The farewell letter written by departing Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will be remembered as one of the most thorough, detailed and outspoken ever crafted by a departing Cabinet member.
It's his actual tenure running America's energy policy we wish we could forget. In his parting 3,781- word term paper he takes credit for the Bush administration's ARPA-E (that's the energy version of DARPA) yet doesn't mention the things he actually should take credit for, like steering American energy research into an expensive morass of feel-good fallacies and solar activism while refusing to stand up to his boss on anti-science policies designed to make energy across the board more expensive for poor people.
He claims his policies have made wind power viable, though costs are the same as they were 10 years ago under President Bush. That shows why he thinks the $72 billion we wasted in four years is an 'investment'. Investment in bankruptcy attorneys, maybe. What doesn't he mention? Updated nuclear reactor designs, even though those have been supposedly important to the Energy Department since the Clinton presidency. Why wouldn't a Nobel laureate in physics believe in nuclear power? He is mostly against CO2 and not for anything, that's why - and that was his weakness. He was a Democrat first and a scientist second and his energy policies played to the progressive activist camp rather than science. The only time he mentions nuclear at all is talking about nuclear weapon stockpiles, even though it is our quickest bridge to reduced CO2 emissions, which he clearly worries a lot about even though emissions declined thanks to technological advancements in the fossil fuel sector he despises.
Energy Secretary Chu’s Parting Salvo By Bill Sweet, IEEE Spectrum
