Posted by
RME KRNL on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 2:27:29 AM
Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and President Obama’s Energy Secretary, recently told a conference of Nobel laureates in London: “If you look at all the buildings and if you make the roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of color rather than a black type of color and if you do that uniformally [sic], that would be the equivalent of ... reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world by 11 years – just taking them off the road for 11 years."
Uhhhh, what? And just how much would it cost to paint all our residential and commercial and industrial rooftops white and redo about half of all our roads? What a lame-brained idea and an even dumber thing to say out loud in public! I guess it's a good thing that Chu's Nobel in physics had nothing to do with climatology. Instead he was one of three scientists who received a joint award for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
Now, his being a physicist presumably means he's intelligent, but it may also be that he's like a couple of people with whom I went to college -- smart as a whip but no common sense. You know, the type who can discuss almost anything about anything but can't remember to tie his own shoelaces. Yeah, that guy. We've all known at least one.
Oh, and before you get too impressed by Chu having a Nobel, so does Al "the Goracle" Gore, who never struck me as even being all that super-intelligent about anything. In fact, a lot of people have been awarded the Nobel in a lot of different fields, a lot of them for highly specialized stuff. On the other hand, for example, Yassar Arafat also won a Nobel, and for peace, no less. He shared it in 1994 with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres after their secret meetings in Norway resulted in a peace agreement between Israel and Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
But Arafat was a life-long terrorist. And Chu, Nobel prize winner or not, certainly could use a healthy dose of good old common sense -- and maybe double-check that he tied his shoelaces. But, what worries me most is that this is who Obama chose to oversee our country's energy policy?
So, we've got Democrat Representative Henry Waxman and the Democrat Congress trying their best to hurry up and pass the draconian, minimally effective (for global climate change) but maximally damaging and costly (for American businesses and consumers) Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade scheme that Obama wants sooner rather than later -- and no common sense Chu is in charge of our energy policy? Great. Just great. Oh well, just something else to worry about, folks.