Ron Paul talks energy policy at Portsmouth NH Town Hall (Video)

Ron Paul laid out his plan for partially eliminating the Department of Energy while responding to a voter's question at a November 30, 2011 Town Hall style event held in Portsmouth, NH. The Republican presidential candidate and Texas Congressman also explained his free market approach to energy policy:

Voter: You propose to eliminate five departments. Let’s pick on one. Let’s pick on the Department of Energy. I’m not really sure what the Department of Energy really does, but how would you go about doing it?

How do you think you can accomplish it?

Would you replace it with another energy project?

Ron Paul: No – one out of five – Department of Energy – How do you go through the process? 

You go through the process by eliminating it, but you don’t eliminate every single function of the Department of Energy, because there will be some with nuclear materials and other things. That would be transferred.

The program that I’ve devised takes that into consideration.

But the question that we hear so often, and it’s a serious question, but it’s somewhat misleading. They say, “Well, what is the energy policy?”

“Who’s going to do the energy policy?”

Well, the market does the energy policy and not the government. Therefore you're not involved in trying to figure out who should get the subsidies and who should get the help, because the market would determine it.

What you want to do is get the regulations out so you don’t need a lot of regulators in the Department of Energy.

But the President would have a lot of authority to shrink the size of it. You would work with the Congress as well in making sure that some of the functions you need to take care of are transferred.

Because it’s in the Executive Branch, the President certainly does have the authority to just shrink the size of this thing and release some of the decision making to the people and talk Congress into making sure that you don’t give subsidies to corn, but not to some other substance.

They give us bad policy. They’ll subsidize corn.

But today I read, well I think it’s been known for a while, that we probably use up more hydrocarbons making corn than we do otherwise. But there was an article today that I’d never thought about and they said, “Boy if you really want to protection your…”

This guy at least was posing as a mechanical expert, he said, “Don’t ever use that ethanol, it’s really bad for your engine.”

I’ve never heard of that one. Have you heard of that? I wouldn’t be surprised.

But you know, this is like governments shouldn’t be making these decisions. I want them out of that.

You don’t need many people to do it, but you could protect some vital functions by transferring it to other – like if it had to do with nuclear waste or nuclear power, you could have the DOD take care of it.