Rick Perry wanted to eliminate the Energy Department — now he’s said to be Trump’s pick to run it

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry holds the Department of Energy in such low regard that he famously couldn’t even remember it was on his list of federal agencies to eliminate altogether.

Now Donald Trump has chosen Perry to run it, according to multiple news reports.

In Perry, Trump would have another oil industry ally and climate skeptic in an administration that is shaping up to be dominated by them. And like other Trump picks for cabinet posts, Perry is deeply skeptical of the department he would lead.

It was Perry’s disdain for the Energy department – or, rather, his inability to articulate it – that helped sink his bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. “It’s three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: Commerce, Education and, the, uh, what’s the third one there?” Perry said during a primary debate. “Commerce, Education and the uh, the uh...”

He continued. “The third agency of government I would do away with -- the Education, uh the, uh, Commerce, and let’s see -- I can’t... the third one, I can’t. I’m sorry ... oops.”

It was one of the more awkward moments in the history of presidential politics. Perry finally remembered the agency he was reaching for was Energy later in the debate. Perry had been jockeying for the post with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who supports Trump’s crusade to rollback environmental restrictions on coal energy production. Trump’s passing over of Manchin likely means he will remain in the narrowly divided Senate to work with Democrats against much of the rest of the Trump agenda, and possibly against some of Trump’s nominees.

Perry is an unyielding proponent of opening up more land for drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, who promises to do away with subsidies for renewable energy and would set the department on a drastically different course than it is on now. Under the Obama administration, the Energy department has been a hub of the president’s signature effort to counter global warming. It has distributed billions of dollars in loan guarantees to pioneering wind and solar projects, and its laboratories are incubators for clean energy innovation.

Like Trump, Perry has consistently mocked the Obama climate change effort as driven by politics. He questions the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming, that holds the earth is warming at an alarming rate and time is running out to make aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. During his 2012 run, he called climate change a “contrived, phony mess.” When Perry ran for president again in the 2016 race, he joined almost all the other candidates in refusing the embrace the scientific consensus on warming.

But under Perry’s administration, Texas firms leveraged federal subsidies to become a national leader in wind energy. It produces more energy from wind than any other state, and Perry boasted that emissions in the state have dropped substantially as a result.

Even so, he continues to call for an end to such subsidies.