Rick Perry vowed to scrap the Energy Department. Now he may lead it.
Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, once said the U.S. Department of Energy "needs to be done away with."
Now, Perry is poised to lead that same agency.
President-elect Donald Trump plans to name the Texas Republican as his secretary of energy, transition officials told reporters Tuesday.
SEE ALSO: Donald Trump's anti-climate science shakedown just started
Perry would fit right in with Trump's other cabinet picks, a fact that climate scientists and environmentalists say they find particularly troubling.
The former governor has said he doesn't think carbon emissions — a main driver of climate change — are harmful pollutants, and Trump's nominee for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions from Alabama agrees.
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Perry also champions increased production of oil and natural gas. So does Trump's pick for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil Corp. — the biggest oil company in the world.
And like Perry, Trump's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency opposes the very agency Trump wants him to run. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt has a long record of suing the EPA and has described himself as a "leading advocate" against the EPA's "activist agenda."
Perry previously vowed to eliminate the Energy Department in 2011, when he was seeking the Republican nomination in the 2012 presidential race. The cut was part of Perry's broader plan to shrink the federal budget and revamp the tax code.
Before he said any of that, however, he forgot what the agency was even named.
During a televised debate, Perry turned to Ron Paul and proclaimed he would list off the three federal agencies he wanted to cut: "Commerce, Education and, uh, um, what's the third one there?"
Trump has chosen @GovernorPerry to lead the department he forgot in a list of agencies he wanted to abolish in 2012 https://t.co/t6JU9ajRiE pic.twitter.com/FlOxKLLhaI
— POLITICO (@politico) December 13, 2016
After the debate, Perry met with reporters and clarified what he had intended to say on stage.
"Those three agencies of government — Education and Energy and Commerce are part of it, and the bottom line is, I may have forgotten Energy, but I haven't forgotten my conservative principles," Perry told reporters.
"Everybody tomorrow will understand that the Energy Department needs to be done away with," he said.
The Energy Department, with a budget of $29.6 billion, has a broad and complex mandate.
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The agency manages the country's nuclear weapons stockpile and oversees cleanup of nuclear waste. The department also funds research and development for clean and fossil energy technologies, electric vehicles and basic energy research.
Its 17 national laboratories serve as the nation's leading institutions for scientific research in areas such as climate change, computer science, biology and the origins of the universe.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist, has jokingly referred to his agency as the "department of everything."
Despite its varied roles, the department remains one of the most important drivers of low- and zero-emissions energy technologies in the U.S. and around the world.
For instance, the department's Loan Programs Office helped finance early-stage solar projects that ushered in a massive expansion of large-scale solar farms across the U.S.
Perry isn't necessarily opposed to clean energy. During his tenure as Texas governor, the Lone Star State became one of the world's top producers of wind energy, according to the American Wind Energy Association.
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But Perry is a major proponent of fossil fuels. The former governor sits on the board of Energy Transfer Partners, the Dallas-based company building the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline through North Dakota.
If Perry revives his plans to slash Energy Department spending, the nation's progress on clean energy research and development could slow, leaving other countries — like China or India — to pick up America's slack, said Jonathan Levy, a former deputy chief of staff to Secretary Moniz who is now a director at Vision Ridge Partners, an investment firm focused on sustainable technologies.
"The choice that the next administration has is, do you want to keep pushing hard on this trillion-dollar clean energy market opportunity, or step aside?" Levy told Mashable. "Do we want to lead, or do we want to follow?"
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Geoffrey Supran, a renewable energy researcher and activist, said he was disheartened by the "climate-denying cabinet" that Trump is seeking to build.
Supran said his doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was funded entirely by the Energy Department. He is now a post-doctoral researcher at MIT and Harvard University, and one of the labs he works in recently received a large federal grant to model future energy systems.
"Now there's huge uncertainty as to whether we can use that money" in the next administration, Supran told Mashable. He noted that Trump has vowed to slash funding for other major science agencies such as NASA and the EPA.
"All of us work every day to invent these solutions and bring them to the market, and these policies threaten to completely undermine America's ability to contribute to global decarbonization," he said.
