Hank Hughes, the executive director of the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness and former director of St Elizabeth’s Shelter in Santa Fe, has announced his campaign for Public Regulation Commission (Dist. 4). SFReeper caught him on a snowy Friday to talk about alternative energy, homelessness in New Mexico and joining a scandal-ridden state commission.

First, the obvious question: Why are you running?

The behavior of the current [Public Regulation] Commission is [not] very ethical, and I think it needs a lot of improvement in that area. I’m also very interested in renewable energy, and I think the PRC needs to play a role in promoting alternative energy so New Mexico can be a leader in that area.

Don’t you feel like you’re stepping into an ethical minefield here?

A lot of the ideas are already out there, like having an ethics commission. People are pretty aware of the ethical issues, so it’s a pretty good time to work on that, and I think there’d be a lot of public support for it. Obviously it’s not going to be easy…

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There was much more to our interview with US Rep. Ben Ray Luján than we were able to fit into this week’s SFR Talk or last week’s health care discussion, including:

* Why he thinks it’s important for the US to stay in Afghanistan

* Whether he thinks PNM, one of his bigger campaign contributors, is doing enough to develop renewable energy

* Why he posed with Truffles the Office Pig

Listen to the full interview with the embedded player below, or download the MP3 right here.

And here are some rough and incomplete topical time stamps, for your inconvenience.

0-3 min.: Life in Washington

3-21 min.: Health care

21 min.: Energy issues

23 min.: Changing the national labs’ mission

26 min.: PNM and renewable energy

31 min.: PRC and Jerome Block Jr

32 min.: Iraq and Afghanistan

43 min.: Commercial space travel

44 min.: Adam Kokesh, miscellany

50 minutes: The stimulus

If you die in a dream, do you die in real life? No.

If you promise to die for a dream, will that make the dream real? Maybe.

Depends on the dream and the dreamer.

Española-based energy consultant Miro Kovacevich is floating a $21-billion plan to set up a National Renewable Energy Administration in New Mexico. The scheme would include $7 billion annually for Sandia and Los Alamos National labs and another a $7 billion annually for a headquarters in Santa Fe.

“I’m certain we’ll get it all. I’m certain. I put my life on the
line,” Kovacevich says.

As president of Vivilux Consulting, Kovacevich has led open meeting in Los Alamos and lobbied in DC for his plan to restructure the country’s energy economy around a central scientific administration.

“You need, first and foremost, the best and brightest, 800 to 2000 of them, trans-disciplinary, up close and personal,” Kovacevich. “This is essentially both methodically, structurally and conceptually exactly what the Manhattan Project was. This is the Manhattan Project in reverse.”

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