The environmental group Sierra Club is trying to drum up trouble for Energy Secretary Rick Perry by calling for his ouster after he made remarks Thursday associating increased fossil fuel to ending sexual assault.
“It was already clear that Rick Perry is unfit to lead the Department of Energy, but to suggest that fossil fuel development will decrease sexual assault is not only blatantly untrue, it is an inexcusable attempt to minimize a serious and pervasive issue,” said Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director.
Perry made the remarks at a morning event put on by Axios, where he described his recent trip to Africa and the need for fossil fuels there to bring electricity to much of the continent.
In making the remarks, he detoured to discuss how fossil fuels help to make the U.S. grid more reliable, and in turn, bring light to the streets so that women can walk at night in relative safety.
“And it’s going to take fossil fuels to push power out into those villages in Africa, where a young girl told me to my face, ‘one of the reasons that electricity is so important to me is not only because I’m not going to have to try to read by the light of a fire and have those fumes literally killing people.’ But also from the standpoint of sexual assault,” Perry said.
“When the lights are on, when you have light that shines, the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts. So from the standpoint of how you really affect people’s lives, fossil fuels is going to play a role in that. I happen to think it’s going to play a positive role,” Perry said.
Brune’s group and many other environmental organizations have been stepping up a protracted campaign targeting Cabinet-level officials to force them to resign.
The groups have used Cabinet officials’ use of private aircraft to go after Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Friends of the Earth, for example, contracted a small aircraft to buzz an oil industry conference that Pruitt spoke at last month, asking him to pay back the $58,000 he spent on chartered flights and then resign.
