Donald Trump Appoints Renewable Energy Critic To Head Renewable Energy Office

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/05/04/donald-trump-appoints-renewable-energy-critic-head-renewable-energy-office/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Donald Trump Appoints Renewable Energy Critic To Head Renewable Energy Office[/font]

May 4th, 2017 by Joshua S Hill

[font size=3]In yet another we-wish-it-were-baffling appointment, Donald Trump has announced renewable energy critic Daniel Simmons as the new head of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Donald Trump’s appointments to key positions in his administration have been slow going, but have never failed to raise eyebrows. He appointed an ex-fossil fuel CEO to be his Secretary of State, a renowned climate skeptic to head up the transition for the EPA and a renowned EPA antagonist and fossil fuel-puppet to head up the EPA, a racist anti-equal rights muppet as Attorney General, and any number of Wall Street bankers to positions in an Administration which was supposed to be “for the people.” His energy and science appointments have been especially telling, prioritizing traditional economics over the new reality and scientific fact.

So, to make matters worse and to ensure he doesn’t make a sensible appointment, Donald Trump has appointed Daniel Simmons, a conservative scholar and renewable energy critic to be the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).

The Washington Post‘s article on the appointment explains that “The selection marks one of several recent Trump appointments to top energy and environmental posts, which appear to repudiate the Obama administration’s policies aimed at shifting the nation to low-carbon sources of electricity.” However, that hardly seems to go far enough. Donald Trump’s appointments don’t simply “appear to repudiate Obama administration’s policies” but go all the way to simply repudiating sensible business and scientific realities. Scott Pruitt’s time at the top of the EPA will only castrate the necessary environmental work that organization has been doing for decades, in the face of all good science. Rick Perry’s time as the head of the Department of Energy will severely hamstring the country’s economic development and energy security.

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[kristopher]

1. Trump brings Koch network's green-energy foes from the fringe to the center of power

Dec. 5, 2016

When an obscure nonprofit group attacked one of California’s signature green-energy projects this summer — warning a congressional panel that the embrace of solar energy would lead to crippling hikes in electricity bills — officials in the state shrugged off the testimony as noise from the fringe.

With Donald Trump’s election, however, that group, the Institute for Energy Research, has moved suddenly from the fringe to the center of power. The president-elect has sent the group’s president, a former Koch Industries lobbyist named Thomas Pyle, to the Energy Department to take charge of its transition.

For years, Pyle has led a coordinated national assault on renewable power. His groups and others that belong to the sprawling network bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, whose vast fortune stems originally from oil refining, pressure lawmakers to roll back policies that promote green power. The Koch network gave Pyle’s groups $3 million in 2015.

Now, in his role with the Trump transition, Pyle’s vision will shape the new direction of a federal agency that has been a crucial partner to California and like-minded states in their embrace of solar, wind and geothermal power.

Days before he was appointed to the role, Pyle, who did not respond to interview requests, tweeted that he expected the new administration would go beyond a mere rollback of President Obama’s climate-change actions and bring about “a reset of a generation of failed energy and environmental policies.”

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-kochs-climate-20161205-story.html