Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over at the Washington Post, Chris Mooney and the usual suspects are seriously alarmed by a memo sent out by the Transition Team at the Department of Energy. They describe it in breathless terms in an article entitled “Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings“. The finest part was this quote from Michael Halpern:
Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy, called the memo’s demand that Energy officials identify specific employees “alarming.”
“If the Trump administration is already singling out scientists for doing their jobs, the scientific community is right to be worried about what his administration will do in office. What’s next? Trump administration officials holding up lists of ‘known climatologists’ and urging the public to go after them?” Halpern asked.
Oh … you mean like say the Attorneys General of a bunch of states holding up their lists of known “denier” organizations and tacitly urging the public to go after them? You mean like government officials of a variety of stripes ranting about how “deniers” should be brought to trial or otherwise penalized? You mean like having sites like DeSmogBlog making ugly insinuations and false statements about every known opponent of the climate party line? You mean like Roger Pielke being hounded out of his job by the climate mob?
Mr. Halpern, we have put up with just that treatment you describe for years now. Let me suggest that you take your inchoate fears and do something useful with them—you can think fearfully about how you have treated your scientific opponents for the last decade, and you can hope and pray that they are like me, and they don’t demand the exact same pound of flesh from you.
In any case, the Post put up a copy of the memo in the most idiotic form ever—ten separate individual pages, in image form without searchable text, printed sideways. Thanks, guys, it’s clear you’ve only posted them because you have to.
To save your neck from getting a crick from holding your head sideways, I’ve snagged them off the web and OCR’d them so we could all have a look.
Now, bear in mind that the Department of Energy has been the conduit for the billions of dollars wasted on propping up failing solar companies like Solyndra, it’s been the “Friends of Obama Funding Agency” … as a result, it’s not the Augean Stables, but it’s close …
So, let’s take a look at this already infamous 74-question memo. In it we’ll find two things: (1) just what is setting their hair on fire, and (2) whatever clues are there about future actions by the new administration. I’ll discuss both individual questions and groups of questions.
Questions for DOE
This memo, as you might expect, is replete with acronyms. “DOE” is the Department of Energy. Here are the memo questions and my comments.
1. Can you provide a list of all boards, councils, commissions, working groups, and FACAs [Federal Advisory Committees] currently active at the Department? For each, can you please provide members, meeting schedules, and authority (statutory or otherwise) under which they were created?
If I were at DOE, this first question would indeed set MY hair on fire. The easiest way to get rid of something is to show that it was not properly established … boom, it’s gone. As a businessman myself, this question shows me that the incoming people know their business, and that the first order of business is to jettison the useless lumber.
2. Can you provide a complete list of ARPA-E’s projects?
Critical information for an incoming team.
3 Can you provide a list of the Loan Program Office’s outstanding loans, including the parties responsible for paying the loan back, term of the loan, and objective of the loan?
4 Can you provide a list of applications for loans the LPO has received and the status of those applications?
5 Can you provide a full accounting of DOE liabilities associated with any loan or loan guarantee programs?
6 The Department recently announced the issuance of $4.5 billion in loan guarantees for electric vehicles (and perhaps associated infrastructure). Can you provide a status on this effort?
Oh, man, they are going for the jugular. Loan Program Office? If there is any place that the flies would gather, it’s around the honey … it’s good to see that they are looking at loan guarantees for electric vehicles, a $4.5 billion dollar boondoggle that the government should NOT be in. I call that program the “Elon Musk Retirement Fund”.
Folks, for $4.5 billion dollars, we could provide clean water to almost half a million villages around the world … or we could put it into Elon Musk’s bank account or the account of some other electric vehicle manufacturer. I know which one I’d vote for … and I am equally sure which one the poor of the world would prefer.
7 What is the goal of the grid modernization effort? Is there some terminal point to this effort? Is its genesis statutory or something else?
Asking the right questions about vague programs …
8 Who “owns” the Mission Innovation and Clean Energy Ministerial efforts within the Department?
I love this question. Orphan departments are legendary in big bureaucracies … nobody owns them and they can do what they want. I don’t predict a long future for this Mission Impossible—Clean Energy effort..
9 What is the Department’s role with respect to the development of offshore wind?
Given that offshore wind is far and away the MOST EXPENSIVE of all the renewable options, the answer should be “None”.
10 Is there an assessment of the funds it would take to replace aging infrastructure in the complex? Is there a priority list of which facilities to be decommissioned?
Another critical question, about the state of their own facilities.
11 Which Assistant Secretary positions are rooted in statute and which exist at the discretion and delegation of the Secretary?
Like I said … these guys know how to do what they plan to do, which is to change the direction of the agency. All discretionary Assistant Secretaries must be sweating …
12 What is the statutory charge to the Department with respect to efficiency standards? Which products are subject to statutory requirements and which are discretionary to the Department?
Same thing. They want to find out what they can just cut, where the low-hanging fruit might be. I suspect this is about Obama’s ludicrous CAFE standards mandating a 50+ mile-per-gallon average for all car manufacturers.
13 Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings? Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation of or as a result of those meetings?
Now, this is the one that has the “scientists” involved most concerned. Me, I think they damn well should be concerned because what they have been doing all this time is HALF OF A COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS!!
This is a pet peeve of mine. You can’t just talk of costs in a vacuum. To do that without considering the accompanying benefits is scientific malfeasance. To do it as a policy matter is nothing less than deliberately lying to the public. As a result, I hope that everyone engaged in this anti-scientific effort gets identified and if they cannot be fired for malfeasance then put them to work sweeping the floors. Talk about “fake news”, the so-called “social cost of carbon” is as fake as they come.
14 Did DOE or any of its contractors run the integrated assessment models (lAMs)? Did they pick the discount rates to be used with the lAMs? What was DOE’s opinion on the proper discount rates used with the lAMs? What was DOE’s opinion on the proper equilibrium climate sensitivity?
Cuts to the core, and lets the people know that vague handwaving is not going to suffice. These folks want actual answers to the hard questions, and they’ve definitely identified the critical points about the models.
15 What is the Department’s role with respect to JCPOA? Which office has the lead for the NNSA?
The JCPOA is usually a “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”. In this case, however, it refers to the Iran nuclear deal, and is an interesting question. The NNSA is the National Nuclear Security Adminstration.
16 What statutory authority has been given to the Department with respect to cybersecurity?
Critical in these times.
17 Can you provide a list of all Schedule C appointees, all non-career SES employees, and all Presidential appointees requiring Senate confirmation? Can you include their current position and how long they have served at the Department?
Here’s the deal. It’s basically impossible to fire a government worker unless they held up a bank and were caught in the act, and even then you’d have to have full-color video to make it stick. Public employee unions are among the world’s stupidest and most destructive idea … the government unions use their plentiful funds to affect the election of the people who set their pay scale. Yeah, that should go well …
BUT … if you can get rid of their position, then you’re not firing them, you just don’t have further work for them. They are trying to figure out who they can cut. Hair is catching fire on all sides with this one.
18 Can you offer more information about the EV Everywhere Grand Challenge?
Never heard of it, but then I never heard of a lot of things in this memo … which just shows that the memo makers did their homework. Turns out that the EV Everywhere Grand Challenge is another clumsy attempt to get Electric Vehicles Everywhere regardless of the fact that the public mostly doesn’t want Electric Vehicles Anywhere.
19 Can you provide a list of Department employees or contractors who attended any of the Conference of the Parties (under the UNFCCC) in the last five years?
An IPCC Conference of Parties is much more party than conference—it’s basically an excuse to party in some lovely location (think Bali, Cancun, …), with the party occasionally interrupted by the pesky conference. It is a meaningless exercise which ends up with an all-night session that finishes by announcing that everyone has signed on to the latest non-binding fantasy about how to end the use of fossil fuels, drive up energy prices, and screw the poor. And yes, if I were appointed to run the DOE, I would definitely want to know who has gone on these useless junkets.
Now, I know that people are going to complain about “scientific freedom” regarding the memo asking who worked on what … but if you don’t want to tell the incoming team what you’ve worked on … why not? Are you ashamed of what you’ve done? Look, every job I’ve had, if a new boss came in, they wanted to know what I had worked on in the past, and I simply answered them honestly. Scientists are no different.
Finally, government scientists presumably work on what their agency directs them to work on … so the issue of “scientific freedom” is way overblown in this context where they are NOT free to work on projects of their own choice.
20 Can you provide a list of reports to Congress or other external parties that are due in 2017?
Again, a critical question when you take over an organization—what deliverables is it contracted to produce? Like I said, these folks know what they are doing.
21 Can you provide a copy of any Participation Agreement under Section 1221 of EP Act signed by the Department?
We’re way down in the weeds now. This section of the EP Act allows three or more contiguous states to establish a regional transmission siting agency. Not sure why they’ve asked this, but it does add to their knowledge of the projected vague transmission grid actions, which appears like it could be a big money drain.
22 What mechanisms exist to help the national laboratories commercialize their scientific and technological prowess?
A forgotten task at the DOE, I’m sure.
23 How many fusion programs, both public and private, are currently being funded worldwide?
Huh … looking for duplication of activities.
24 Which activities does the Department describe as commercialization programs or programs with the specific purpose of developing a technology for market deployment?
Incoming administrations, if they’re smart, look for low hanging fruit. In this case if there are commercial programs near completion, they can be fast-tracked to provide evidence that the new administration is on the job.
25 Does or can the Department delineate research activities as either basic or applied research?
This is a critical distinction, and one that they possibly have never made.
26 Can you provide a list of all permitting authorities (and their authorizing statutes) currently held by DOE and their authorizing statutes?
Again, the local denizens will not like this a bit, more hair will spontaneously ignite. In part any bureaucracy prides itself on its power to stop people from doing things … in other words, they demand a permit for an action and then they can refuse to issue it. This asks not just for the permitting authorities, but once again for their authorizing statutes. Again, the easiest way to get rid of something is to show it was built without authorization …
27 Is there a readily available list of any technologies or products that have emerged from programs or the labs that are currently offered in the market without any subsidy?
Quite possibly not, but if so it would be an interesting list.
28 Are there statutory restrictions related to reinvigorating the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management?
29 Are there any statutory restrictions to restarting the Yucca Mountain project?
These two questions show us that they plan to restart Yucca Mountain, the shuttered nuclear waste repository.
30 Which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan?
Because you can kiss them goodbye along with the CAP …
31 If DOE’s topline budget in accounts other than the 050 account were required to be reduced 10% over the next four fiscal years (from the FY17 request and starting in FY18), does the Department have any recommendations as to where those reductions should be made?
This is brilliant. It’s like my gorgeous ex-fiancee regarding colors. She asks me what color I like so she can cross it off the list of possibilities … and rightly so given my color sense. This strikes me as the same deal. The new Administration asks where the current denizens would cut ten percent … then when they are told it, they know they might want to cut somewhere else … useful info either way.
32 Does the Department have any thoughts on how to reduce the bureaucratic burden for exporting U.S. energy technology, including but not limited to commercial nuclear technology?
Likely not … but worth asking …
33 Is the number of Assistant Secretaries set by statute? Does the statute establish the number as a minimum or a maximum, or is it silent on the question?
Assistant Secretaries are now on DEFCON 1, or DEFCON 0.5, their hair is totally engulfed in flames …
34 Can you provide a list of all current open job postings and the status of those positions?
35 Can you provide a list of outstanding M&O contracts yet to be awarded for all DOE facilities and their current status?
36 Can you provide a list of non-M&O procurements/awards that are currently pending and their status?
Open jobs, outstanding Maintenance and Operation contracts, non-M&O procurements, they want to find out just exactly what is the current state of play. It will also allow the incoming folks to see what last-minute hires they’ve tried to jam through before the changeover.
37 Does DOE have a plan to resume the Yucca Mountain license proceedings?
They may have shelved or previous plans, good to know if so.
38 What secretarial determinations/records of decisions are pending?
Have they made decisions that are not written down? If so, what? Man, these people are thorough, I wouldn’t have thought to ask that one.
39 What should the incoming Administration do to balance risk, performance and ultimately completion in contracting?
40 What should this Administration do differently to make sure there are the right incentives to attract qualified contractors?
An interesting pair of questions.
41 What is the plan for funding cleanup of Portsmouth and Paducah when the current uranium inventory designated for barter in exchange for cleanup services, is no longer available (excluding reinstating the UED&D fee on commercial nuclear industry or utilizing the USEC fund)?
Back into the weeds, proving that these folks have done their homework. Right now, those shuttered nuclear plants are trading uranium, a valuable resource, for cleanup … what happens when the uranium runs out? Who is on the hook for the costs?
42 What is the right funding level for EM to make meaningful progress across the complex and meet milestone and regulatory requirements?
According to the Energy.gov glossary, “EM” is environmental management. I’m not sure what the DOE is required to do in this, and that’s what they are asking.
43 What is the greatest opportunity for reduction in life cycle cost/return on investment?
44 Describe your alternatives to the ever increasing WTP cost and schedule, whether technical or programmatic?
45 With respect to EM, what program milestones will be reached in each of the next four years?
47 How can the DOE support existing reactors to continue operating as part of the nation’s infrastructure?
48 What can DOE do to help prevent premature closure of plants?
49 How do you recommend continuing to supporting the licensing of Small Modular Reactors?
50 How best can DOE optimize its Advanced Reactor R&D activities to maximize their value proposition and work with investors to development and commercialize advanced reactors?
All of these questions are concerned with the regulation and waste disposal of nuclear plants, suggesting strongly that the new administration is interested in keeping existing plants open and licensing new plants.
Questions for EIA
EIA is the Energy Information Agency charged with collecting and maintaining energy-related data.
51 EIA is an independent agency in DOE. How has EIA ensured its independence in your data and analysis over the past 8 years? In what instances do you think EIA’ s independence was most challenged?
Now this is a fascinating two-part question, especially the second part. Basically they are asking, can we trust the EIA, and what pressures is it subject to?
52 Part of EIA’s charter is to do analyses based on Congressional and Departmental requests. Has EIA denied or not responded to any of these requests over the last ten years?
53 EIA customarily has or had set dates for completions of studies and reports. In general, have those dates been adhered to?
54 In the Annual Energy Outlook 2016, EIA assumed that the Clean Power Plan should be in the reference case despite the fact that the reference case is based on existing laws and regulations. Why did EIA make that assumption, which seems to be atypical of past forecasts?
Uh-oh … caught messing with the books …
55 EIA’s assessments of levelized costs for renewable technologies do not contain back-up costs for the fossil fuel technologies that are brought on-line to replace the generation when those technologies are down. Is this is a correct representation of the true levelized costs?
Since this is an issue I’ve raised publicly in my posts on levelized costs, I’m overjoyed to see them ask it.
56 Has EIA done analysis that shows that additional back-up generation is not needed? How does EIA’s analysis compare with other analyses on this issue?
This seems like they’re talking about some EIA analysis that says that such generation isn’t needed, and asking them to justify it. If not, they are simply forcing them to admit that yes, backup is needed, and no, they haven’t been including those costs … good on them.
57 Renewable and solar technologies are expected to need additional transmission costs above what fossil technologies need. How has EIA represented this in the AEO forecasts? What is the magnitude of those transmission costs?
Again, excellent questions that the EIA has not been posing, much less answering.
58 There are studies that show that your high resource and technology case for oil and gas represents the shale gas and oil renaissance far better than your reference case. Why has EIA not put those assumptions in your reference case?
Yes, they definitely should put those in … but then from all appearances they hate fracking with a passion …
59 Can you describe the number of personnel hired into management positions at EIA from outside EIA and compare it to the number of personnel hired into management positions at EIA who were currently serving at EIA?
Hiring outside vs promoting inside … interesting question.
60 How does EIA ensure quality in its data and analyses?
61 Where does EIA think most improvement is needed in its data and analyses?
I’d love to see the answer to this one.
62 We note that EIA added distributed solar estimations to your electricity data reports. Those numbers are not part of your supply/demand balance on a Btu basis. Why has that not been updated accordingly?
Uh-oh again … someone finally asking the hard questions.
63 How many vacancies does EIA have in management and staff positions? What plans, if any, does EIA have to fill those positions before January 20?
64 Is the EIA budget sufficient to ensure quality in data and analyses? If not, where does it fall short?
More questions to clarify the fiscal landscape.
65 Does EIA have cost comparisons of sources of electricity generation at the national level?
Not that I know of … but then they may have them and have not released them. We’ll see.
Questions on labs
DOE labs are separate from the DOE itself … I knew the DOE had labs but I had no idea they had seventeen of them, viz:
National Energy Technology Laboratory at Albany, Oregon (2005)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Berkeley, California (1931)
Los Alamos National Laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico (1943)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee (1943)
Argonne National Laboratory at DuPage County, Illinois (1946)
Ames Laboratory at Ames, Iowa (1947)
Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York (1947)
Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico and Livermore, California (1948)
Idaho National Laboratory between Arco and Idaho Falls, Idaho (1949)
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton, New Jersey (1951)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore, California (1952)
Savannah River National Laboratory at Aiken, South Carolina (1952)
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Menlo Park, California (1962)
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Richland, Washington (1965)
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory at Batavia, Illinois (1967)
National Renewable Energy Laboratory at Golden, Colorado (1977)
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility at Newport News, Virginia (1984)
Let me say that as a businessman looking at that list, it screams “Duplication Of Effort” at about 180 decibels. Hence the following questions:
66 What independent evaluation panels does the lab have to assess the scientific value of its work? Who sits on these panels? How often do they hold sessions? Do they publish reports?
67 Can you provide a list of cooperative research and development grants (CRADAs) for the past five years? Please provide funding amounts, sources, and outcomes?
68 Can you provide a list of licensing agreements and royalty proceeds for the last five years?
69 Can you provide a list of the top twenty salaried employees of the lab, with total remuneration and the portion funded by DOE?
70 Can you provide a list of all peer-reviewed publications by lab staff for the past three years?
71 Can you provide a list of current professional society memberships of lab staff?
72 Can you provide a list of publications by lab staff for the past three years?
73 Can you provide a list of all websites maintained by or contributed to by laboratory staff during work hours for the past three years?
74 Can you provide a list of all other positions currently held by lab staff, paid and unpaid, including faculties, boards, and consultancies?
Well, it sure sounds like the gravy train ride is over, and the labs will be asked to justify their existence. I would not be surprised to see some closed and some merged.
===============
DISCUSSION:
My first take from all of this is that there will be a top-to-bottom shakeup of the DOE, with deadwood cut, permitting carefully reassessed, positions eliminated, labs merged, the EIA charged with giving real numbers, nuclear strengthened, and the climate nonsense moved way down the list.
My second take from all of this is that the people who made the memo are very good at their job. They’ve asked all of the right questions and then some.
However, I don’t find in this anything to support the claim that the new Administration is looking to hold up a list of scientists for opprobrium, or that they plan to interfere in the scientific process. As with every incoming Administration, they DO plan to refocus and redirect the overall future course of the agency, which will inescapably mean that the scientific studies will move in a different direction.
Finally, folks, lets get real. Every Administration has chosen the scientists it want to be studying things, and has told them what the Administration wants them to study. If these DOE scientists don’t want to be re-directed to study different things, this is not an infringement of their scientific freedom. Instead, it is part of the price you pay for being the government’s scientist—just as in any other field of endeavor you do what is directed by the people who sign your paycheck.
Overall, I gotta say … it’s about time, and it couldn’t happen to a better agency,
Regards to all,
w.
AND … if you disagree with someone, please have the courtesy to QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU DISAGREE WITH, so we can all be clear on your objection.
Civil servants should not have an agenda. They should professionally do the jobs they are mandated to do.
Hiring a lot of managers from outside the civil service is a red flag. Something’s wrong one way or the other.
Regulatory capture.
That’s a yuge problem. The big bucks are in industry. Civil servants won’t do anything to upset industry if they think they can get better paying jobs with said industry. If the civil servants don’t see the possibility of promotion in the civil service, it multiplies the problem times at least two.
regulatory capture == fox guarding henhouse
The civil service in America is very different from that in the UK, or Australia. In the US, many civil servants are tied to one or other of the parties. They will leave the service when the “wrong” party wins power and re-enter it years later when the “right” party gets back in. In management, this appears to be nearly 100%. For instance, the secretary of the department is a political appointment and will be changed with every new government.
It is extremely rare for the secretary of a department in the UK or Australia to be changed by the minister. It happens, but only when the secretary has become so enamoured with a previous governments policy that they are unable to follow the new minister’s directions.
Not quite true.
Most civil service employees may belong to a party, but they do not need to reveal that to anybody, ever. Nor do these employees leave the government employ when the Administration changes parties.
There are political appointees to head a number of the agencies. The number of appointees is not great.
Properly or perhaps better stated as traditionally, all appointees submit their resignations when a new President takes office; technically even when a President is re-elected.
These appointees and the President’s cabinet are the people who the President elect is building his Administration; and their approach looks to be solid business from the start.
The secretary, frequently referred to is not actually a stenographer typist clerk, but is the head of the State Department; known as the Secretary of State. One of the more powerful positions of a President’s cabinet.
Every president gets to pick their own cabinet.
Yeah, and can someone maybe do a calculation for the the LCOE of coal generation WITHOUT carbon sequestration technology. All that I see these days, are comparisons between absurd intermittents and LOOK – coal is now really expensive TOO – because we added ludicrously priced CCS to our coal calculation and got the total to come out in the region of pedal-power!!
Here’s an example, where costs are compared, but where we don’t get to see the cost of conventionally burned coal. Here’s my idea – maybe they should stop trying to hide the truth by playing silly games: http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf
‘Correct’ Calculations for USC coal, CCGT, and onshore wind were guest posted at Judith’s Climate Etc maybe 18 months ago in essay True Cost of Wind. All the corrections to EIA are discussed in transparent detail, with refrences. The EIA costing malfeasance is much greater than just omitting wind backup as noted by Q 55. We identified four major additional areas. Blatant Augean Stables stuff. The ‘answer’ is CCGT LCOE ~ $56/MWh depending on natural gas price assumptions, USC coal ~$60 based on Powder River low sulfur subbituminois, and onshore wind ~$144 based on ERCOT grid backup actuals.
My guess is the EIA was constrained by the EPA’s existing 111 (B) requirement for IGCC w/ Carbon Capture as the Best Available Technology for new coal plants and 111 (D) rules for existing plants. The bottom line being that the EIA assessed costs are based on existing regulation and on a forecast of expected regulation. When the EPA regulations are changed the EIA base case assessment will follow.
Problem is solved if: 1) the new EPA administrator reopens the GHG endangerment finding and concludes little danger or too much uncertainty (thus gutting the EPA GHG regulations), 2) the new EPA administrator simply changes the EPA’s 111 (B) Best Available Standard to new pulverized coal unit (as well as the 111 (D) rule for existing plants [i.e. the Clean Air Plan]), or 3) Congress defangs the EPA with respect to GHG’s and Ocean Acidification.
Thankyou for that detailed explanation.
I was unaware that the economic nonsense of CCS had been cast in stone as a regulatory requirement.
No wonder people are complaining that America has gifted an unfair advantage to their trading partner, China.
I’m shocked. I still assumed that CCS would never fly due to exhorbitant costs associated with the technique.
Besides the fact that these are very complex questions that even a dedicated Department would find very hard to answer, these questions will never get through the political appointees in the DOE before the transition.
It will be professional bureaucrats trying to answer the question properly against the political appointees who are trying to stifle the answers which say “we did not have statutory authority to spend these billion dollars”. I suppose some stuff will get brown-enveloped over to the transition team, but professionals in government normally respect the chain of authority even if the political appointee/authorities will be gone in a few months.
When new people are put in charge after the transition, the professional bureaucrats and lawyers will be trying to provide the correct answers to protect their jobs but they will be stonewalled by the appointees still remaining in the Department. There will also be professionals still remaining in positions of authority who are genuinely captured by the climate change religion that they will also stonewall the answers.
It will take many months before these very complex questions have full objective responses. There has got to be room for Willis to participate in this somehow. Anyone involved in the transition that reads this should take note.
Trump may not be able to do anything about elected members of House of reps or Congress, but he can run the bureaucracy as a business. Stonewall too much and you get fired or forced into early retirement. These ‘professionals’ as you call them are used to dealing with politicians and not to ruthless businessmen.
Also, don’t forget the power of the budget process. For many of the questions failing to provide a complete answer may result in program cuts or outright termination.
looks like a democratic way to elect volunteers for the guillotine.
i eagerly anticipate the concensus…
Or President Trump could do a PATCO on the whole department. I’m sure he’d be delighted to have a sacrificial lamb to show potential transgressors that the way is hard.
The usual suspects would, of course, make an unseemly squeal, but that would easily be drowned out by the cheers of tens of millions of taxpayers nation-wide.
The entrenched bureaucrats will dig in and take forever at answering the questions. They will treat this like a filibuster and claim it will cost millions of dollars to come up with the answers.
Good!
Outright refusal to comply is a denial of responsibility and grounds for job termination.
Obfuscation and obstructionism are falsehoods and grounds for reassignment, at minimum.
As pointed out earlier, the easiest way to clear a position is to recognize the job is worthless since it isn’t performed properly and eliminate the position.
bye bye bureaucrat.
Reading though the questions, I suspect a number of fed-up DOE professionals, both retired and active, were involved in the development of the questions above.
Agreed!
The next step should be calling lobbying by its true name- corruption. I live in China at the moment and lobbyists and their companies would be arrested and imprisoned and probably have their assets confiscated. China has grown soft these days. They used to execute them, harvest their organs and issue a bill to the family for the cost of the bullet.
Anyone asks: What does he mean “Drain the Swamp”?
Well, here we go.
We’ve just pulled the plug at the DOE.
Comeuppance for them.
Schadenfreude for me.
When Australian governments change, the bureaucracy in every department prepares a brief for the incoming minister, which details such things as:
– what the department does
– how it is structured
– how it’s budget is structured
– issues it is dealing with at the moment, as well as longer term
– and many other items to allow the incoming minister to take over, relatively seamlessly.
Much of the questions which Trump’s Transition Team are asking falls into these categories and is quite unremarkable. However, there are also questions which suggest a plan exists to transition the DOE into a new direction. The fact that Trump may think he is allowed to run the DOE in the way he wants, is what appears to be igniting the hair of greenies all over America.
Perhaps Trump hasn’t seen ‘Yes Minister’. Uk and Australian ministers conform. Trump is a wildcard.
Hivemind December 10, 2016 at 4:51 am
The fact is that he CAN run it the way he wants, and he WILL run it the way he wants. The thing that astounds me is that the Democrats are surprised by this … what on earth did they expect, that he’d nominate Leonardo DeCaprio?
w.
I would have asked DeCaprio to lead my new Environmental rehabilitation department.
When he said yes, I would have handed him a shovel and told him the job required him personally to plant enough trees to counteract his use of fossil fuels in his cars and airplanes.
That would keep him busy for decades, and might actually get him to do something useful.
The Democrats expected the usual Republican capitulation. Problem is, they didn’t get the usual or a Republican.
Numerous questions asked about statutory authority, suggesting that the incoming administration is aware that the law may impose boundaries on what they may do.
Pretty much anything not required by law is discretionary, and the president is generally understood to have sole discretion (as the head of the executive branch of government).
If congress thinks that the president is going to far, it can enact law limiting his efforts.
Within those constraints, I’d be of the opinion that the president _can_ run the DOE precisely the way he wants, which is exactly how the government was designed to function.
Equally NASA and other executive branch functions. Some presidents have taken advantage of that relationship in the past. It isn’t without precedent.
Willis, EM is about cleaning up the cold war environmental hotspots. It involves very big, as in money, general fund(s). I think they are looking at not only the money and accounting, but whether it has been usurped past the legislated remit. They will need the statutory authorizations, etc just as they requested about EIA. The cleanup of the Savannah River site is one.
Thanks for that, John. The amazing thing about this site is that eventually almost all the questions get answered.
w.
Willis, I’m still waiting for a question I can answer… 😉
14 Did DOE or any of its contractors run the integrated assessment models (lAMs)? Did they pick the discount rates to be used with the lAMs? What was DOE’s opinion on the proper discount rates used with the lAMs? What was DOE’s opinion on the proper equilibrium climate sensitivity?
Oh dear – “undermine the science”? No wonder they’re worried. When you shine a light on “climate science”, it vaporizes vampire-like.
But surely undermining (or trying to do so) the accepted view is a cornerstone of science.
If what has been produced by the DOE can’t withstand scrutiny then it was not god science in the first place. On the other hand, anything that *does* withstand scrutiny is more reliable.
Doesn’t that just establish Rob Jackson as an anti-scientific mountebank. The whole point of science is that you do everything in your power to undermine every bit of it. The scraps remaining which cannot be undermined represent the current state of the art. That the idiot Jackson doesn’t even understand that much is why he is into voodoo junk science.
Bingo!
Note that Rob Jackson is himself dependent on the climate money flow. He might have to find real work, after parasitizing citizen taxes, his cover letter will not be as credible with real research outfits.
Wonderful way to start the weekend, sitting here with a nice dark roast, toast, blackberry jam and all these delicious questions to the DOE… life is good.
Thanks Willis
Great job as usual Willis. Sounds like someone on the inside is giving advice
I agree witgh John Picirrilli–the sort of questions being asked look like someone on the inside of the DOE is giving advice, and already knows the answer to a vast percentage of the questions already. Trump is thus far surprising me pleasantly.
I worked at the DoE national laboratory in Idaho for 32 years; now retired. I’ve worked on nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, and environmental R&D. Worked with many of the other national laboratories, as well as our foreign counterparts.
The group who wrote this memo has put serious work into analyzing DoE. I am very impressed. DoE is a complete mess and someone wants to fix it.
Digging deep into the analyses and data of EIA is particularly wise. There are all sorts of assumptions baked into their models (what a shock) such as a risk penalty that reduces the projection of future nuclear power.
EM has huge obligations (and huge costs) at Hanford, Savannah River, Idaho, and elsewhere to clean up portions of the national laboratory complex that are contaminated and no longer used. Buildings, waste burial sites, and so forth. BTW, i totally agree with the comment about DuPont’s tenure at Savannah River.
Yucca Mtn needs to be repurposed and then opened. Burying used commercial nuclear fuel is stupid because ~95% of the material has high energy content. The used commercial nuclear fuel needs to be recycled. At the same time, there are all sorts of wastes that do need permanent disposal and DoE owns them. From a geochemistry standpoint, some belong at the salt waste site in New Mexico. Others belong in Yucca Mtn. We might actually make huge progress on nuclear waste, infuriating the anti=-nuclear organizations who thrive on keeping nuclear waste an active controversy.
One of the controversies around EM has been funding, and what the money used is actually funding. The cold war problem goes back all the way to Carter, maybe before. I worked for a firm in the mid 80’s that wanted to get part of the contract and send me to Hanford. Part of the problem is DOE and NRC is that often regulations are even worse for them and with even more reporting and oversight. Looking at the general structure, it appears to me that the questions also indicate not only a new direction, but a new emphasis as well. Businesses get it from all sides and with required comments and addressing these comments, progress is not only slow but can be stopped easily.
Agree. Ford’s fear about proliferation led tomthe bury spent fuel silliness. Yucca can be used as a partial solution to the Hanford mess. Dry casked spent fuel should be reprocessed usingnthe MOX process. Japan has a complete facility at Rokkasho that will be underutilized if it phases out nuclear.
It was President Carter in 1977 who issued an Executive Order banning USA reprocessing.
As history has proven, there were no technical reasons for such an order.
I have struggled with DOE a long time. Here is an email from 2013. The link to our published paper for a proposal to clean up the radwaste at Hanford no longer works (surprise!) but I can post it if anyone is interested.
DOE Hanford 5/1/2013
I requested information from DOE about progress and cost of cleaning up the radwaste at Hanford on Feb 23rd and have not received an answer,
Rather than repeat myself below is a copy of the email I have just sent to Senator Ron Wyden in the hope he will be more interested.
I wasted some months of my life trying to get DOE to consider better proposals than their RFP specified without success. See my paper linked below.
To Senator Ron Wyden 5/1/2013 Re radwaste at Hanford.
As you are mentioned in the article here, I thought you might be interested that if DOE had followed our proposal it would have saved $100 billion and all the liquids would have been vitrified by now. See http://people.duke.edu/~mgg6/A67402113108.pdf
This note was prompted by the piece in the Daily Kos linked below
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/05/1198971/-Hanford-s-Radwaste-Tanks-Leaking-Explosive-Waste-Treament-Plant-Unsafe-Whistleblowers-Vindicated#
It looks like the problems are even worse than we forecast. It seems that DOE has not vitrified ANY of the liquid waste, yet if they had accepted our proposal it would all have been vitrified by now. I also requested information on progress in cleaning up the radwaste and the cost so far from DOE and have not received a reply from them either.
I thought DOE was supposed to respond to inquiries. My direct experience is that DOE is no longer technically competent and just relies on outside contractors for advice when it comes to something complicated like this. Why has no one been held accountable for this extremely expensive disaster? It is becoming a farce.
Adrian Ashfield
Getting information from the Daily Kos would suggest that Adrian is a crackpot was would his post.
Once a RFP (Request for Proposals) is issued, it takes someone with an iron will to tell the procurement department that the RFP must be cancelled, rewritten and reissued.
Many employees prefer to let the RFPs die naturally, quietly.
Take names if you want. Then get rid of the DoE. The whole thing. Everyone.
It is my hope that the Trump administration defunds the left whenever possible. Everyone is right to worry about crony capitalism, but the left has invented crony NGO-ism, where government agrees to a deal with an NGO not to payoff in money but to pay off in achieving the same ideological goal. The icing on this cake is that government somewhere along the line finds a reason to also give the NGO a grant to study this or that urgent issue. It is horribly corrupt.
Thanks Willis. Interesting and very good to have. Lot of work, I’m about half way through. On #21 Participation legislation – this is important for the costly high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines “needed” to support the movement of energy from windy regions to population centers. While there are good practical HVDC applications and usage – the scale and cost of some of these proposed projects to support renewables (Clean Line) appear way out of the money relative to benefits and uncounted additional costs and burdens they would impose. A big question on these is who benefits and who pays.
Thanks for that clarification, it makes sense. To allow for massive input of uncontrollable wind and solar energy they need to revamp the whole transmission system.
w.
The follow-up questions should be even better!
Excellent article. Nicely done.
Wondering why the request wasn’t available directly from transition team.
Here’s hoping EPA, Energy, n Interior, Homeland, Education, and more get similar specific requests. Although I suspect as Illis has stated that no action will happen until after the new folks are fully in place. In the least all agencies should now be required to fully release the data, algorithms and such used in developing the cost / benefits of any specific findings leading to rule making, and provide follow-up results measured against those findings.
One thing about this election …there was NO hope with one candidate, and at least SOME hope with the winner. This article allows me to feel there is even MORE hope.
Thanks Willis.
Hopefully someone(s) on Trump’s team is/are reading the responses to this thread
Responses that contain good information from scientific minds can and should be put into the MAGA transition page by the author. A suggestion to read this article with commentary would be good also.
It is very easy to get ideas across now. I do believe that each response is being read, and the more intelligent and helpful ones are forwarded to appropriate persons.
“What was DOE’s opinion on the proper equilibrium climate sensitivity?”
That is a good question. The gut feeling by IPCC on that question is everything from a walk in the park to catastrophe:
“The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multi-century time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)( Note 16 ).”
Note 16 “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
IPCC; WGI ; AR5; Summary for policymakers; Page 16
Great post. Just one quibble….”Folks, for $4.5 billion dollars, we could provide clean water to almost half a million villages around the world … or we could put it into Elon Musk’s bank account…”
Nope. America’s government shouldn’t be interested in foreign villages water supplies either. Not their concern.
That 4.5 billion dollars needs to be returned to the American taxpayer and all taxes reduced so that it isn’t taken from them next time…. Americans are being treated as Tax Slaves. Time it stopped.
bingo … Willis just wants to spend the money on the things that HE considers virtuous … the government should no business in virtue signaling …
Kaiser, where did Willis write or indicate he “wants to spend the money on the things that HE considers virtuous”?
That 4.5 billion dollars needs to be returned
==============
agreed. while it may seem harsh, foreign aid almost always causes massive problems in the country that receives it, because it undermines the local economy.
what would happen in the US, if for example Saudi Arabia started giving the US all the free oil they wanted, and the US government wasn’t powerful enough to prevent it? The US oil industry would collapse. And if the Saudi’s then turned off the oil? The country would collapse, without a shot being fired, due to energy shortages, because the US oil industry would no longer exist..
This is what happens in the 3rd world when aid is given the removed.
I’d pay $10 (~4.5B/350M) for half a million villages to have access to clean water.
And you are free to do so. I wouldn’t (for whatever reason) so I should be free to decline.
Take your $10 bill to the toilet and flush it, same effect. We have been drilling wells and telling people to boil their drinking water, to not urinate/defecate in springs/streams/lakes/rivers for 200 years. It. Don’t. Work. Until they can stop embracing socialism and wake the f**k up nothing will help them. Throwing money at them certainly has not.
But now that I think about it, an addendum to the federal tax return would be good.
“I want to pay for drilling wells for foreigners: Y/N.”
“I want to pay for green-energy subsidies: Y/N.”
“I want to pay Elon Musk to go to Mars: Y/N.”
“I want to spend lavishly on politicians’ lifestyles: Y/N.”
“I want to pay to send our young men and women to some crapholestan to get slaughtered and maimed in a misguided attempt to bring so-called democracy to inbred cave-men who can barely govern their local bazaar: Y/N”
Answering “no” gets you a tax credit for the prorated amount.
I would answer “yes” to the third if I could stipulate that it was Elon Musk who was to go, personally, and never return. And take his stupid taxpayer-subsidized “businesses” (con-games) with him.
I’d settle for Native Americans to have clean water on our/their own lands.
Hear here!
Re Questions 70 – 74 seem to relate to the productivity of the lab staff. (“Can you provide a list of all peer-reviewed publications by lab staff for the past three years?; Can you provide a list of current professional society memberships of lab staff? Can you provide a list of publications by lab staff for the past three years? Can you provide a list of all websites maintained by or contributed to by laboratory staff during work hours for the past three years? Can you provide a list of all other positions currently held by lab staff, paid and unpaid, including faculties, boards, and consultancies?”)
Do the incoming administration suspect that lab staff have been putting effort into their own little extra-curricular projects, ’causes’, charities, etc. and furthering their own career (by increasing their ‘paper-count’) all at the DOE’s expense?
Having worked in energy storage materials in my own company (several issued US patents, two fundamental) I have interacted for a decade with some of these DoE labs such as Oak Ridge, Sandia, Idaho, Argonne, and NREL, both directly and via technical conferences. Their scientific output is feeble or worse. Many investigators will have produced no papers the past few years. A lot of their ‘studies’ are case histories of what somebody in the private sector did with federal grants and subsidies from ARPA E, or feasibility speculations (what if, if we just had…) justifying some harebrained program. Have seen it up close and personal. Plus, lots of duplication at different labs.
My guess is you could trim deadweight and duplication by half, and end up with a more managable and productive national lab system focussed on potentially useful stuff like 4th gen nuclear rather than future wind power options if we just had a nationwide HVDC transmission backbone.
Rud: About three days ago I put a note in Trump’s suggestion box nominating you to be his national science advisor.
You description does not at all apply to SLAC, Rud. There’d be no problem supplying published work and describing contributions to science.
Chopping dead wood makes noise. The US media will continue to publicize the context free commentary of USC and like minded political groups to undermine an administration it opposes. Our hope is that the new administration which owes them nothing proceeds with its agenda.
Thanks Willis. This is what got me started looking into this climate stuff back before climategate. Someone had tried to get information out of OUR government about how it was funding IPCC and CRU and Phil Jones. Where were the audits of how the money was spent? Where were the receipts? Who was responsible? Turned out it was just a big slush fund for Mike Mann, Phil Jones and the whole cabal. And what did we get for all those millions? Nothing.
WIllis: many thanks for your efforts in putting this article together.
Regarding questions 55-57 (LCOE calculations):
Rud Istvan and Planning Engineer wrote The True Costs of WInd Electricity, which disputed the EIA LCOE figures for wind generation. The two main errors were (1) plant lifecycle assumptions that were unreasonably optimistic for wind and at the same time unreasonably pessimistic for coal, and (2) hiding the assumption of a carbon tax in the capital fund rate to finance coal plants (9.5% for coal vs. 6.5% for wind).
A thorough review of the official LCOE figures from the EIA would be an excellent initial action from incoming Secretary Pruitt.
Man, this is going to be fun to watch.
AW, glad you liked it. Russ and I had great fun putting it together. Not the only place I have caught EIA in complete screwups. Essays Reserve Reservations (California’s Monterey shale) and Matyoshka Reserves (Russia’s Bahzenov shale) in mymebook Blowing Smoke illustrate two other collossal basic blunders.
Yes, collect the names, find which ones have and are committing crimes and PROSECUTE them.
“Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore, California (1952)”
I guess that’s where Ben Santer works. His hair may be feeling a bit warm.