Obama declares war on energy

Just to prove that he hates America, Obama has appointed an academic who knows nothing about real energy to be the next Secretary of Energy:

Obama Expected To Tap Nobel Prize Winner To Head Energy Department.
Fox News' Special Report (12/10, Hume) reported, "Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated Energy Secretary. Chu is a proponent of using alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels." CNN's The Situation Room (12/10, Yellin) said Chu is "very well known in energy circles. He runs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. He won the Nobel Prize in 1997 in physics. But the big question is going to be: If in fact this goes forward, will he have the political clout? He doesn't have a lot of political experience. Will he have the clout to pass a massive energy reform bill?"

In a front-page story, the Washington Post (12/11, A1, Mufson, Rucker) notes that "Chu, the son of Chinese immigrants, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the 'development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.' But, in an interview last year with The Washington Post, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago." Said Chu, "I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed. ... Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation." USA Today (12/11, Hall, Schouten), the AP (12/11, Sidoti, Cappiello), Los Angeles Times (12/11, Tankersley) and Financial Times (12/11, Luce), among other media outlets, run similar stories this morning.

In the Wall Street Journal (12/11) Environmental Capital blog, Keith Johnson examined Chu's "ideas about finding new supplies of energy." Johnson noted that "Chu's marquee work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the Helios Project," which is "an effort to tackle what Dr. Chu sees as the biggest energy challenge facing the U.S.: transportation. That's because it's a huge drain on US coffers and an environmental albatross, Dr. Chu says." The project "has focused largely on biofuels," particularly research into second-generation biofuels. However, "Big Coal won't be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE," as Chu has called coal his "worst nightmare," particularly ""given the sheer scope of the challenge of economically storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground." Johnson also examined Chu's stance on nuclear power, and the implementation of renewable energy.

The Washington Post (12/12, A9, Mufson) reports on "the next secretary of energy, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu," who argues that "the United States and other countries" need to address the issue of climate change. "He said governments need to 'act quickly' to implement fiscal and regulatory policies to stimulate the deployment of technologies that boost energy efficiency and 'minimize' carbon emissions." According to the Post, "Chu's views on climate change would be among the most forceful ever held by a cabinet member." In the past, Chu has called "the cost of electricity...'anomalously low' in the United States," and said "that a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gases 'is an absolutely non-partisan issue,' and that scientists had come to 'realize that the climate is much more sensitive than we thought.'" Chu has also "said that he had confidence in mankind's ability to solve its energy problems," arguing that "the challenge...was to create things from nature that nature cannot make on its own."