Outgoing DOE secretary Moniz: Carbon reductions are being driven by free market (now he tells us!)

Sometimes the media shows their bias if only accidentally and sometimes government bureaucrats reveal truths when it no longer matters. On both of those counts I found Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’ interview with Obama Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz to be quite interesting and revealing.

For starters, Moniz, one of the leaders in an Administration that has spent eight years and wasted countless billions of dollars of What’s happening (with carbon emissions) is largely a market-driven phenomenon. We at the Rio Grande Foundation been saying that for years, so why burden the oil and gas industries, utility customers, and the US economy with massive and expensive new regulatory burdens?

Perhaps Obama’s policies were driven more by special interest politics and the green agenda than real concern over carbon emissions?

The whole article is worth a read, but the other fascinating part is Ignatius’ seeming assumption that President Trump WANTS to emit as much carbon as possible. I don’t know about Trump, but I know a lot of people sympathetic to his views on energy and not one of them WANTS to emit more carbon as an end-goal.

Trump and his supporters view government mandates and regulations as costly and ineffective (and it seems like Moniz is tacitly admitting as much) ways to address “climate change” which may or may not be a serious problem. So, would Moniz be so kind as to come out and say that the Clean Power Plan, Solyndra subsidies, ethanol, fuel emission standards, and the raft of other Obama-era policies are simply unnecessary as tools to reducing carbon emissions? A man can dream.