The Invisible Dr. Chu

By Alan Caruba

While we all are now familiar with Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar’s remark about keeping the government’s boot on the neck of BP, one of the most remarkable aspects of the oil spill drama has been the near absence of Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy.

Other than an appearance MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the Nobel Prize laureate for physics has not been the designated spokesman for the Obama administration. That job has fallen to Carol Browner, the energy and environment advisor to the president. One might think the man overseeing the Department of Energy might logically also be addressing the oil spill, but no.

Perhaps the answer can be found in the fact that Secretary Chu has been double-dipped in all the environmental lies about global warming and no one has told him that the Earth has been cooling for the past decade or that a huge batch of leaked emails is evidence of massive data tampering to support the global warming hoax.

Well, he has a lot on his plate. It’s hard to be Secretary of Energy when you pretty much hate most hydrocarbons, coal, oil and natural gas, blaming them and the six billion people on Earth for generating the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the Earth’s average mean temperature is one of those details he’s overlooked.

As Secretary Chu was saying back in September 2008, “Coal is my worst nightmare.” Well, if your resume sported the fact that you headed up the “Helios Project” (named for the Sun) when you were working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focusing on biofuels, you too might take a dim view of the other sources that represent the energies everybody uses.

Before the BP oil spill accident, Secretary Chu was unhappy that the United States was dependent on oil (like every other nation on Earth.) The Secretary said that “most proven reserves…are now off-shore. It will cost more to extract from tar sands and (there would be) more CO2 emissions.” Earth to Dr. Chu! There’s millions of barrels of oil in Alaska, but it is off limits for fear a caribou might be harmed.

The Secretary of Energy is no big fan of nuclear power either. He cites waste problems, but apparently is unaware that the huge billion-dollar depository, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, was abandoned by the Obama administration despite having been built specifically for storing nuclear waste.

It’s more like wasting money than nuclear waste, but the United States Recovery Act, the ill-famed stimulus act, allocated $80 billion to research and use of “clean” energy such as wind and solar, and to “efficiency.” The problem is that, without a dependable supply of electricity, all the efficiency in the world will not make much difference if the lights go out.

Perhaps it’s not a good idea to send out Secretary Chu to discuss the oil spill. As reported in the May 27, 2009 edition of The Times (UK), at the opening of the St. James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, he suggested that painting the world’s roofs, roads and pavements white would be a great way to cut carbon emissions. They would “reflect up to 80% of the sunlight that falls on them.” He added that “a global initiative” would be a way to save us from global warming.

Only there is no global warming, carbon dioxide has nothing to do with the climate, and one rig out of more than three hundred in the Gulf has sprung a leak. Ironically, years ago when he was an academic at University of California-Berkeley, he received a winning bid for a $500 million grant funded by BP to study something or other.

Too many years ago than I want to recall, I was the publications director for a major northeastern institute of technology. It was filled with engineers who actually know how to make things work, build bridges, fix oil leaks and such. There were also some brilliant physicists on the faculty. The latter had trouble parking their cars between the yellow lines and other mundane tasks.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Hamas' Definition of "Peace"

Al and Tipper Gore in Splitsville

By Alan Caruba

For anyone who has followed Al Gore’s Green Brick Road to the land of Global Warming, there has to be more than a bit of schadenfreude---taking pleasure in other’s misfortunes---on hearing the news that he and his wife of forty years, Tipper, have separated. However, that feeling is fleeting for reasons that have to do with lots and lots and lots of money.

There is always a moment when one gets an opportunity to peer into the mind of someone and discern that something is seriously amiss. For me it came when I read the 1993 softcover edition of his book, “Earth in the Balance.”

Deep into the text, Gore wrote, “Within the context of the Strategic Environment Initiative, it ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five year period.”

There is a special kind of crazy to propose eliminating the engine the powers automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, boats and most everything else that transports humans and goods across the face of the Earth.

There is a special kind of crazy that hates oil so much it actually thinks it should not be refined as gasoline, but there are people in government who, unable to accept the genius of the internal combustion engine, have mandated that gasoline be mixed with ethanol.

Ethanol is a chemical otherwise known as moonshine. Every gallon of gas costs more while producing less mileage. Ethanol is so corrosive it cannot be transmitted via pipelines. It requires that acres of corn be turned into a useless fuel instead of food.

I break out in a sweat when I think this loony ran for president of the United States and it took a Supreme Court decision to cede the election to George W. Bush, a Midland, Texas boy whose daddy was in the oil business.

While serving as vice president under Bill Clinton, Gore was a driving force for the United Nations Kyoto Protocols that we now know were based on the lies about global warming. Those same lies are the basis for the Cap-and-Trade legislation under consideration in the U.S. Senate.

Al Gore’s big, big problem these days is something dubbed “Climategate”, the revelation that the “science” of global warming is entirely fabricated and utterly false.

After his election defeat Al Gore put in a call to David Blood, an 18-year veteran of Goldman Sachs. As stated in a new book ‘Killing Wealth’, “Together they began talking about the potential for the largest swindle in history.” In 2003, “Mr. Gore and Mr. Blood had established Generation Investment Management and created a $1 billion fund to invest in the ‘green technologies’ that would save the planet.”

Thereafter, in collusion with a handful of climate scientists, Gore led the most sophisticated and diabolical campaign to convince people and entire governments that “the Earth has a fever” due to too much carbon dioxide. It would require, he said, green technologies to save the Earth from global warming.

These are, by the way, the same technologies that have reaped millions in subsidies and grants from the U.S. government for those desperate to convince everyone that a zillion wind turbines or acres of solar collectors were a better source of energy that a few coal-fired or nuclear plants.

This is the same global warming scheme that enriched a number of university scientists like Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and government hacks like James Hansen who, as director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, started the hoax with his 1988 testimony about global warming before Congress. Their data has since been debunked.

There was, Gore told everyone, a climate crisis and, in the process he grew rich, hailed the first “carbon billionaire” for his various investments.

The problem was that, beginning around a decade ago, the Earth began to cool in a perfectly natural way. In November 2009, the Climategate revelations put the skids to the UN’s climate conference in Copenhagen and nations that had bought into green technology began to realize it was an idiotic idea that killed jobs and undermined their economies.

As bad as the bursting of the housing “bubble” has been, the next bubble will be a very green one. And, at the heart of it will be the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore and his partner in crime, the UN climate change program. People will wonder why his famed documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”, filled with inaccuracies, won an Oscar and was force-fed to children in schools around the world.

Breathing down his neck is Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) who has called for the U.S. Justice Department to investigate possible fraud by the perpetrators of the “global warming hoax.” Inhofe is Gore’s nemesis. “Every assertion that he made in his science fiction movie has now been disproven…” Should political power in Congress pass to Republicans and when President Obama has left the White House, Gore will have no protection against an investigation that will rival Watergate.

The investigation will involve agencies of the federal government, NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others as co-conspirators along with the scientists that participated in the global warming fraud. It will likely put a number of people in jail and among them is likely to be Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

If Al Gore and Tipper are legally separated, it will likely provide a measure of protection for the millions he has secured through a fraud that dwarf’s Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

This, I suggest, is probably the real reason for the separation. It is as coldly calculated as his global warming lies. Even their forty-year marriage must be sacrificed.

The global warming fraud has been undermined by Climategate and by the forces of Nature that are determined by the Sun, the oceans, and the clouds that circle the Earth and remain a mystery to the greatest climatologists of our times.

© Alan Caruba, 2010