The Daily Caller | June 8, 2016 | Doug Domenech
I remember the first time I met Sally Jewell. She had come into the office to meet then Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. At the time she was the CEO of the outdoor equipment co-op REI. I was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Secretary and was excited about the prospect of meeting Jewell. I had been an REI member for many years. When she arrived, I reached out my hand and, just for fun, introduced myself by my REI member number. Her immediate response was, “Oh you have been a member for a long time.”
At the time, neither of us would have guessed that she would serve as the 51st Secretary of the Interior, and as only the second woman to lead the Department. (Gale Norton was the first.)
Jewell showed a glimmer of the practicality I’d hoped for when a few weeks ago she called activists in the “keep it in the ground” movement as “naïve.” The “it” is fossil fuels. She went on to tell the Desert Sun news, “It’s going to take a very long time before we can wean ourselves from fossil fuels, so I think that to keep it in the ground is naïve, to say we could shift to 100 percent renewables is naïve. We really have to have a blend over time, and a transition over time, that recognizes the real complexity of what we’re dealing with.”
There is no doubt that Jewell is a complete apologist for climate change theory, one based more on models than observations. As a climate scientist recently said, models are to science as polling is to election results. Models are guesses. But when confronted by activists, Jewell asked, “Did you burn any fossil fuels today?”
Read the full editorial here.
The Honorable Doug Domenech is the Director of the Fueling Freedom Project at The Texas Public Policy Foundation.
