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Surely You’re Joking, Dr. Chu!

15 yard penalty against the Blue Team for dissemination of bovine material.

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  February 3rd, 2013 at 05:31 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Chu Obama crop

With the toner barely dry on Dr. Steven Chu’s resignation from his post as Secretary of Energy, the building of a mythology complete with tales of the Physics professor’s Feynman-esque insight is well underway.

From Chu’s New York Times bio:

After the 2010 Gulf oil spill, [Chu] became one of the most visible members of the Obama cabinet by actively participating in the effort to contain BP’s runaway well, often ordering company officials to take steps they might not have taken on their own, though he has no training in geology, seismology or oil well technology. [Emphasis added.]

Okay, this is where I drop the B.S. flag. Throughout the BP spill, well control and spill-containment operations were under the direction of an Incident Command Team, lead by BP and the U.S. Coast Guard. Regulation of offshore oil falls to the Department of the Interior, and specifically the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. Nothing happened to the well without BSEE’s prior approval. The DoE may have played a supporting role, but Steven Chu wasn’t ordering anyone to do anything.

The Advocate (Baton Rouge) chimes in:

One of his accomplishments was something that Chu rarely talked about, but was frequently cited by Obama: Chu’s role in helping to plug the massive BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Chu and a team of engineers helped devised [sic] an interim solution before a replacement well permanently plugged the leak, which spewed more than 200 million gallons of oil in the worst offshore oil disaster in the country’s history.

Chu came up with the solution “when nobody else could figure it out,” Obama said Friday. “And that’s typical of the incredible contributions that he’s made to this country.”

Ask yourself, “Do these stories even make sense?” The Macondo technical team was comprised of the best, most experienced minds in the industry, not just BP. Maybe Chu rarely talks about these accomplishments because they’re simply not true.

Bear in mind, this is the same Steven Chu who did not seem to know that negotiating oil supply policy with OPEC was part of the job description when he accepted his position as Secretary of Energy.

The same Steven Chu who promoted white roofs on buildings as a solution for Global Warming.

The same Steven Chu who said, “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

I’m quite sure Dr. Chu is a nice man and a capable researcher in his field, but Richard Feynman he is not. I’m not convinced that Dr. Chu has the sense to come in out of the rain.

Here’s a happy little going away video for Dr. Chu from our friends at the Institute for Energy Research:

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.


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COMMENTS

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  • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

    I followed the BP oil spill very closely in the news. I heard Kevin Costner’s name a lot in the news. I don’t ever remember hearing Chu’s name even so much as once. I will second Steve Maley’s Bovine Scatology.

  • checkmate2012

    Is Chu related to Hagel….distance cousins or something? Glad to see another cabinet member bite the dust and hope the replacements aren’t the same or worse, be it communication skills, idealogy or competency!

  • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

    Return volley accepted. ;^)

  • norris

    The best way to protect the gulf would have been to drain the well dry ,once they had it capped . Now the oil is seeping up through the ocean floor miles away from the well .
    This wasn’t caused by BP it’s just natures way .

  • stevemaley

    The media sure got excited about Costner, and BP bought a bunch of his centrifuge machines. They sat in a warehouse, unused, and the only result was a lawsuit between Costner and his partners. There was nothing novel about his technology, it could only be used in ideal weather conditions, and it could not discharge water sufficiently clean to be discharged back into the Gulf. It was all strictly about the PR.

  • stevemaley

    Cool story, but not true.

  • stevemaley

    I haven’t read it. Not sure what aspect you’re most interested in, but any forecast is just someone’s best guess, and almost certainly wrong. No one has a good track record for forecasting gas and oil prices. Since it goes out to 2030, it will one day be proven either way too optimistic or way too pessimistic, it’s just hard to say now which one. It will become clear one day, and with 20/20 hindsight the right answer will seem to have been obvious.

  • cardindrake

    Yeah, let’s talk about how helpful Dr. Chu and the other government bureaucrats were. They couldn’t figure out a way to let us use Norway’s massive oil skimmers to help contain the spill early on. Why not? Because EPA regulations wouldn’t let the massive skimmers skim up the oil water mixture and return the water to the gulf. Because even though they were taking out 99.99% of the oil, the water that was going back into the Gulf didn’t meet EPA regulations. I know, it sounds like an Onion article. But that’s why we had to tell Norway that we couldn’t use the skimmers that would have taken care most of the spill right away.

  • spandrel

    The Wall Street Journal reported much the same thing at the time:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704913304575371602465657696.html

    in particular, it was his suggestion to use gamma rays to look inside the blowout preventer. Though it seems a lot of what he did was contact other scientists, that’s still a worthwhile investment of his time, I would think.

  • kipling

    On of the stats cited in the summary said that the U.S. should be 99% energy self-sufficient by 2030 due to the shale oil and gas boom. Access to cheap natural gas might lead to the “re-industrialization of the U.S.” It sounded a bit to cheery for me but we could use some good news.

  • davesinsanantonio

    There are two reasons Obummer and other Lefties tell lies. The first is that they love to. It is easier to just make stuff up than it is to actually look stuff up. But, in addition to that, they love that they can create a story that they can get others to swallow—it gives them a sense of accomplishment to have that much power over those others. And, Lefties feelings are right at the top of their list of priorities, just below their love of power over others.

    The second reason is that they know the lick-spittle press will never call them on it. Why? Because the press also are too lazy to actually look stuff up, and they too love the lie that will advance the leftist agenda. That is why “what difference does it make?” resonates so well with the media—they know that without their attention to it, it won’t make much difference at all.

  • rennyangel4

    “What does it matter now?” All that matter’s is their “narrative”: obamster ended al Quaeda so if a few lives have to be sacrificed for that lie, what does it matter?
    Chu has overseen the explosion of gasoline prices, electricity prices, and the degradation of domestic energy production from deep water drilling to the Keystone pipeline and has NOTHING to brag about.

  • gyakuzuki

    A post-mortem on Dr. Chu’s “investment” of the $1 trillion in stimulus money Obama promised would generate millions of “green” jobs will show an unmitigated disaster. Money for weatherproofing homes, smart meters that utility companies were going to install anyway, etc. Dr Chu apparently didn’t know that there were no “shovel ready” jobs, either, nor did Obama.

    Fawning over the guy’s intellect is disgusting … the reality is as an administrator this guy has been a disaster even when presented with massive amounts of capital to “invest”.

  • audax1

    Think it’s the “Jones Act”

  • cardindrake

    An administration that can waive Obamacare requirements for any union that wants it could surely waive an EPA regulation that didn’t make any sense under the circumstances. It wasn’t an inability to get around an EPA that shouldn’t have applied. The administration just wanted the oil industry to get a black eye. Not complicated at all; just hard to believe that any President could have such misplaced priorities.

  • stevemaley

    From the WSJ article: “A BP spokesman declined to comment on Chu’s
    role, directing questions to the U.S. Energy Department.”

    I’m sure that Chu played a role in the incident, but I’m just as sure that it was not the central command role that they’re trying to depict. DoE is not in the oil well business. There is a lot to be said for outside-the-box thinking during a crisis like this, and it sounds like that’s where experts from DoE labs like Sandia and Livermore made themselves valuable.

    It also says a lot about industry’s capabilities that they were able to implement some of these ideas by remote control in water a mile deep. I’ll repeat, BP’s competitors volunteered the services of the brightest, most knowledgeable and experienced well operations people in the world to this task. It’s not like they were sitting around on their thumbs waiting for somebody from the government to tell them what to do.

  • sliverlining

    Love the comparison. They both dance too. One literally, one verbally (albeit not very well).

  • vandalii

    Ah, but think, this is the administration built on, “never let a crisis go to waste”. To allow a solution that early in the crisis would be foolish for the opportunistic administration. They still had to “kick some butts” and show just what tough metrosexuals were in charge here… ;-)

  • vandalii

    Y’know, your statement “…just hard to believe that any President could have such misplaced priorities…” sounds ominously like the Jews in 1930′s and 1940′s Germany that just could not believe such evil as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party could possibly exist.

    We’ve had front row seats to this administration’s “priorities” and it’s the Party of Me, Myself and I. Sadly, nothing BHO does anymore surprises me, just deepens my disappointment.

  • sdharms

    Lysenko. Look it up.

  • reggie1

    Like the media reporting on EPA Lisa Jackson’s recent resignation. Never a word about the Harry Windsor email scandal.

  • funwithknives

    What/who comes next at D O E ? “Shudder” is the best I can do, thinking of
    ‘the next big thing’ from Barry’s Brain Trust.

  • feiel

    “The same Steven Chu who promoted white roofs on buildings as a solution for Global Warming.” – From the article you linked to, it doesn’t seem like all that bad of an idea..