Chu the Latest to Go

Energy Secretary Steven Chu resigned today.  In the usual nonsense that passes for wisdom in Washington, the White House thanked Chu for helping to move America towards energy independence.  The actual facts are really quite different.  Chu presided over a department that managed first to stop and then slow walk all efforts to produce energy from federal lands.  While energy production grew on private land across the country by close to 20% over the last four years, Chu's department arranged to cut energy production on territory that it could control by about 15%.  Any move towards American energy independence was despite Chu, not because of his efforts.   Of course, some in the media will undoubtedly praise Chu for the great efforts made to support alternative energy sources like solar and wind energy.  The problem there, as we all know, is that those alternative energy sources have failed the instant that the federal government stopped pumping limitless funds into them.  There are no great increases in solar energy production in the USA compared to four years ago.  All we have for the federal efforts is a new crop of multi-millionaires who got billions of dollars in federal money for their companies and who managed to take out enormous profits for themselves before the companies went under.  Just think Solyndra and you get the picture.  The wind energy "industry" has developed more than solar (not too hard a thing to do), but now it is hitting a wall due to two problems.  First, it is now clear that the wind turbines simply wear out much faster than expected.  A wind turbine that was built in the expectation that it would produce electricity for twenty years at a cost about 25% higher than conventional power sources is now turning out to be useful only for five to ten years with an ultimate cost for power of about twice that of conventional sources.  That means that the use of these installations to power American homes and industries would cause a depression due to extremely high power costs.  Second, the wind turbines are killing birds at rates that would usually send the Sierra Club into a tizzy.  Because the turbines are "green energy" pushed by Obama, the Sierra Club types have held their tongues, but that reticence to speak seems to be ending.  The wind turbines are killing millions of birds each year, perhaps wiping out whole species.

In short, Chu does not deserve thanks for anything he had done with one exception:  it is a good thing that he has resigned and we can thank him for that.