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President Obama’s reference to algae in his Thursday energy speech drew flak over the weekend from Newt Gingrich, who called it “weird” before calling algal biofuel “a terrific concept.” But Obama had political reasons to promote algae in Florida, the sunny, swampy, politically-volatile state he carried in 2008. The Obama Administration has already sunk $25 million into a Florida company—Alganol Biofuels—that is building an algae biorefinery using a patented technology that promises to streamline the process of extracting oils from algae so they be converted to ethanol. “We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet...

As gas nears $5-a-gallon out west, the president, who has cancelled a key pipeline and frozen federal leases from Alaska to the East Coast, teaches us about American algae potential, in the way he used to emphasize the importance of tire pressure and “tune-ups.” He castigates the opposition for making political hay out of bad news, in the way he routinely did as a senator in compiling the most partisan voting record in the Senate. Energy Secretary Chu cannot and will not say a word about soaring gas prices, since he is on record not so long ago hoping that...

Newt exposes the depth of Obama's mendacity as only he can. Enjoy. Newt at California GOP Convention

FEDERAL WAY, Wash.— Newt Gingrich has been hitting Obama’s energy speech since the president delivered it Thursday, calling the speech funny enough to be on SNL and ”something worthy of Leno or Letterman.” Gingrich’s biggest talking point about Obama’s speech attacks the president for his embrace of investments in biofuels such as those made from algae. He is referring to a point in Obama’s speech when the president said, “We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance known as algae.” “Believe it or not, we could replace up...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Folks, did you know that pond scum, algae, pond scum is now the new source of energy in this country? We were on the air yesterday, Obama was down in Coral Gables making a speech, I told you if we had anything memorable from that we'd play it today and we do. We've got about nine or ten sound bites on gas prices alone, including some things Obama said about algae, pond scum. Now, this needs a czar. We need a pond scum czar, and that means we need somebody slimy. I think Obama could probably find...

News report: President Obama declares that rather than drilling for new sources of oil, or building the pipeline, we should get fuel from algae. Algie saw the bear The bear saw Algie The bear was bulgy The bulge was Algie -- Red Skelton

Obama's Energy Plan -- Algae By Susan Jones February 24, 2012 (CNSNews.com) - "The American people aren't stupid," President Obama said on Thursday -- as he insisted that drilling for more oil on U.S. territory is "not a strategy to solve our energy challenge." The president's solution? Algae, for one. There are no quick fixes to the nation's eneergy problem, the president said, dismissing Republican calls for more drilling as a "bumper sticker." "We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance -- algae," the president said at...

President Obama admitted today that he does not have a "silver bullet" solution for skyrocketing gas prices, but he proposed alternative energy sources such as "a plant-like substance, algae" as a way of cutting dependence on oil by 17 percent. "We’re making new investments in the development of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that’s actually made from a plant-like substance, algae -- you've got a bunch of algae out here," Obama said at the University of Miami today. "If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we'll be doing alright. Believe it or not, we could...

DISTRICT OF CRIMINALS -- Fresh off blowing hot air at the press about the dire need to move U.S. energy dependence from oil to algae, President Barack Downgrade Obama today took daring steps, naming Batboy as the nation’s first Algae Czar. In his first official decree, Batboy, who has lived openly in public for 27 years as Congresscriminal Henry Waxman from California, announced the president will issue an executive order later today to create the Dental Algae Reclamation Project, to be funded by confiscated tax returns of the 1%. Read More

Charles Krauthammer responds to President Obama's suggestion that the U.S. turn to algae for energy production. After making his case, Krauthammer goes head-to-head with Washington Post columnist Charles Lane who defends Obama's energy policy. "I was impressed by the president's analysis of this situation where we have no control over the global price of oil," Charles Krauthammer said. "We're dependent on oil from unfriendlies. And he says, as we heard, drilling for oil to relieve our dependency is not a solution, it's not a plan. He said we have to go to clean energy. He talks about something really revolutionary...

THE mass attack by seabirds on a coastal town that inspired Alfred Hitchcock's thriller The Birds may finally have been explained. Biologists have blamed toxic algae eaten by the birds for damaging their brains and making them so aggressive that they dived at people, buildings and moving cars in Capitola, California, in 1961. Hitchcock's film, released two years later, was inspired partly by the event and partly by a short story by Daphne du Maurier about an unexplained avian attack on a Cornish farm worker and his family. In the Californian incident, hundreds of normally unaggressive sooty shearwater gulls suddenly,...

No more war, no more tree-hugging hippies lecturing you There are (at least) around 60 startups hoping to produce oil and diesel biologically, with accelerated fermentation or photosynthesis techniques to produce an end product that is 100 per cent compatible with the existing infrastructure. Some, for example, tweak the algae to make them do photosynthesis anything from 40 to 100 times more efficiently. LS9 received $30m in funding and has a one-step process to convert sugar to create renewable petrol. It expects production within five years. If oil prices remain high, say over $40 or $50 a barrel, then it's...

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Solazyme, Inc. (NASDAQ:SZYM - News), a renewable oil and bioproducts company, announced the continuation and expansion of its relationship with Unilever, one of the world’s leading consumer goods companies. The Commercial Development Agreement, which is funded by Unilever, expands the companies’ current research and development efforts and is the fourth agreement the parties have entered into. Upon successful completion of the development agreement and related activities, the two companies have agreed the terms of a multi-year supply agreement in which Unilever would purchase commercial quantities of Solazyme’s renewable oils.

A massive patch of bright orange material washed up on the Alaskan coast, and has scientists baffled. The substance, which experts don't believe is man-made, could possibly be algae, but a kind no one has seen before. "There doesn't appear to be any evidence of a release of oil or hazardous substances at this time, but we're continuing to investigate and trying to get lab determinations on what exactly the material is," Emanuel Hignutt, analytical chemistry manager for Alaska's Environmental Health Laboratory told CNN. "What it is - an algal bloom, or something inorganic - that's what we're working to...

Genetically modified blue and green algae could be the answer to the world's fuel problems. Bioengineers have already developed algae that produce ethanol, oil and even diesel -- and the only things the organisms need are sunlight, CO2 and seawater. Biochemist Dan Robertson's living gas stations have the dark-green shimmer of oak leaves and are as tiny as E. coli bacteria. Their genetic material has been fine-tuned by human hands. When light passes through their outer layer, they excrete droplets of fuel. "We had to fool the organism into doing what I wanted it to do," says Robertson, the head...

Efforts to remove climate-warming carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere appear to be getting a helping hand from a surprising source: the iron in meltwater from Antarctic icebergs. Icebergs calving off of Antarctica are shedding substantial iron — the equivalent of a growth-boosting vitamin — into waters starved of the mineral, a new set of studies demonstrates. This iron is fertilizing the growth of microscopic plants and algae, transforming the waters adjacent to ice floes into teeming communities of everything from tiny shrimplike krill to fish, birds and sometimes mammals.

Organism's ability to distinguish strontium from calcium could help in dealing with nuclear waste. Common freshwater algae might hold a key to cleaning up after disasters such as Japan's Fukushima nuclear accident, scientists said yesterday at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California. The algae, called Closterium moniliferum, are members of the desmid order, known to microbiologists for their distinctive shapes, said Minna Krejci, a materials scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. But the crescent-shaped C. moniliferum caught Krejci's eye because of its unusual ability to remove strontium from water, depositing it in crystals that form...

Ancient food source may offer neuroprotectionNutritional supplementation with Spirulina, a nutrient-rich, blue-green algae, appeared to provide neuroprotective support for dying motor neurons in a mouse model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, University of South Florida neuroscientists have found. Although more research is needed, they suggest that a spirulina-supplemented diet may provide clinical benefits for ALS patients. A spirulina dietary supplement was shown to delay the onset of motor symptoms and disease progression, reducing inflammatory markers and motor neuron death in a G93A mouse model of ALS. Spirulina, an ancient food source used by the...

Everything is grubby in countries run by statist moonbats — even dishes fresh out of the dishwasher. A couple of months ago, Sandra Young from Vernon, Fla., started to notice that something was seriously amiss with her dishes. "The pots and pans were gray, the aluminum was starting to turn black, the glasses had fingerprints and lip prints still on them, and they were starting to get this powdery look to them," Vernon says. "I'm like, oh, my goodness, my dishwasher must be dying, I better get a new dishwasher." But others are having the same problem all across the...

An invasive species of mussel called quagga has recently begun eating its way through the phytoplankton population of Lake Michigan, which could have dire effects on the lake's ecosystem, scientists now warn. A giant ring of phytoplankton (microscopic plants such as algae) was discovered in Lake Michigan in 1998 by Michigan Technological Universitybiologist W. Charles Kerfoot and his research team. The "phytoplankton doughnut" is formed when winter storms kick up nutrient-rich sediment along the southeastern shore of the lake. The disturbed sediments begin circulating in a slow-moving circle with the lake's currents, which provides a massive supply of food for...