By Morgan Clendaniel

President Obama is continuing with his strategy of appointing actual scientists to head the energy department, by replacing outgoing Secretary Stephen Chu with MIT physicist Ernest Moniz.

Moniz has more government experience than Chu did, having served as associate director of the White House office of science and technology policy and as Bill Clinton's undersecretary of energy.

The Washington Post notes what he'll bring to the table in terms of energy policy for the next four years:

[Moniz] is devoted to the "all-of-the-above" strategy for energy that Obama has embraced. In a voluminous written and spoken record, Moniz has come out in favor of nuclear power, research into carbon capture and storage for coal, renewable energy and shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing.

Chu was also outspoken in his support for "all of the above" while also directing lots of money and research toward cutting-edge projects through the ARPA-E program.

Moniz and new EPA head Gina McCarthy, who was also nominated today, have to be confirmed by the Senate first. They will make up the two most prominent personalities behind any second-term attempt to deal with climate change. Perhaps their confirmation hearings will be a chance to, er, clear the air about the administration's plans for the environment and energy in the next four years.

1 Comments

1. 1. sault 03:25 PM 3/4/13

   While anything but more coal and oil for our energy sources is an improvement, "all-of-the-above" is kind of a simplistic way of explaining a prudent energy policy.
   
   First of all, fracking is exempted from following the Clean Drinking Water and Clean Air Act. We need to repeal these exemptions so the goverment isn't picking winners. Everybody should play by the same rules, right? Once we get this accomplished, we also need to stop the ridiculous practice of keeping the EPA from knowing what, exactly, is in all that fracking fluid. Just because it might be "proprietary" isn't an excuse. The government handles proprietary information all the time and the companies involved hardly ever have any issues. This way, the EPA can adequately monitor for contamination, fine the companies responsible for it, and adequately protect public health.
   
   Secondly, nuclear power gets a lot of attention, but the rate of new reactor construction is totally inadequate to have any meaningful impact on our energy future. Whether through incompetence, overwhelming complexity, a burdensome regulatory environment, NIMBY-ism or a combination of factors, the large, light water reactors (LWRs) that make up nearly all of our current and planned nuclear fleet each take a decade or more to build. The approval process from the NRC has been streamlined a great deal in recent years, but the pipeline of proposed new capacity is still vanishingly small compared to what we need to reduce pollution and avoid dangerous climate change.
   
   "Next generation" reactors have been proposed that MIGHT be cheaper and quicker to build, but their benefits need to be confirmed with a few commercial demonstration reactors first before we go all-in on them. Otherwise, we will have to work through another suite of unforseen problems like the LWRs saddled us with.
   
   Finally, efficiency and renewables have proved to be highly successful in countries that prioritize them, like Germany for example. While it takes a lot of investment to get these approaches up to scale and to counter the IMMENSE incumbency / externality advantages that dirty energy has (for example, they get to release pollution that harms people's health, but they don't have to pay ANYTHING to cover those damages), the payoff of an increasingly clean and sustainable economy is worth it.

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