On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump formally announced two Texas-centric cabinet picks. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson will serve as Trump’s secretary of state, and former Texas governor Rick Perry will be in charge of the Department of Energy. And while the two men will serve wildly different purposes in the administration, they are bonded by a certain, very Texas thing: reckless dealings in the energy industry.
Besides being the head of America’s largest oil company, Tillerson is a huge fan of fracking. He’s even gone so far as to fund friendly studies about the practice through his alma mater. In 2012, the University of Texas, from which Tillerson graduated in 1975 with a degree in civil engineering, announced that ExxonMobil and GE would each give $1 million to the school’s Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering to "inform and educate the regulators… about basic petroleum technology." The Energy Institute at the University of Texas caused a stir a few months later when Chip Groat, a professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, authored a study that found “little evidence of groundwater contamination from fracking.” (The EPA says that fracking “can impact drinking water resources,” and evidence of contamination has been found in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming.)
Tillerson himself resisted a fracking project in his hometown of Denton County, Texas, citing concerns for his rural lifestyle, which he claimed would be disturbed by the loud noises that fracking produces.
Perry, for his part, is a notorious climate change skeptic who, during an unprecedented drought in Texas, proposed a widespread prayer for rain. However, it isn’t Perry’s views on climate change that make his appointment as head of the Department of Energy worrisome, but his relationship with nuclear waste. One of the department’s main duties is managing the safety of America’s nuclear supplies so we don’t all die. In 2003, the Texas Legislature handed its state-run radioactive waste program over to Waste Control Specialists LLC in a multi-million-dollar deal. Waste Control Specialists, a private company, happens to be run by Perry’s buddy, the 80-year-old billionaire Harold Simmons, who has donated $3 million to Perry’s numerous campaigns and initiatives.
Despite its name, Waste Control Specialists is not great at its job. As Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a non-profit group that tracks political corruption and corporate abuse, told NPR: "There has been no secret that Harold Simmons' direct self-interest lies in building, permitting, and operating his hazardous waste dump and low-level nuclear waste dump in West Texas." The dump of which McDonald speaks has drawn concern from environmental groups since 2007 because it was established without a public hearing. According to NPR, the waste will remain in West Texas "until the government comes up with a long-term disposal plan.” Which doesn’t look like it will happen anytime soon as long as Texas has space and Perry is in power.
These good ol’ Texas boys have a tendency to use their power to bend reality and help out their buddies. Exxon’s pending $500 billion deal with Russia has plenty of Republicans and Democrats shaken up, and rightfully so. If the way business works in Texas is any indication, Trump’s America might be up for sale.
