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WASHINGTON - The government's inadvertent and red-faced Internet posting of a 266-page list of U.S. nuclear sites provided a one-step guide for anyone wanting details about such sensitive information. Obama administration officials said Wednesday the document contained no classified material about nuclear weapons. They contended the locations and other details already were available from public sources. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said "a snafu" led to the online posting. "A little embarrassing," he acknowledged. The document, stamped "highly confidential safeguards sensitive," made it onto the Government Printing Office's Web site - and why that happened was not immediately clear. A newsletter...

Professor Steven Chu: paint the world white to fight global warming Mark Henderson, Science Editor The Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as US Energy Secretary wants to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so they reflect more of the Sun’s light and heat to combat global warming, he said today. Professor Steven Chu, speaking at the opening of the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The Times is media partner, said this simple and “completely benign” approach to “geo-engineering” could have a vast impact at low cost. By lightening all paved surfaces and roofs...

Mr. Chu said Thursday he feels “like I’ve been dumped into the deep end of the pool” in confronting questions about oil policy,...." he doesn’t know what the Obama administration would urge the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to do at its meeting next month."...." “I will be speaking and learning more about this in order to figure out what the U.S. position should be"....He later told reporters on a conference call that his response to the question reflected “more of my naiveté than anything else.“

 One of them wanted to see Americans paying $8 a gallon for gasoline. Another tried to block access to domestic oil reserves that could one day exceed those in Saudi Arabia. Another thinks global warming is a dire crisis justifying a massive crackdown on energy -- decades after saying the same thing about global cooling. Yet another had a position in the one of the world’s top socialist organizations.Meet the Obama administration’s energy team.Forget everything you’ve heard about the president’s moderate picks on the economy, national security and other issues. When it comes to energy policy and related environmental concerns,...

We can expect a proliferation of new regulations that will reach into every area of American life and commerce. What do President-elect Barack Obama’s leadership picks tell us about the kinds of energy and environmental policies we can expect in the next four to eight years? On balance, they suggest we are in for a radical shift away from George W. Bush’s pro-market policies and back to the aggressive regulatory approach favored by the Clinton administration. Let’s take a look at Obama’s prospective appointees.Lisa P. Jackson Obama’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be the first African...

I had an OMG experience when I clicked on this. The Obama administration really intends to act in a big way on this climate change bull stuff. Don't miss Obama's video (you'll have to click through to the article.) Obama's caveat about there being only one president seem hollow here.-- AZLiberty We need strong U.S. leadership on climate change, especially as we head into next year's COP-15 talks. President-elect Obama has already spoken more boldly (by far) on climate change than almost any other American elected official:Obama on YouTube There is often, however, a large gap between words and...

So Steven Chu, President-elect Obama’s likely choice to head the Department of Energy, is a proponent of energy efficiency and conservation as the first step in rejigging America’s energy mix. But since conservation alone won’t do it, what are his ideas about finding new supplies of energy? Dr. Chu’s marquee work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the Helios Project. ... Helios has focused largely on biofuels ... is looking to make second-generation biofuels more viable. ... What about other energy sources? Big Coal won’t be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE—he’s really,...

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has backed up campaign promises to focus on green energy with an Energy Secretary nominee who experts say will provide scientific expertise and pragmatism to the search for new clean sources of fuel. Obama's pick, Nobel physics laureate Steven Chu, has been a strong advocate for making buildings more efficient to cut energy use to counter global warming and climate change. "If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade," Chu told Reuters in an interview last year. Chu has led...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Nobel laureate Steven Chu as energy secretary and Lisa Jackson to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, according to media reports Wednesday. Obama is also expected to name Carol Browner as energy 'czar,' the reports said. Chu, a Chinese-American, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997.

WASHINGTON — According to Hillary Clinton, "the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority." Oh, really? That comment, proffered by our secretary of state Tuesday, is overshadowed by the serious jeopardy U.S. citizens now encounter thanks to the ideological blindness and national security incompetence of the Obama administration. Since 2011 began, more than 20 Americans have been injured, killed or gone missing in the midst of violence in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Mexico and the Indian Ocean. American citizens are being held by government authorities in Iran, Yemen and Pakistan — and...

You can't burn a Koran in a crowded theater, and Supreme CourtJustice Stephen Breyer suggests that to placate foreign extremists, Koran burning might be banned everywhere else in America too. In an interview aired Tuesday on ABC's "Good Morning America,"Justice Breyer, who is on tour promoting his new book, averred that in the Internet age, speech traditionally protected by the First Amendment may have to be weighed against its global impact. George Stephanopoulos asked the justice about the canceled Sept. 11 Koran burning proposed by Pastor Terry Jones, and whether the fact that people riot in Afghanistan over what happens...

Recession: The Democrats' politicized housing and mortgage policies pushed our economy into its worst downturn since the Great Depression. So, of course, it's a perfect time for the biggest tax increase in history. Why is the economy still paralyzed after the president's much-touted "Recovery Summer"? It may be that private investment, too, has been immobilized. With unemployment now up to 9.6%, Americans fear that the economy won't get moving again anytime soon. As a new report from Americans for Tax Reform shows, that fear is completely rational. The report outlines the impact of the largest-ever tax hike that's coming in...

It is becoming apparent for all to see that a man who made his name as a community organizer does not have the skills to be president of these United States. Maybe he could develop the requisite skills as a governor. Possibly he could develop such skills were he to sit in the Senate for a couple of terms. Yet there are delicate sensitivities, the ability to listen, to stick by your guns, occasionally to remain reticent. These are the fundamentals of a leader, and President Obama has demonstrated that he lacks all of them, most notably reticence. I think...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, called for an investigation of those who are protesting the building of the Ground Zero Mosque on Tuesday. She told San Francisco's KCBS radio: Link to audio

Have we ever had a president so disconnected from the heart of America? On Friday night, at a White House iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, Obama strode directly into the blazing controversy over whether a mosque should be built two blocks from Ground Zero. Speaking as though this were simply an open-and-shut case of constitutional law, Professor Obama declared that Muslims "have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," including "the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan." Hailed by Mayor Michael...

When the Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy had grown at a humble 2.4 percent in the second quarter, even the liberal Washington Post suggested President Barack Obama’s policies were not leading to the sort of economic growth necessary to reduce unemployment, which has risen from 7.7 percent to 9.5 percent since Obama took office. “The recovery is fading, and a troubling pattern is setting in: economic growth that is too slow to put Americans back to work,” said the first paragraph in the Post’s report on the new GDP numbers. But in the worldview presented in an early...

WASHINGTON – Republicans are positioned to score solid victories in November's congressional elections which would force President Barack Obama more to the political center, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday. "If the election were today, we'd have a good day," McConnell told Reuters in an interview, saying Republicans were enjoying a reversal in fortunes after in the 2006 and 2008 elections when they were on the defensive and lost ground. "We're on offense," he said. Critics say Republicans have done little but oppose Obama on healthcare, finance, global warming and other issues. But the party expects to propose...

Energy Policy: Senate Democrats have shelved job-killing cap-and-trade legislation, at least for now. Neither the political nor the Earth's climate suggests it's a good time to try to fool Mother Nature or the American people. After a Thursday meeting with Senate Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has apparently dropped plans to pursue cap-and-trade before the August recess. He doesn't have the votes to overcome a GOP filibuster, and saving the earth from a phantom threat stands way below jobs on Americans' wish list. But watch out after November. "What he suggested is that we move forward on several bills...

Neal Boortz: ObamaCare has stealth IRS bombBy Neal Boortz Opinion 9:00 p.m. Friday, July 23, 2010 Now what was it that Princess Nancy Pelosi said? Oh, yeah, I remember. It was something to the effect that we were going to have to go ahead and pass ObamaCare so that we could see what’s in it. I suppose that made sense, in a medical way; but it certainly wasn’t that smooth a move insofar as the electorate is concerned. The latest polls show that 56 percent of Americans want ObamaCare repealed. You’re about to discover yet another reason why: Do you...

As Washington prepares to implement the White House's health care reforms, no one is talking much about Regina, Saskatchewan, these days. Maybe that's not surprising: With so much work falling on state governments, the news cycle focuses on Albany, Indianapolis and Sacramento, not some small city in the middle of the Canadian prairie. But while Americans may not know Regina, Canadians know it well. Regina (ridge-EYE'-nuh) is the birthplace of Canada's socialized health care system. It was there that Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas first proposed a government-run health care system back in the 1950s. And it was there that, in...