Note to Mr. Obama: Your buddy, Tim Geithner, is more than an embarrassment; he's a scofflaw. His offense is not civil, but criminal in nature. It's that "intent" thing-- like deliberately trying to avoid paying self employment taxes for FOUR years.
Obama claimed it was, "Just a memory lapse...a "common' mistake...and "that shouldn’t bar the Senate from confirming him".
But in saying this-- is Obama embarrassing himself? Didn't he maintain during his campaign that his administration would be the most 'transparent" in history?
And treasury Secretary nominee-designate Geithner has also been deemed, by an-eager to-confirm-Congress, also as being no embarrassment. "Just a few hiccups," said majority Senate leader Harry Reid. So despite his obvious sin, looks like ol' Timothy is in for treasury czar.
OK now, who's next for confirmation? Apparently it's for the Dept of Energy... "Calling the renowned Dr Stephen Chu! You're wanted by president Obama to appear in front of the senate energy committee for confirmation"!
But the "renowned" scientist Chu, may himself be an embarrassment--an embarrassment to the intelligence of energy scientists and physicists around the world. Dr. Chu last September stated that, "somehow we have to figure out how to get the price of gasoline in the US to the level of that in Europe". In April of 2007, Dr. Chu, at a presentation at the University of California at Berkeley, stated that, "Coal is my worst nightmare".
Presently, coal represents almost 66% of our electricity production, and its use as a cheaper alternative than natural gas is re-surging. But evidently, the dreaded thoughts of coal have caused the renowned Dr. Chu to experience even more unsettling bad dreams ...(quote) "The abundance of coal in the U.S. means we won't run out of energy, but it represents enough carbon in the ground to really cook us". Hows that sound-- OUR energy secretary... our proposed energy czar, can't sleep because of his coal nightmares.
But rest easy fellow Americans; Dr. Chu has some interesting cures for his global warming paranoia; and in the future, every time we go to raise our thermostats, or fill up at the pump, it's us who'll be having the nightmares! This man intends to use science in place of practicality and common sense. He seeks not what's best for America, but what he deems will be best for the environment-- reducing consumption by raising energy prices.
Dr. Chu is about as diehard a global warmonger as anyone you can think of. And our green obsessed new president is right alongside with him about saving the planet; turning back the oceans; and stopping the biblical like apocalypse of mankind burning up the planet with fossil fuels.
Yes president Obama...you've made a great choice for our new energy secretary; right at a time when Dr. Chu's plan to reduce consumption of oil and electricity come when both energy prices and and consumption are falling, because of MARKET FORCES. And Dr. chu, exprimenting away in his shelter from the real world at his Livermore lab, probably thinks "Market Forces" is some hot new title on X-box.
Dr Chu is determined about his mission to turn plants into petroleum substitutes, and actually hopes to find (or engineer) better biofuel plants. Chu wants to develop processes for breaking down cellulose and transforming it into fuel, at costs "competitive" with gasoline. This would indeed be a huge breakthrough, replacing gasoline with cellulosic ethanol.
Just imagine how afraid OPEC must be right now....
oil sheik #1; Hmmm, what are we going to do about this guy, Dr Chu?
oil sheik# 2 : we've got to stop this madman.
oil sheik#3: this cellulose for fuel thing looks like it's the end of the line for us. Now we'll all have to get real jobs ...I hear that new resort complex over in Bahrain might be hiring.
If you want to get a level of the enthusiasm (fanaticism ) Dr. Chu has toward "saving the earth from fossil fuels", get a gasoline-vapored whiff of this recent AP quote: "DOE (dept. of energy) will be run by Dr. Stephen Chu of U.C. Berkeley, who after winning a Nobel Prize for capturing atoms with a laser at Stanford, then took over the Laurence Berkeley Lab and gutted its research staff, transforming it from a power research unit, to one working on "alternative energy" (i.e., wind and sun only).
But predictably, ever since the fanatical Dr. Chu has been in charge, Lawrwence Berkely Research Lab (LBRL) has accomplished exactly nothing in energy research- except a barrage of peer-reviewed papers on (what else?) Global Warming. (All of which boil down to Chicken Little screaming "The Sky Is Falling!")
Can you picture cellulose replacing oil? Are we about to enter the age of..."fill-er-up there Shorty, with premium cellulose''.
And what else does the great Dr. Chu, besides cellulose, have in mind? What other scientific treasured energy gems does he have waiting to reveal to us? Are we totally hell-bent on spiraling back to the stone age? While we're saving the earth, lets just get it over with now--end all land-based and ocean based energy exploration. It simply leaves too great of a "carbon" footprint...bring on the biomass!
Consider Dr. Chu's profoundly scientific approach to coal (his worst nightmare). Sixty-some percent of America’s power comes from coal, and Chu’s earlier comments have made the coal industry and the mining unions extremely nervous. But Chu has assured the senators in the energy committee that science and technology will allow coal "to keep the lights on".
However, when it comes to making federal investments in coal sequestration (i.e. clean coal), Chu acknowledged that research into new sources of energy will take a higher priority than cleaning up coal CO2 emissions by "sequestering" them into the ground. Oh those poor groundhogs! Will PETA be cool with this?
Chu’s two hour confirmation hearing touched on all the energy issues: wind and solar power, on shore and off shore oil and gas drilling. Chu also spoke on renewable resources, which he deemed to be "carbon neutral" and can replace coal eventually. Dr. Chu supports federal loan guarantees to restart the nation’s nuclear power industry, but is quick to say that, " Science must find a solution to store nuclear waste".
Translation; since nuclear waste has a "hot" half-life of about 99 hundred-thousand years (i.e. forever) Chu and his ilk will never let another nuclear plant go on line during the next 8 years; and you can take that to the bank...er, waste dump.
Despite all the conflicting evidence (and extremely cold recent weather) Dr. Chu has been unambiguous in stating that carbon dioxide emitted by cars, power plants and industry is a direct cause of global warming; and that urgent action to slash emissions is needed to avoid upheaval of the planet’s climate. Yes, it's Dr. Chu to the rescue.
Dr. Chu's stated mission for the last four years as dirctor at LVRL has been to use so-called synthetic biology to convert plant cellulose into fuel; these plants would be a biomass composed mostly of switch grass and woodchips. But the growing of plants for fuel competes with the growing of food.
And since cellulose plants (like switch grass) have less energy content than planting corn for ethanol, they require eight times as many acres to produce equivalent amounts of energy. One estimate says replacing corn ethanol with cellulose fuel would require planting enough switch grass to cover the state of Ohio.
There's a basic truth that cannot be altered - each drop of crude oil has an energy content that far surpasses the same amount of corn, switch grass or anything else. A gallon of ethanol can't take you as far as a gallon of gasoline because there's less power in it.
And don't forget--the burning of biofuels still emits carbon dioxide, even if it is the same carbon dioxide that the plants had sucked out of the air. Subsidizing ethanol while suppressing domestic drilling, and halting construction of refineries and nuclear power plants, is a big reason why energy costs keep climbing.
To Dr. Chu's credit, there area few pluses. Cellulose energy might indirectly bring down food prices in the future. Cellulosic ethanol, while not yet ready for market, has more favorable energy ratios than corn, and presents more room for productivity gains, making it appealing to investors, farmers and refiners.
But large-scale development of cellulosic ethanol is plagued by environmental problems. Turning cellulose into fuel would require a huge expenditure of increasingly scarce water resources; and the mass production of cellulosic ethanol would likely impact soil quality.
Cellulosic energy DOES represent a better alternative than corn ethanol. But Dr Chu-to our peril--ignores one scientific fact:--gasoline is a better fuel than ethanol by many measures, especially because a gallon of gas has about 20% more energy in it than you get with the absurdly low increase in energy yield from either corn or cellulosic ethanol.
The bottomline? Political correctness makes for a lousy energy strategy. Are you listening out there Dr Chu? We know your intentions are good, but you must understand; America simply does not have even a fraction of the acreage necessary to grow enough of anything that would replace petroleum.
So those OPEC sheiks can rest easy, and put away the want ads for now.