Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus slammed President Trump on Friday over the president’s “military plan” to bail out coal and nuclear plants, calling it a “dangerous and unwarranted” plan motivated by politics and geared toward corporate interests.
Mabus was the civilian head of the Navy for eight years under former President Barack Obama before stepping down last year. In that time, he was acutely aware of the need for military installations to have access to reliable energy resources.
“But rather than advancing that objective, President Donald Trump appears poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on a corporate bailout that would do nothing to improve grid resilience,” Mabus wrote in an op-ed published Friday by the Houston Chronicle. “Worse, his proposal would represent an unprecedented federal intervention into power markets, masking blatantly political objectives with a dangerous and unwarranted use of national security authorities.”
Mabus pointed out that Energy Secretary Rick Perry tried to institute a plan with a proposed rule last year that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, including Trump appointees, unanimously rejected.
Now, the White House National Security Council, along with Perry and other agencies, is leading an effort to save struggling coal-fired power plants by arguing that they benefit the national security of the country.
In a speech earlier this week in West Virginia, Trump underscored the effort, saying “we are working now on a military plan that’s going to be something very special” for coal.
“In times of war, in times of conflict, you can blow up those windmills; they fall down real quick,” Trump said in preceding remarks. “You can blow up those pipelines … you’re not going to fix them too fast.”
“But you know what you can’t hurt? Coal,” he continued. “You can do whatever you want to coal.”
Mabus opposes that argument, saying most electricity outages are cause by downed transmission lines and distribution cables, not by power plants being knocked out of commission.
“Virtually all power outages — including those at military bases — result from problems in transmission and distribution systems or, in the case of the military, on-base energy infrastructure,” Mabus wrote. “Ignoring that real problem, the president’s proposal would instead bail out a select number of power plants while doing nothing to harden power lines and other infrastructure that delivers electricity to homes, businesses and military bases.”
Mabus also called out the administration’s resiliency argument as “equally suspect.” The administration’s argument that subsidizing coal and nuclear power plants is necessary “because they have fuel supplies on site” is flawed, says Mabus. He points out a recent study by the Rhodium Group that showed fuel shortages were responsible for fewer than one-in-a-million hours of electricity outages.
The former Navy head said the administration is “addressing a nearly nonexistent problem” that will “spend a very real amount of money.” One recent study calculated it would cost in excess of $34 billion over two years.
“That money would either come from America’s rate payers — showing up on the monthly bills of millions of households and businesses — or from a Pentagon budget that the military needs for the real business of national security,” Mabus added.
