Straight Talk

The Boston Globe is reporting:

The nation’s top energy official delivered a blunt message Monday to a Connecticut audience of energy executives, regulators, environmentalists, and others who already know that fuel heating and cooling homes and businesses and running power plants in New England is among the costliest in the nation.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, stopping in Providence and Hartford in a months-long federal review of energy issues, said New England doesn’t share the good news developing in the field of energy with the rest of the country.

‘‘Out there, in much of the country, the talk is about the energy revolution, the abundance of energy that we have, the way that we are in fact drawing upon new resources . . . promoting renewables, at the same time reducing carbon emissions,’’ he said.

‘‘But yet if we come here, it’s not a discussion of abundance. It’s a discussion of, in particular, infrastructure constraints,’’ he said.

Actually he was being kind. The discussion in New England is not about infrastructure constraints but how to put more obstacles in front of the oil and gas industry. 

Of course that's what all the pundits will focus on.

The big story is this. Well, actually two stories. First, the top US energy official knows New England: he is a physicist and professor at MIT, Cambridge (across the river from Boston), Massachusetts.

Second, he recognizes the US is in the middle (or at the beginning) of an energy revolution. Certainly he uses the same phrase when the cabinet heads get around the table for a photo op with the president.

I wonder if he golfs? I wonder what his position on the Keystone is? I wonder if he ever meets with the president?