Obama-era energy secretary champions clean-energy progress in the Trump era
To open the Atlantic‘s 14 June article “Obama’s energy secretary defends his legacy against Trump,” interviewer Alexis Madrigal called that former cabinet officer, physicist Ernest Moniz, the “antithesis” of President Trump. “You’d be hard-pressed,” Madrigal added, “to find anyone who understands the politics, policy, science, and technology of energy as well as Ernie Moniz.” But as media coverage vividly shows, longtime national science leader Moniz isn’t just defending his Obama-era legacy. He’s working hard to advance a Trump-era technopolitical outlook and program.
Within weeks of leaving office, as seen in a video snippet from Fareed Zakaria’s CNN talk show, Moniz was condemning “disturbing” and “antiscientific” Trump administration statements. He charged that they “fundamentally cut to the core of democracy, in the sense of, if we’re not going to have fact-based discussions, it’s very, very difficult to have an informed electorate and informed opinions.” The Guardian reported his alarm.
In that same month, Moniz became chief executive officer and cochair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative , which says of itself that it works “to prevent catastrophic attacks with weapons of mass destruction and disruption—nuclear, biological, radiological, chemical and cyber.” The other cochairs are former Georgia Democratic senator Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner. At Science, Richard Stone published a Q&A with Moniz about the initiative under the headline “Moniz looks to get U.S. nuclear scientists more engaged with China and Russia.”
Moniz’s Trump-era outspokenness has become routine. At the Washington Post in May, science writer Chris Mooney opened an article by framing it with Moniz’s views:
New budget documents released by the Trump administration … confirmed fears of an extremely deep cut aimed at the government’s leading clean energy research office, triggering criticism from the former secretary of energy under President Barack Obama, Ernest Moniz.
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy would see just $636 million in new funding in 2018 under the proposal, compared with a budget allocation of $2.069 billion in 2017, a decline of more than 69 percent, according to the documents. It would also cut staffing expenditures from 634 full-time employee equivalents down to an estimated 458, an almost 28 percent reduction.
“The United States played an indispensable role in creating the Mission Innovation initiative, where 22 nations and the EU have agreed to double governmental investments in clean energy R&D over a five-year period,” Moniz said in a statement posted on Twitter. “This administration budget proposal would put us behind China and Europe, blunting our competitive edge in a multi-trillion dollar developing clean energy global market.”
A few days later in the Washington political publication The Hill, Moniz published the commentary “Under Trump, energy security is running on empty.” The administration, he charged, “has put forward a budget proposal for fiscal 2018 that would, if enacted, erode U.S. energy security, diminish our competitiveness in the growing global clean energy economy and slow progress in modernizing our domestic energy economy on the path to a low-carbon energy future.”
A sense of the piece comes through from excerpts about the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. “ARPA-E moves novel technologies to a stage where private investors can assume the commercialization risk,” Moniz explains. Then he punches: “ARPA-E investments have led to 56 new companies and over $1.8 billion in private sector follow-on investment, an enviable record for any technology investment portfolio. Acknowledging these successes, just last month, Energy Secretary Rick Perry appropriately praised ARPA-E innovation. This month, the Administration’s budget zeroes it out.”
At about that time, Moniz joined the board of directors at Tri Alpha Energy. The organization explains that it “applies advanced particle accelerator and plasma physics in order to create a commercially competitive fusion electric generator that is compact, safe, carbon-free and sustainable, creates no environmental or health hazards, produces only helium, is not a controlled substance, and is non-radioactive.” Reports have appeared about Tri Alpha in MIT Technology Review and Scientific American and at PBS and BBC .
On 1 June, Moniz published a Boston Globe op-ed that quickly inspired a seven-minute-long interview with him on National Public Radio. The op-ed began with mild sarcasm: “The Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement has just made the question ‘What do the US, Nicaragua and Syria have in common?’ a staple of late night comedy.” Moniz continued, punching again:
But this is serious business. The statement from President Trump that the United States will exit the agreement, combined with his first budget proposal, effectively denies science, diminishes US competitiveness in the developing multi-trillion-dollar clean energy global marketplace, abdicates US leadership on an urgent issue of global concern, and once again shakes the confidence of allies and friends about American commitment to collective obligations. History will judge the president harshly.
In that op-ed and elsewhere, Moniz presents his outlook and program in business-world terms and insists that, given not just scientific but business realities, there’s “no going back.” In the Globe he characterized the Paris pullout as “in effect ‘betting the business’ on hitting a double zero in a game of roulette.” He argued that the “principal solution to climate-change challenges lies with a transformation to an all-of-the-above low-carbon energy future”:
Clean energy technologies have become remarkably competitive in just the last few years. The United States is already on a trajectory for meeting our Paris target, with rapid growth in natural gas and renewable power generation as well as energy efficiency leading the way. Other major economies with comparable or even stronger Paris targets don’t have the same advantages: low-cost natural gas, sustained investments in technology, a highly skilled workforce, a robust national laboratory system, and research universities that are second to none.
The Globe op-ed also asserted that President Trump “incorrectly stated that the Paris agreement was a job killer” when in fact, according to Moniz, the “real job killer is the failure to invest adequately in innovation.” The advantages from such investments, Moniz declared, “differentiate us from our competition.” The piece ended this way:
Withdrawing from the Paris agreement is bad for science-based decision making, national and energy security, and innovation. Thursday’s announcement will just make it harder and more expensive for America to adapt to climate change and mitigate its risks. There is one note of optimism however: Cities and states and the business community are primed to keep us on course to the low-carbon future that we need. Doing so with an administration that is not pulling in the same direction will inevitably slow progress and make this course more demanding.
That note of nonfederal and business-community optimism reappeared a week later when Politico posted the three-paragraph Moniz comment “A regional approach to clean energy.” It appeared among 11 luminaries’ “bright ideas for Washington.” Between paragraphs summarizing the importance of clean energy and predicting enterprising American circumvention of the Paris-pullout setback, Moniz wrote:
Congress should also support the development of regional energy innovation ecosystems. This approach draws upon the unique strengths and needs of regions across the country and can ensure that everyone prospers from a clean energy transformation. Over a dozen of the nation’s finest research universities have hosted regional meetings to discuss this approach, and many submitted proposals to the Department of Energy on how to shape regional innovation. These should be supported and their recommendations pursued.
“Supporting industry, academia, and city, state and regional leadership in pursuit of energy innovation,” Moniz concluded, “will create jobs, enhance our global competitiveness and address the imperatives of climate change.” Though Moniz skirts the need for a presidential signature on federal legislation, he seems to be asking, “Who needs the Trump administration?”
Madrigal’s 14 June Atlantic article has now publicized much about the Trump-era technopolitical outlook and program that Moniz is striving to advance. The article also reports that Moniz “is founding a new organization that he calls the Roosevelt Project to try to address, on a community-scale, the dislocations that workers will face in a deeply decarbonized world, underpinned by new energy technologies.” Moniz stipulates that it’s linked to something called the Emerson Collective in California. He asks, “Why don’t we start with the workers and the jobs and the communities and build up solutions for their regional development that are consistent with a long-term low-carbon economy?” He explains that he chose the name “because Teddy Roosevelt is identified with environmental stewardship, Franklin Roosevelt with the New Deal and jobs, and Eleanor Roosevelt with social justice.” No further details are currently available.
On Wednesday, 21 June, Moniz appeared at the National Press Club to announce the Energy Futures Initiative , a nonpartisan “think tank and advisory firm working across all energy sources to provide evidence-based analysis on decarbonizing energy systems, creating high-paying energy jobs, and finding ways to make energy infrastructure and supplies more secure.” He plans “to mobilize stakeholders in government, industry, labor and NGOs in creating a clean energy future.” Who needs the Trump administration?
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.