Rick Perry Tapped to Run Energy Agency He Vowed to Kill

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a climate science denier who once said that he wanted to shut down the U.S. Department of Energy, has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to run that very agency.

In Perry's famous "oops!" moment in 2011 that helped derail his candidacy for president, he forgot the name of the Energy Department during a Republican debate when asked which federal agencies he would eliminate.

Perry is an ardent critic of Obama administration climate policies and denies that humans are causing climate change. He has falsely said that human-caused global warming is not "settled science by any sense of the imagination."

"Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice to the country, and I believe a disservice to the world," Perry told the Dallas Morning News in 2014. "I'm not a scientist, (but) short term, I'm substantially more concerned about Iran changing the temperature of New York."

If confirmed, Perry would succeed MIT nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz as Energy secretary.

Perry is a former U.S. Air Force captain with a bachelor's degree in animal science from Texas A&M University. He served as Texas' governor over a 14-year period during which the state became the nation's top wind power producer and a leader in shale oil and gas development.

Texas also is the nation's leader in carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption, sending nearly twice the carbon pollution into the atmosphere as California and three times that of New York, DOE data show.

As secretary of energy, Perry would oversee an agency that has a wide-ranging impact on U.S. energy policy, renewable energy research and development, and record keeping on U.S. patterns of energy production and consumption.

The DOE is in charge of all of America's national laboratories, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and others such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which together form one of the world's largest scientific research institutions.

Many of the national laboratories conduct research into the global impacts of climate change, sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and technologies that could be used to reduce carbon pollution. The DOE is also in charge of America's nuclear energy research and helps fund climate-related scientific and energy research at universities nationwide.

Trump's transition team appears to be scrutinizing the DOE's climate-related research and work. It sent a questionnaire to DOE management last week asking for details about its climate and renewables-related activities and requesting the names of all the DOE's employees involved in those projects.

The DOE announced Tuesday that it is declining to provide the names of any individual employees to the transition team.

"The fact that the Trump transition team appears to be targeting employees whose work relates in some way to climate change is only more worrisome given that Gov. Perry doesn't believe in climate science," said Robert Cowin, director of government affairs in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program.

"Given his record as governor in Texas, it's hard for me to see him going after clean energy with prejudice, but it indicates that they want to remove climate as a key aspect of DOE policy," Cowin said. "Perhaps of greater concern is that it might be a preview of what's to come from a science intimidation and scientific integrity standpoint in a Perry-run DOE."

Perry's nomination is receiving mixed reviews from scientists and observers who champion the DOE's climate and renewables work.

"We do know that Rick Perry had proposed that the department be abolished, although it is not clear that at the time he understood that the mission that consumes the largest share of the budget of the Energy Department is nuclear weapons and security," said Jeremy Firestone, director of the Center for Carbon-Free Power Integration at the University of Delaware. "But it does provide a cautionary note for the important energy research that DOE supports and conducts."

Firestone said Perry has little experience in energy or nuclear security and does not have the technical expertise that Moniz has.

Cowin said Perry likely understands that clean energy is a pro-growth strategy, but only as part of an energy policy that includes fossil fuels and other non-renewable sources of power.

"But he certainly saw the business opportunity with wind energy, and helped turn Texas into a national leader," Cowin said. "As governor, he supported a clean energy mandate, some clean energy innovation, and was a genuine champion for wind energy and expanding transmission across the state to bring wind to new markets."

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said an early test of Perry's priorities will be what he does with one of the DOE's least-known but most important jobs — setting energy efficiency standards for appliances and industrial equipment.

Those standards help reduce the sales of natural gas, electricity and other forms of energy, and Perry's actions on those standards will show whether he will be pro-energy or pro-consumer, Gerrard said.

Jennifer Layke, director of the World Resource Institute's Energy Program, said Perry comes from a state that has worked hard to boost renewables even as it remains a leader in fossil fuels production.

But Trump's anti-renewables agenda threatens to reverse recent trends toward clean energy, Layke said.

"Recent signals about Trump administration's energy agenda suggest a return to an earlier era and outdated energy model," Layke said. "This would undermine hundreds of small businesses and thousands of workers who are working in the clean energy sector. It would stand in conflict with the country's shift to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy.

Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard University Environmental Economics Program, was blunt about Perry's nomination.

"It is very disappointing yet not surprising that Mr. Trump would nominate to be secretary of energy an individual who just five years ago indicated that he wanted to eliminate the entire department but could not even remember its name," Stavins said.

Syrian Refugees Flee from War...and Into Risky Earthquake Areas

SAN FRANCISCO — Syrian refugees fleeing civil war have flooded into areas of Turkey that are riven with dangerous earthquake faults, new research shows.

As a result, traditional seismic hazard maps may underestimate by 20 percent how many people could die in a cataclysmic quake, according to research presented here today (Dec.13) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

"The total scale of fatalities that the earthquake scenarios show are significant enough to potentially inspire some action," Bradley Wilson, a geoscientist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, told Live Science.

Over the last five years, Turkey has taken in more than 2.7 million Syrian refugees, according to the U.N. Refuge Agency. Many of these people have settled in areas that have experienced catastrophic earthquakes in the past.

However, typical seismic hazard maps may not include these newer residents.

To remedy that problem, Wilson used estimates of refugee population distribution collected by the State Department's U.S. Humanitarian Information Unit. Though the Humanitarian Information Unit keeps some of its methodology private, there are some basic elements to its population estimates. For instance, the Humanitarian Information Unit may combine data from registered refugees in camps, with surveys taken by workers on the ground, as well as aerial imagery, to estimate the number of refugees in particular districts of Turkey, according to Wilson.

It turned out that just 14 percent of the refugees lived in traditional tents or container refugee camps in Turkey, said Wilson, who's research is funded by a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship and a fellowship from the University of Arkansas.

"A majority of the refugee population is not located in refugee camps and is distributed amongst the local cities and villages," Wilson said.

By combining that data with other population data, Wilson estimated the population before and after the Arab Spring, or the uprisings that spread across the Middle East in 2011 and escalated into the Syrian civil war, to see how the most seismically vulnerable areas of Turkey were likely to be affected by the resulting refugees. His model assumes that most of the refugees, like the rest of the population in Turkey, live in more urban areas, he said.

Next, Wilson estimated fatality rates from earthquakes of different magnitudes, from 5.8 to 7.0. If a magnitude-7.0 quake struck the population centers, the fatality rate could be 20 percent higher than otherwise would have been predicted, Wilson said.

The refugee influx also shifted the areas with the highest fatality risk. Before the refugee crisis, the area with the highest potential for fatalities was in the heart of the country. But after the crisis, the highest risk areas shifted farther south, near the Turkey-Syria border, the study found.

Still, there are some limitations to the study. The population estimates are inherently uncertain, and there isn't much data on earthquake resistance of the buildings where refugees are living, though another study of a refugee camp in Palestinian territory found the structures were typically not very resistant to strong shaking, he added.

It's also not clear whether the new findings on increased mortality will affect Turkey's efforts to seismically retrofit buildings and prepare for the next big one, he said. Previous research, published in 2014 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, has suggested that a segment of the North Anatolian Fault just west of Istanbul is likely to cause the next major earthquake there. However, nobody can predict when that might happen.

"Whether the 20 percent makes a difference for the Turkish government, I'm not quite sure," Wilson said. "But I still think the analysis has important implications for the hazards community."