The February resignation of Karen Harbert from a top Energy Department post gave the Bush administration an opportunity to nominate a more moderate thinker for the job.
Bush should have taken the opportunity in light of all that’s been written about energy since Harbert — a strong drilling and nuclear power advocate — took the job in 2004.
Last week, however, The Washington Post quoted several current and former administration sources as saying a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney is the leading contender for the job.
The aide, Chase Hutto, is a virtual clone of Cheney when it comes to oil-centric energy policy, opposition to governmental regulation of energy companies and indifference to global warming.
Harbert, who resigned as assistant secretary for policy and international affairs to take a job with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had long favored expanding nuclear power, increasing the use of coal and greatly accelerating the pace of domestic oil and gas production by opening more federal land and offshore sites to drilling.
She supported these positions despite abundant evidence presented over the past several years about global warming’s near-term dangers, the prohibitive cost of building nuclear power plants and the continuing negative health and environmental effects of burning fossil fuels.
Much has also been documented recently about the dropping costs and advancing technology of renewable energy, factors that should have led to clean power’s becoming an administration priority.
It was clearly time for a change in this assistant secretary’s job, whose holder heavily influences federal policy on global warming and the government’s posture toward national and international energy resources.
If Hutto gets the job there will be no change, except possibly for the worse. He will be in a position to bring about policy changes that could do a lot of damage, even if he’s replaced early next year by the new administration.
The Energy Department’s Web site says the role of the assistant secretary for policy and international affairs is to deliver “unbiased advice to the (department’s) leadership.” If Hutto is nominated, the Senate should withhold confirmation on the obvious grounds that he is not unbiased on the issues central to the job.
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