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Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/08/live-stanford-s-sustainability-summit Home • The White House Blog The White House Blog Live from Stanford: Secretary Chu on the Global Clean Energy Challenge Posted by Secretary Steven Chu on March 08, 2010 at 01:45 PM EST What are the steps we must take as a nation to create new, clean energy jobs and ensure America’s long-term competitiveness? What are the consequences for our climate of inaction? How can science and technology offer us new and better choices – and how can America’s young people make a difference? Today, I’m returning to Stanford University, where...

Many of us had just the grandest time conducting worthless research for the old monopolistic phone companies.  Dr. Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy was one of the typical products of that era of unfocused industrial research.  He nurtured his career in what had become the most arrogant and unfocused lab of them all, Bell Laboratories.   If you landed one of those storied jobs as a newly minted Member of Technical Staff, you could expect to conduct research indistinguishable from that of any academic scientist supported by government agencies like the National Science Foundation. That a once glorious Bell Labs...

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons. Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--A grant program introduced in the federal stimulus package passed earlier this year was intended to jump-start investment in renewable energy, but the rules of the program threaten to hobble it from the start by restricting private equity involvement in any projects the government backs. The rules, published July 9, exclude from the program any projects with investors that have tax-exempt status. That was done because the grant program is intended to replace tax credits, which have become less widely used as taxable incomes have fallen.... However, most private equity firms receive backing from tax-exempt limited partners...

After the selection of a largely centrist economic team, liberals have been asking when President-elect Obama would give them a seat at the table. Well, now we know, and Americans should strap themselves in. Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters. It's striking that the moderate in this bunch may be Steven Chu, who has reportedly been tapped as Energy Secretary. Though a political unknown, Mr. Chu is the respected director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the...

WASHINGTON -- Aiming to keep the focus on climate change legislation, President Barack Obama put a plug in for administration efforts to make lamps and lighting equipment use less energy. "I know light bulbs may not seem sexy, but this simple action holds enormous promise because 7 percent of all the energy consumed in America is used to light our homes and businesses," the president said, standing alongside Energy Secretary Steven Chu at the White House.

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...

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.

Congressman Hinojosa files for bankruptcyby Action 4 News Staff Posted: 02.03.2011 at 6:46 PM WASHINGTON (AP) -- An eight-term Texas congressman who serves on the House Financial Services Committee has filed for personal bankruptcy and is blaming his family meat company for his problems. According to federal bankruptcy court documents, Democratic Rep. Ruben Hinojosa has $2.9 million in liabilities, though he also has nearly $1.5 million in assets. **SNIP** The Financial Services panel has jurisdiction over legislation affecting banks. House aides and outside experts say the House has no rules forbidding a lawmaker who owes large sums to a bank...

This satirical ad pilliories the now-infamous moment in June, 2009 when Boxer asked an Army brigadier to call her "Senator" and not "Ma'am" during a committee hearing: it concludes with her gleefully signing a $900 billion stimulus bill. [Boxer is so full of herself that she makes a self-caricature of herself for an ad ridiculing her pretensions and self-importance]

Washington: Social Security is deep in the red, the post office is losing billions, and Fannie Mae's back for another handout. These and other examples speak volumes about government fecklessness and negligence. Social Security checks mailed in 2010 will total $41 billion more than the program will collect in payroll-tax revenues, trustees reported last Thursday. The program will also run a deficit next year, before briefly returning to surpluses for a few years. Then the red ink will be back — for good — starting in 2015, a year earlier than previously projected. Some analysts believe that while deficits begin...

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...

Health Reform: Key provisions of the president's health care reform are about to take effect. Don't expect any of it to be pretty. It turns out that — as predicted by health experts, and reported on this page — ObamaCare will make health insurance premiums rise rather than fall. This and other unpleasant truths are revealed in a new report from two Republican senators, which charges that "when measured against the administration's own stated goals, the new health law fails to address the top health care concerns of the American people." Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming...

-- snip --Although it cannot create jobs, government can retard job creation. An EPA ban on mountaintop mining will wipe out thousands of jobs in Appalachia, according to the National Mining Association. The ban on deepwater drilling -- which promises to extend beyond six months since the advisory committee to evaluation drilling safety has not even met -- will cost 20,000 jobs. Financial regulation promises to drive tens of thousands of Wall Street jobs overseas to free-market havens like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Switzerland. Pending cap and trade legislation will further sap growth and reduce competitiveness, leading to further job...