclear energy regulation, safe-guarding of our nuclear weapons, mutual defense treaties, and development of clean, renewable energy sources.    Coal is dead, and oil is on the way out.  Fracking for natural gas will last a few decades.   But it's not the wave of the future, and we need an energy czar that knows that.

Which is all the more reason to rejoice that something worked right in our government structure this week.   Vox.com's David Roberts explained it this way:

Late last year, Rick Perry's Department of Energy asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to bail out struggling power plants that run on coal or nuclear energy.   The plan was to require that the government ensure the full recovery cost for their maintaining a 90 day supply of those fuels on hand.

In effect, as I understand it, it's a selective give-away to coal and nuclear industries -- but not newer renewable energies sources.   It's sort of the anti-subsidy for renewable energy.

Here's where it gets good and we can start rejoicing.   The FERC gave its answer yesterday, and they said: No. 

Roberts wrote:   "There's no spinning this news.  It is a serious setback for the Trump administration, a rebuke to Perry, and an assertion of FERC's ongoing independence and integrity.

"It also marks the emergence of a serious national discussion about the performance of the electricity grid . . .  Despite Perry's efforts . . . big piles of coal will not play a prominent role in that discussion. . . .

"Perry was asking FERC to intervene in energy markets in the crudest possible way, distorting their results based on justifications that were not even facially plausible.

"[Perry's] argument was twofold:  a) subsidies for renewable energy are driving coal and nuclear plants out of business;  and b) the loss of those plants is hurting the reliability and resilience of the electric grid."

The problem, according to Roberts, is that neither argument is true.  Several technical reports showed that the Perry proposal would "substantially raise costs on consumers, for no benefit. . . . "   The commission's decision was unanimous, which is even more promising, given that four of the five members are now Trump appointees.

This decision suggests that FERC will make rational decisions, not just the politically expedient ones.  FERC's core legal justification is simple:  "To justify a change in energy market rules, petitioners to FERC must show two things:"  a) that existing rules are unjust, unreasonable, unduly discriminatory or preferential;  and b) proposed rules are just, reasonable, and not discriminatory or preferential.

The commissioners ruled that the Energy Department proposal failed on both counts.    Now isn't that the way things are supposed to work?    Isn't this a cause for rejoicing -- not just for this one decision -- but for the fact that such a decision can still happen?

I'll let Roberts and Vox.com have the last word:
"For now, it's enough to say that a blow was struck this week for evidence-based policy-making.   In pursuit of crony capitalism, Perry blundered into a nest of wonks.   He did not fare well."

Oops !

Ralph

PS:   Maybe the real lesson here is that in Trumplandia it's better to put an "oops" guy in charge, if the professionals know what they're doing, rather than a Scott Pruitt who knows enough to destroy the EPA.