Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Friday that more regulation isn’t the answer to Texas’ power crisis that left millions of residents without electricity or heat this week due to a brutal winter storm.
“I’d love to have President Biden come to Texas,” the ex-member of former President Trump’s Cabinet who also served as the governor of Texas until 2015, told guest host Jason Chaffetz on “Hannity.” “We could show him some things that he certainly needs to see.”
Biden said Friday he plans to travel to the Lone Star State but the date was unclear.
Perry — who succeeded George W. Bush as a Republican governor of Texas prior to serving in Trump’s Cabinet — said the federal government needs to be a “partner in innovating our way to better energy solutions rather than regulating it.”
And although he says he’s willing to talk about Texas, which has its own power grid, joining the national one, “my experience with the federal government has been [that] the first thing they do is regulate.”
RICK PERRY SAYS TEXANS WOULD GO LONGER WITHOUT POWER JUST TO KEEP FEDS ‘OUT OF THEIR BUSINESS’
Perry said he would caution people over finger-pointing amid what he called a likely “once-in-a-lifetime” event and urged people to look for solutions and ways to innovate instead.
He also called walking away from fossil fuels and nuclear power a “recipe for disaster.”
Touting the environmental achievements of the Trump administration, Perry slammed the proposed Green New Deal.
“Last week in Texas as people were losing their power, thank God we had fossil fuels in this state because if all we had had was the AOC Green New Deal plan, wind and solar, we would have had a massive disaster on our hands. As it was, fossil fuels are what really saved the day.”
However, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, clarified last week that failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear energy systems were responsible for nearly twice as many outages as frozen wind turbines and solar panels combined.
Perry added that the “only” thing the Paris Climate Agreement, which the U.S. officially rejoined Friday, would do would be to let countries like China “off the hook.”
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“They’re going to continue to develop their energy resources climate be damned and America will pay the price. I don’t understand why [White House special envoy on climate] John Kerry and President Biden can’t see the truth to that.”