Rick Perry wants to bail out the coal industry
Economic experts from both the right and the left have also opposed the plan. Josiah Neeley, the director of energy policy at the conservative R Street Institute, said he found Perry’s remarks at the hearing “a little strange.”
“Secretary Perry didn’t sound very much like Governor Perry that I remember back here in Texas, because Governor Perry, of course, was a big fan of free markets in electricity,” he told me.
The R Street Institute has been “very critical” of the proposal, he said, which he said was also “pretty vague.”
“There’s certainly not a reliability crisis. And even if there was, the proposed rule doesn’t address any of the issues with reliability that are out there,” he said. “To the extent that there is an issue here with reliability, the principled way to deal with it is to create some sort of market product … and not have the Department of Energy pick winners and losers.”
