US Energy Secretary Steven Chu Will Resign

Under Chu's regime, the money spent on advanced nuclear the only possible solution to global warming and the United State's 10 year tech advantage, dropped to almost nothing (200M annually) while expenditures on nuclear weapons and worth carbon capture, wind and solar exceeded $100B annually. The US's lead in high tech nuclear dropped to zero, and China has taken over the yoke.

While under Chu filthy GHG spewing fossil fuels, much of it used to back up wind and solar, continued relentlessly to kill tens of thousands of American's from air and ground water pollution, the Chinese started construction of a 200MW HTGR reactor for 2017 with 70 per cent of it output devoted to clean and green synfuel production. As Chu's last act he gave out a $1 million contract to study the concept.

He was and is a traitor to his country.

Yes via the sun cycles the Earth warms, scientists know this.

And scientists also know since the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels, humans are amplifying the warming and pollution.

And scientist keep trying to educate the public, but there is a certain percentage that just wants to deny it happening or likes to just argue for the sake of arguing.

Being more efficient and creating less pollution is a good thing. There is no devious plot behind it.

Perhaps United States Energy Secretary Steven Chu leaving is a great thing; time for fresh blood and someone with incentive to do something!

@sethdayal As a supporter of nuclear energy thats a little extreme. In fact early on his time in office people were talking about a nuclear renaissance. Then fukishima happened and well its gonna take a while if ever for nuclear energy to regain the ground it lost because of that. China has the advantage of being able to control media coverage on the topic so its easy for the government to tell the public about the safety and efficiency of its plants while condemning the unsafe foreign ones while in America our new programs know we would rather hear how the Jersey Shore's cast afternoon bathroom break went or if were feeling political who designed the first lady's dress.

How does one become a popular scientist or expert in the 21st century? The formula is simple:

STEP1... PICK AN AGENDA
Choose a leftist-anti western agenda. Be creative, anything that weakens America will do.

STEP2... YOU GOT FRIENDS
Trust your new friends. Who are they? Well, do you remember all those hippies in the 60's who hated their parents and their country? The ones who threw tantrums at protests, bombed things they didn't like, and never bathed? Well they all got jobs in education, government, politics, entertainment, and news. (they never grew up, they just got old, but their herd mentality is still as strong as any peer pressure found in jr. high hallways today.)

Step3... FIND A PROJECT
(Here's the tricky part) Take only a pinch of science. You don't need too much, a little will go a long way. But do not allow any contrary data that may crumble your theory in your batch. Got some bad data in there? Relax, changing or skewing data is ok, remember, your one of the popular kids now! (see step 2)

Step4... GET STAMP OF APPROVAL
Submit to your fellow science community, but this isn't as scary as it sounds. Remember the unbathed protesters? Lucky for you they've spent the last 50 years educating the current science community. So if you truly nailed Step 1, Step 4 is automatic. If needed, a Nobel Prize can easily be arranged.

Step5... LET YOUR FRIENDS KNOW
Let your friends begin their jr. high style network buzz. (it takes a lot of work, these things just don't sell themselves)
Here's where it gets fun, the media will begin to chant the brilliance of your new theory. Articles & puff pieces spring up everywhere from Popular Science to People Magazine. It's like magic.

Step6... THEY GOT YOUR BACK
Now remember, all your entertainment, news, & elitist friends have your back. No one will be allowed to say anything negative about your new theory. An endless barrage of eye rolling, scoffing, and gaped mouths await any questioner of your theory, no matter how incorrect it may be, like I said, they got your back. Free-thinking students will be ridiculed by his/her unionized teacher from Head Start to UC Berkley.
Your friends are everywhere and can't wait to knock down even the most basis questioner. Facebook, water coolers, news blogs, no place is safe from an "education". they are masters at their favorite game... Whack-A-Thought.

Step7... DID WE SAY THEORY?
After most objections have stopped, education can now proceed to rename your theory "Truth". Teachers, professors, and science fans can now drop any reference to "theory" from here on out. Congratulations!

STEP 8... ENJOY IT WHILE YOU CAN
Your theories will now be a bedrock for other agenda driven works, new theories based on your theories will build and build.
But inevitably your agenda-based theory will find itself so far off reasonable thought and scientific truth, it will quietly be put out to pasture like all the others.
Look at the popular theories of the early 17th, 18th, 19th, & 20th centuries, majority of them were extremely popular and extremely wrong.
In generations to come, early 21st century scientists will be the joke of their successors, they will mock us that we taught, as fact to our children, that we evolved from monkeys and that we caused the warming and cooling of the earth.
Don't lose hope though, Academia will stubbornly continue to teach it decades past it's death and science always has a way of overlooking it's failures.

Fotobum

Dr. Chu has seen more dirty-handed deals disrupt our move towards sustainable cleaner energy than he would ever relate to CNN.
Guys like Fotobum up there apparently think that no one not doing exactly what's been failing up til now has any worth, neither as a scientist, nor as an American citizen. As far as I'm concerned, Dr. Chu has been fighting the good fight whether we've managed to invent a totally acceptable energy cycle for national energy independence or not. The day before he took on the responsibility of managing the rampantly corrupted DoE for us there was no plan or format for bringing ANY of these alternate energy plans forward against the power and wealth of our current energy godlets that have crushed everything from hydrogen power to gas saving devices for 100 years. If he had done NOTHING else there, he still earned his pay.

You missed the point completely quesi44, I'm not saying he hasn't "paddled real hard", I'm saying his compass is off which causes him to paddle the wrong way with a leaky raft.

Note Step 1, Agenda = Taking America & it's advantages to the back of the line and redistributing the money the "evil oil companies" make and funnel it to our enlighted, groovy friends.

Note Step 2, ignore or alter any data that wind farms kill thousands of endangered birds or alter weather patterns, the cult-chant is...do not reevaluate, full speed ahead, to doubt is to empower the enemy.

Note Step 8, Sorry Robot, excuse me Queisi44, history has yet to write it's final chapter on the damage this president and his stoned friends have done to cripple & shackle this great country.
Guaranteed Dr. Chu's tenure in Washington will be taught in Moscow and Beijing on how to do it right.

@ FotoBum; So in our current hyperpolarized nation, what do you advocate? Never doing any research or development on the many thousands of discoveries of the last forty or fifty years? Or just keep paying for gas at 4 bucks plus a gallon, or an 800% markup-to 5 bucks, a 1000% markup, on what WE pay to bring here to refineries we paid for; plus buy electricity at however much they decided to raise YOUR rate this last quarter, and continue watching the dams that we paid for crumble, and the nuke plants we paid for crumble as the barons decide on another Generation 3 nuke plant standard. Get in the century. Say that there had only been four individual major advances in each energy field even in only the last six months. That means that there are many combinations and configurations to explore, and if you know anything about a power grid, it's all about facility placement by source. Flow consistency. Creating a cost beneficial environment where the new techs can survive long enough to be tested in the high power setting they will have to function in when any prove worthy of serious national development.
Maybe you are mad about this issue because you haven't seen the fact that this cycle of R+D was not planned by Obama? It's been in the offing for many years now. Our government outlays in this development cycle has invited private investment. The current Big Energy crowd wasn't gonna put out dime one, because they get to charge you or me more any day they want TODAY, and twice as much if they have an 'accident' that they directly cause and then we pay for.

The failure of Dr. Chu was not his lofty goals and good intentions, it is simply that his priorities for this nation are dangerous, destabilizing, and expensive.

FAIL: Obama and friends have, in one term, doubled the price of gas by thrusting new taxes on all oil & gas production and use, immediately imposing crippling regulations, and destabilizing the world's oil market by wrenching this nation's transmission into reverse, not to mention stoking wild speculation on wall street. Obama's amateur handling of, well... everything, created this unstable market, ripe for speculators, spikes & drops.
How in the world did oil companies make record profits under Obama?
When gas prices go up, oil companies raise their prices, but competition ensures prices stay competitive, but when prices fall, oil companies drop their prices also, but never at the same rate as the barrel price drops, dropping prices very slowly allows profit margins to widen with each down-cycle. They do this to brace against the next wave of up-spikes. Obama's chaotic agendas causes one roller coaster after another.

Common Sense...

PRIORITY #1 Low-Cost & Stable
Our nation must ensure a continuing, stable, low-cost flow of energy for it's tax paying citizens, no matter what energy strategy is selected in the future. The nation needs to get up in the morning, get ready for work, get to work, get home, make dinner, and pay our taxes.

PRIORITY #2 Self Contained
The nation must be energy independent which must include all viable sources, wind, fracking, coal, solar, or nuclear.

PRIORITY #3 Lowering Impacts
Minimize the impact that all of our energy sources have on us and the environment, whether it's cleaner burning coals, improved wind farms, or newer generation nuclear plants. The goal is to improve all sources of energy we rely on, not choke them out. This type of sibling rivalry is not healthy for our country.

PRIORITY #4 Focused Research
Funnel all research into achieving and perfecting these benchmarks.
Want R&D funding? Sure, can you help:
1) Lower the cost of our energy?
2) Help us be more self-sufficient?
3) Cost effectively lower the environmental impact somewhere?
4) Cost effectively improve efficiencies that would ultimately pay for themselves?
5) Find new energy sources?

Keep these priorities in this order and it will reduce the Enron's and Solyndra's and focus the flag wavers & flag burners to work together.

Mr. Chu's great failure was the idealism and causality.

(1) Renewable energy is great. It pulls power without consuming non-renewable resources. We would all love a world where energy was all derived from renewable resources, but we are not there yet technologically.

(2) There is no crisis, and generating a crisis to create crisis response behavior has cried wolf too often (whether this time it is a wolf or not).

(3) Had Chu supporting putting proven renewable tech into the field and worked supporting proven technologies, his legacy would have been far more sound. Solar is not there. Windfarms are, low impact hydro are, nuclear has been for awhile, and tidal has potential.

(4) Also, infrastructure and smart grid technology to reduce consumption inefficiencies have more potential to reduce carbon consumption than increasing solar from .2% to .3% of the mix.